This morning I took my initial foray into the text of Isaiah, beginning the process of preparing our adult curriculum for September-December 2009. Isaiah is on the schedule, and I've been watching it growing larger on the horizon with a wary eye. This is going to be a difficult study to coordinate on a congregational level. The first step seems to be an initial reading of the whole text, which is a fair task in and of itself. Today I started.
It was difficult to get going. The Hebrew prophets and their poetic oracles require some focus and preparation to read. My mind kept resetting, grabbing whatever distractions were around me and derailing my groove. And this stuff does require a groove. It seems to me that once I got some sound isolating headphones on and a little Mozart (Serenade no. 13 in G Major), I found the right place to read from.
A couple of thoughts from the reading this morning: first, I think one of the challenges of this study is going to be responding to the text emotionally, not just rationally. the poetic form of the material insists on the involvement of the reader's emotions. Our tendency to pick apart scripture and dissect it for it's rational bits may be a barrier to overcome for the digestion of these particular texts. That being said, if we can tap into the emotional nature of the text, we are offered the opportunity to align not just our minds with the thoughts of God, but our hearts with the feelings of God.
Second, how do we produce the right type of environments for these texts to be heard? I had to work pretty hard to get in the right place to read this stuff, and I am one of those geeks who really truly likes it! So how do we help people who already have some resistance to the material to experience it in powerful ways?
