Pastor’s book teaches as it turns heads‘

Marry a Pregnant Virgin’ seeks to remedy biblical illiteracy

By CAROLYN CLICK - cclick@thestate.com

The Rev. Frank Honeycutt once invited 15 of his agnostic and atheist acquaintances to come to church and listen to a series of his sermons, not with an eye toward conversion, but to simply help him understand the mind of the skeptic and the failings of traditional church language.

In his latest book, “Marry a Pregnant Virgin: Unusual Bible Stories for New and Curious Christians” (Augsburg Press, 2008), he returns to that theme of unlocking the mysteries of Scripture for a culture that is increasingly biblically illiterate. If readers do a theological double take, all the better.

“Jesus tells these masterful stories and they kind of detonate in our minds years down the road,” said Honeycutt, pastor of Ebenezer Lutheran Church in downtown Columbia.

Honeycutt isn’t above employing the occasional elliptical run around a treasured Bible story, requiring parishioners and readers of his books to follow their own circuitous “to be continued” path to theological awakening.

It used to unnerve him when he delivered a sermon and parishioners exiting the church at the conclusion of the service would focus on a totally unexpected theme of the Scripture he employed. But not anymore.

“They are making connections to the text that may lead them down different paths, and many I didn’t intend,” he said.

In “Marry a Pregnant Virgin,” Honeycutt celebrates the strange and complex world of the Old and New Testaments with “huge fish, pregnant virgins and talking donkeys.”

But he worries that in today’s 24-7 world, few are taking the time to truly study the Scriptures and extract helpful interpretations.

“We like our spiritual truths served up quickly with sitcom clarity,” he writes in the introduction. “We prefer the condensed version, God’s Little Devotional Bible, the easy path to insight — a straight, unencumbered shortcut to divine wisdom.”

But Honeycutt believes longtime Christians and those new to the faith are shortchanging themselves by skimming the surface, failing to “eat this scroll” as the prophet Ezekiel was advised to do by God.

“Very often the Bible will tell a story that seems to be about one thing when actually it’s a curve ball about something else entirely,” he writes. ”It takes time and attention to digest the living word.”

Honeycutt, 51, leavens the essays with stories of his own family and faith journey, of his love of the natural world (he has hiked the length of the Appalachian Trial) and with reminders that Christians should not confine the Christian life to one hour on Sunday.

As he likes to tell people, the phrase “going to church” never appears in either the Old or New Testament. Instead, every day is church, which requiresChristians to truly see the homeless man on the street, the starving woman in Sudan, the friend who has fallen on bitter times. And then to ease their suffering.

“I don’t disagree with this statement: To have faith that there is a God in a world like ours sometimes requires a lot of hard work and imagination,” he writes. “I’m convinced this helps: ‘All things have been created through him and for him.’ All things. To believe that does not explain away all our faith difficulties. But widening the territory of Christ’s dominion reminds me that faith is not just my personal ticket to heaven or my promise of a pain-free life.”

Reach Click at (803) 771-8386.