I’m intrigued by the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”  I’ve never played it, and I doubt that I’d be any good at it since I’m not a movie buff.  But the underlying assumption is interesting:  there are no more that six degrees of separation between any two people on earth.  If you take all the people I am acquainted with and add in all the people each of them are acquainted with, and add in all the people each of those people are acquainted with, and repeat that process four more times, you would end up with all the people on earth.  When  you do this you create a huge web with billions of nodes and billions of connections, and very small chains.  That’s the assumption.  And that assumption is gaining strength. There’s a Facebook app that will determine the degree of separation between any two Facebook users through their friend lists.  The average degree of separation on Facebook is down to 4.7.

This way of looking at our world is not really about separation but about connections.  And each of these connections is between real people . Each of these people has a name and a face, each has a physical and cultural context, an individual history and personal experiences.  This way of seeing our connections with others bypasses the abstractions of categories such as nationality, social status, or religious affiliation.

It can be helpful to view our connection with God in terms of degrees of separation, in terms of the real people who make the connection between God and us.

It is possible for me to experience God directly—God can become an acquaintance of mine—and there is no degree of separation.  More often, though, my connection with God involves one or more degrees of separation.  With one degree of separation, someone I know can tell me of their personal experience of God.  I can also be connected to God with two and three and more degrees of separation, and all those connections, with their various degrees of separation can be active at same time.

Since the Bible is a record of God’s interactions with people, it can be helpful to think like this as we listen for God’s word to us when we read the Bible.  It is important to keep in mind those real people who connect us with a particular person who experienced God.

Our connection with God through the Bible always involves at least two other people aside from us; there are at least two levels of separation.   There is the person who wrote the particular passage and the audience, those people the writer was connecting with at the time of the writing.  On a few occasions the author relates a personal experience God, such as Paul writing to the Christians in Galatia about his experience of receiving a revelation of Jesus Christ.  (Galatians 1:12)  But the biblical authors also write about experiences of groups they are part of, about experiences of people they know, about experiences they have read about, or have heard about second or third hand.

We understand the Bible better when we can imagine all of those connections, when we can imagine the people the stories are about, the people who are telling the stories, and the people the stories are told to.  We recognize our separation from the original experience, but we also sense our connection to each of the people in the chain.

Those people who are our connections with that experience of God are examples of the words of God becoming flesh.  When we look for the ways the word of God is embodied in others we discover a word of God that can become flesh in us.  We can imaginatively put ourselves in the place of a person who first heard or read the words of a passage of scripture.  Then we can put ourselves in the place of the person who wrote it or told it; and then into the place of the person who first experienced God in that way.

Here’s an example.  In Galatians 2:20, Paul writes “I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”  Paul is here recounting his experience of Christ alive within his flesh.  But Paul is also taking about the crucifixion of Jesus, something he didn’t witness but which others did and told him about it.  He also talks about the faith of Jesus, a faith in God which Jesus told his first disciples about and they in turn told Paul about.  Without even considering an original audience, I am already imagining the word becoming flesh in Paul and in the disciples who told Paul about Jesus  and in Jesus himself.

It’s complicated.  But even as it gets complicated, it gets more and more real.  The faith of Jesus is a matter of the word becoming flesh.  And Paul’s life in the flesh, by that faith of Jesus, is a matter of Christ living within him.  As I imagine the lives of these real people, God makes a connection to me through them.  The life of Jesus in Paul can also become the life of Jesus in me.  The faith which took form within Paul (the faith Jesus had in his Father) can also become the faith which takes form within me.  The word of God can become flesh in me and in you.

If we want to embody the scriptures, if we want the word to become flesh within us, then it helps to imagine that word becoming flesh in the people we encounter in the Bible, the characters, the writers and the original audiences.