Closing the Blue Parakeet

Blue parakeet passages are oddities in the Bible that we prefer to cage and silence rather than to permit into our sacred mental gardens. (In reality though, the term Blue Parakeet serves as a metaphor for women in ministry).
In light of all that has gone before, Scot wants to wrap things up here. So, how then do we read the Bible?
Instead of reading each passage in its storied context, we will zoom in on getting out of the Bible what we want. Scot wants us to read the Bible from front to back as Story (capital “A” on purpose). Scot recaps the Story (here). Then seeks to point us to living out the story today.
Some thoughts on the Bible:
• The Bible is more than laws, and each law is connected to its context
• The Bible is more than blessings and promises; there are some warnings and threats as well
• The Bible is something that comes to us from God and not something onto which we can impose our wishes and desires
• The Bible is a story to be read, not a divinely scattered puzzle to be pieced together into a system that makes sense of it all.
• The Bible is a collection of wiki-stories of the Story, and each author, each Maestro, is but one voice at the table.

Living out the story today
First, we need to be mastered by the Story by reading the Bible so deeply that its story becomes our story. It is not merely that the Story masters us, but the God of that story is the one who masters us.
Second, together as God’s people we are to so inhabit the Story that we can discern how to live in our world.

What now?
We cannot think that our task is complete once we’ve figured what Paul or Peter meant when they spoke the gospel in their world. Instead, we are given a pattern of discernment in the Bible, a pattern that flows directly out of the Story, to listen to what God said in that world so we can know what God is saying to us and through our world. So we can know what God wants us to say about that story to our world – in our world’s ways.