Coffee Mugs and Bible Stories

Every morning as I prepare to pour my cup of coffee, I am faced with the weighty decision of which mug will hold my morning brew. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a big deal to you – it’s only a cup of coffee, right? But our collection of mugs is special. Each mug has a story or a collection o stories that make it special. When I take hold of that mug in my hands, I am holding memories – reminders of why the mug made it to our home. There’s the black, “Been There” mug with a map of Iceland, the yellow Singing Rooster mug, the mugs from my kids from Barcelona and Costa Rica, the 50-year anniversary mug from Ninos de Mexico, and the mug from Utah Beach, along with many others. Each mug holds a reminder of special stories - memories of people, places, events, decisions, and invaluable time with family. Each mug holds more than morning coffee, it holds reminders of life. But the whole collection of mugs is even better than each one individually because the collection weaves all those stories together into a bigger story about our family – who we are, what we value, and what we hope for – and that bigger story makes all the individual stories even better.

But it is the bigger story that matters most. As good as the individual stories might be, the bigger story gives them context.

To understand the importance of the mug from Utah Beach, you have to understand my family. You need to know that my father landed on Utah Beach in WWII. You need to know how much I love my son and how much it meant for me to share that glimpse of his grandfather’s past with me. You would need to know how that trip fit into the grander scheme of my son’s adventure and my extended family’s desire to honor my father’s legacy.

To understand my attachment to a cheesy mug that says, “Fatherhood: Nailed it!” you would need to understand my love for my daughter, the one who promised when she was young, that she would always be my little girl. You would need to know how important it has been to me to be a good, involved, and present dad who taught my children to stand on their own feet in a way that made them willing to take risks and face challenges head-on. Only then would you grasp how much it meant to receive that mug from my daughter as she transitioned to adulthood and prepared for a grand adventure of her own.

To understand the true significance of the Fresno Pacific University mug, you would need to understand the depth of love I have for my wife. You would need to see that Fresno Pacific was more than a place that issued my degree, it was the place that turned the course of my own history and the history of our family because it was where my wife and I met and fell in love. There can be no greater course correction than finding the person that you want to spend the rest of your life with.

So, each of the stories that go with each mug is not just detached tales of the past, they are building blocks to something bigger and better. They paint a picture of my family’s history, that gives insight into our present and a hint of what is to come in our future. All of that is held in my hands every morning, so, yes, choosing my mug in the morning is kind of a big deal. Holding that mug, though, is most important not when I think about the individual stories, but when I see them all in the larger context of my family – who we have been and who we have become.

For our 30th anniversary, our family went on a two-week adventure driving the perimeter of Iceland. Shortly after we got home, a couple of friends stopped by to ask about the trip. At one point I began to talk about a pivotal moment in our family adventure. There were some disagreements amongst us and tensions had been rising, so one evening I convened a family meeting and we laid everything out in the open. I did so with a bit of fear and trepidation knowing that this could all blow up and cause our vacation to turn ugly. But what could have turned the trip into a disaster worked out to be a blessing. Each voice was heard and met with understanding and a willingness to compromise our own wants and desires for the sake of the family as a whole. It was a powerful moment and in some ways, it was the highlight of the trip for me because it brought us closer as a family at a time when we each could have chosen a different way and fought for our own selfish desires.

As I related the details of that experience to my visitors, I could tell one of my friends was disinterested. He interrupted to ask for more details about Iceland seemingly oblivious to the emotional tone of my story. He wanted to know more about where we went and what we saw. He wanted to put himself in our shoes and see the waterfalls and the glaciers for himself. He wanted to put himself in our adventure, but he wanted it to be his own. He wanted to hear about Iceland, not our family. He came with certain expectations about what he wanted and expected to hear and the story about our family moment was not meeting his expectations. He wanted to hear the story that he wanted to hear, not the one that I wanted to tell. He wanted the cup of coffee, but he was not interested in the mug.

As a result, I truncated my story and gave him more of what he really wanted… kind of. I was offended and hurt by his disinterest. I wanted him to see God at work in a seemingly insignificant moment in the middle of a grand adventure. I wanted him to see how the trip was more than a vacation; that it offered glimpses into who we are as a family and that it provided interactions amongst us that shaped who we are. So when I shifted to talking about where we had gone and what we saw, I did so with less enthusiasm because to me those were secondary details of a better story. The whole conversation ended sooner than it might have. In a sense, he got what he wanted, but in reality, he not only got less than he hoped for, but he also missed out on something better. He showed that the bigger and better story was less important to him than the story he wanted to hear. Ultimately, even though I was offended, hurt, and disappointed, the loss was his, not mine. I still had my stories, big and small, and he had the same thing he came with – the story that he wanted to hear.

Maybe it is a byproduct of our culture’s glorification of individualism and self-absorption that causes us to project ourselves into the story, but often when we read stories in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, I think we do the same thing as my friend. We come to scripture with a story that we want to hear, and we press the narrative until we get what we want. We desperately want to see ourselves in the story, and we want the story to be our own. Rather than trying to understand the story in the grand plan that God has laid out in scripture, we remove the story from its context, and we create our own context that allows us to extract a lesson that may or may not be there. In a sense, we create our own reality for the Bible passage to satisfy our own desire to be part of the story.

Imagine people, who I have just met, come to my home and notice my collection of mugs. If they were to ask about my collection, I could give them a general overview of why my collection is meaningful, but they won’t really understand the depth of meaning and they won’t grasp the bigger picture until they start listening to the individual stories that are attached to each mug. And even the stories themselves won’t give them a complete picture unless they take the time to get to know me. The better you know me, the better you interpret the stories, the better you understand my collection of mugs, and the better you understand its representation of my family.

So, let’s say the people begin asking me about individual mugs – asking me to tell them the stories behind them and why they are significant. Suppose that before I finish the details of my first story, the person interrupts and tells me that they are reminded of a story of their own. Before I know what has happened, my story has been hijacked. The person has taken over the conversation and tells me how their story compares to mine. The meaning of my mug suddenly evaporates and the only thing that matters to my new friend is how they can morph my story into their own. From a partial description of the significance of one mug, the person jumps to conclusions about who I am, who my family is, and how my story is connected to theirs. Some of what they say may be true, even insightful, but clearly, their confidence in understanding my story is misplaced because they simply don’t know me well and they didn’t take the time to hear the rest of my story.

If we go further with the analogy, we can imagine that the person continues coming to my home on different occasions, and each time they do the same thing. They ask about one of my mugs, interrupt my story to relate a story of their own, and leave assuming that now know me better despite never hearing the end of the story about my mug. Each time they leave they feel like they have greater insight into who I am, however, they have built an image of me based on their own story, based on what they wanted to hear, and who they wanted me to be. Over time they will gain some understanding of me, but some of that understanding will be distorted. They will know many of my stories, but with their own twist to each of them. Ultimately their inability to listen completely to my individual stories associated with each mug will cause them to also misunderstand my collection as a whole. The collection will appear to them as a fragmented jumble of disconnected events that only have meaning when they can insert themselves and extract their own story from each mug.

I remember attending a youth event as an adult sponsor where the star of the show based his sermon loosely on Isaiah 6:8, which says:

“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’

“And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’” (NIV)

As all good youth rally speakers do, he sufficiently energized the crowd so that by the end everyone was shouting enthusiastically, “Here I am. Send me!” What he didn’t do, however, was delve into the rest of the story, because frankly, reading past verse 8 in the chapter is a bit of a downer:

He said, “Go and tell this people:

“‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’ Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”

Then I said, “For how long, Lord?”

And he answered:

“Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken. And though a tenth remains in the land, it will again be laid waste. But as the terebinth and oak leave stumps when they are cut down, so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.”[1]

That’s not exactly the message that the star speaker was wanting to project, and he knew it wasn’t what the youth wanted to hear, so that part of the story was conveniently left out. In fact, almost everything else about Isaiah was glossed over for the sake of the story that the speaker wanted to tell. He wanted the youth to be bold about sharing the gospel. He wanted them to feel like they were being sent out, like heroes, to save the world. With this was an underlying assumption that people just needed to hear the story from these young heroes and hearing their story would be enough to change the hearts of others.

Unfortunately, Isaiah didn’t spend his life as a hero. He only became a hero as a historical figure. In other words, he had to die before he became a hero. At the time he was sent, he was a pain in the behind to a stubborn nation that constantly mocked and humiliated him. There was no glory in what Isaiah did. In fact, there were times when Isaiah would have rather died than continue telling people the truth that they refused to accept. But Isaiah also painted a picture of what was yet to come. Isaiah drew from the past to tell the harsh, unpopular truth about the present and announce the glory of the future, and all the while he was scorned, abused, and his words were ignored – the very thing that God said would happen.

“Here am I. Send me!”

Be careful what you ask for.

Telling the rest of the story about Isaiah was not the story that the star speaker wanted to bring to the show. He brought the Bible, but he didn’t bring the Bible’s story, he brought his own. When you are selling water by the river, you need to make your water sound better than the river. Unfortunately, that is what we do far too often in the church. The Bible’s story is often messy and hard. It takes time to put all the stories together in some coherent way so that we can see the bigger picture of God at work throughout history. So, especially in the microwave culture of the west, we settle for shorter, disjointed, and disconnected stories where we can insert the story that we want to tell rather than the story that God has written. It’s like the scientist so consumed with analyzing protein strands in DNA that they never see the beauty (or the horror) of the organism they are examining. After a while, it is just coded strands of DNA – a microscopic puzzle in a laboratory devoid of blood and breath.

There is certainly nothing wrong with declaring, “Here am I. Send me,” but is that really the point of the passage? Was the story of Isaiah’s dramatic interaction with the Most High written to coerce each of us to declare our willingness to be sent? And if that was not the intent, is it fair, or even right, for us to use it in that way?

The problem with reading the Bible in sets of disconnected stories (or commands, or doctrines, or disconnected anything else) is that we often look for “truth” that isn’t really there, and/or we generalize those “truths” to have more universal application than is supported by the rest of scripture. We place ourselves in the story and look for something we can take with us. We search for the nugget of wisdom that will help us get through another day, or make us feel like what we do matters, or allow us to rationalize that what we are already doing is right and good enough. Sometimes we even look for something that will shake us and move us from where we are because we are tired of who we have been. So, we insert ourselves into the story to extract the thing that we think will help us make sense of life and faith. We cling to it as a universal truth and walk away feeling like we have done our due diligence of letting scripture “speak to us” and transform us. What we get, however, is the same kind of story that my friend got from me about Iceland – a truncated lesser version of what was, what is, and what will be.

When we go looking for the story we want to hear, we inevitably find it. What we should be looking for, though, is God’s story – the story that he wants us to hear. That story is bigger than isolated passages. It is bigger than a single prophetic message, a letter of Paul, a historical narrative, or poetic Psalm of Praise. The story that God has to tell is all these things and more. It is each individual part intricately woven together to point us to a kingdom ushered in by Jesus. All of scripture points in the same direction. The Bible Project says it well in its mission statement:

“From page one to the final word, we believe the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus. This diverse collection of ancient books overflows with wisdom for our modern world. As we let the biblical story speak for itself, we believe the message of Jesus will transform individuals and entire communities.”[2]

There is a lot packed into that statement, but there are two points that I feel are especially noteworthy and too often neglected when we read scripture and listen to interpretations (sermons, Sunday school lessons, Bible studies, etc.). First, all of scripture is unified in pointing to Jesus, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation. Jesus is the focal point of the entire collection of material that we call the Bible. That means every story, every prophecy, every poem, every letter, and every catchy phrase, is ultimately part of the collection because it works with, and alongside, every other part of scripture to point us to Jesus. So, when we read, and when we interpret, that must be our overriding frame of reference – the context in which we understand what we read. Saying that seems like a no-brainer, and I would hope that I would be hard-pressed to find a Christian who does not agree with that idea, at least in principle, but is that how we really read our Bible, especially the Old Testament? Is that how we prepare sermons and Bible lessons? Is this unified frame of reference what we use to think critically about statements that we encounter, like, “Here am I, send me”? Do we utilize this perspective to help us evaluate the truth of what we are being told?

This leads to the second important aspect of the Bible Project’s statement, which is to “let the biblical story speak for itself” so that the message of Jesus will transform us. Let’s be honest, reading the Bible is often difficult. There is much that can be confusing. On first reading (or second, or third…) there are many parts of scripture that leave us wondering how this can possibly be useful. Much of reading the Bible is an exercise in patience and trust.

For a culture incessantly craving instantaneous results, reading the Bible often leaves us wanting. Trying to understand the part, in the context of the whole, can be an agonizing process that often leads us to more questions than answers. That is not something most of us enjoy. It's not how we function. We find far more satisfaction in isolating a passage, inserting ourselves, and constructing a meaning that makes us feel good – we put the verses in the microwave and a minute later we get the full meal deal. That is our preferred mode of operation, but it does not let “the biblical story speak for itself.” Unfortunately, this approach often gives us a distorted, disjointed view of what God is trying to tell us. Even more, when we teach and model this approach to others, especially new Christians, it feels like the Bible over-promises and under-delivers, because we are selling a version that was never intended.

Recently I listened to a sermon series entitled, “But God…” The foundation for the series was the life of Joseph, focusing on the series of events in his life that culminated in his prominent leadership role in Egypt and the reunion with his family. In Genesis, we are told that Joseph was sold into slavery only to emerge as an important and trusted figure in his master’s household. He is then falsely accused of impropriety and thrown in prison. In prison, he is given the gift of interpreting dreams, which eventually allows him to not only gain his freedom but rise to second in command of Egypt. It is a remarkable story, and the sermon series took these events (and others) one at a time and extracted lessons from his life. There were good points made throughout, but the overriding theme, and underlying implications made me uncomfortable. Joseph endured lower lows than most of us can imagine, but he emerged from each to reach greater heights than most of us can ever hope for. The sermons indicated that those “but God…” moments were times when God turned the bad into good. With many more words we were told that the lows Joseph endured were mere bumps in the road on the way to something much better and that they were part of God’s master plan all along. Through each trial, we were reminded, God had something better in mind for Joseph, even if he could not see it at the time. And so, the implication goes, when you are experiencing trials, when things seem to be taking a turn for the worse, remember that God has something better in mind for you. The lows are mere bumps in the road to something better. Things might seem bad, “but God…”

If we insert ourselves into Joseph’s story that is an easy conclusion to reach, not to mention it makes us feel good. But if that is how we understand the story of Joseph, we run into a number of problems. Around the world there are thousands of Christians trapped in some form of slavery, who will never have that “but God…” moment. Christians all over the world are suffering in prisons and will never be released. Christians are persecuted, tortured, and killed for their faith daily. Where is their “but God…” moment? When do they get to emerge from the lowest of lows and stand victorious and vindicated?

Certainly, there are times when God intervenes. I don’t mean to imply that God never turns our lowest lows into something unexpectedly better. We would be remiss to not give credit for the blessings he has poured out on us and the ways that he has rescued us from many tragic situations. I need to ask, though, is that the norm – is that what we should expect? Is that the message that is being communicated through the story of Joseph? When we read the story, does God want us to walk away with a sense that no matter how bad things seem, he will deliver us and set us in a place (here on earth) that is better than where we were before? Is it possible that is not the point?

If we turn the story of Joseph into a series of lessons that teach us that God is always going to turn our lemons into lemonade, we create a serious disconnect between his story and the rest of scripture. In the dissonance of our own creation, we tend to listen all the more to the things that we want to hear (which is what usually creates the dissonance to begin with) instead of the things that God is actually saying. Just as I was when telling my story of Iceland, I can’t help but think that God is often offended and saddened by the truncated version of his message that we often walk away with. There is a bigger, better story than our own happiness, that points us to Jesus, and to a hope that surpasses all the feel-good stories of man’s kingdoms.

Our human desire is to want to be an intricate part of a great story. We want to believe that we are special and that God has a beautiful plan laid out just for us. But in our desire to be important we often miss a greater, more compelling truth. As we elevate ourselves, we minimize the bigger picture and shrink God’s story into something less than what it really is. Ultimately, we are the ones who miss out. We are the ones that walk away with something less than what was intended.

I have thought often about Donald Miller’s book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, especially his idea about being a tree in a forest. Paraphrasing his phrase to make it personal:

I am a tree in a story about a forest and it is arrogant of me to believe any differently. And the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree. [3]

[1] Isaiah 6:9-13, NIV [2] The Bible Project, https://bibleproject.com/about/ [3] Miller, Donald. “A Tree in a Story about a Forest.” In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life, 198. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010.