The Telling of Timothy

I finished Last week with a couple of blogs about the oral tradition behind the
formation of our Bible and the suggestion that we may be entering a season where
being able to tell the Bible may be a valuable resource for gossiping the Good News.
This solution is applicable to all parts of the Bible with just a little thought, and
perhaps training. The main point of this preparation is in being able to describe and
make a narrative to include the context of the passage that you are commenting on.
Psalm 23 is a basic example of the sort of background that could be included in
turning, in this case, a poem into a piece of “Living Scripture.”
David the king had once been a shepherd. He knew too well the need for feed and
water for the sheep. He knew the dangers, not just for the sheep, but also for the
shepherd of the wild carnivores such as bears and lions. He was also aware of his
responsibilities as shepherd to care for those in his care. So he wrote a poem that
related God as our Shepherd, the one who would put the welfare of the sheep ahead
his life.
The letters to Timothy are also fairly simple to develop using a little reading into the
letter itself and into the Book of Acts. Timothy had gone out from Antioch with Paul
as his protégé. His mother and grandmother were both believers and the tone of the
letters is that of a father writing his son, Paul even uses that term. Young Timothy
had taken the role of Church leader after Paul’s incarceration and was having a hard
time from those incapable of accepting his youth for the leader of a congregation.
So Pauls writes to him to encourage his child in the faith tp stand firm and not be
intimidated by older heads. I will leave the application from the letters to your
imagination but I think that this has been enough detail to get started.
Of course, to this point I have only been “contextualizing” Bible stories. There is an
entire goldmine to be developed in terms of paraphrasing original texts into stories
that have significance for specific cultures. The tribespeople of the New Guinea
highlands had no concept of, among other things “the Lamb of God” another picture
had to be found. The same was true of the people of Polynesia who knew of the
breadfruit plant but not of the “bread of Life”. Today in our own backyard are groups
of people who have no understanding of the rural background of which the Bible is
set. They may understand the story about the “lost jewellery” but have little concept
of the celebration that resulted.
Our challenge is to find creative ways to present the truths that we hold dear in such
a way that is culturally relevant to the experience and society from which our
listeners come. I recall it didn’t take David Wilkerson much time to work out there
were two colours not to be seen in while working with the colour gangs that he
ministered to. It takes that sort of sensitivity to minister to a group who have grown
up in a “Christian Country” but without the experience of Christianity or the education
of what it is all about.
Just one aside, I heard the story of a Christian in dialogue with a Jewess recently. In
a discussion about spirituality the Christian referred to “her Sacred Book” rather than
his Old Testament. It is just an illustration of the length to which we might need to go
to reach some of these lost ones.