When you stop reading halfway through

Acts 16:16-34

About halfway through reading today’s scripture for the first time this week I stopped and opened up the lectionary document in the shared drive on the church’s computer and double-checked that I had the right scripture. Unfortunately, I did.

            Then I read the rest of the reading, and it wasn’t that bad. I had stopped after the part about the divining girl and the imprisonment; I hadn’t read far enough, and I didn’t remember what this story was about. I rejected the scripture on its premise without trying to understand where it was going.

            This got me thinking: This is a common challenge with how we read the Bible. Sometimes we start reading something in there, and it’s strange or shocking or we just don’t get what it has to do with anything, and so we are tempted to skip ahead and read something else, or else we read it quickly and say “I don’t know what that had to do with anything,” and then move on without a second thought. All the while we are missing our blind spots where scripture might be speaking to us; we pick and choose how we want to be affected and we don’t allow the Bible to challenge us. In this way, we domesticate this Bible that is naturally wild.

            After my reaction—and when I finally finished the reading—I was reminded of the men’s Bible study we did on the book of Romans last year for the few of us who gathered on Tuesday mornings. The book of Romans is a fantastic book—one of my favorites in the Bible, really. However, if you start reading in the beginning of Romans—which you should!—it’s easy to say, “Wow, Paul stop talking about the law. Give me some good news, man!” You see, in Romans, Paul sets the stage by talking about what it means to be justified according to your words and actions; he obsesses over righteousness; he tells us about the example of Abraham; the first half of the letter is mostly on sin and death and the law. If that’s not your cup of tea then in all likelihood you’re no longer reading when he gets to the point.

The first nine chapters of Romans leave us hanging on by a thread, wondering where Paul is going with all this. Then, there is this great turn where all that talk of sin and death and righteousness leads to a God who is the champion of grace, who embodies love, who saves us apart from all those things that Paul talked about so much in the lead-up. Starting with Romans 10, the next several headings in my Bible are: 1. Salvation is for All, 2. Israel’s Rejection is Not Final, 3. the Salvation of the Gentiles, 4. All Israel Will be Saved, and 5. the New Life in Christ. The book of Romans sets the stage for what life looks like under the law so that the rug can be pulled out from underneath us and show us why we so badly need the good news of Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, most people who started reading the book of Romans gave up before getting there.

            Ours is a sound bite culture. Online articles warn of how they will take to read—1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 20 minutes. The articles that are longer get less page views, less advertising revenue. Book sellers are hurting and not just because of Amazon; people are reading less books this year—and you can’t just blame the millennials! My generation is actually reading more than the national average—80% read a book last year compared to 72% of all adults. For everyone, the trend is simply to briefer and briefer bits of information. More sobering studies have shown that people don’t even read articles anymore; they mostly just read the headlines.

            This is where the life of faith is going to stand in stark relief against the world of efficiency yet again. We need to sit with things longer; to dwell deeper. We don’t need more surface-level info; we need to wade into the river of life and ponder our place in it. We need to sit with things we don’t understand; not ignore them or reject them out of hand. We need to be deeply honest with ourselves, because that is part of what it means to be Christian.

            Finally, to the story Paul and Silas—yes, I am going to go there, but mostly I’m interested in the jailer. The jailer was about to kill himself having assumed that the prisoners had escaped after the earthquake. His knee-jerk reaction is that he blew it, his dignity is gone, and so his life is over. His initial impression is absolutely wrong, but if not for the quick actions of Paul and Silas he would never have known it; it’s Romeo and Juliet, except with a timely intervention. It took Paul and Silas revealing a reality to him that was deeper than his expectations that saved him from death. That’s the Gospel, folks. It’s waking up in the morning, understanding that you failed at the one job you had; it’s looking at your sword and saying, “Well, that’s it for me.” It’s giving up completely because of your sin, realizing you deserve death, and then it’s Jesus Christ meeting you in that exact moment—in the flesh or in the person of others, interceding on your behalf; Paul, Silas, whoever—it’s Jesus saying, “You are not defined by your worst, and I love you for it all the same.”

The jailer is this great recipient of grace, and he didn’t know it until it was almost too late. Moreover, I wouldn’t have known it if I hadn’t kept reading—and you might not have known it if you weren’t stuck hearing this reading this week—a reading none of us were likely to choose. Grace does that to us; it sneaks up on us when we least expect it. It always comes when we need it and usually when we don’t see it coming, and it’s an amazing gift we still don’t deserve.