That one guy who kisses everyone he meets in church
There was a man at a church I once attended who made people uncomfortable in a way no one quite knew how to talk about.
Every Sunday, during the moment when everyone stood up to greet one another, he did the same thing. He didn’t shake hands. He didn’t nod politely. He leaned in and kissed people on the cheek.
Men. Women. Teenagers. Elderly folks. No exceptions.
It wasn’t aggressive. It wasn’t flirtatious. It wasn’t secretive. It was… earnest. Almost reverent. And somehow that made it harder to respond to.
You could feel the room subtly shifting when he stood up. People suddenly remembered they needed to grab coffee or adjust a shoe or check on their kids. A few braced themselves and smiled politely. Nobody ever said anything out loud.
And the thing was — he was genuinely kind. The kind of person who helped without being asked. The kind who remembered your name and showed up when life got heavy. There was no malice in him at all.
One day, curiosity finally won.
I asked him, gently, why he greeted people that way.
He looked surprised, almost confused by the question. Then he smiled and said, “Because the Bible tells us to. It says to greet one another with a holy kiss.”
He wasn’t being ironic. He wasn’t trying to make a point. He was simply doing what he believed Scripture asked of him.
And that moment stayed with me — not because it was awkward, but because it revealed something deeper about how we read the Bible.
When Ancient Words Meet Modern Lives
The man wasn’t wrong. The verse is right there. Chapter. Verse. Clear as day.
But something about the situation felt… off.
Not sinful. Not dangerous. Just misplaced.
And that’s when it hit me: we often read the Bible as if it were written directly to us, in our language, shaped by our culture, answering our modern questions. But it wasn’t.
The Bible was written for us — but it was not written to us.
It emerged from worlds that look nothing like ours. Societies shaped by empire, survival, oral tradition, and communal identity. People who didn’t think in terms of personal brands, quiet time routines, or individual spiritual journeys.
When Paul wrote his letters, he wasn’t picturing a solo reader highlighting verses on a phone app. He was speaking to small groups of people trying to stay faithful while living under systems that could crush them at any moment.
That difference matters.
Because when we forget it, we start bending the text until it fits our modern instincts. We expect it to sound like us, think like us, and solve problems it was never addressing.
And when it doesn’t, we get frustrated — or worse, we force it to comply.
When the Bible Becomes a Mirror
One of the easiest mistakes to make is reading Scripture as if it exists primarily to reflect our own lives back to us.
We ask, What does this mean for me?
How does this apply to my season, my emotions, my goals?
Those aren’t bad questions — but they can’t be the first ones.
When we start there, the Bible becomes a mirror instead of a window. We stop encountering a story larger than ourselves and start hunting for validation, comfort, or justification.
That’s how ancient letters turn into self-help slogans. How complex stories get flattened into motivational quotes. How verses written to communities under oppression become bumper-sticker optimism for comfortable lives.
The irony is that the Bible actually becomes more meaningful when we stop forcing it to sound like us.
The Cost of Forgetting Context
Context is not a scholarly luxury. It’s an act of respect.
These texts were written by people navigating exile, persecution, poverty, and uncertainty. They weren’t crafting inspirational content — they were trying to survive with their faith intact.
When Jeremiah wrote words of hope, it was to people who had lost their homes.
When Paul wrote about unity, it was to communities tearing themselves apart.
When early Christians gathered, they did so knowing it could cost them everything.
Reading those words without that awareness is like overhearing half a conversation and assuming you understand the whole story.
It’s how Scripture gets misused — not because people are cruel, but because they’re disconnected from the world that shaped the words.
When Faith Becomes Individualized
One of the quiet shifts in modern Christianity is how personal everything has become.
But the early Christian vision was deeply communal. Faith wasn’t something you practiced in isolation. It was something you lived out with others — imperfectly, awkwardly, and often messily.
The commands to love, forgive, bear burdens, and pursue peace only make sense in community. You can’t practice them alone.
We’ve slowly turned a shared way of life into a solo project. And in doing so, we’ve lost something essential.
When the Text Gets Flattened
There’s also a tendency to treat the Bible like a rulebook or a search engine.
We search for verses that support our opinions. We pull lines out of poetry and treat them like policy statements. We forget that metaphor, exaggeration, and story are part of how truth is told.
When Jesus spoke about tearing out eyes or cutting off hands, no one listening thought he meant it literally. They understood the language of urgency, exaggeration, and moral imagination.
Yet today, we often read ancient words with modern literalism — and then wonder why faith feels brittle.
Reading Like a Guest
Maybe the posture we’re missing is humility.
Imagine being invited into someone else’s home — a place shaped by memories, customs, and stories that aren’t yours. You wouldn’t rearrange the furniture or criticize how things are done. You’d listen. You’d observe. You’d learn.
Reading Scripture works the same way.
When we approach it as guests rather than owners, something shifts. We stop demanding that it sound like us and start letting it speak on its own terms. And in that space, something surprising happens — the text begins to speak back.
Not by mirroring us, but by stretching us.
A Story Bigger Than Us
I still think about that man from church.
In some ways, his reading of Scripture was clumsy. But it was also sincere. He wasn’t trying to perform holiness or win arguments. He simply trusted the words he read and acted on them with an open heart.
There’s something quietly beautiful about that.
When I think about the communities those words were first written for — people clinging to faith in hostile worlds — his actions make more sense. The kiss wasn’t about awkward affection. It was about belonging. About solidarity. About reminding one another that they were not alone.
That’s what context gives us. It doesn’t strip Scripture of meaning — it restores it.
And when we let the Bible be what it actually is — a collection of voices, struggles, prayers, and hopes — it stops being a weapon or a mirror.
It becomes an invitation.
An invitation to step into a story that is older than us, larger than us, and somehow still generous enough to make room for us within it.
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