~ The Telling of Timothy

I finished Last week with a couple of blogs about the oral tradition behind the formation of our Bible and the suggestion that we may be entering a season where being able to tell the Bible may be a valuable resource for gossiping the Good News.
This solution is applicable to all parts of the Bible with just a little thought, and perhaps training. The main point of this preparation is in being able to describe and make a narrative to include the context of the passage that you are commenting on. Psalm 23 is a basic example of the sort of background that could be included in turning, in this case, a poem into a piece of “Living Scripture.”
David the king had once been a shepherd. He knew too well the need for feed and water for the sheep. He knew the dangers, not just for the sheep, but also for the shepherd of the wild carnivores such as bears and lions. He was also aware of his responsibilities as shepherd to care for those in his care. So he wrote a poem that related God as our Shepherd, the one who would put the welfare of the sheep ahead his life.
The letters to Timothy are also fairly simple to develop using a little reading into the letter itself and into the Book of Acts. Timothy had gone out from Antioch with Paul as his protégé. His mother and grandmother were both believers and the tone of the letters is that of a father writing his son, Paul even uses that term. Young Timothy had taken the role of Church leader after Paul’s incarceration and was having a hard time from those incapable of accepting his youth for the leader of a congregation. So Pauls writes to him to encourage his child in the faith tp stand firm and not be intimidated by older heads. I will leave the application from the letters to your imagination but I think that this has been enough detail to get started.
Of course, to this point I have only been “contextualizing” Bible stories. There is an entire goldmine to be developed in terms of paraphrasing original texts into stories that have significance for specific cultures. The tribespeople of the New Guinea highlands had no concept of, among other things “the Lamb of God” another picture had to be found. The same was true of the people of Polynesia who knew of the breadfruit plant but not of the “bread of Life”. Today in our own backyard are groups of people who have no understanding of the rural background of which the Bible is set. They may understand the story about the “lost jewellery” but have little concept of the celebration that resulted.
Our challenge is to find creative ways to present the truths that we hold dear in such a way that is culturally relevant to the experience and society from which our listeners come. I recall it didn’t take David Wilkerson much time to work out there were two colours not to be seen in while working with the colour gangs that he ministered to. It takes that sort of sensitivity to minister to a group who have grown up in a “Christian Country” but without the experience of Christianity or the education of what it is all about.
Just one aside, I heard the story of a Christian in dialogue with a Jewess recently. In a discussion about spirituality the Christian referred to “her Sacred Book” rather than his Old Testament. It is just an illustration of the length to which we might need to go to reach some of these lost ones.