Arm Wrestling with the Bible...and Losing

I know that experts don't always have the answers. Nonetheless, it has been frustrating this week to work on a sermon for Sunday and find no expert to steer me out of my interpretive dead end. I must have consulted a dozen or more commentaries or articles, certain that the next one would open a door. Or the next one. But nothing. Perhaps I have been asking the wrong questions. Perhaps I am just a person of little faith. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. All I know is that tomorrow morning I will stand in a pulpit before a crowd of people who -- foolish, even laughable as it may sound -- expect me to be the expert. Perhaps I can simply remind them that experts aren't always helpful. Experts aren't always expert.

My problem has been with one of the readings for the day in the Revised Common Lectionary -- that three-year cycle of readings that, if I allow it, quite regularly forces me out of my spiritual and homiletical comfort zone. And as I think about it, I'm due for some discomfort.

The story that has been nemesis this week comes from the book of Acts in the Christian scriptures, and reports the death of a good and saintly woman whom the Apostle Peter raises back to life. On first reading, it sounds like great news. But on second thought, I'm stumped. What the heck am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed to climb into the pulpit and look a room full of people in the eye who have, every single one of them, prayed for the healing of a loved one, only to find themselves forthwith at a graveside saying farewell? Am I to merely say "be glad it happened once upon a time; at least someone managed to go home happy"? Am I to bait and tease them with the possibility that it just might happen again? Am I to dismiss the whole idea as a dramatic, spiritualized, hyper-ventilated fiction? The "experts" have all kinds of really helpful points to make about how the story is remembered in Acts as a way of connecting Peter's ministry with that of Jesus and Elijah before him, but somehow that observation isn't likely to be well received by a congregation that wants to know how such a tidbit is supposed to be useful to them today.

Perhaps the thing to do is to stand up in the pulpit and confess that I have failed -- failed to crack the interpretive nut; failed to trace the line between this ancient story and these contemporary folks; failed to find the Good News and proclaim it.

But wouldn't it be funny if confessing my failure amounts, as far as the congregants are concerned, to an odd sort of success -- that I have successfully come to terms with my humanity and my humility and managed, however painfully, to come clean with what they already knew: that I am just a struggling Christian, same as them; and that the struggle is finally more important than the answer. Wouldn't it be funny, indeed.