March 22, 2009 Fourth Sunday in Lent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 15; I John 4:16b-21; John 17:20-26
The title of this sermon is “A Progressive Christian’s Guide to Reading the Bible.” Remember that a progressive Christian does not mean a political progressive who happens to be Christian. The quality that most characterizes a progressive Christian is openness—being openhanded, open minded and open hearted. A progressive Christian is open to the possibility that God is still speaking, that there may yet be, in the words of one old hymn, “more light and truth to break forth from God’s word.”
I do not know, because I never talked politics with her, but I suspect that Lillian Vaughan was not a political progressive. I would also guess that she would fall into the category of moral conservative, holding onto old values and ideals. This is what Craig Palmer guessed, too, and why he tried to hide from Lillian and many others here the commitment ceremony he had with his partner Sam Abel in this sanctuary. He was afraid of Lillian’s response. So he must have felt a little anxious as he saw her coming toward him the Sunday after the ceremony, when the word had leaked out. Sure enough, she was angry. She said to him, “Craig Palmer, why didn’t you tell us you were doing this so we could celebrate with you?”
A wedding cake appeared at coffee hour not long after that, and on top of it were two grooms, for the first time in the history of this church, I bet. And it was possible because of the openness of Lillian Vaughan’s response.
Lillian was also open when she read the Bible, something she loved to do. We moved our Bible Study to her living room after she could no longer travel comfortably. Lillian may not have put the guidelines I am going to describe in exactly these terms, but I think she would have recognized many of them as ways she read the Bible.
I also need to point out two other people who would have recognized their own reading of the scriptures in what I am about to say: Jesus and the Apostle Paul. I need to say that because people in conservative churches might claim that the progressive approach is radical and unorthodox. But if you read the Bible, you find that Jesus and Paul read the scriptures in similar ways.
Conservative Christians might also say that a progressive Christian reading of the Bible is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Progressives don’t read the Bible. And that may be true for many who associate the Bible with Bible thumping fundamentalists. But here are four approaches to reading the Bible that I hope will help progressive Christians reclaim the book as their own. The four are: 1. The Midrash Principle; 2. The Good Parts Version; 3. The Box of Lenses; and 4. The Vision Quest.
First, the Midrash Principle. Jesus and Paul were brought up in a Jewish tradition of scriptural interpretation called midrash. The idea that there is only one right way to read a given scripture passage is utterly foreign to midrash. The midrash tradition believes that every interpretation is a gift from God, because God created the mind and enabled it to think up the interpretation and put it into words.
Midrash revels in coming up with creative readings. Entire books have been written with literally hundreds of different interpretations of a single verse. Midrash does not waste time arguing about whether one interpretation is right and all others wrong as so many Christians do. For one thing, that would insult God, who is the source of all interpretations. For another, it would take the joy out of all that creativity. And for another, it is the wrong question. The question that matters to midrash is not right or wrong, but which interpretations are more useful in this situation and which are less useful. The principle of midrash is to put the creative interpretation of scripture to practical use in our every day living. A progressive Christian should read the Bible remembering this, and approach it creatively, allowing the Holy Spirit to inspire intuitive interpretations that can be applied to the matter at hand.
The second approach is the Good Parts Version. We had the Revised Standard Version, then the New Revised Standard Version. Now we have the Good Parts Version. In William Goldman’s book, The Princess Bride, a grandfather reads aloud to his sick grandson what he calls “the good parts version” of a pirate adventure story. In other words, he skips over the boring parts. The Good Parts Version of the Bible skips over the parts that any given reader finds useless or counter-productive.
Someone who is as sexually obsessed as a seventh or eighth grade boy should probably leave the highly erotic Song of Solomon out of his Good Parts Version, as I learned the hard way in confirmation class this week. People who believe in the loving God of Jesus Christ should probably leave the book of Joshua out of their Good Parts Version, because it is not useful to hear God telling the Israelites to batter down the walls of a town and kill every man, woman, child and animal there. Maybe if you did midrash long enough on that you could come up with some useful interpretation, but why bother? There are lots of other verses in the Bible. The Good Parts Version is based on the principle that you do not have to buy it all, and that it is far better to skip the bad parts than to throw away the whole book in disgust.
Like midrash, this, too, would be familiar to Jesus and Paul. The Jews started disregarding parts of the scriptures almost as soon as they were written. Jesus himself has his arguments with passages relating to the Sabbath and the touching of lepers, to name only two. The Good Parts Version is nothing new. Martin Luther did it. Thomas Jefferson did it. You can do it, too.
The third approach is The Box of Lenses. The image I have is of that little box of lenses the eye doctor has. She pulls out two at a time and puts them in the little device in front of your eyes and flips them back and forth asking, “Which is clearer? This…or this?”
There are many different lenses available for reading scripture, and some may make the meaning and usefulness clearer than others at any given time. In confirmation class on Friday we were reading the Psalms as well as the Song of Solomon. We were talking about that great line in Psalm 121, “The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.”
The class was not sure what that meant. So I told them about different lenses, and I suggested they take out a historical lens and a geographical lens. Historically, where did the Jews live who wrote that psalm? And geographically, what was the terrain like, what was the climate like? Once they thought about a hot Mediterranean sun and a cold, desert-like night, the verse was much clearer to them. Then you could take out two other lenses, a linguistic lens and a religious or intellectual history lens, and you could remember that the words lunatic and moonstruck come from the suspicion that the moon could make you crazy, and that in Biblical times epilepsy was thought to be brought on by the moon.
There are all kinds of lenses that you can apply to scripture—a political lens, feminist lens, literary lens, wisdom tradition lens, mystical lens, liberation theology lens, and on and on. (To increase your lens supply, take one of Rev. Dick Devor’s Bible courses, or read some of the excellent contemporary Biblical Commentaries that Dick or I could recommend.)
The more lenses you have in your box, the more clarity and usefulness you will find in what you read. Also, the more aware you are of your lenses, the more honest you can be with yourself about the slant you are giving to your reading, and the more respectful you can be of others who see things differently simply because they are looking through a different lens. As with midrash, this can make reading the Bible together much more creative, mutually enriching and fun, once we stop worrying about who’s right and who’s wrong.
The fourth approach is the Vision Quest. Martin Luther said, “God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.” We can go out and read nature as if it is the Bible, looking for meanings and signs, as Native Americans do when they go on a Vision Quest. But we can flip that around and say that we can read the Bible as if we were going deep into the mountains and opening our hearts and minds to receive the Spirit’s visions and insights. We can just open the Bible and start trekking through, scanning a page or leafing along until something leaps out at us. I cannot tell you how often I have done that and found exactly what I needed.
There is an ancient Christian monastic way of reading the Bible called Lectio Divina or Divine Reading that is designed to be like a vision quest. I would be happy to teach you how to do it. It combines reading with prayer and reflection and silent openness. Lectio Divina lets the Spirit speak to you on the level where visions are born.
The reason this works is that we are dealing with a living word here, we are dealing with a real, live power. The same Spirit of God that is in us was in the people who wrote the Bible, and when we come to it on a deep spiritual level it is like hooking up jumper cables—sparks fly. Power surges.
If we use these four approaches—Midrash, the Good Parts Version, the Box of Lenses and Vision Quest—the Bible can be a tool for transformation and healing, a source of guidance and power. It was these kinds of approaches to reading the Bible that fueled the revolution of values that took place in the Roman Empire, springing from Jesus and the disciples and apostles like Paul.
It is still fueling revolutions of values. That is what Martin Luther King Jr. called for in his day, and William Sloan Coffin in his. It is what another progressive Christian, President Barack Obama, is calling for today. Reading the Bible this way has led this congregation to become the only mainline protestant church in Vermont to endorse the Freedom to Marry for all. Dozens of pastors have endorsed it, but we are the only mainline protestant congregation.
What made it possible was our faith that God is still speaking, that there is more light and truth still to break forth from God’s word. Opening our minds to new interpretations of old passages opened our hearts to new ways of following Christ. We heard Psalm 15 ask, “O God, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill?” And we heard the First Letter of John reply saying, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” And we heard Jesus pray what became the motto of our denomination, “that they may all be one.”
We heard these passages and others and decided that they contradicted and overruled the Bible passages that exclude homosexuals from loving union. We felt that for us to abide in love we had to welcome into God’s tent all others who abided in love. This is how the Bible spoke to us, how it guided us, and we followed where it led. In the coming weeks, we will continue following it as we place an ad in the newspaper and call the State House in Montpelier and do all we can to bring about the triumph of God’s love. Others will be coming from the other side working against us from the same Bible, reading it with other lenses, reading it without the benefit of all these progressive approaches, and that is alright. That does not take away the slightest bit of our interpretation’s legitimacy or of the Bible’s usefulness to us as a source of power and guidance.
The Bible is a tool. A hammer in the hands of a vandal may smash a window. That does not make the hammer bad. It should not lead us to try to build a house without a hammer. Let us take up this tool and go out and use it in the weeks ahead, looking to it for the inspiration we need to make this world a little more like the realm of God that we find described in its pages, a realm of mercy and justice, compassion and love.
Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 03/22/2009