Presence and Community in Bible Study

By Collin Caroland-MacConnell

“When have you ever been in a situation like this? How did you respond?”

This is a common refrain I see in devotional material. There are many times when we read Scripture and hope to gain some sort of personal insight.

Another question I frequently come across is “What can we learn from this?”

However, this question fails to encourage a dynamic spiritual formation. It would not be the most appropriate thing to ask someone telling a personal story. Could you imagine divulging a story about a grief or struggle in your life and their response was “Why are you telling me this? What am I supposed to do with this?”

We have a tendency to want to distance ourselves from the characters of the Bible. Since they are set thousands of years ago, we want to identify their stories as some timeless truths — which they are — but we must also recognize the value of seeing their stories as embodied moments of God’s movement in someone’s life. We cannot do this if we insist on only finding out what their stories can teach us. Their stories are testimonies, much like any other testimony you might hear from a congregant or anyone on the street.

We can look at just about any character of the Bible to hear their testimony and subsequently discover something about God’s work in their life. Widely disliked characters, such as Pharaoh, supporting characters only mentioned in a few verses, such as Zaccheus, and widely received characters, like Moses, all can reveal some aspect of God. All the people in the Bible are representations of the imago dei; all people are made in God’s image. Whether we like them, love them, hate them, generally dislike them, or any other emotive response they might cause in us, God is in them.

We want to root for the “good” guys and against the “bad” guys. However, just like in real life, there is rarely such a clear delineation between the notion of “goodness” and evil.”

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 “I believe there is significant value in learning to be present with the characters of the texts as an exercise to prepare us for being present with each other.” 

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This is why there has been such consistent conversation around the character of David through the years. How can such a godly person have such significant moral failing, such as his abuse of power that included impregnating Bathsheba and then arranging the death of her husband, Uriah the Hittite?

Instead of seeing David’s character as a paragon of goodness, deifying him beyond his humanity, we should try seeing him as a guy from humble beginnings thrust into the throne. Can you imagine the impact of readjusting the questions to center his humanity instead of as some moral lesson?

We don’t approach each social interaction as a moral lesson, so why do we engage with these stories as such? I am not suggesting we cannot learn from the stories, just like we can still learn from social interactions. Instead, I believe there is significant value in learning to be present with the characters of the texts as an exercise to prepare us for being present with each other. We participate as a community more fully when we can put ourselves aside for a moment.

Characters as People

Most of us have favorite stories or characters, typically because we can relate to them in some way. This relational aspect of them is because they depict people of God trying to navigate life in their contexts, like us in our own. Holding to this reality allows us to pause and reflect on these characters as people like us.

We all can be people like Jonah who will create extra trouble for themselves because they would rather do what they please rather than listening to what God tells them the first time. We can relate to Peter because he faithfully associates with Christ until he faces social and political repercussions. We never want to admit it, but even Judas betraying Jesus — and immediately regretting it — is relatable when we recognize we have our own particular expectations for what God would be like.

We should start from a place of sympathy in biblical study, just as we are called to love one another in our church community. Understanding someone’s condition helps us be more present in our love for them. This is why I argue we should start practicing presence with the Bible — the characters have stories but are still also words on a page. We have responses, and words on a page will be gracious as we learn better presence.

Presence in Practice

Learning presence is a process and takes practice. So how can we learn to be better about being present? How can we practice this process with the Bible? Let’s try to break it down.

1. Pray. Start with prayer. When praying before practicing presence with the Bible, we can ask for open hearts to be attentive to what is being said and for clarity in acknowledging the life and person we read about.
2. Read. The next practical step is to read the story. Refrain from making any judgments and acknowledge the feelings you experience. Maybe it stirred a strong emotional response — this is fine, but don’t stop at the emotion. Acknowledge the response but continue being aware that the exercise is about attending to the person in the story. There is room for God to work in you without centering yourself, if you let Him.
3. Inquire. Ask some probing questions about the character’s possible emotions. The stories often depict people going through some pretty gnarly things; there is nothing wrong with starting the inquiry with “that sounds tough,” and going deeper into their emotions from there. You could ask “How did you feel while that was happening?” What needs are the characters experiencing that are going unmet in the story, causing them to act how they do? Take this as an opportunity to imagine how their stories would play out if their needs had been met or if they had gone unmet.
4. Pray again. Where is God working in their story? Practice praying for others by praying over the character in their struggles. Ask God for the power to attend to their issues with compassion and consideration. This is an exercise of presence first. Just as we can practice presence with others, we can practice prayer for them during this exercise too.

From Biblical Study to Biblical Living

I have primarily argued we should practice presence with others through engaging the Bible and its characters. However, this exercise is not limited to reading and personal study. Practicing presence during devotional study is only part of the whole process. While engaging with the Bible like this can help us grow as Christians, practicing presence should go further. The primary value of reading the Bible this way is that it should prepare us to be better present with one another, in church, evangelism, and everyday interactions.

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 “We must learn to be present with others’ emotions and recognize that our own will be tended to in due time.” 

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Practicing presence allows us to recognize our interactions do not have to be dominated by our own struggles. These struggles, whatever the scope, can be set aside for a moment to fully attend to the other person’s struggles. This does not mean our own struggles go unattended, because the great thing about being in a community is we can trust each other to attend to our needs as well.

The joy of being a people of God is that we get to be more than a single person of God. We do not struggle alone, because we attend to one another, and God tends to us all. To do this, we enter into a social agreement, a relational contract with one another: to set our struggles before God so that we may bear each other’s burdens together.

Doing this requires practice. We have to be able to set our own problems before God, trust that we no longer need to be crushed by them, and pick up each other’s problems together. We need to practice setting our problems aside, and we need to practice attending to one another.

This need is what the proposed exercise seeks to address. Fortunately, reading characters in the biblical text can be a low-stakes means of engaging in presence. This means we can graciously mess up and learn for when we must practice presence in real life.

Everybody is going through something at any given time. Being a Christian witness then is to witness their needs, momentarily empty ourselves of our own needs, and attend to them, comforting those who grieve and feasting with those who celebrate.

Being Christian is to trust that God attends to our own needs and that others in our communities can take up our feasting and fasting alongside us as a community of witness.

We have a present God, and we reveal this to others in our presence. When we grow in presence, we grow as witnesses of Christ. Christ was present for many people, and continues to be present as the living God.

Jesus comforted those who were grieving His own death. He set Himself aside, both on the cross, forgiving those who were actively killing Him, and after the resurrection, acknowledging the grief His friends and family experienced, seemingly ignoring His personal trauma that would understandably come from His own dying.

This is not all to say that what we are going through does not matter. Instead, we need to recognize that what we are going through does not matter more than anything anyone else might be going through. To trust that God can bear our burdens is to trust we can set them aside momentarily for others. We must learn to be present with others’ emotions and recognize that our own will be tended to in due time.

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