Living in The Story

A Year to Read the Bible and Ponder God’s Story of Love and Grace

Charlotte Vaughan Coyle

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781666705232
  9781666705249
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666705256
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

What kind of book is the Bible? Is it a rulebook or a guidebook for moral living? Is it a history book or a book filled with fascinating (and sometimes fantastic) stories? Did humans write the Bible or did God somehow speak a perfect message that the authors transcribed? Many people have asked these questions about the nature of this beautiful, odd, comforting, disturbing book the church calls its "Holy Scripture." Charlotte Vaughan Coyle shares her own journey to make sense of the Bible in this read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year project. She discovered that the crucial work of asking hard questions and even arguing with the Bible revealed the Scriptures to be a symphony of polyphonic voices, a work of art that paints an alternative vision of reality, a complex novel-like story unavoidably embedded in its own culture and time, and yet able to give witness to the God beyond history who has acted (and continues to act) within history. With the heart of a pastor and the passion of a preacher, Rev. Coyle invites seekers and students (both churched and un-churched) to strap on their scuba gear and join her for a deeper dive beneath the surface of this immense, colorful, mysterious world of the Bible.

Week 1

We Begin with Faith

Deuteronomy 6–8

Psalm 119

Second Timothy 3

John 5

As You Read in Overview

What is your basic understanding of where the Bible comes from and how it functions? How were you taught or what did you absorb as you were growing up? How have you changed your views over the years? What questions have shifted your thinking? Our first week of reading the Bible with Living in The Story begins by considering the nature of Scripture. Together we will ponder the question, “what kind of book is the Bible?” as we read this week.

A popular aphorism says: “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.” I absolutely believe this. We all interpret. We all interpret everything. There is no such thing as un-interpreted awareness. We all have some lens or another through which we see the world. We all have a framework with which we make meaning. This was as true of the biblical writers as it is true of us Bible readers.

The authors of these ancient texts began with faith. They started with a confidence that God was somehow in their story and as they collected and recollected the stories of their life together as God’s people, they sought to understand its meaning. The biblical writers are not, for the most part, apologists, arguing for their faith in a way that was designed to convince nonbelievers. Rather their writings were intended to confess and explore their faith within a community of faith.

As You Read the Old Testament

This week’s readings from Deuteronomy are key for the self-understanding of God’s ancient people, Israel. Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Torah, traditionally and poetically called “the books of Moses.” The stage of the Deuteronomy drama is set at the River Jordan as the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob recalled their liberation from bondage in Egypt and their forty years in the wilderness. Moses is the revered leader, calling them to remember God’s past faithfulness and urging them to entrust themselves to God’s ongoing fidelity.

But consider that the actual historical setting of the story in Deuteronomy probably is juxtaposed within the setting of Israel’s dilemma many years later, ca. 597 BCE. Most likely, during the time the book of Deuteronomy was composed, the nation once more was displaced from their homeland. God’s people were seeing their past history through the lens of their current captivity in Babylon, and they recognized they were standing on a precipice. Either they will learn from this experience. Or they will be lost.

So Moses’ ancient challenge to their ancestors to “hear”—to remember, recall, take heed, obey—is also a word for Israel centuries later: love God, the one God, God alone; this is everything. All the rules of the Law, all the codes and commandments and ethics and devotion, everything that is written is designed and intended to shape God’s people into a community of love.

As You Read the Psalms

The ancient Hebrew tradition says God spoke to Moses in fire and cloud on the mountaintop and wrote “the ten words,” the Ten Commandments, with the Divine Finger. Psalm 119 celebrates the Law of the Lord handed down from Mount Sinai and revered as God’s definitive word for God’s chosen people.

As you are reading this week’s psalm, consider its form as well as its message. Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible and it is written as a poetic Hebrew acrostic. This hymn is shaped according to the Hebrew alphabet, the several lines of the first stanza beginning with the Hebrew letter, aleph, then all the lines of the second stanza starting with the second letter bet and so on through the alphabet.

The poets of Israel believed that in all of life—from “A” to “Z”—the Way of God is ordered and trustworthy, that creation is “good,” that light and darkness exist as they were created to exist, in perfect harmony. The teachers of Israel taught that the whole of life is founded upon trust in the Law of the Lord. They believed that every challenge of life can be overcome by faithful obedience to God’s Word; that true life, right life, good life comes not through simple obedience to rules, but rather through the grace and mercy of Yahweh who sustains all creation. In this methodical, disciplined form of acrostic, the singer/psalmist is able to wax eloquent about God’s Law in a poetic, alphabetical cadence.

Notice how the psalmist uses several different words to describe God’s way: Torah, Law, Word of the Lord, ordinances, statutes, precepts.

I would add another: the Tao. 600 years before Christ, the philosophy of the Tao developed in China. This “tao” literally means “way, path, and road” and it teaches that there is a way within the cosmos, a way of perfect balance that is the natural order of things, a way that flows from the unity of all things, a way that exists in harmony with all creation, and coincides with the core Truth that binds the universe together.

Father Richard Rohr describes this reality when he, too, speaks of The Story in which “the patterns are always true.” Each of us has a personal story, most of us are a part of a group story, but transcending and including all the smaller stories of our humanity is The Story.

The biblical tradition takes all three levels seriously: My Story, Our Story, and The Story. Biblical revelation is saying that the only way you dare move up to The Story and understand it with any depth is that you must walk through and take personal responsibility for your personal story and also for your group story . . .

We are neither trapped inside of our little culture and group identity, or our private pain and hurts. We are people of the Big Picture . . . full of meaning, where nothing is eliminated and all is used to bring us to life.1

The psalmist begins with the faith that this kind of Law, Truth, Word, and Way is the foundation upon which all other just laws are founded. Think of Torah/Law/Word within this framework of The Great Way, The Story of Creator’s way for all creation.

As You Read the New Testament

We know from Acts and Paul’s undisputed letters that Timothy was a student and colleague of the apostle Paul. Probably these two letters addressed to Timothy were written in Paul’s name by second-generation disciples nearly one hundred years post-Jesus as the Church mushroomed across the Roman Empire. The original Christians were all Jews, but as the movement spread, many Gentiles (non-Jews) came to claim Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

“All scripture is inspired by God,” Second Timothy asserts. But consider there were no New Testament scriptures during this time; there was only the Old Testament, the ancient Hebrew Scriptures. So the exhortation for Timothy to continue in the “sacred writings” has to mean the ancient Scriptures of the Hebrew people. “All scripture is inspired by God” has to mean that God’s Breath, Life, Presence, Word—somehow, in some mystery—can be encountered within very imperfect, incomplete (and even ancient) human words.

Within the Christian tradition that followed from Paul, John, and Timothy, we continue to acknowledge the wisdom of Scripture that can and does “instruct, teach, reprove, correct, train, equip.” Now we Christians have the NT, our own sacred writings that have made their own journey of writing, editing, and compiling over a hundred years or so. But even a...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Week 1: We Begin with Faith
• Week 2: Creation
• Week 3: Sin
• Week 4: Abraham
• Week 5: Isaac
• Week 6: Jacob
• Week 7: Joseph
• Week 8: Exodus
• Week 9: Law
• Week 10: Covenant
• Week 11: Tabernacle
• Week 12: Esther
• Week 13: Jonah
• Week 14: Re-Reading the Law
• Week 15: Leviticus
• Week 16: Faith
• Week 17: Numbers
• Week 18: Love
• Week 19: Deuteronomy
• Week 20: Joshua
• Week 21: Cornerstone
• Week 22: War and Violence
• Week 23: Samson
• Week 24: Job
• Week 25: Ruth
• Week 26: Samuel
• Week 27: David
• Week 28: Signs and Symbols
• Week 29: David’s House
• Week 30: Confession
• Week 31: Wisdom
• Week 32: Solomon
• Week 33: Elijah
• Week 34: Elisha
• Week 35: Self-Destruction
• Week 36: Laments
• Week 37: Isaiah
• Week 38: Revelation
• Week 39: Prophets’ Imagination
• Week 40: The Psalms
• Week 41: Jeremiah
• Week 42: Hope
• Week 43: Ezekiel
• Week 44: Daniel
• Week 45: Ezra
• Week 46: Nehemiah
• Week 47: Minor Prophets
• Week 48: Final Reflections
• Bibliography