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July 29, 2007Today I’d like to teach a little bit about how we approach the Bible. I took one look at the readings for today and realized I had to. It’s a classic case of Good Bible/Bad Bible, and you must feel like you’ve got spiritual whiplash.
In the first reading, the prophet Hosea is commanded to go marry a prostitute as a symbol of Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. There is no forgiveness for the house of Israel, and they shall soon be defeated in battle.
The psalm then speaks beautifully of God’s forgiveness, how he has withdrawn all his wrathful indignation, that now righteousness and peace have kissed each other. In the second reading, Paul goes on about circumcision and uncircumcision, and how God erased our record of sin by nailing it to the cross. Finally, Jesus teaches simply and eloquently about prayer - the Lord’s Prayer, persistence and God’s faithful love.
How are we supposed to deal with all this? Israel is a whore and God will not forgive; no, wait: God withdraws his wrath. Jesus came to pay for our sins on the cross; no, wait: Jesus came to teach us about prayer and divine love.
And, of course, today isn’t the only Sunday you might be feeling this way. The last couple of Sundays we’ve heard from Amos, where God’s people are told that the bodies will be piled up, beloved wives turned into prostitutes, and that God will smite them with that Mother of All Curses as every head shall be afflicted with baldness! These pronouncements were contrasted with beautiful gospels that we’ve been hearing: the story of the Good Samaritan, and the evening with Martha and Mary.
One very common approach to the problem of biblical whiplash is to engage in a game that I call, again, Good Bible/Bad Bible. We avoid the Bad Bible: passages that seem ugly and inconsistent with a God of love. We may reject the Old Testament entirely. We ignore many of Paul’s writings, and even the gospel of John - well, who wants to listen to Jesus saying No one comes to the Father except through me?
But if we go to church, the Bad Bible passages just keep coming at us. We squirm, we look out the window, we leaf through the hymnal. We’d rather that we only be exposed to the Good Bible – those passages like today’s gospel. Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened. Blessed are the peacemakers. Faith, hope, and love abide, but the greatest of these is love. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Couldn’t we just be like Thomas Jefferson, who took a pair of scissors to the Bible and cut out all the bad stuff, leaving only the good?
But if you cut the book of Hosea out of your Bible because of its awful words about punishment for Israel’s whoredom, you will miss the real point of this book, where God laments like a disappointed lover: What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes away early. I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God and not burnt offerings.
If we take a pair of scissors to the Old Testaments, we will miss the point of the angry prophets, which is not to point the finger at everyone’s little moral weaknesses, but to call to accountability the powerful who trample on the poor and take away their land away and think that they can get away with it.
Here’s where my teaching today comes in. In the early 19th century some German biblical scholars began a field of study called biblical criticism. As with literary and historical criticism, they looked at biblical passages in their original contexts. They studied the form of writing of any given passage or book of the Bible, the authorship, the audience, the cultural beliefs and morals of the region and time in which it was written, how it was edited and why it was edited the way it was. They examined the political, military, and religious conflicts that influenced polemical writings where God sanctions one side over another.
In short, as I always say to our New Member Class, God did not write the Bible. Human beings, often inspired by God, wrote the Bible. And they brought their assumptions, prejudices, and limitations with them when they wrote.
The gift of this approach to the Bible is enormous. For up until biblical criticism came along, Christians never asked whether the world was really created in 6 days. They accepted it as a God-given fact. Now they could try to understand the Bible as God-inspired but human-influenced, full of both transcendent wisdom and what Origen of Alexandria called things that are not worthy of God.
But here’s the key. They are all mixed in together. The beauty and violence, the truth and prejudice are intermingled. If you throw out some awful thing that a misguided author had to say, you’ll also be throwing out the truth that God was speaking through him. And of course, on the other hand, if you accept it all unquestioningly, you’ll be putting your faith in some things that are not worthy of God.
This means that every one of us has to try to tease out the broad, God-inspired messages that are imbedded among the less lofty and sometimes downright ugly ones. As Jesus said, we have to let the weeds grow right along side the wheat. If you pull out the weeds, you’ll pull out the wheat, too. It’s like having an obnoxious old uncle who swears, drinks too much, and says some really mean things at times. But he also writes poetry whose depth of feeling and wisdom makes you want to cry. Think of the Bible as a kind of family reunion, where everyone has something valuable to say, and everyone also needs a little correction and confrontation now and then. It’s all mixed in together. You have to tease out the wheat from among the weeds.
You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to do this. You already know the character of God, of Jesus, and you can tell what is consistent with that character and what isn’t. You know that something like today’s beautiful gospel teaching on prayer just had to have come through pretty unfiltered. It is just so Jesus. And hopefully you also know that in spite of Amos or Hosea’s fulminations about how God was going to strike Israel dead for their sins, they also had something there about accountability for social injustice and God’s desire for our steadfast love. Look past the weeds; search for the wheat. It’s there in just about every passage of scripture.
Can you forgive the authors of scripture for being human, for mixing up what God was telling them with their own fears and cultural limitations? You would have, wouldn’t you? Can you forgive God for trying to speak to the ages through these confused and inconsistent voices, instead of finding some perfected beings who wouldn’t mess it up?
I hope so. Because there are no such perfected beings. There is no unfiltered truth here on earth. God has no choice but to use the corrupt to communicate the divine. As St. Paul said, We have this treasure in earthen vessels.
But more immediately for you, this says that God is trying to speak through your life as well. You are a Bible of sorts. Whatever wheat is in you is mixed up among many weeds. You are a maddening mix of transcendent truth and petty deception. You are have God’s treasure in a common earthen vessel. And so does everyone else.
And so when you look in the mirror, when you look at your neighbor, search for what is good, what is God-inspired. But don’t expect it to be pure, ever. And don’t imagine that God expects you to be pure. For if God successfully used such fools as the authors of scripture to reveal the eternal Word to the ages, surely God can speak to you - and through you - as well.
End Document — St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church