Beware of Magnets

Handling precious texts

For some time it has troubled me that we often turn favorite Bible verses into cutesy ‘fridge-magnet’ pieces of text which function more like a talisman than a piece of transformative text. Whilst this has the positive benefit that we remember them, on the negative side it means that we are less able to appreciate the full depth and resonance which arises from their context.

Last night we started with some basic ‘tools for texts’ to help in processing any piece of Scripture, great or small:

Filters

The text can be passed through a

Genre: what kind of writing is this? Is it poetry or argument or historical record?

Culture: was this written to nomads, exiles, settled believers or prisoners?

Tone: is the tone upbeat, downbeat, reassuring or challenging?

Questions:

WHO wrote it?

WHEN did they write it?

WHO did they write it for?

WHAT did they write it for?

Equipped with these simple tools, we looked at Jeremiah 29 v.11 in the context of the letter written to the exiles in Jeremiah 29 v.4 – 14.  We saw that it was preceded by a call to settle down, followed by a reassurance that better things were coming, and coupled with a condition – namely that people should seek God with all their heart. Often this verse is a barely Christianized version of ‘things can only get better’. However, closer scrutiny reveals that it is not so much a promise of ‘jam tomorrow’ as ‘God today.

After looking at all this, we sat around tables and reflected on letters written from a distance as we listened to Clifford T Ward’s song ‘home thoughts from abroad‘. Each group then wrote their own letters to the exiles (pictured below). Sometimes we only really understand a text when we interact with it, which this exercise allowed us to do. AS a dynamic equivalence translation of Jeremiah 29 v.11, the following from one of the groups takes some beating:

“Trust me, believe me when I say that I won’t harm you. I want to give you hope and a future”

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