Fire By Night by Melissa Florer-Bixler: A Review

And Florer-Bixler does a beautiful telling of the story of Ruth and Naomi. She uses the familiar story as an archetype for what Peter Dula calls fugitive ecclesia. "As a church we are offered an elusive interconnectedness as an earthly body of Christ, not a constant and fixed institution... Ruth and Naomi remind us, as does Jesus, that the space where God's life occurs isn't necessarily in church programs or Sunday school classes but in companionship, a spark of God's life - unexpected, unplanned and uncalculated."True confession: I am not an especially devoted fan of the Old Testament.

In theory, I get that there is a connection between the Old and New Testaments. And that the first five books of the Old Testament comprise the Torah.

When Jesus walked the earth, he didn't trash-talk the Old Testament. In fact, he said that he came to fulfill it. It would stand to reason that anyone who wanted to get to know God, or Jesus, better, would be motivated to spend some time searching its pages.

That's where Melissa Florer-Bixler's FIRE BY NIGHT: Finding God in the Pages of the Old Testament comes in.

Florer-Bixler has a way of finding the wisdom-diamonds hidden underneath the mines of antiquity. She writes about the corporate nature of evil, how our enemies are interconnected with our allies and how the church is routinely tempted to control holiness.

We "expect that we can make God show up. Often we believed that places were marked as holy by naming them as such. We think we are owed this as God's people." Ouch!

But Florer-Bixler offers a way out of this trap of self-righteousness. "Reckoning with our past, seeing how our Scriptures have been used for both devastation and for blessing - this can help us to live differently into the future are we embody practices, policies and habits that rechannel our desire to control God."

"The Bible is consistently a story of humans making sense of God's redemptive action in the world while at the same time wrestling with our desire to control God, to make God do our bidding, to make God into our image."

So what is the purpose of the Old Testament?

"The Old Testament," writes Florer-Bixler, "calls our attention to fragile lives in our world. Throughout the stories of ancient Israel, we are invited to turn our attention to those overlooked and left at the margins of power."

Florer-Bixler re-tells the story of the healing of Naaman highlighting that it was a young slave girl who

Melissa Florer-Bixler/Herald Press

pointed him in the direction of the prophet who eventually healed him. After Naaman looked past his privileged way of life. "Naaman sees importance in political connections and wealth," she points out. "And he learns that the God of Israel is the God to whom all are precious."

Probably one reason I don't have a particular affinity for the Old Testament is that it can reinforce the view of God as an old rulemaker-in-the-sky who is just waiting for me to do something that ticks God off. But that's not the way Florer-Bixler sees it.

Within FIRE BY NIGHT there's a short, but eloquent, passage where Florer-Bixler describes living for a time in one of the L'Arche communities in Washington, D.C. Her goal was to eventually set up a similar community in North Carolina, where she is a Mennonite minister. She quotes Jean Vanier (the founder of the original L'Arche movement in France), saying that many of us "live with the burden of unconscious guilt." She goes on to write "We feel we are not who we should be. So it is a wonder, a profound surprise, to hear you are simply enough as you are."

The Old Testament, writes Florer-Bixler helps us realize this. "Church is often trust in that which I cannot control, the shared life of another without institutionally mandated promises or production. "