Wrestling with the weird words...

Today in worship, I shared some reflections on the importance of apocalyptic writing in our tradition. Like Matthew Fox and others, I have come to see the wisdom of including these "weird words" of scripture in the lectionary because not only do they teach us to go deeper than what is obvious, but they also remind us that God's grace and justice are bigger than the evil and sin all around and within us.

I have come to treasure being pushed into reconsidering these weird old words much the way that Bob Dylan came to love the strange songs of old weird America. They show us truths that awaken us from the slumber of the status quo: sometimes they are frightening and sometimes they are funny and almost always - even in exaggeration - they give us a piece of the truth.

If you know the music of Dylan, the lost "basement tapes" with the Band show his experimentation with the tunes of the old, weird America. They are the songs of this land before we were homogenized. They celebrate regional eccentricities, they speak in native tongues long forgotten and they evoke the passions and prejudices of the American people in an almost primal way.(Greil Marcus wrote an insightful book on this called, The Old Weird America: the World of Bob Dylan.)

And so, too, the words of scripture speak in weird ways of God's grace and justice that is bigger than the fear and evil that surround and infect us: what a great and weird blessing.