I love when Jesus is smart and edgy—when he trips up the Pharisees, puzzles them, mystifies them. They know the scriptures, but he knows God. They’re well schooled; he’s subtle and deft and wise. They live by the letter; he lives by the Spirit.

Too many Christians have weaponized the Bible, using it to defeat and exclude, sometimes to destroy. Too many have driven honest seekers away from faith by making its sacred stories into traps or tests.

After being subjected to some of those tests and caught in a few of those traps, I have come to see the great legacy we have in the Bible as an invitation: Dwell in these stories. Explore them. Wrestle with them. Imagine your way into them. Talk about them with one another. Seek the wisdom of scholars, and let the words speak to you across the ages in your own language, in your own heart. Listen for the word or phrase that stops you. Let the Spirit breathe in the sentences and the spaces between them. Carry the stories in your heart. Remember the tax collectors and sinners, the wise virgins and the sheep, the ravens and the angels. Treasure them and let them teach you. Never use them to browbeat others. Don’t reduce poetry to pious pronouncements or parables to rules. Let them mystify, invite, unnerve, and delight you. It’s all yours to enter—this many-roomed mansion—but not to own or control. All may enter and dwell and learn by going.

When I read the Bible in that spirit, the passages can enliven me. I find what I need and sometimes what I didn’t know I needed: bread and breath and song.