Get Rich Quick Scheme.

For everyone who has will be given more, and she will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.

Back where i grew up, one of the things people did was that they really liked "verses." The ancient text of the Bible was parsed into smaller digestible numbered bits a while back and these bits are called "verses." What's strange to me now that I'm far away from that world is -- how some of these little bits come to mean strange things for people:

1. people memorize verses. that's right -- just the little bits -- don't give me the whole idea, please, its too much, and not very easy to insert into the myriad of situations that i might like to insert this little bit.

2. people string together verses to create new wholes. this hermeneutic practice is actually widely practiced throughout christendom. the wild and wacky part occurs when the longstanding commercialism braided with Christianity -- and particularly American christianity -- seizes upon one of these strung together bits-cum-wholes and develops an entire discourse around the new whole. Example: The Romans Road. Jeremiah 29:11.

3. oh, and speaking of Jeremiah 29:11 -- people "claim" these bits. I'm not, honestly, entirely sure what it means to CLAIM a bit of scripture, but I've got a little bit of an idea.

One day Lynn and I were walking down a perfectly average sidewalk in our little suburban allotment in Bowling Green Ohio, when my eyes lit upon a small bit of paper. I picked it up. (See, I claimed it.) It had been torn from a little message pad and in loopy cursive letters the note read:

"You can try, but you'll never get rid of me."

I loved this note for all kinds of reasons. For me, most of those reasons were the rich storied-ness that he note evoked. I put it on my refrigerator with tape. I told Daniel about it and he laughed hard. He said that we should try.

Try what? I said.

Try flushing it down the toilet. Burning it. Burying it. See what happens.

Spoken like a true literalist, my brother had succeeded in "claiming" the note much more totally than I. For him the rhetor I had imagined -- a love-crazed tenth grader, panicked and vengeful, a furtive moment of stuffing a note in backpack too loosely -- had been erased completely. For him the note itself spoke. It taunted us from our refrigerator much like Dagon, god of the philistines, and Sampson, his faithful worshipper taunted the Hebrews.

And I can imagine any number of crazed characters who have paraded through our house taking the note a different way.

Can I have a drink? she asks.

Sure. I say. Help yourself. nodding toward the kitchen.

And as she stands in front of the refrigerator, water streaming into the cup, she looks at the note. "Did he send me to get this water so i would look at this note? Are the Rudds threatening me? They don't think I can get rid of them? *That's* why he told me to go get this water." And with the cup of water still sitting on the formica counter of our BG kitchen, she fled to her car and oddly enough, we've never seen her again.

Again! She claims it DIFFERENTLY.

This seems like the power and horror of stories moving across time and locale. Their meanings shift so profoundly. And so fast.

Likewise these bits of paper / scripture....

When I came to this job at this "evangelical" college -- someone asked me (as someone is prone to ask everyone when they come here): "Whats your life verse?"

Which means, I guess that you're clinging to one particular bit more than any other, right? I want to be the guy who follows one of the EIGHT MILLION jeremiah 29:11 thieves and announce that mine is:

"in your family line there will never be an old man. Every one of you that I do not cut off from my altar will be spared only to blind your eyes with tears and to grieve your heart, and all your descendants will die in the prime of life."

You can find it here if you want to claim it. Or better yet, my brother's favorite: Ezekiel 23:20.

My point? That excerpting scripture and divorcing it from context in order to affirm yourself / your strength / your confidence is bad? mmmm, not completely.

My point was actually that in the middle of the scripture reading at church on Sunday, I leaned over to Lynn and said, "Hey. That's my new life verse." (referring to that bit at the top of this blog...)

You'll have to read the whole story yourself to confirm my interpretation -- but this interpretive hook that Jesus offers to me turns the world upside down. Here's my down and dirty rendering of what this story is saying:

"You wanna be rich? treat what you have like its the best resource *ever*. you wanna be poor? Treat what you have like its not enough."

Ouch. and Wow.