The Bible, Reimagined

I'm gonna tell you a story about my life.

I've told it once before, maybe twice, but you'll understand why I'm telling it to you in a second.

I never wanted to be a pastor.

I know a little ironic that I'm standing here, but that was not my goal in life.

In fact, when I finished high school, I I went to engineering.

Can I just extol how many engineers do we have in the room here?

I know we have a few.

Okay, there we go.

A few more.

Shout out to the engineers.

Love it.

You know what I love about engineering?

It's based in math.

Guess what?

Two plus two always equals?

Is it ever not equal to four?

No.

Anyone remember an English class in grade 12 where they're telling a story about some person wearing a red bow in her hair and they spend 16 hours discussing what that red bow means?

Guess what we never talked about in engineering?

Red bows in people's hair.

It was all about, you know, I I could put a I could see take give me a table, give me the measurements of the table, I'll put a glass on the edge of the table, and I'll tell you if that glass is going to tip over and fall over.

That's what I could do with math.

I loved it.

So it's a bit ironic that at that point of my life I had this feeling, voice, I don't know.

It said, go to Bible school.

Become a pastor.

That makes no sense.

Engineering.

Like, duh.

And so I I would kind of like the voice was here, and I'd kind of be over here in school, like doing school.

And again, school, I loved it.

Engineering was, it's like how my brain works.

Loved it.

And this voice over here kept saying, No, no, no.

Go to Bible school.

Become a pastor.

And I was like, there is no way that this human is gonna go there.

There's a story in the Bible about I named Jonah.

Jonah has a similar thing.

He's got a voice in his head that says, go to Nineveh.

Folks, Regina and Nineveh.

If Regina's where the school was, Regina and Nineveh are basically the same place.

Like, way, you should never go there.

God bless Regina, but and and Jonah, like me, is like, la la la la la la.

I don't want to listen to that.

So Jonah jumps on a ship.

If Nineveh's that way, he goes that way.

He's like, I don't even care where it is.

Just if whatever's the opposite of that way, give me a ticket there.

So he jumps on a ship going the other way.

For me, it was like I ignored it as best I could.

Three years into engineering, I couldn't, it was like haunting me.

I said, okay, well, I'll just quit school and start working.

Maybe that'll get it off my back.

And so I did.

I quit.

I quit engineering after my third year.

I had one more year and I would have graduated.

I went and worked at a store.

Do you guys know what MEC is, Mount Equipment Co-op?

It was like a version of that called Mountain Sports Company.

My job was to learn about and purchase outdoor gear.

It's like the heavens came down and said, What would be the perfect job for Vince that's not engineering?

That my gear closet was so full at that time because yeah.

And so for years I did that, just like, okay, maybe, maybe it's not, maybe it's the school thing, right?

I was like, school and engineering, but if I don't go to school, maybe it'll be quiet.

Can you guess what happened?

It was not quiet.

I was like, well, maybe, maybe it's my girlfriend.

So I broke up with my girlfriend, she moved out.

I was like, okay, finally I'm gonna have peace.

No.

Jonah is on this boat going the opposite way of anything.

And he he's doing the same thing.

He's like, maybe, maybe this will all go, maybe I can outrun it.

You know, anyone heard the geographical solution to your problems?

If you move farther enough away, your addiction or whatever problem you have will not catch you.

It's like the addiction is running along, and you're like, ha ha, I take the plane, I'm faster.

It was that feeling, right?

Right back from the olden days, there's like the geographical solution.

I'll go there.

Problem was the voice gets louder.

A storm blows up.

They wake Jonah up.

Hey, in their mind, in their story, remember this whole series, or this last four weeks, we've been talking about story.

I started off with the stories that we hold.

I'm not good enough.

No one will love me.

Had to take care of myself.

I'm an imposter.

Whatever the story is that runs your life, it's so much so that our stories often curate the data we pay attention to.

And then I said, actually, just like we have stories, and again, this is not our brains are story-making machines.

They build stories, that's their job.

So the fact that you have a story is not abnormal.

This is normal.

Just some stories are helpful, some stories are harmful.

Then I said, our spiritual traditions have stories.

Most spiritual traditions don't read the Bible, they read their stories version of the Bible.

And then I said, There will be things in your life that will break your stories.

Your story will do everything possible to get you to ignore that.

The good performance review.

Nope, nope, they're lying.

Nope, nope.

There's someone else gonna, the other shoe's gonna drop.

Nope, that's not true.

The friend who's always there, meanwhile, your head's going, no, no, everybody leaves me.

The friend's still there, and you're going, okay, but they're not no, given enough time, they will leave.

My story is true.

I said, what if we hold on to those things that undermine our stories?

Hold them as spiritual entities that can undermine our stories.

In some sense, today is part of that journey.

My story, Jonah's story, I think, is I don't want to do that.

That is not me.

I don't want to be a part of that.

There's nothing good over there.

Now, there's another story for Jonah in his tradition.

When bad weather happens, someone has pissed off the gods.

That's just the way they saw it.

So, question who pissed off the gods and got this little mess going on?

Because I was planning to go dirt biking after service, and now I'm not.

Oh, you think this?

There's actually a way to solve this in their tradition.

Here's what they did: they rolled dice to figure out who pissed off the gods.

Lois roll gets it.

So, all you DD fans out there, legit Bible stuff.

You are following how people have divined God for you know thousands of years.

I'm not sure they used 20-sided dice.

Is that a right word?

20-sided dice?

I'm not sure it was 20-sided.

I'm not sure how they did it.

D20.

But Jonah gets the low roll.

They're looking around.

There's a storm about to kill them all.

Jonah gets the low roll.

And they all kind of stop and they're he's like, I did it to Phelan this morning.

She came in, God bless her.

She's our sound person.

She was sick this morning, and she still came in.

Like, thank you.

Let's give her a.

But she comes in.

I was like, Are you okay?

She's like, I'm sick.

And I went.

Right?

That's what they did.

Jonah gets a laurel.

They're all like, oh, when the lightning hits, I don't want to be close to that guy.

What do you do with the guy who's pissed off the gods?

They threw him over the edge of the boat.

Storm went away.

Here I am.

I've quit school.

I broke up my girlfriend.

I had her move out.

And the storm is still going.

And finally I'm like, I won't say it here because I'm not supposed to swear that much, but there was a lot of swearing.

Like a lot of swearing.

And it was like, screw this, screw all this.

I will show you this is not the right answer.

I will get thrown over the edge of the boat into Regina, into Canadian Bible School, and I will show you that this is not the right answer.

Job used the Uber of the sea.

The story says a fish caught him, swallowed him, and spin them up on the land.

I used a 1976 Dodge station wagon.

I put as much stuff as I could into the station wagon, whatever didn't fit.

I just literally my station wagon's here, the dumpster was here.

It was like, oh, that's full dumpster, dumpster.

There's a couch in the dumpster.

I was like, oh, I can't fit that.

And I finally went to Bible school.

An engineer.

Question for you.

Has your life been a straight line between where you are, where you started, and where you are now?

Mine has been a hot mess.

It's like.

You know, you think you're like, okay, I have a whole plan, and then life happens.

Um, someone just said the AA term life, living life on life's terms.

Yeah, I try not to do that because life never got where I wanted it to go.

I'm like Jonah.

Oh, wait, I'm supposed to go that way?

How about I go that way?

Anyone resonate with the messiness of life?

The messiness of our spiritual lives, of this thing of going, okay, I'm gonna be this, oh wait, I'm not this.

Many of us are from previous spiritual traditions.

We grew up with a certain story that at some point we said, that does not work anymore.

That is messy.

When I read the Jonah story, I read a story of a life as messy as mine.

As messy as yours.

And our spiritual ancestors wrote it down to say, just so you know, yeah, that's how this thing works.

It is not a clear, straight line from start to finish.

It is messy.

You're gonna take wrong turns, you're gonna figure stuff out on the way.

If things feel a bit chaotic right now, yeah, that's life.

That is our spiritual lives.

And yet, how many people read the story of Jonah?

And what they're focused on is can a human live in the belly of a whale for three days?

Does anyone care about that?

Has anybody seen somebody live in the belly of a whale for three days?

Well, well played, touche.

I like it.

When I read the Bible growing up, they had a story that said it was God's word.

You need to take it literally.

Which means the story of Jonah is a story about can a human live in a whale for three days?

And yet that part of the story has stopped more people from being part of the Christian tradition than many other things.

I went to school, we argued ad nauseum about things like that.

Does anybody care?

Because I didn't.

But when I read the story of Jonah, the human, just like me, whose life is as messy as mine, whose spirituality is as chaotic as mine, suddenly my journey to get here, to being a pastor, your pastor, in all its chaos, in all its confusion, I realize this is the journey for most of us.

It is not clean and simple.

So then what do I what do we do with the Bible?

Like, really?

I was gonna ask, how many of you read it?

Don't put up your hands.

How many of you I could say this, how many of you think you should probably read it?

That's maybe a better question, right?

And yet, do you want to?

No, I talked to somebody who's like a friend of mine told me if I read the Bible, I'll have my life questions answered.

Read the whole Bible.

He's like, did I miss a section?

Because I don't know what to do now.

What do we do with the Bible?

And yet, the Bible itself has been around for let's say two to 3,500 years.

Would that be a fair guess?

Depending on how you're dating everything.

Let's say 35, 3,500 years.

For 3,500 years, people have read this book, explored the stories, and used them to inspire them to a life of something more.

Bart Erdman, one of the scholars that I'm a big fan of, I talked about him a couple weeks ago.

He's writing a book that says, How does Christianity shape the world?

Do you know that we wouldn't have most of the social programs we have without Christians who use the Bible to inspire it?

There's a reason many hospitals have a religious name to them.

My dad, he was in Saint Boniface.

Because the Bible was used to inspire people to live in a way that says, I care about the people around me.

So to ignore the Bible altogether because it's about people living in a fish belly, undermines what it can do.

So if we can't use it the old way with the old story, how do I recommend we use it?

This actually took me a while to figure out because I was trained in this way.

I went to seminary.

Seminary is the fancy word for master's degrees for religious people.

I went to grad school essentially.

They told me how I was supposed to see the Bible, and yet, for lack of a better term, no one cared.

You all didn't care.

Do you care about the documentary hypothesis of Genesis 1?

You're supposed to care, right?

I spent a lot of money studying that.

Um, by a certain gentleman named Jordan Peterson.

Before he was Jordan Peterson, that we love and we hate, right?

Life is complex.

He was doing a series of lectures on the Bible.

That's my jam.

You know, here's the thing that blew my mind.

He was doing a series of lectures on the Bible, not even the easy stuff, not the Jesus stuff, the old stories, the hard ones.

And he was packing out lecture theaters with college students who wanted to come learn about the Bible.

The pastor in me was like, what is actually going on?

So I started watching his videos.

He's talking about the creation narrative.

But he was doing it all wrong.

Just I'm throwing.

I have a master's degree, folks.

He would talk about the or the fight between order and chaos.

I was like, actually, that's not what that is about.

The text clearly says X, Y, and Z.

And then he would talk about the Cain and Abel and this fight between the demons and the dragons inside of each of us.

And I'm like, there's not even a dragon in the story.

You're making this stuff up.

And yet people are like hanging on his every word.

I went to school to figure out what the Bible says.

I realized it it wasn't what the Bible says, so it was what the tradition story says the Bible says.

But something shifted in watching Jordan Peterson's videos.

It took me quite a while.

I'm embarrassed at how long it took me, actually.

I had this ongoing fight with him, Bible scholar against him.

You're doing it wrong, you're doing it wrong, you're doing it wrong.

Until one day I realized, wait a second.

Jordan Peterson is a psychologist.

A clinical psychologist.

With a doctorate in psychology.

Psychologists ask the question, Who are we?

What moves us?

What motivates us?

What destroys us?

What is non-functional for us?

And so the questions he's asking the text wasn't, what does the Bible say?

He's asking the question, what does the Bible give us insight into what it means to be human?

And suddenly my brain clicked.

Click, click.

He's not asking, can a man live in a whale for three days?

He's asking, how many of us have messy lives?

And what can we learn about navigating a messy life from somebody else who's navigated a messy life?

I'm gonna be all technical.

I gotta get, you know, folks, bear with me for a second.

I spent a lot of money on my education.

You're just gonna get a little bit of my education here.

I renamed it, I called it a psychological hermeneutic.

Hermeneutic is a fancy word to say, what questions do you ask of the text?

How did I write that?

Asking questions about what it means to be human.

That's what he was asking the Bible.

Not what does the Bible say, not what does our tradition say, not any of these like weird, abstract ideas that we spent time arguing about.

No, no.

What does the Bible say about us?

About dealing with loss and sickness, about fighting a journey that's not going the way we think it's supposed to go.

Stories that that call us out and say, actually, there's something else you could have done here.

Those are psychological questions, questions about you and me.

What if we spent our time asking the questions, what does this story say about me?

Instead of saying what does this story say about some conception of the divine or some abstract theory of theology?

That's what Jordan Peterson taught me.

So today, I would like us to apply Jordan Peterson's psychological hermeneutic to a story together.

Now there's a part of this that you guys are this is like a choose your own adventure one.

So I'm gonna tell you a story from the Bible.

It's a common story.

Traditionally, it's called the story of Jesus turning water into wine.

Felt like a wine story would be apropos today.

Now, at the end of the story, I want you to ask or answer the question.

I'm gonna get you to yell it out.

Which character in the story do you find some resonance with?

Not can somebody turn water into wine?

I have winemaking buddies, they can turn water into wine, they just add a few more things, right?

Takes a couple months.

Or I don't know how long it takes, but they can do it.

We're not asking the question, can you turn water into wine?

What we're asking is where which characters in the story have elements that resonate with us?

Okay.

Okay, let's read together.

Can you throw it up for me?

Three days later.

So this is uh three days later is just how the text says, and then the next story.

So three days later, there's a wedding in the village of Canaan in Galilee.

Jesus' mother, Mary, was there.

Jesus and his students were there also in attendance.

When they started running low on wine at the wedding, Jesus' mother said, They're just about to run out of wine.

Next slide.

Jesus replied, Is that any of our business, mother?

Yours or mine?

This isn't my issue to deal with.

Don't push me.

Next slide.

Mary went ahead, anyways, telling the servants, whatever Jesus tells you to do, do it.

Okay, next slide.

Six stoneware pots were there used by the Jews for ritual washing.

Each held about 20 to 30 gallons.

Jesus ordered the servants to fill the pots with water, and they filled them to the brim.

Now fill your pitchers and take them to the host.

Jesus said, and they did.

Next slide.

When the host tasted the water that had become wine, he didn't know what had happened, but the servants knew.

He called to the bridegroom, said, Everybody I know begins their fine with their finest wines, and after the guests have had a few, they bring out the cheap stuff.

But you've saved the best till now.

That's the story of turning water into wine.

Let me ask you.

Which character intrigues you in that story?

Just yell it out.

Sorry, say it again?

The host.

The host.

Okay, let's do the host, then we'll do Mary the Mother.

Let's look at the host for a moment.

And again, we're not looking at it through some sense of divinity or anything.

Look at them from if you are that person.

Here you are, you're hosting a wedding, so you're like the wedding planner, I would guess.

That'd be something similar to what we'd call it.

And you're expecting a certain the life to go a certain way.

We start with the good wine, then they drink a bit, and then we start with the medium wine, and then they drink a bit more, and then we give them the crappy wine.

And out of nowhere, something you did not see coming hits you.

Have you had those moments?

You're walking through your life thinking everything is normal, and all of a sudden it's like, whoa, I did not see that coming.

How many times do you find yourself, you almost missed it because you were down doing something else, focusing on something else?

What happens when you have those moments?

What happens inside of you?

Is there a moment where you're like, oh, and also kind of the world starts to feel different?

Like maybe there's a purpose here or a meaning, or maybe it's just like the newness of it snaps you into the moment where you're suddenly fully present.

And the question I ask after listening to the host story is how have we managed our lives?

Do we create space for newness?

Do we deliberately build things into our lives that give us new things?

You know, if you're a golfer, instead of being like, well, I golf, actually, I have no clue what it was the name of a golf course.

You have the name of a golf course.

Tiger Woods.

Say it again?

Tiger Woods.

Tiger Woods, okay.

He plays on what golf course?

I don't know, some golf course.

Let's say there's a golf course in town called golf course A.

If you always go to golf course A, you guys are not helping me at all with my Centennial Golf Course.

That's the name?

Yes.

Love it.

Centennial Golf Course.

You always golf centennial golf course.

What if you went to a different golf course?

Right?

Part of you is like, no, I can't do that.

Difference?

You could die from different.

And yet maybe it's the difference where you'll see something new.

Suddenly you see life again.

Instead of the thing you're always expecting to happen.

So what if the turning water into wine story today asks you, where in your life can you expose yourself to something new?

Something that will snap you out of the routine?

If you're a couple, what if date night looked completely different than you normally do?

What if you took a different way to work?

What if instead of going to the place you always go to, what if you did it differently?

What if you changed up your routine so that you opened yourself up to the experience of the new that said, wait a second, boom, I'm right here right now.

That's a pretty inspiring story, isn't it?

When we focus on the humanity instead of the magical portions.

Can I do one more?

Uh I heard Mary.

That's the one that got me.

Mary's storylines.

So I'm I'm in the hospital with my dad.

I think I'm doing a fantastic job of taking care of him, right?

Like I am nailing this.

I've talked to the doctors, I've talked to the nurses, I've organized everything.

And I'm sitting there at the room, he's sitting in his bed, and I'm kind of at the door.

And my aunt comes in, my auntie Mary.

She walks in.

The first thing she does is she sees his feet are uncovered.

She grabs a blanket and tucks in his feet.

And then she she rolls them a little bit, and then she she tucks a pillow into his side so he's comfortable.

You can just see his face just soft.

And then she she reaches out, she sits next to him close, and she's like, Oh, Jake, how are you doing?

And then she she reaches out and takes his hand and they hold hands, and I'm like, I saw none of that.

I'm the guy at the party who did not see that we're running out of wine.

I'm just like doing my thing.

How many of us are missing the they all around us?

Oh, Mary was on my shoulder this whole week.

She's like, You missed that one, Clausen.

Did you see that one?

Nope.

How about that one?

Nope.

Not in a judgy way, not in a painful way, but in a way that says, I thought my role here was to navigate this well.

But I realize I'm missing a whole bunch of things that could take water in this moment.

That merry story, that one rings my bell.

Can I add one more?

Actually, two more.

You notice how she says, uh, I see this need, and then she asks Jesus, hey Jesus, can you help?

And his answer is kind of terse.

In the Greek, it's it's a little ambiguous of whether he's being a complete jerk or just like a medium jerk.

We're not exactly sure.

You ever asked for help and got blown off?

What do you do?

Because what I do in my head is, okay, never gonna ask for help again.

Just take care of myself.

And what does Mary do?

She is not phased by it.

She's like, he's having a bad day, I don't care.

Whatever he says to do, do it.

Tell me, that is not a call out to all of us people who are self-sufficient, who pride ourselves in self-sufficient because we don't like the feeling of being rejected or turned down or like blown off.

Here's Mary totally calling us out.

The final piece of Mary's story that I ugh, again, she's been on my shoulder all week.

Do you notice at the end of the story, Mary is never once acknowledged for what she did?

Oh that hurts my soul.

I didn't ask for this, but Holly, when you have a second, can you throw up the uh spiritual journey slide for me?

How much of our lives do we kind of mix up levels of our spiritual journey?

Remember, at the bottom level, it's I against them.

The thing you need to figure out at the bottom level is who am I and who are they?

If you just ignore the I and focus on they, you will burn out with resentment.

If you focus on the I and don't care about the them, we call you a narcissist, and probably you are.

If those two are fully understood and in conflict, you have the world that we're currently in right now.

I fighting them.

This group's fighting this group.

Everyone's, we understand who we are, we understand who they are, we are against each other.

So we say, what if we go up one more level?

We fully understand I, we fully understand them.

But now we figure out a win-win way of being.

Ultimately, this is where our the goal here is for have.

You give and you get.

Once that's built in a beautiful way, where you have core groups that fuel you, you have capacity to start taking water, which means you give to people who will not give you anything in return.

Think about that for a second.

You have the capacity to give without needing anything in return.

Mary's an invited guest.

She sees a need, she sees the they.

And for whatever reason, she's resourced enough to say, we need to take care of that.

And it doesn't matter if anyone sees that I was a part of that.

How much of our lives are we giving with a desire to get something in return when the relationship is not designed for that?

This might be Schadenfreuden, meaning, you know, joy at other people's suffering, but I hope Mary's riding shotgun on your shoulder this week, because she has been on me all week.

Vince.

Not in a shame way, but in a beautiful way, you can do better.

Is that more interesting than at some point, possibly 2,000 years ago, possibly a bunch of jugs of water were possibly turned from water into wine?

If we read the Bible through a lens of humanity, who are we?

Where is the areas where I'm not I'm not in a healthy place?

Where is stuff that I'm missing?

Where is there somebody else just like me where I go, yeah, pfft, me and Jonah?

Like, screwed it up again, Jonah.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah, it's good.

We're not out of the race yet?

No, we're still in it.

Okay.

When we see the Bible this way, the Bible speaks to us all the time.

I'm gonna be wrestling with this story for months.

That's why I say the Bible is as relevant today as the day it was born.

In fact, I'll take one step further, and this is maybe opening a can of worms, I don't mean it.

I think most of early religion was actually psychology.

Who are we?

What things are healthy for us?

What things do we need to avoid?

How do we need to grow?

Where do we need to challenge ourselves?

Where do we need to feel welcome?

So I'm gonna give you some homework.

You just heard the story of turning water into wine.

Take another character in this week, or maybe maybe you're going like Vince, enough.

I'll just focus on the Mary on my shoulder this week.

Asking for help, got it.

Okay, I'm on it.

Take any character in the story and ask yourself, what about their story resonates with me?

What calls me out?

What gives me comfort?

What makes me go, yeah, me too.

Got it.

How about the Jesus story?

Someone asks you for help, your first response is, uh, not my problem.

This week, may we let the beautiful human insight of the Bible challenge us to be the healthiest humans, the most loving humans, humans that are taking water to our world.

Amen.

As I always like to say, hell yeah.

Okay.

Have a great week.

May may Mary live on your shoulder this week.