Bible Study Led By Greg

This past Wednesday, we gathered at Canterbury House for a bible study led by our very own Greg, who I've affectionately nick-named "Greg the Baptist."  Greg took us through Matthew 6:25-34.  You all know it.  It's the passage in the Bible that tells us not to worry about tomorrow, that God will provide for us, no matter what.  It got me (and many people in Canterbury) thinking about how to cope with this difficult message.  Everyday, I look around at the homeless on the streets on Charlottesville and think, how do they feel about what the gospeler claims?  We are fortunate to have support systems on which we can rely when tomorrow appears uncertain; but when that support vanishes, when it's no longer available, how would it affect the way in which we interact with each other.  It seems to me that this verse has been taken and used by those of us who are well off enough that we don't have to worry about tomorrow.  Honestly, it's quite a comforting message that allows us to abide in a sense of security; however, the way in which most of us interact with this verse feels contrived, that we use it for purposes for which it wasn't intended.  I don't have an answer to how we should use this message, but - what I do know -, is that we can't regard it as simply as we do.  Yes, it's quite nice to think that we don't have to worry about the future, but what if we did?

How could I have forgotten the dinosaurs?

This weekend I found myself looking through a special magazine that featured the best cartoons from The New Yorker for the 2010 year and found this lovely piece taken from, I think, the March 2010 issue.  It got me to thinking about how often we take for granted the world we live in, how we sometimes look at it too seriously, losing sight of what's really important.  Kanin's piece reminded me that, even though the Bible exists as God's word, not everything in it has to be true - least of all that geological time and divine time cannot co-exist. The more I thought about it, the more I saw the irony at work in this piece by Kanin: that we allow ourselves to view the world solely as either black or white, when really, it's more shades of yellow (I just wanted to avoid the cliche). 

I think Kanin's cartoon works on many levels, playing off of the stereotypes that we've constructed for the divine over the centuries.  God sits in a great big chair, on a cloud, and has a beard.  Not quite sure that that is an accurate representation of God.  Why is it that we place human restrictions on someone who should be indescribable?  Even as I wrote that statement, I used a human invention to describe God, confining such an ecstatic idea within a linguistic shell.  So what did I take from this cartoon?  Well, I think, perhaps, that it helped me see the divine as something that we can connect intimately with, but that we cannot fully describe.  And yes, I did avoid using the more grammatically correct who in that last sentence for just that reason; but I think this funny really just reminded me that our worlds don't need to be so divisive in how we seek to neatly categorize everything with which we come into contact.

What do you think?