October 7, 2009 - You Can Smell the Old Testament

     The fall of the year is an Old Testament time of the year. Fall is a time of remembering, conjuring up memories of past experiences, a time when musty old stories can be as easily smelled in their telling as they can be heard in their telling. Fall is when the past comes to life again.
     Just recently I was in a store where I happened by a bunch of plastic-covered cardboard notebooks. The new plastic was doing what new plastic does by giving off the pungent smell of new plastic. In that moment, I was caught by surprise and taken back to Miss Grogan’s third grade classroom. The classroom was a linear room with high ceilings, radiator heat, wood and metal desks in five straight rows of six chairs each, and two extra desks on each end of the teacher's desk for her two lowest students, 32 children per class, and huge slate blackboards right up in front. In that store on that day I had a “Nifty” notebook remembrance. Those new plastic notebooks in the store took me back some 50 years with only a casual smell.
     While driving near the foot of the Appalachians last week, I drove through a little valley where I was suddenly transported back to tobacco fields, flue-cured tobacco barns, and the dusty smell of thousands of strung-up leaves hanging in the heat. The wafting aroma was the smell of a flue-cured tobacco barn that someone had fired up. This sweet and thick smell is a smell that is only seldom smelled today, but is a long ago memory evidenced by early morning patches of low-lying smoke in calm-air valleys. Flue-curing was a process whereby the bright green leaves filled with moisture would be gently dried til' they turned a bright gold and hung brittle in the barn.
     The fall of the year is a time to remember, and remembering is what the Old Testament is all about. We too often read the Old Testament stories as a history book of how a group of people, back there, “lived” with their God, how their God “lived” with them. We make a mistake and read the Old Testament history as if it were written like a textbook, a term paper, or a dissertation for a degree. To us, it is possible that the Old Testament writings can become stagnant, in their black and white and recorded format.
     We think of history in the third person, as recollections occurred to “them.” When we think of history, we say things like, “’they’ lived in Canaan,” or “the enemy attacked ‘them.’” For us, history is a thing of the past. But for the Jew and the Old Testament, history exists in the present. A proper reading of the Old Testament should say, “Moses delivered ‘us’ from Egypt,” or “’we’ wandered in the wilderness,” for each Jew, and Christian, bears within herself or himself the results of the past. The books we call the Old Testament are living books of faith.
     Historians hate this kind of living history. Historians want events recorded in a pristine fashion, once and for all, with all current or popular interpretations stripped away. Historians like their history as dry and matter-of-fact like a valley of dried and scattered bones.
     But the Old Testament is not that kind of history. The Old Testament books are a history and wisdom of “us,” a compilation of memories that are continually inviting “us” to live in "them," to smell the smells, to walk the walk, to feel the presence of God, and to remember our generational walk through time with God.
      If, when you read a portion of the Old Testament, you find yourself being pulled into the story, feel free to go there. Our spiritual ancestors are continually inviting us back to experience the redemption, grace, deliverance, and creation of a God who remembers our covenants even if we refuse to do so. The Old Testament does not as much teach us, as the recollections call us to remember.
Rev. Dan Martin is pastor of First UMC, Hendersonville. He can be reached at moose1953@hotmail.com