← The BEMA Podcast
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- [00:11]
A
This is the Baymon podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co host, Brent Billings. Today I'm with El Grover Fix to burrow into three different ways to wrestle.
- [00:19]
B
Now, that burrowing is not supposed to be like termites, by the way. It's supposed to be picture a nice little cozy woodland creature thinking like a badger in that kind of situation. No invasive species, no invasive bugs. Okay, yeah, we're getting our cozy badger selves, our fox. You know, unless you're in the UK and you hate foxes. But, yeah, we are here to talk about wrestling. I'm stoked. Our last pillar here of Bama, and I have three different approaches, three different possibilities, three different hats to try on as we think about wrestling. And so, without further ado, here is number one. You ready, Brent?
- [01:00]
A
I'm ready.
- [01:01]
B
I think one way. Okay, great. I also think I'm going before the other guys or after Marty. Is that the case?
- [01:09]
A
Well, yeah. Marty's got his solo episode that will be out already, and then your episode, and then Reid with Marty will follow Reid with Marty.
- [01:17]
B
Okay. So I'm not totally on fresh snow here. There is a path I'll probably be trotting along after Marty, our executive producer, but I feel confident we are moving over snow that just has the lightest of tracks on it. I am stoked.
- [01:34]
A
Okay, good.
- [01:34]
B
The first approach. The first way we're gonna think about wrestling today is maybe the one that pops first to mind, depending on what Marty talked about on his episode. It's wrestling as a way to continue to pursue more goodness out of a certain text, out of suck more marrow out of a particular passage. So Marty recently reminded us of the 70 or 72 Wink facets of the gemstone. The 70 different ways that we can approach a text.
- [02:09]
A
Yeah.
- [02:10]
B
The reason that that's so helpful is because we have a long life, Lord willing, ahead of us and only a certain number of stories in this Bible that we hope to spend our lives walking through. Right. And especially if you're at a liturgical church that follows the lectionary, you're going to be hit the same stories every five years, sometimes more than that, if that's a particular, like, holiday thing. And so if we don't have any knowledge of wrestling, it's not in our values. It's not something that we're leaning into. We can approach a story about, say, the transfiguration of Jesus and just think, oh, yeah, this is the one teaching. This is the one lesson that I heard about that. This is the pashat that I grew up with. And that's about it. And then we live the rest of our life being annoyed if we belong to a certain denomination that we have to come on back to Transfiguration Sunday every single year and hear the same story again. However, there are always more than just the few ways to dig into a text. We can continue to try to find more meat on that bone. That is a form of wrestling and. And it holds blessing in it, just like Jacob wrestling in the classic story from Genesis. The Talmud models this really well for us, right. Even when we talk about the Jewish teaching or whatever, that's always just one out of a bajillion that is recorded for us in places like Sepharia. But I just want to take a moment here to look at the transfiguration story as a little parable, a little illustration, or what is the T fig, as I like to call it? You're welcome. What is the tea fig all about?
- [04:03]
A
Gotta love a good L. Grover. Frick slang term patented here.
- [04:08]
B
So I had to Google, actually I've had in my brain for so long that Jesus is the enfleshed version of the law, which is represented by Moses at the transfiguration. And the prophets being Eliyahu or Elijah. Marty taught that to me 10, no more than that, like 15 years ago now. And so it was hard for me to be like, what is the standard take? I had to Google it. I had to look at the blogs. Apparently it's about the Trinity. Jesus is the beloved Son. Congratulations to us.
- [04:40]
A
And what, Moses is the Father and Elijah is the spirit?
- [04:43]
B
I know there's problems too.
- [04:45]
A
Well, I don't know that kind of. That's.
- [04:49]
B
You might be onto something. There's goodness in that. That just pulled out, that feels new and fresh. There's a lot that that still leaves on the table though, right? Why is he glowing?
- [05:00]
A
Sure.
- [05:01]
B
Why are his clothes like lightning? Why is it so many days after? But it's one approach and it's the one that we might encounter in our churches the most often. Jesus is God's son. And that's why the story is here. Okay, okay. I love that you just modeled how we can dig into that more, Brent. But there are more takes even beyond those top two. We can also look at it as Jesus in the T fig story is our bridge between death and undeath. Because Moses, of course, died famously on the mountain before he got to the promised land. Versus Elijah doesn't seem to die. He goes straight up in the fiery chariot. And so Jesus is our Bridge between those, you can go. Number four. Jesus is our access to the holy of holies. Why is he glowing? Moses glows when he's seen God face to face, but he has to wear a veil because the people are frightened. But Jesus, of course, is God face to face, and he doesn't have to veil anymore. He's our access to the presence of God. Number five, Jesus is our atonement. He is Yom Kippur, so he's wearing all white, just like the priests do on the day of atonement. He's out glowing in public because the veil is being torn. Number six, tapping a little into the epistle to the Hebrews. Jesus is better than the angels. And you can also rope into this one. He is our bread. Why that one? Well, they've just seen Elijah. And in our story in First Kings about Eliyahu, he falls down and he passes out underneath a broom tree. Who comes and visits him?
- [06:40]
A
Brent, it's angels, right?
- [06:41]
B
It's an angel. Yeah. An angel says, get up and eat. And then what does Jesus say to the disciples after they've passed out? Depending on the gospel, fully or just a little bit, he says, get up and don't be afraid. Don't be afraid is what angels are always saying. Right. They're always saying to whoever they appear to. That's the first thing they say. Hey, don't be afraid. I know I'm scary looking.
- [07:07]
A
Chill out, man.
- [07:08]
B
Chill out.
- [07:09]
A
It's all good.
- [07:09]
B
Yeah. Surfer angels, Incredible. But you can also. Right. Spin that into Jesus as our bread, because he doesn't say, get up and eat this physical bread. He says, get up. You're with me. Right? He is the living bread. You can also look at Jesus as the new circumcision. Whoa. Where's circumcision in the story? Well, Matthew and Mark say it's six days after a previous story, but Luke says after about the eighth day. The eighth day after what? Jesus teaches them about becoming a disciple and taking up their cross specifically. And then Luke says after. About. About the eighth day, the thing that happens on the eighth day is circumcision.
- [07:53]
A
Wow.
- [07:54]
B
Why does circumcision happen in Egyptian culture? It happened at the end of your priestly training, when you were ready to be a priest, you're ready to serve, you're ready to go into the presence of the gods in the temple. So way back at the beginning of the story, Although of course, there's other ways to interpret circumcision, but using this one, God takes that and says, no you're not qualified to be with me and to be in my presence. At the end of a long education, you are qualified to be with me, to live life with me. If you are a living baby and you have a name, you are already a priest. You're already qualified to be in my presence. So back to tfig. Jesus says, eight days ago, you agreed to be my disciple, even though you knew that it would involve great suffering. Awesome. Eight days later, circumcision. You are now qualified to have these numinous experiences, not seeing Ra show up in the temple in the form of a ray of sun, but Jesus himself. Right, Number eight, Fittingly, because eight days later, number eight, we can also say that Jesus embodied wisdom. That's what he's doing up there. He's the embodiment of wisdom. When we're looking at different interpretations, we're going to check intertextuality in the word. We're going to check the Jewish conversation. But what's the other thing we gotta check, Brent?
- [09:12]
A
The spirit.
- [09:15]
B
I like that. I like that answer. Very good. Very John 16 of you.
- [09:18]
A
Thank you.
- [09:19]
B
The Greco Roman culture that's in the land.
- [09:22]
A
Oh, culture, yes, of course.
- [09:24]
B
Thanks to Roman presence. Thanks to the Hellenists, we've got Greek theaters in Caesarea, Maritima, Jerusalem. Bet. She and Gadara Sebastia. Right. We have the Decapolis and the land. And so it's a huge force in their culture as well. And if we look at that culture that predates Jesus in the moment of the tea fig, Athena is one of our central figures in many of those plays and epics. She, of course, is the goddess of wisdom. And she is the one where, if you look at that literature, which is also in Greek, handy dandy. It says that her clothes flash bright as lightning, which is the same thing that it says about Jesus, which is pretty hard to pull anything out from the Tanakh side. Unless I'm missing some things, clothing specifically, flashing bright as lightning, I'm not sure where that is in Tanakh listeners. You, of course, will let me know if I'm missing something. And so, looking at that culture. Okay, what's the context where she has clothes flashing bright as lightning and one of the many scenes in which she appears in the Greco Roman literature, she says this, which I think is resonant with their story. Telemachus, it is no longer fitting for you to be childish. You have heard what sort of glory your father won. Get up, ding, ding, ding, and call the assembly. So she's telling this guy soon to be portrayed. Maybe by the time this comes out, about to be portrayed by Tom Holland, she's telling him to go and confront the corruption of his home community. That home community is full of suitors and they are seeking personal gain. Right. They're not looking for good responsibility in taking care of people. They're looking to marry Penelope, who is in their home community, who's seeking personal gain. The Sadducees may be getting power from Rome, Hellenists who are just embracing all the comfort and convenience of Rome. And so it is no longer fitting for you to be childish. You have heard what sort of glory your father won. That rings true for me. And then she says, get up and go call the assembly. That's what Jesus says here. Get up. And in the story, in this quote, she then goes on to tell Tom Holland that he's going to have to go on this big journey to Sparta and Pylos. To do what? To seek and spread the good news of Odysseus. What are the disciples going to be sent to do? To go out beyond their homeland to different places to go seek and spread good news. Right. So that's just eight quick, quick little walkthrough of one story. Just what I came up with in one sitting of different ways that we can talk about the transfiguration. There's 64 more. Why is that important? It's not just me flexing. It's important because there is an additional fruit that comes from that practice. Yes. Hopefully there's blessing in somewhere in one of those eight ways of looking at that story. Hopefully one of them caught your heart in some way. But cultivating all of the lenses, cultivating all those different ways of encountering story is a practice that generates humility and learner's posture that doesn't get snotty and bored. Right. If we have encountered Bama stuff and other material like it out there, there's amazing resources out there. And then we walk back into our church and the pastor has a more traditional path about talking about the text. It is really easy for us to feel like there's something dying in us a little bit like they're missing it. How do they not know that this is really a conversation between Shammai and Hillel or whatever? And Jesus is doing this really cool thing and they're missing it. You could be correct. And also, please have compassion and empathy for your pastor whose job is not just sitting there and thinking about the Bible. They wish it was that, but it's actually meetings and going to the Hospital and doing funerals, all these other things. But if we have done the work at looking at, oh, man, what are 10 different ways that you could look at this story? It becomes easier to come back into that space with whoever is leading at your church and the way that they're approaching their Bible study or whatever it is. They're not wrong for just having a traditional or pashat reading of a text. They're just taking a traditional or historical approach which yields certain fruit. And that's good, too. It's not that there is one right answer and one wrong answer, and that preacher is just doing the wrong answer. Right. We're all finding all different goodness that's in a text and other hermeneutics yield different fruit, and that's good. But we can stay humble and stay curious and wrestle with the text, and that keeps us humble and joyful in all sorts of spaces and contexts.
- [14:23]
A
I totally agree. It is very easy to go through something like bama and then have that perspective on a sermon. But I think it is also. Maybe I'm putting too strong terms on it, but I think it's an officially sanctioned Bama practice to do the same thing in repetition, knowing that some days it's not going to bring anything to you, but the faithfulness of doing that over and over, over again is going to produce the results like Marty talks about with his daily prayers. It doesn't mean he's, like, fully energized because of the blessing that he. He does every morning, but he does that every day because some days it's going to speak to him in a different way than it has before.
- [15:05]
B
Right.
- [15:05]
A
Even though it's the same thing. And so going over the same lens of looking at a particular passage doesn't mean that you can't yield any fruit from it.
- [15:14]
B
Right. You're creating a space, as Marty likes to say. If we are on the same drive to the grocery store, it's probably going to be the same route most days. But one day you might notice a beautiful tree there that you hadn't noticed before. Or another day you might see something that had been there the whole time, but you had never noticed it, et cetera. So wrestling with the text, that's the number one way that I think about wrestling, that hopefully we can all gain joy but also humility through engaging in the number two way that I like to think about. Wrestling is related, but instead of focusing on the text, it focuses on wrestling with our community and tradition. What does that mean, Elle? Just fighting with people, being like, well, we're going to wrestle our way to the truth. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Please don't do that. Focus in. It's a huge tool that can help us to feel belonging in the communities that we talked about valuing just a pillar or two ago. Right. So let me tell a parable, a little story. Perhaps somebody out there came from a background, maybe like Marty, a fundamentalist evangelical nom da nom person. Maybe that space that they were in wasn't super healthy. They realized as they grew and changed, ooh, there's some, there's some stuff happening here that isn't too great. They leave. Maybe they found Bama along the way, maybe something else, deconstructing, reconstructing, whatever, and they find a new place to be where there's values that are more closely aligned with this person's. Hopefully people aren't being abused behind closed doors. And very often, if you're coming from the fundamentalist evangelical non denom space, oftentimes the landing place that people find is high church. It's liturgical. It's one of the denomination denominations with liturgy and lots of steps and confession and all the things that non da nam doesn't have. So say this person finds this place and it's starting to feel life giving. It's starting to feel good, like a place that they could be and flourish with your family. But then after a couple weeks or a couple months, they notice that one of the liturgical elements is the statement of a creed. And maybe there's something in that creed. First off, maybe the creed itself is kind of annoying, like why do we have to sign off on all these doctrines like write our names in, bled in it every single week. I know, I get it. But maybe even beyond that, maybe there's something in the creed that doesn't sit awesome with this person. It could be a whole number of different things. It could be. We'll take for sake of example the part that says Jesus descended into hell.
- [18:02]
A
Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to bring up. Yeah.
- [18:05]
B
What does that mean? What's happening here?
- [18:07]
A
Somebody asked that on a recent live Q and A. So it's kind of swirling in the Bama conversation already.
- [18:12]
B
Perfect, perfect. Love that. So imagining this person who's come from one context, they're in another. They don't feel fully at home there yet and they've stumbled across this thing that bothers them maybe for a couple reasons they might have curiosity about or maybe a little bit of annoyance with. Perhaps this person complains to somebody else in the church, they start to make a friend and they say, hey, why? Why do we have to say this creed every week anyway? Like, don't we all know this stuff? Why do we all have to sign on to the exact same thing, right? Isn't the church about unity and diversity? Why do we all have to be on the same page here? They're probably doing that because they're looking for connection. They're looking to not feel so alone. They're looking for a cohort. Maybe they're looking for stability. That's usually why people are complaining, right? One of those things. And maybe the person says like, oh yeah, I've never thought about that. That is a weird line, huh? But maybe they don't care at all. And they say, I don't know. Why are you worried about it? It' it's just one line. It's just three seconds. Stop stressing. Maybe somebody actually gets pretty defensive and says, hey look, you're new here. We've been saying this for 2000 years nearly by now. So maybe you can sit down and listen and learn before you start criticizing. So that happens, however that goes. And there's kind of two options for that person going forward. Number one, they can continue to say that line in the creed and still participate. And maybe they feel a little othered from themselves doing that. They feel a little inauthentic saying descended into hell. They don't know what that means. Or there's a portion of it they don't believe or they don't say it. And they're like, I'm going to sit down during this part or I'm going to go silent for the whole creed, or I'm going to go silent just for these lines that I don't like. And when we do that, even if we are being authentic to where we're at and honest with ourselves and therefore others, we can feel othered from our community, right? Everybody else is saying this line and I'm the one person throwing a stink about it, right? So that person can end up either othered from themselves or from their community. What happens then? Well, it's pretty possible that cynicism moves into this space mentally and in that person's heart, right? Maybe there really is no great place for me to belong. Obviously my fundamentalist background didn't have room for me to be myself. But maybe this place isn't one either. Especially if the person responded defensively when they tried to talk to them about the creed. Maybe the voice of cynicism says, you'd really be Better off just with your books or your other few heretic friends or just on your own. You don't have to go every week, right? It's not that life giving go once a month or something, right? These kind of thoughts start coming up and sooner or later, worst case scenario, right, this person ends up on social media lambasting the church, either globally or this one specific church. Even worse being like, I thought that Bethany whatever was gonna be the place where I could belong. But it turns out not that would be pretty, pretty extreme. But maybe we just start following, listening to other bitter and disappointed people, right? And that becomes more of our daily bread. So that's one possibility that might be real for some of us. Leaving one place that wasn't so great, coming into a new place, encountering something that we don't feel like we can really get behind or feels problematic in some way and then not knowing how to go forward. Is there another possibility? Can we wrestle through this particular issue and become an expert in it? Even though that takes work and time and sitting there saying how cringe other people are is a lot easier than becoming an expert in that issue. What would that look like? What do you mean, Al? Well, first you'd have to look up the verse that the creed is talking about because there is one, they didn't just make it up, they're taking it from a portion of scripture, I think actually two. So you're gonna have to Wikipedia commentary, find your favorite author who talks exhaustively, right? And find people who are talking about that verse and take it apart in a way that makes sense to you and that you can get on board with and sign off to at least 50% of it. You might go to intertextual Bible and look up the references in contemporary literature to say, whoa, what is this passage talking about? Where is it coming from? What were they thinking about? And then that's not the end. You're not just going to become an expert in that verse, right? Because then you just go back to the person who is defensive against you and say, well actually, blah, blah, blah, right? That's not the better end of the story. That's not the end that worked. Then after you figure out what you think about that verse, you're going to figure out all the ways the different denominations have interpreted that verse through history. That's called reception history, by the way. If you're looking for a good googleable keyword, then you're going to learn about the history of that creed, Nicene, Apostles, whatever, and you're going to Learn how it was put together by how many people, for how long, etc. And you're going to learn what that creed was. In conversation with nothing but God's original creation is ex nihilo, right? Everything is a response to something else, a pendulum going from one side to the other. So you're going to figure out what was in the culture, hopping around the zeitgeist that made them want to include that line. And then you're going to learn why the other creeds left it out and what the people who wrote the other ones had to say about that line. The cool thing is, if you actually do that and don't just ingest the resentful words of resentful people on TikTok, there is blessing in all of that. It will reap fruit if you're setting your mind on the things of the spirit. One of those fruits of that spirit, by the way, is humility. You understand complexity that gives us that learner's posture. We're understanding why that creed came to be what it is. And whether we agree with it or not, it's easier to relax into a posture of openness about the fact that our community is saying that creed. If we're really angry about something, it's often because we don't know the complexity of what's going on with a particular issue. That's true about people, that's true about institutions, that's true about creeds and other stuff that shows up in our communities. If we know that there are other places that are doing things differently, that also helps, right? Instead of saying the whole church is dumb because they say this creed and nobody even thinks about what this verse says, we can know that maybe the criticism that we're lobbying, if that's what we end up where we end up being like, wow, they decided to put that in because of this issue. And I think that issue is really lame or whatever. You know, then if you've done that work, that your issue is with a teeny tiny fraction of the global body of Christ. It's not the whole church. It's not all of Christianity. It's not even all of 21st century Christianity. It is one very particular group of denominations which says that particular creed. If we can follow that, follow that curiosity, we will find God in the midst of it. If we can turn toward that burning bush. Moshe thought that he was just looking at the bush. He wasn't. He was actually finding God. He was finding his calling. He was finding out about being enough. He was finding out about his split identity. He was finding out about the accompaniment of God who said, I am with you. Right. We also can find God in the midst of, of whatever we're wrestling with as well. And often that is community. And if we just tap out and walk away from the community, tap into resentment, skepticism, cynicism, bitterness, we're just walking away from the bush. Right?
- [26:01]
A
Yeah. And it's so easy to do that. Like the way our culture is set up today, the way we are so individualist, the way everything is so like summarized and then summarize the summary. And like everything is just like a 10 second and there's so much depth to going in and doing the work.
- [26:24]
B
Yeah.
- [26:25]
A
And there aren't that many things that I like. You can't care about everything. You can't go that deep on every single statement in the creed.
- [26:33]
B
Well, you can over 20 years, but. Yes.
- [26:35]
A
Yeah, over. Yeah. But it's like we all have lives. We're not all Bible nerds who are independently wealthy and can just dedicate any amount of time. We have families, we have jobs. There's just so many things. So yes, you can't do that all the time. But man, when you have something and let that thing get in there and bother you enough to motivate you to actually do that work, man, it's so rewarding.
- [27:04]
B
Absolutely. And if we can just find a little sliver of time, whatever that is our commute to work, even if that's just eight minutes. Right. Eight minutes a day. I'm going to learn about this part of church history. Eight minutes a day. I'm going to find out different historical ways of approaching communion, the Eucharist. If we're annoyed by the way that our new church is doing that, we're going to learn more about hymns. Right. Maybe we're annoyed that our community uses hymns instead of music that we prefer. Great. Learn about that particular hymn. Learn about the hymn writer. There's all these angles that we can take and there's goodness in it. And we end up encountering God along the way. It's not the end of the story. Just like learning more and having more facts and feeling better because of the facts. When Paul was on the road to Damascus, he thought he was wrestling with his community. Right. Jews who were worshiping Jesus. That is a false God in Paul's mind or Shaul Will's mind. But then when Jesus shows up and blinds him on the road, he says not, hey, you need to stop doing what you're doing because the other people are actually right. And you're actually wrong. What he says to Shaul is, why are you hunting me? Doesn't say, why are you hunting these other people? You're hunting me. So may we, even as we have all of our feelings about whatever community we're in and we're burrowing down like badgers and foxes and trying to find some treasure in that dirt, know that we're really hunting after God, not just trying to prove that we're right about something. So, number one, wrestle with the text. Number two, wrestle with our traditions or community. Number three, I'm going to invite us to wrestle not just with text and community, but with the Lord walking by the spirit. It's really just another term for wrestling. We're seeking the face of God. We're pursuing life alongside his presence. If we're doing all of that and it's not just in his name, right. If we're actually seeking God's presence in our spiritual disciplines, in our daily walk, that's a wrestling. I don't know about you, sometimes I wake up in the morning and I don't feel super grateful. I don't feel super jazzed. At 5:15, about time to go pursue the Lord. So I gotta wrestle through that first right before I even get to my spot where I'm doing my spiritual disciplines. That's a whole wrestling. But then once I'm there, crack into whatever text I'm writing out that day, whatever blessing I'm putting down, I probably won't immediately feel the spirit there, right? That would be awesome. If as soon as I open my Bible app, I'm like, woo, God's in this place. That'd be great. But most mornings it's earnestly, I seek you. Right? I thirst for you like a deer in a dry land. That's wrestling with God, saying, hey, I want to experience you. I want to encounter you. I want to hear from you. Please show up. That's wrestling can also be wrestling on a bigger stage. Right. Than just the stage of our spiritual practice. Reid shared the story at CCF recently. Ish. I know, I'm quoting. Read a lot. It's good. You're welcome, everybody. He can quote Beatner. I'll just quote him.
- [30:19]
A
There you go.
- [30:21]
B
So he shared his own story at CCF about how he had heard something from God on a car ride and he quit his job and he spent three months wrestling with the thing that he heard from God. And then, spoiler alert, I'm so sorry. Because it really deserves the whole breadth of his storytelling. He heard the Rest of the sentence from God on his personal retreat today. That's its own kind of wrestling, right? I'm curious about whether it'll come up. I'm so sorry if I spoiled Reed's episode. Hopefully I didn't. I don't know. But if we are in conversation with God regularly, he's going to bring stuff up for us that we have to wrestle with and work through. And that's not just separate from God. That is a. Whoa, Holy Spirit, what are you talking about? I thought that that friendship was done and over, right? We went our separate ways. Things are doing pretty good. What do you mean? You want me to be a minister of reconciliation? What do you mean? Surely it's fine. Surely there's more for the spirit if I don't chase after that person, right? I can find principles that make me feel good about that. But yet often God brings something up, either from the text or otherwise. If we. Depending on the tradition we walk in, there's stuff to wrestle with, too. And if we just pour ourselves into our own projects, right, Based on what we're irritated by with their community, or just based on a text like the transfiguration that we want to pull more juice out of, then we'll miss this. We could. We might miss this part of our relationship with God. What is God actually saying? We are able to flood out God's voice of what God actually wants to talk to us about, about our marriage, the way we're parenting, the way we're showing up in our workplace, matters of integrity, all of that. It can be so nice to ignore by just listening to the Bible on audiobook, right? It's hard to ignore the voice of God sometimes when he's really like, hey, I think that actually gambling on Kalshi isn't a good use of your money and time. That doesn't feel comfortable sometimes. And so it's so much nicer to listen to this sermon or watch this video or listen to a podcast. But we can't just wrestle with the text, which we can feel in control of, right? When I open my Bible and when I close my Bible, wrestling with community, when I show up on Sunday and Wednesday or whenever and when I don't, God wants to wrestle with us all the time. Every day Jacob is in the middle of the night, right? He's just helped his wives and children across a raging river. He believes there's an army after him. And that's when God apparently has something to say to him.
- [33:02]
A
Or like the Moses example that you brought up earlier, like, he's just wandering through the desert tending his flocks, right? And the spirit's like, hey, you see that bush over there is burning? He's like, okay, bushes be burning all the time. What are you talking about? Whatever.
- [33:14]
B
Bushes be burning next.
- [33:17]
A
Next time, next time. He's like, hey, hey, is that the same bush that was. It's like, I don't know. Who cares, right? Next day, hey, do you see that? It's like, what? No, I. That can't be the same bush. Whatever. Next day, hey, that bush is still burning. Did you see that? Okay, fine, I'll go look at it. Yeah, it's like, how many times like that where it's like, oh, why do I keep running into this person in town who I haven't really seen in years, but then I've seen them three times in the last week, right? Like, what is God doing?
- [33:49]
B
What is happening?
- [33:50]
A
Yeah. Are you open? And maybe, you know, maybe it's not anything that you need to do specifically, but, like, maybe that person needs to share something with you. Like, who knows?
- [33:59]
B
Who knows? Gotta chase after it.
- [34:01]
A
Sometimes it's hard to listen to the spirit, but God can be persistent.
- [34:05]
B
Yep. We like to be in control and say, actually, my agenda today is becoming more kind. And God says, actually, it's to become more patient. Here's a whole bunch. Here's a really long train ride, and it keeps getting stuff, whatever it might be. Your plan got delayed again. Do you have self control? Do you have forbearance? Let's find out. Absolutely. For some of us, we're okay with the idea of wrestling God, but it's easy. Easiest for us to imagine that in the context of big questions, contemplating the big things of life, like Reid thinking about his job and career. You've talked about your dreams and marriage, Right? That makes sense for a lot of people to be like, yeah, God would show up when telling you who to marry. Or God would show up and talking to you about your purpose in life and what you're supposed to do with your one precious and wild life. Wild and precious. However, Jesus describes himself as. What kind of bread, Brent? Pumpernickel. Just kidding.
- [35:05]
A
Warm, fluffy bread. French bread. What kind of bread? Bread of life.
- [35:13]
B
Bread of life.
- [35:14]
A
Is that what you're looking for?
- [35:15]
B
That is.
- [35:15]
A
Okay.
- [35:16]
B
How often are we looking to eat that thing according to the Lord's prayer?
- [35:20]
A
Daily bread.
- [35:21]
B
Daily daily bread. We live in a land of privilege, you and I, Brent. We get to go to Costco, or at least I get to go to Costco. I don't know where you go, but along with whatever nice bakery bread that I get, I also am going to get my nine grain bread with the orca on it. Comes in a two pack.
- [35:39]
A
The orca bread? Yes. We prefer the airplane bread. Same brand, just with the airplane on it.
- [35:44]
B
That makes sense. With your two boys and also your whole personality and obsession and hobby. I'll say, that's nice. Hobby. It comes in a two pack. My family always manages to eat it before it gets moldy. We have three kids, so there's a lot of peanut butter and jelly happening, a lot of sandwiches, a lot of cream cheese. But it still takes us a while to get through those. Maybe a week and a half, maybe two weeks. And throughout those two weeks, it's still fine. We can pop it in the fridge. We can even pop it in the freezer if we're worried about it. I just discovered this recently. However, if you don't have a Costco or preservatives or refrigerators, and if you are in a place in the world where if you're going to have bread, you're going to be the one making the bread, it does get stale and or moldy in about three days. If you're in a humid area, you'll probably get there even sooner. And we forget that when we're thinking about bread and talking about Jesus being the bread of life and our daily bread. When we live in a land where all of those things, the dailiness of bread is just ephemeral. It's not part of the fact of our existence. We're not out there making new bread every single day like the people who wrote the Bible were doing. However, it is only artificial supports that make us able to live off of Jesus for longer than a day or two. Lamentation says you, mercies are new every morning. Not every week at church, not every time. Our favorite author publishes a new book. Jesus is our daily, daily bread. So we gotta come back and do that wrestling, make that a practice of our life with Jesus wrestling with the Lord, not his promises. Right? Jacob isn't wrestling with the things that God told him previously. He's not wrestling with his community yet. He's going to wrestle with Eish Sah in just a hot second in that story. But it's with an angel, right? Or God himself that he's wrestling with. And so we are invited to do the same. And if in our spiritual disciplines, in the way that we're pursuing God, we aren't hitting any of that glorious friction, that place where the rubber meets the road, and something new comes out of it for us, a new blessing emerges for us. Then maybe we need to switch it up. Maybe we need to do things a little bit different, find something that is life giving, where we do encounter God.
- [38:16]
A
Yeah. I'm aware from traveling in Europe and seeing some of the smaller towns and the markets and stuff, there's definitely a culture of, like, you just go to the store every morning and get the food that you need for that day.
- [38:30]
B
Yeah.
- [38:30]
A
And I feel like I've seen a few people in the States who have that same philosophy, and maybe they come from a culture where that's more of a thing. But, like, maybe you have somebody in your community who approaches things in that way, and it's like, okay, how do you. Like, how do you think about food? Like, having that conversation? Like, what does that change about your perspective? And, like, bring up one of these, like, what do you think about daily bread? Like, when you pray the Lord's Prayer? How does the way that you approach your own food, like, how does that affect how you. And maybe God can speak to you through that conversation as well?
- [39:08]
B
Yes. Pretty much anytime I make a new European friend, it's not that long before the subject of American bread and its falseness comes up. I made a new German friend just a couple weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago, and I'd only spent two days with this person before he was like, what? That is not bread. Well, all right. Okay. We're doing our best out here. All right.
- [39:35]
A
Yeah.
- [39:36]
B
Just.
- [39:37]
A
Just one more angle that you can look at. A passage from is like, oh, there. There are people around. You have a different perspective on just how they live life. And that can affect how we view these passages and these. These prayers and everything else. So.
- [39:51]
B
Which is why our wrestling should happen together in the context of community, perhaps even in the context of discipleship over the text. See how I did that?
- [40:04]
A
Perfect.
- [40:04]
B
Built our own little Parthenon right there at the end. Amen.
- [40:07]
A
And Amen.
- [40:09]
B
Amazing. Well, let's land this point. Thinking about all these things, thinking about all these pillars. However, at least for this particular episode, these three different ways that we've thought about wrestling.
- [40:21]
A
Yeah, you say three, but I. I feel like there's so many. So many facets to this. I. I really appreciate the conversation you brought today, Elle.
- [40:28]
B
Amazing. I'm so glad. May we be people who can grip the word and not let go. May we be people who can grip our community without letting go. May we grip, as best we can, the spirit and not let go. May we be a people who can trust that God has a grip on our heart, hearts and wants to bless us if we just don't let go. Amen.
- [41:01]
A
So beautiful. Okay, well, thank you, Elle for that. Listeners can find details about our show@baymontasupership.com I don't know if we had any specific things to put in the show notes today. A little unusual for an Elle episode, not a ton of links, but I know if anything comes up, those will be there in your podcast app or on the website. You can use the contact page on our website to get in touch with us. If you have ideas about, you know, how often we should buy bread, I'm
- [41:31]
B
sure the Europeans will tell us.
- [41:32]
A
I'd love to have that conversation. If you were in Europe and you want to tell me how you buy bread, please reach out. I look forward to those emails. But yeah, everything that we do is made possible by listeners like you who support our work. So we thank you for that. We thank you for the, the, the daily bread provision of people who see
- [41:50]
B
what you did there.
- [41:50]
A
Yeah. Of people who contribute to our work. We like, we are thankful every single day for that. So thank you for that and thank you for joining us on the Baymaw podcast today. We'll talk to you again soon.