Bible reading for money

This acquisitive mode is so culturally expected and congregationally rewarding that it cannot fail to affect our approach to the Scriptures. When we sit down to read the Scriptures we already have an end product in view: we want to find something useful for people's lives, to meet their expectations of us as pastors who deliver goods. If someone says to me, "I don't get anything out of reading Scripture", my knee-jerk response is, "I will show you how to read it so that you can get something out of it". The operative word is "get". I will help you be a better consumer. By this time the process is so far advanced it is nearly irreversible. We have agreed, my parishioners and I, to treat the Bible as something useful for what they can get out of it. I, a pastor shaped by their expectations, help them to do it. At some point I cross over the line and am doing it myself - looking for an arresting text for a sermon, looking for the psychologically right reading in a hospital room, looking for evidence of the truth of the Trinity. The verb looking has taken over. I am no longer listening to a voice, not listening to the God to whom I will give a response in obedience and faith, becoming the person he is calling into existence. I am looking for something that I can use to do a better job, for which people will give me a raise if I do it conspicuously enough.

Peterson, Working the Angles, p98-99.