Lent 32

You have heard it said...But I say... - Jesus

I'm working on putting together a case study at the hospital about a situation that came up recently. This little project is requiring me to talk to a whole bunch of people and get their various perspectives on a case. Last week, when this whole thing came up, it seemed so cut and dry. The case was presented to me by one person and I heard her viewpoint and I thought, well, that's it then. But then today, I talked to another person involved in the case. And it was almost like she was describing a completely different situation. The perspective changed and it seemed the whole thing changed all together.

I've done a lot of talking about sitz im lieben lately, which is a super cool sounding German epistemological term that basically means that you can only know what you know from where you are sitting. Basically, I KNOW something, but I know it through the lens of a middle-class, white, Southern, theologically trained, Christian, female eyes. Likewise, someone else might know something through poverty stricken, non-English speaking, immigrant, Asian, male eyes.

Scripture is a little like that, I suppose. For one thing, I am going to read the text differently than someone else, but there is also the gospel lens. I've been arguing, quite spiritedly, with one of my peers lately about interpretation of scripture. He considers biblical "commands" compulsory if they appear in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. His interpretation of scripture seems as simple as that. For me, I read everything through the lens of the love ethic of the gospel. That is my lens. That is how I know what I know. God loves us. God wants us to love God and to love one another. We are created, redeemed, and sustained by God's grace. But, I have to also recognize that how I understand this lens is through my own sitz im lieben. I don't know how we come together. I don't know how the gap gets bridged, but for sure, the place to start is to recognize that we know what we know in different ways for different reasons.