Today, my thoughts revolve around one thing: harlotry. Well, harlotry and spring break, but harlotry is the more immediate of the two. I'm writing an exegesis of Jeremiah 3 which, over the last few days, has proven harder than I thought.
Don't get me wrong. I love sitting and working with a text in the nerdiest possible way. I'd like to do it for a living. Because it's so exciting when you can see something new in it, something that changes the tenor of the whole thing. In one of my classes first year we read something that said to preach, you first have to be astounded by the text. I love finding the part of each text that astounds me.
But I'm not astounded by Jeremiah 3. I wrenched out a thesis. It's basically taking part of another guy's thesis and nuancing it a bit to fit my passage. He took pieces of other people's scholarship and nuanced it a bit to fit his passage. Sometimes it feels like the pressure to write sucks the joy out of the discovery. But on the other hand, I love that theology is a conversation, even one of nuances. And maybe at some point I'll come back to this text and it will astound me. Maybe even later tonight, after a few too many lattes.
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