Today’s scripture: 1 Corinthians 14:13-25 (NRSV) (The Message) (KJV) What might God be saying to me?
My thoughts (John Seksay):
Dreaming is an odd process. We all do it. Sometimes we remember clearly what we dreamed and sometimes we recall only glimpses. Either way, making sense of the images in our dreams is hardly a clear science. The interpretation of dreams has been pursued, and practiced in various ways, for thousands of years without a particular approach being able to yield consistent or universal results. If we do assign them a meaning, it is often more by faith than by reason.
I summon up this example to highlight how we struggle to deal with information for which we cannot form a logical context. In our passage today, Paul is attempting to help the church in Corinth deal with certain gifts of the spirit which present this challenge. One is speaking in tongues, the other is prophecy.
Prophecy is a challenge because what is said can be understood in real world terms, but it may offer us a very different perspective from what we perceive to be true. It appeals to both faith and reason in the pursuit of understanding our world. It is like a dream where the location and people are quite recognizable to us, and we are just trying to figure out what they meant by what they said or did because we feel the underlying message is very important to us.
Speaking in tongues is a different order of challenge; it is listening to a sequence of sounds for which you have no vocabulary or reference syntax to allow translation. It’s that dream where you were watching a herd of deer sail a boat up the valley on dry land while fish applaud them from the trees. By its nature, it must look to faith for an answer since reason lacks the tools to extract information. In this sense, the message may be more personal than general, since it is impossible for the intent of the message to be readily shared. This seems to be why Paul, who had experience with both gifts, felt that prophecy would contribute more swiftly to a church’s growth than speaking in tongues; for the latter, in the absence of a gifted translator, the hearer had to wait on God for the translation.
Here is a little experiment to help us understand how the two relate. Pick a voice recording that you like and know well. Play it once at the normal hearing volume. Then turn the volume down slightly and play it again, at the level where your memory has the ability to fill in the few sounds or syllables that don’t quite reach audible volume. This would be like prophecy — there is enough familiar context and information to follow the conversation. Next, turn down the volume to the point where only occasional random sounds can be heard — where your senses cannot fill in the gaps because the missing portions are too broad. Now you are having that “speaking in tongues” experience. All three situations have the same information — the only difference is how able we are to comprehend it at the current level of transmission. The importance of the message is unchanged, but our varying ability to grasp it can deeply affect the importance we assign to what we do manage to pick up.
I believe that is why Paul, while admitting that prophecy was more immediately useful, still insisted that speaking in tongues had a place. As we practice at listening to what seems to us to be nonsense, we may just grow our ability to hear the missing pieces and fill the gaps. All religions assert that the voice of God is unchanging in its eternal call to humanity — what varies most is our ability to focus on listening in depth to the message.
Thought for the day: Today, Lord, help me be more aware of the limitations of my own abilities to understand. Help me to identify where I can grow my ability to understand your message more fully!
We encourage you to include a time of prayer with this reading. If you need a place to get started, consider the suggestions on the How to Pray page.