TED talks

 

Good morning and welcome to Thought for the Day and a big thank you to Peter for hosting us at the new time.

I wonder you have ever listened to a TED talk… No, nothing to do with cuddly toys, TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design”, and online you’ll find hundreds of experts give a TED talk on anything from “my dream of a flying car” to “why bees are disappearing”.

Well a friend shared a fascinating TED talk last week entitled “My year of living biblically”. In it, Esquire magazine journalist A.J. Jacobs reports back on trying to do everything that the Bible commands for a whole year. He spent a year paying minute detail to every one of the 700 “rules” as he saw them, that he found in the Bible.

And his talk is quite irreverent but at times quite amusing. So he takes seriously the commands in the Old Testament not to wear clothing made of mixed fibres, he grows his beard long, so that he’s not disobeying a command in Leviticus to not shave the corner of your beard, and he tries to stop lying or gossiping.

But concludes in a really interesting way. Should you take the Bible literally? Should you put into practice every command. Liberal Christians would say no, the Bible needs triage, conservative Christians like me would say yes every word is the Word of God. He says you have to pick and choose. Well if I met AJ Jacobs there are a couple of things I’d say.

First, I’d say you’ve just seen lots of evidence for God. He testifies to how though he didn’t become a believer it changed his life. Things like taking a day of rest, being more compassionate, and being thankful were real positives. Perhaps they should point him to the fact that there’s a God who gets us and knows how we tick, a God who made us and who is really there.

Second, I’d say we have to read the Old Testament in the light of what Jesus said about it. Some of the cultural and ceremonial laws were always supposed to be time limited rather than universal, others remain.

And third, I’d say to him, the Bible isn’t a rule book anyway. Actually, Christianity is about relationship not rules. It’s about rescue and not ritual. At the heart of the Bible’s story line is the story of a God who wants to know us, and who is so kind that he steps into our world to forgive us and get to know us. A TED talk on what Jesus thinks about you and me. That would be worth listening to! Maybe I should sign up!