All learning is unlearning

and a haiku

an album

I’ve been listening to Brooke Ligertwood’s Infinity on repeat since it dropped a few months ago. The flow of the album (not shuffled!) helps reform my frayed thoughts. Hard to pick a favorite song, but especially appreciating Authority:

One word from You
Things change on Your authority
Your Word, it's true
Things change on Your authority
All authority belongs to You

on reading

I had a professor once tell me: all learning is unlearning. If you want to learn poetry, you must unlearn everything you have been taught about grammar, sentence structure, punctation. Leave it all at the door.

That’s why I like what Jen Wilkin says about the 66th book of the Bible:

When you look at the way many of us have been catechized to read the Bible, we have been given an approach that is almost entirely devotional: I’m gonna sit, take 15 minutes, read something, and it needs to leave me with a positive feeling in the end that’s going to get me through the day. We can’t do that with Revelation. Or many books of the Bible. Once we get outside of the wisdom literature, we are pretty much in big trouble with that kind of approach. When we look at the book of Revelation, we forget that the original audience heard it aloud. It’s about 1.5 hours to read the whole thing, it would have hit them in a very cinematic way. Some of what we feel today is I don’t get it. Maybe I’m dumb or I need an expert or the Spirit doesn’t speak to me like he said he would. I think once we look at how the genre functions and how the book is given to us according to a certain set of rules, as all books are, then it begins to open itself up to us.

Keep the emphasis where Scripture keeps the emphasis. Similar to the creation account [in Genesis], the Revelation account is profoundly unconcerned with the how, and deeply concerned with the who and the why. The how and when just don’t really factor heavily into how the book is written, and we wouldn’t expect them to based on the genre rules that you would find for this type of literature. Think about haiku poetry. I was raised on Dr. Seuss, so the first time my teacher introduced a haiku to me and I’m like this is straight trash. And then I find out how sophisticated it is, following a set of rules with which I was not familiar with and doing it extremely well. And then my appreciation for haiku poetry increased. I was using the wrong set of rules to try to understand what this poetic form was doing. I think the same is true for the book of Revelation. Similar to Genesis, once we realise there is a poetry to the way this writing is constructed, then we begin to gain from it what we are intended to.

One of the biggest missing attributes of God that we forget to acknowledge and celebrate is that God is a poet. And he is really good at it. Poetry is a higher form of communication than say, historical narrative. It uses language in ways that are not always immediately accessible, but that yield access on further examination. And we don’t like that. We live in an instant gratification culture. Just say it. Just tell me what it means. Just tell me what’s going to happen. We’re not poetic people. To be invited into the story of Revelation (and I would argue into the big story of Scripture as a whole), is to be invited into the poetry that was given to us by a poetic God.

a haiku

Speaking of poetry, I wrote a silly one:

two months ago i
plunked this avo in a jar
behold! a butt crack

fresh guac farm coming in five years 🥑

a few questions

In the same interview about reading Revelation, Jen Wilkin asks some keen questions. She also quotes one of my other former professors.

We are all contributing to the church’s reputation. We have to be careful about taking an overly individualistic read on Revelation. It is a message to churches and the “big C” Church of all time, so it is useful to ask: what is my overall contribution to the reputation to my local church, and as the Church as a whole? how does my behavior align more closely with some of these church descriptions than others? It’s notable that of the seven churches, only two get a decent report card. And then you’ve got five that are just stinking the joint up. That’s probably a good indicator to those of us who are frustrated with our local church that we’re going to have to bear with one another in love because historically it would seem that’s a ratio we’re going to deal with. You’re not going to see churches that are necessarily representing Christ in the way that we would hope, but insofar that it is possible with us, we can be an influence for that in our local church. A question to consider: if you were church shopping in Asia Minor, which of these churches would you go to? The truth is that the two that get a good report card are both enduring persecution. It’s worth asking: is that the church I would sign up for if I really knew it was the healthiest embodiment of the church in my local context?

Iain Duguid writes that Satan has three ways that he assails us: through deception (giving us a lie), through seduction (luring us into something that we think is more beautiful than the story that we’re given in the gospel), or through persecution. When you see the seven churches, you see some combination of or one of those things that is defining what is happening. They’re either deceived or seduced or enduring persecution. So it seems like if Satan can deceive you or seduce you, he doesn’t have to persecute you. It has caused me to wonder if the church in the West is not enduring persecution because it has already succumbed to one of those two other things.

---

be well, friends! smol nephew turns two soon. we like jamming to Jesus and rawring like dinosaurs.

the good life 🦖💚

love,
reb