First Person with Wayne Shepherd

First Person: Michael Card

Long time friends, Wayne and Michael talk about the use of the informed imagination in reading and studying the Bible. Send your support for FIRST PERSON to the Far East Broadcasting Company: FEBC National Processing Center Far East Broadcasting Company P.O. Box 6020 Albert Lea, MN 56007 Please mention FIRST PERSON when you give. Thank you!

Duration:: 23m
Broadcast on:: 19 Nov 2010
Audio Format:: other

Long time friends, Wayne and Michael talk about the use of the informed imagination in reading and studying the Bible.

Send your support for FIRST PERSON to the Far East Broadcasting Company:
FEBC National Processing Center
Far East Broadcasting Company
P.O. Box 6020
Albert Lea, MN 56007

Please mention FIRST PERSON when you give. Thank you!

I would love for people to say, you know, at the end of my life, to say, you know, not, oh, wow, that was a great song, but to say, yeah, I engage with the Bible differently because, you know, I crossed paths with this guy, that would be a great thing. Welcome to First Person, a weekly one-on-one conversation with people who prompt us through their stories to give thanks to God for his faithfulness and love. I'm Wayne Shepard, you may have recognized the voice of Michael Card, who opened today's program with how he would like to be remembered someday. Mike Card has been a friend to me and to Joe Carlson, who produces First Person for many years. The three of us used to meet regularity in the studio at Moleland in Franklin, Tennessee, to record a weekly radio program, and we'll always remember those sessions for what they taught us about God's Word, creativity, and community. But before we begin today's conversation with Mike, let me remind you to visit our website, FirstPersonInterview.com. Today's program will be added to the archive. Again, that's FirstPersonInterview.com. Mike Card is well known for his songs, which are steeped in biblical story and truth, and recently just before an event we both attended in Cleveland, Ohio, we sat down to talk. Mike, as long as we've known each other, which is a long time, I don't think I have ever asked you, how do you introduce yourself? Who is Mike Card? I've introduced you on radio for 10 years. I don't think I've ever introduced myself. Who are you? When people ask me what I do, like if I'm sitting next to someone on a plane, I'll say I'm a writer. Because in Nashville, no one's really proud of being a songwriter. That's like being the pizza delivery man in Nashville. So yeah, I would introduce myself as a writer and I write about the Bible, I guess. I don't know. But it goes way beyond that. I thought you were going to say I'm a slave of Jesus Christ. Oh, well, we all, Bill Lane, you know, all you need to know about me is I'm a man under authority, the authority of God's Word. I would rip that off and yeah, I'm a slave of Christ. It all starts there, doesn't it? Yeah. But I don't know. I'd almost be reluctant to even say that about myself because I do that so poorly. But I can, in a broad, general way, say I'm a writer and not feel too guilty about that. And when did you write your first song? I wrote first song in high school, you know, probably for some girl. I think I had a crush on this girl in high school or junior high school and wrote some, you know, silly little song. The first real song I wrote though was in college for Bill. Bill gave me a sermon that he'd done on John 21, the second miraculous catch of fish. And I wrote a song called Stranger on the Shore, I think that's the first real song I ever wrote. When we first started doing Radio Together a few years back, Bill Lane, your mentor, was still alive and we actually got to bring Bill into the studio. So it was a wonderful privilege the last year or so of Bill's life for me to meet him and understand the relationship that the two of you had. Yeah. He basically shared the experience of dying, of knowing that he had cancer and he only had at one point six months to live. And he was really transparent in those last months. It was incredible. That was an incredible time to sit with you and Bill because you're better at questioning and sort of moving the discussion along. Well, you were always the student in Bill's process. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? You know, PhD from Harvard, 16 languages, all these major commentaries. He reached out to me a lot of times he would say that, you know, I was his little brother in Christ, which was, you know, which was an incredible compliment because it was really a father and son thing. You know, we did get closer as the years went on. So it approached being a big brother and a little brother, but he was just so many light years beyond any of us really in his understanding of Scripture. And I miss him every day. I don't know about you, but yeah, he was a big brother. I think of him often. Yeah. And I think of the influence that he had on you and you in turn now are having on others through your music and through your teaching and writing now. Yeah. Well, it all stems from something, right? It does. Yeah. Yeah. We are the, what's the right word? We're the stewards of, you know, what we receive from, you know, the older men and women of God, the people that he puts in our lives. And we, yeah, we do become stewards of that. Yeah. You've experienced loss. Of course, the loss of Bill Lane who meant so much to you. Another man, a good friend, was Denny Denson. Yeah. Denny is with the Lord now. Yeah. You got to be close. I did. And I was with Denny about 30 minutes before he died. If I'd stayed with him 30 more minutes, I would have been with him when he died. And that's how I really regretted that. And in fact, there's a, his last message to me, I've still got on my phone message box. So when I listen to all the messages, it's Denny just barely coherent. I mean, he was kind of slipping in and out and it's, you know, he's speaking really in a broken up sort of way about, you know, just wanting to call you back. My brother, you know, call later and then he just hangs up the phone and so I hear that every couple of days and reminded of this, another huge presence. And your mother died the same day as your best friend? Yeah. And their funerals were the same day and all that happened after a two or three year process of looking at lament. So I was really teed up, you know, to say, okay, what am I going to do with this loss? You know, I've told everyone else that they're supposed to offer that up as an act of worship. So, and I hope I did that well. I hope I did that well. Just because you thought about it and wrote about it, didn't make it any easier for you to do it. Yeah. And that doesn't mean I would necessarily do it. But it did prove, you know, lo and behold, it did prove to be true that that's what you do with that stuff, you know, that my loss of my mom and Denny was something that was a gift of pain as it were in loss that I gave to the Lord in it. And in an odd sort of way, it makes me closer to the Lord because that's just one more thing we share that, and that only he is worthy to share those things with. It's an interesting, it's an interesting aspect of relationship that you come into. Death does something to you that nothing else does, right, in your life. It does something to you that nothing else does. And to do that with the Lord is a pretty cool thing. Yeah. You're always so good. I mean, life is hard and we all experience that, you know, and you haven't been exempt from some of those hardships, but you seem to have a way of expressing that on behalf of all of us in a way that we would like to be able to express it, whether musically or in writing. Do you think in those terms? Well, I think that's part of my call. I think that's what songwriters and writers in general do. They articulate things for us. And if you're doing your job well, you articulate things in a way that people say, well, you know, I could have, if I'd have just had the right time or the right moment, I would have said, you know, the same thing, oddly enough, James Taylor was always that person for me. I would listen to James Taylor or I'd still listen to James Taylor and I think I could have written that. You know, so he's this, he's a musical genius, but he's so available, right? And even someone like, I can't think of any other examples, like a Wendell Berry, who's a great writer that I really admire, same sort of thing. Now there are geniuses that are so beyond, for me, you read someone like Frederick Beakner and you think, oh, that's so beautiful, I never could have never said that. So I've always believed that there are different types of genius. There's genius that really makes you think, I can do that. And there's genius that sort of shuts down your creativity. And when I hear Phil Caggy play the guitar, even though he's so incredible, I want to play the guitar. I think, if I just worked hard enough, they make us better. Right. And instead of shutting us down, that virtue, oh, so level, that everyone's sort of, you know, it was always fawning and groveling in front of, I'm not really interested in that, actually. Of course, it starts with scripture, but you have a gracious appetite for just good literature. I do. I like to read, I think I got that from my mother. My mother was always reading something and always talking about it. And with the iPod era, I listened to a lot of audiobooks and some of the ones that you, you know, that's so bizarre is to listen, is to have you read me a book on my iPod. Let me tell you, it's bizarre to have Michael Card listening to the books that I read. But it's neat because it's like you're this friend, it's like, we're, you know, we're setting up and you're reading a book to me. Like, how do you discover new things to read and to latch onto? Yeah, there's just so much out there. And with technology, anything you're interested in, you know, you Google it and there's, you know, any number of books and I just, I just find this endlessly fascinating. I'm sort of backed up really with, I was, I was just in Singapore. One of my favorite writers is a guy named Oliver Sacks who writes about the brain. He was the guy that the movie Awakenings was all about. And I, there was this man in Singapore who was a neurosurgeon and I said, oh, you know, do you like Oliver Sacks? Oh, yeah. He goes, if you read any name two or three other guys, I'd never heard of it. So I've got all their books sitting on my shelf now waiting to read and. And you don't seem to be a casual reader. No, I'm, I read pretty serious. I don't read anything boring. I don't have time for boring, you know, I read very little fiction. It's got to be, you know, it's got to get me in the first two chapters or I'm out. My wife Susan is this diligent person who if she starts a book, she'll always finish and I go, no, if they don't get me in the first two chapters, I'm out of there. And when you tackle a topic, you really dig deeply into research, you've done that. I've seen you do that in a number of projects. Yeah, I try to. And I'm doing the Gospels now and that that's a great fun just reading commentaries because there's a, there's a mode that you get into when you read commentaries, you can read commentaries actually very, very quickly, at least if it's stuff you're already familiar with because you'll hit, you'll hit a paragraph or two and you go, okay, I've heard this, I've heard this. And then, then, ooh, you'll hit something new and then you slow down. So yeah, I enjoy reading commentaries. And one thing leads to another, you have to follow the thread, don't you? Yeah, and there'll be some reference or some article and again, Wayne, that's what's so great about technology now, there'll be some article in a journal and what I don't have access to, which I wish I had better access to is journals because all of the new thinking is in the journals, but you know, there's software that you can get that has a lot of the journals or you can go online and get some of them and yeah, it's, it's fun to run down topics. Yeah. We'll have part two of today's conversation with Michael Card coming up in just a moment here on First Person. When you join us next time on First Person, you'll hear Milton Massey of here's life in our city. I believe the challenge is for us as believers is to move from our comfort zones and to recognize that God has called us to have a heart for ministry, whether she's occupation or not as believers, God has called us to be ambassadors on the frontline, not just being comfortable in our pews. Milton Massey has been with campus crusade for Christ for over 30 years and knows what it's like to minister to the inner city. That's next time on First Person. Let's pick up our conversation with Michael Card on First Person. I ask Mike, how do you approach studying God's Word? I think it's a mistake to ever say, well, I'm going to read it just for devotion or I'm just going to read it just for scholarly purposes. I think this is something that Bill taught both of us Wayne. He always talked about this idea that you bring all of yourself to Scripture, all of your heart and all of your mind, and you have to engage with your imagination. That's what's in my mind when I read Scriptures, this idea. Again, this is Bill's idea that I'm going to engage with it and interact with it. It's a voice, Scripture's alive. It's this voice that's speaking into your life and so you realize that you have the freedom to ask questions. You have the freedom to be disturbed and unsettled because the Bible does that to you. Should. Say more about biblical imagination. I know this is something you're really spending a lot of time with. Read with Bill Lane, you've got conferences now. What do you mean by biblical imagination? For me, the direction of probably the rest of my life of what I'm going to do is going to be focused in terms of encouraging people to read the Bible with all their heart and all their mind and to ask the right questions. Bill did that. That's Bill's statement. You must engage with Scripture at the level of the informed imagination. That's straight out of Bill Lane. I was with him for 27 years watching him do that, but he never told us how. He never developed. I think he just wanted us to, I guess, come up with our own approach and so I was forced to do that. Some people might be uncomfortable with imagination thinking that we're adding something. You said the informed imagination. I've already, we started this biblical imagination page on Facebook and I've already got some angry people who, "The only place the Bible, especially King James, uses the word imagination, it's always negative. When men and their sinful imaginations," and so there's this line of thought that the imagination is bad and that it's wrong to use the imagination when you approach Scripture. I definitely agree with the Bible that men have sinful imaginations because I've got a sinful imagination, but that doesn't mean that I'm supposed to abandon that. I think that's one of the things that God is reclaiming and recreating by the Holy Spirit. So I'm beginning to be convinced that the imagination is this link in that God has created in all of us between our hearts and our minds and that if I'm going to come to the Bible with all my heart and with all my mind, I use my imagination to do that. Give us an example of the use of biblical, the informed imagination with a biblical passage. Okay. Well, you take a passage like Luke 7 where Jesus is in the home of a Pharisee named Simon. In the first place Luke, Luke is a companion of Paul, correct? We know that, and that's just a fact that I know, but then I ask myself, "What does that mean?" What does it mean that Luke is a companion of Paul, a Pharisee? What impact does that have on his writing? And lo and behold, when I look in Luke, I realize that the Pharisees aren't bad guys necessarily in Luke. In fact, only Luke shows Jesus having meal fellowship three times with three different Pharisees or groups of Pharisees, and one of the meals goes pretty bad. Jesus ends up pronouncing the woes and it doesn't go well, but the first and the third time he has meal fellowship with Pharisees, he goes actually very well. And Simon in chapter seven is, that's when the woman comes in, the sinful woman weeps in Jesus' feet, and Simon is there, and he's thinking, people who think things to themselves tend to be bad people in the gospel. And Simon thinks to himself, "Well, if this man were a prophet, he would know what kind of woman is touching him and that sort of stuff." And that's a great example, a great story where you engage with your imagination and you realize, "Okay, here's this Pharisee. If I've done my homework, I know that Luke is not anti- Pharisee, but he paints a very realistic picture of the Pharisees. And so I understand that Simon is a good man. Simon is a good man. And Jesus is there to be graceful and to love Simon well. And so Jesus doesn't condemn Simon, he just says, "Simon, I have something to tell you." And very cordially, Simon says, "Tell me, teacher." And then Jesus goes on and tells this little parable and helps Simon to realize that he's never really seen this woman. And the operative, the moment is when Jesus is looking at, and here again, you're using your imagination, but Luke says, "Looking at the woman, Jesus said to Simon," so you don't read past that, you realize Jesus is looking at her, but he's talking to Simon, and he says to Simon, "Do you see this woman?" And I think a lot of people just read past that, but if you engage with your imagination, what you realize is Simon had never really seen her. And so I ask myself, "Are there people that I don't see?" You know? It's a great example, I love that. The imagination is always held and checked with the facts of Scripture, obviously. Yeah, it's the informed imagination. And I think that's a good point when we just don't go off half-cocked, and every now and then you'll hear a preacher do that, and you kind of roll your eyes and think, "Oh, come on, let's be real." So it's fictionalizing the Bible. Right, right. And no, it's always when then the confines and the constraints of Scripture and the facts. But it's also a wonderful opportunity to do what Bill did, and that is to do your homework and understand, let's do some work, let's find out who Luke is, how is Luke different from the gospels and that sort of thing? And doesn't that make the Scripture that much more rich to us, that we have to invest something in? Yeah, it should. Right. You're engaging. There's the word "engage." Yeah, you don't just... I think too many Christians in America, we have this idea of, "Oh, well, there's the expert Bible teacher, I'll listen to them, you know, or I'll buy their books or whatever, and then I'll agree or disagree with them." I think that's very irresponsible. I think a good Bible teacher should do what Bill did and encourage you, you know, I'll give you the facts and I'll give you some of my ideas, but then you engage and create an appetite. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And so the commentaries for me aren't the end, they're the beginning. That's where I start with commentaries. And then when I read the Scripture, then when I read the Scripture, I engage on my own. Yeah. What are you working on now, Michael? I just started Mark. I finished Luke, the book that's coming out in January. And I'm actually still working on the album on Luke, but study wise, I'm working on Mark now, which is wonderful, because Mark is a person that we know, you know, we know something about. Matthew is next, and we don't know a whole lot about Matthew, so that's gonna be harder. But Mark is this, you know, companion of Peter, and the Gospel of Mark is basically Peter's story, and you know me, I really love Simon Peter, so. It's also interesting to me that, like, for instance, I know that ancient faith is about to be re-released, or by the time this is aired has been re-released. That's gotta be gratified. It is, I'm really thankful that Sparrow is willing to do that, and they asked me to write a new song, so I never did Malachi. I never made it quite the way to the end of Scripture, and so I spent a couple of weeks and just had a wonderful time in the book of Malachi, and again, sort of engaged with the book of Malachi, which I hadn't really ever done before, and interesting that the last book in the Bible, you know, God opens the book by saying, "I have loved you." I've never seen that before, so look, at the end of all this that He's been through, you know, with the children of Israel, He starts out by saying, "You know, I have loved you." You're a strong language. I have loved you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that is remarkable. Yeah. I know you get this question a lot from young people who want to do, who admire what you've done, want to do what you do, or take it even in a different direction, but creativity. How do you answer the question about where do I start, and how do I get as creative as you are? Well, I don't want them to be as creative as you want them to be better, yeah. Because it's a struggle and a burden. You know, I don't know. I know you want to mentor people. I want to encourage people. I want to mentor the people that God brings kind of within my reach, as Scott Rollie would say. Yeah, I'd like to, you know, walk with those guys. Yeah, I don't know if there's a specific one thing that I say to those people because everyone's different. Some people, a lot of people are really discouraged because I think some people don't have, they haven't determined whether they're really called to do it or not. It sounds like it'd be fun. Yeah. Yeah. And I always encourage them to go back to their community because, you know, me, I believe that your community helps you determine your calling and, but there are people. I mean, I walk pretty closely with Andrew Peterson and phenomenal, you know, more creativity in the dirt under his fingers than I have in my whole body and a tremendous admiration for his work. Yeah, great guy. Well, I think your best years are ahead and I really, as your friend, you mean that because I see how God is using you and I see he was a mentor, not just in music, but in how to approach the scriptures that and ultimately that's going to serve people far better. Well, that I'll tell you, I mean, thanks for saying that and I hope that's true because that would be, you know, at the end, you know, because I'm closer now to the end than I am the beginning. Oh, let's not get a model in here. Well, well, it's very mug, muggerage, you know, Malcolm Muggerage had this sort of preoccupation with death. He talked about it all the time and I've read too much Muggerage to have not been impacted by that. You know, that would be, I would love for people to say that, you know, at the end of my life to say, you know, not, oh, wow, that was a great song, but to say, yeah, I engage with the Bible differently because, you know, across paths with this guy, that would be a great thing. Be encouraging. Michael Card in a reflective moment and we've learned much through his music for many years. Now it's not only his music, but his Bible teaching that is feeding our soul. The best way to learn more about Mike Card in his latest albums and books is to visit our web page, firstpersoninterview.com and follow the links to his website. You'll also learn about his biblical imagination conferences, some of which are coming up real soon. You can check it all out at firstpersoninterview.com. It was a great feeling to sit down with Mike again and talk together. This interview and all of our programs are archived on our website, firstpersoninterview.com. There you can also learn about our podcast, which is available on iTunes as an automatic download each week to your computer. Just remember firstpersoninterview.com. When you join us for next week's conversation, you'll hear Milton Massey of Hears Life inner city and campus crusade for Christ talk about his life's work of proclaiming the gospel to the urban poor here in America. It's a mission field right around the corner and we'll talk about it next time. Now for my friend and producer Joe Carlson, I'm Wayne Shepard. I hope you'll join us next week at the same time for first person. [music]