Sermon Cliff Note: Bible 101

School’s started.  It’s time to get back to basics.  Using the book of Philemon as our departure point, let us consider seven guidelines for reading and understanding the Bible.

1. The Bible is not a book; it’s a library.   Its contents are a compilation of many books written by many people over a period of centuries.  It was written by people doing well and people suffering; by people afraid and people brave; by people sure and by people in doubt; by the learned and the unschooled.  When we forget that we are hearing many voices rather than one, we reduce the Bible away from a story of God’s people seeking understanding of their God to a text book with rules to be memorized.  It is so much more than that.

2. Context matters to meaning  Philemon was a man. . . a slaveowner . . . a convert to Christianity . . . someone Paul believes that he (Paul) has authority over . . .  That Onesimus was a slave is important to the story.  Just as important is who Philemon is.  Their context matters.  So does ours.  What we understand about enslavement matters – more, perhaps, than what the letter actually says.  Think not?  Consider that this letter was used by both slaveholders and abolitionists in the United States during the argument over slavery.  It’s the same letter.  But what each person believed before they ever read it determined how they would hear it.

3. Not every word is for every person in every time  If you have no enemies or have long-ago forgiven them, Jonah has little to offer you.  The Bible as a whole presupposes a belief and faith in God.  If you’re an atheist, the Bible has little to say to you.  Philemon is Paul’s letter to one of his students, a convert to the Christian faith, begging him to see another convert as a brother in the faith and not as slave.  There are lessons we can learn from Philemon.  Before coming to those lessons,  we must begin with the clear understanding that this letter was not intended for us.

4. To learn a new thing, we have to listen with new ears.  (Put another way: if we already know it all, all we know is all we will ever know) Paul invites Philemon to see Onesimus not as a slave but as a brother.  The letter begins with Paul’s own condition – that of a prisoner.  Who is Paul more like – Philemon?  Or Onesimus?  What new thing do you suppose Philemon heard/learned from Paul’s letter?  What did it require of Philemon to be able to learn in the first place?  As Christians, it’s one of our jobs to always enter the world with a teachable spirit.  We have to be open to learn a new thing.  Or we won’t.

5. We don’t worship the Bible; we worship The One the Bible speaks of   A story, any story, is just one piece of the whole cloth.  The stories reflect where the people were at the time.  No less, but no more.  Thus today we can say that enslavement is wrong and not think we somehow violate the teachings of the Bible, for it is not the Bible we worship.

6. Any interpretation we give to the Bible that condemns someone else (rather than ourselves) is suspect (the Bible is not intended to be a weapon)  If we come to the Bible looking for evidence that someone else is ‘wrong’, we come in the wrong spirit.  If we come to the Bible seeking ways to prove we’re right, it’s the flip side of the same coin, isn’t it?  If, however, you read a word that challenges you, changes you, convicts you, you’re most likely on to something.  The book of Philemon is about Philemon.  Not Onesimus.  Paul is writing about Philemon to Philemon.  It is Philemon who Paul seeks to change.

7. People not like us have much to teach When the white majority in the South in pre-Civil War days read Philemon, they read a ratification of the existence of enslavement.  When African American theologians read Philemon, they read Paul encouraging Philemon to set Onesimus free.  It’s almost impossible to imagine a perspective we do not have.  So I cannot read this library with the eyes of someone who is black in America . . . or with the stomach of someone who is desperately poor . . . or with the pain of someone whose life has been nothing but despair . . . and I cannot imagine it on my own . . . but if I listen to them – to the others who are so different than me, I can learn much.  I can see and hear these blessed texts in a whole new way.  Conversely, if all I ever listen to are people who think just like me, then I’ll end up with a Bible that looks and sounds . . . just like me.

The challenge is to be open to listen for a new word, a new understanding, for Christ has said, I am making all things new (Rev. 21.5).  And that includes our ideas of how things should be, especially when it comes to the story of God.

Amen.

Sermon Cliff Note: Holding Fast & Letting Go

Archeologist Robin vanAuken writes of her vocation as being a ‘steward of the past’.

But not all that is past is created equal.  Some is treasure.  Some is trash.  Context makes the difference.

How many of us have gone through the leavings of someone we loved after they died?  How much of what they left behind did we keep?  How much did we give away or toss away?  Context matters.  Their past is not ours.

In deciding what to keep, my Great-Aunt Virginia undoubtedly asked, “might I need this”?  When I’m going through my dead Aunt Virginia’s papers, however, I do not ask whether she might have need of it. The question I ask is not about Aunt Virginia’s need; it’s about mine.  And that shift in the question changes everything.

But what has that to do with stewarding the past?  With what we of today are to keep from yesterday to carry in to tomorrow?

Everything.

It has to do with humility.

It has to do with care.

It has to do with understanding.

And it has to do with love.

Humility: some people of the past genuinely believed that the ownership of another human being was not only consistent with being a godly person, but it was so entrenched in their worldview that they genuinely believed the person over whom they claimed ‘ownership’ had a duty to be owned and not resist.  We have to be humble about our understandings when it comes to things biblical.  Sometimes we get it wrong.  Seriously, harmfully, wrong.  And almost always, our wrongness arises out of our certainties, out of our pride that we can know absolutely what God intends – not only for ourselves, but for others as well.  Our certainties, especially when they concern what someone else should do, must be tempered with humility, with the simple realization that I might be wrong.  Or those I revere who came before me might have been wrong.  Their path need not be mine.

Care – as Christians, we have a duty of care.  But care of whom?  Of what?  And to what end?  In Luke 9.60, Jesus tells a young man whose father has died to leave the dead to themselves and come now.  It’s cruel-sounding, this command not to even attend his own father’s funeral.

The call to the Christian is to be concerned with, to care about, the things which concern God.  And when it comes to the work of this world, God makes it clear that God’s focus is on the living, not the dead – on the present and not the past.

We are to take care of Jesus’ message, yes.  But it is for a purpose and not merely for its own sake.  Church is not a cemetery.  Nor is it a museum.

Jesus’ message is a living gospel proclaimed by living people to living people.  It is a word from the past, but it is a word for the present.

If we preserve Jesus’ message perfectly but keep it under glass, we have killed it.  The gospel is a living gospel or it is no gospel at all.

Understanding is necessary in order to have something worth proclaiming.  Amidst my Aunt Virginia’s papers were coupons from the 1920's . . . her ledgers of the money she spent day-to-day . . . her bridge scores . . . and stock certificates.

It takes understanding to be able to tell the important from the unimportant . . . that worth preserving unto the next generations and that which can be cast away.  Without understanding, one might  keep the bridge scores and toss the certificates.

Understanding requires intentionality.  It requires listening.  It requires learning.  It requires letting go of what we think, as if our opinions were our gospel, and being open to learn from others.  It requires a teachable spirit, one willing to learn.

Finally, stewarding the past has to do with love – a love that embraces and values the one in need standing right before us as much as we do our memories of those who have gone before – and even more.

To be good stewards of the past challenges us to examine what to keep and what to throw away.  And that requires from us large doses of humility, understanding, care and love.

Ultimately it requires that we surrender our own questions of the past and ask instead whether in the keeping or discarding we are about our Father’s business or our own.  As church, the only business we have is our Father’s.

Amen.

Scotland Day20: From the Sublime to the Ridiculous and Back Again

I visit the Crossraguel Abbey ruins on my way to Girvan on the western coast of Scotland and like any good tourist, I take all the free literature on offer and snap pictures that years from now will make absolutely no sense without a remembered context.

And that’s kind of what the ruins themselves seem like to me: a thing that makes no sense without its history remembered.  Thus do they become sublimely ridiculous and wonderful all at once, their own context having slipped into history long ago.

Abbies are places where people lived out the entirety of their lives, so in addition to worship spaces, there had to be places for beds and places for latrines.  And here remain evidence of all three and more besides.

And two of my own favorite views were views not available at the time the Crossraguel community was active, way back before the Reformation:

The view of the cross against the sky while standing within the choir (what my lot would call the   sanctuary or simply the church), for the simple reason that there would have been a roof impeding the view.  Looking toward the cross, one can actually still see the roof line.  It seems somewhat ironic, in a sad sort of way, that what directs my own eye to God (often an upward thing for me) in this space is possible only because the place is in ruins.  When it was a living community, the cross was not there to direct the gaze upward; rather, it stood higher than surrounding landscape to draw the people in for worship – serving as a literal signpost: here’s the church.  People thus could spot it from miles away.  But they were meant not to be sky-gazing; rather, they were meant to be earth-walking.  And that, surely, is the better purpose.  Isn’t it?

The view from through the waterways serves as a wonderful frame for the visual of this quiet space sitting as it does adjacent to the motorway.  The viaduct structures I look through served as the sewage system.  Literally I stand in the midst of the fairly complex latrine system in order to look through, look beyond.  I wonder whether folks in centuries yet to come will one day stand in the places where my own waste once coursed and ooh and aah at the view.  Maybe they’ll read historical records – things like this blog even – and decide to give that particular pleasure a miss.  Besides, I’m pretty sure our plastic pipes, even emptied of all dross, won’t have the aesthetic appeal of the stone-laid tunnels, gulleys and gulches – more’s the pity.  Isn't a society that views even the courses for the removal of waste as things not only of utility but also of beauty, a society from which we might have much to learn?

Context Matters

Context matters.

It’s obvious, isn’t it?

But why do we, why do I, forget it so easily?

I made a friend cry today.

It wasn’t my intention, but I did.

Being the carrier of news less than positive, and delivering it at a time when she is mourning her mother dying before her very eyes, I made her cry.

Of course she cried.

But why did I carry anything but love and gentleness to her today, of all days?

My only defense is that I forgot.  I knew, but I forgot . . . forgot how very vulnerable she is right now . . . forgot her needs in the felt needs of others . . . forgot that her context matters too.

Of late, I find myself explaining people to each other . . . not their motives – their context.  And somehow, the learning of the context of shared human suffering makes detente, if not full out reconciliation, possible when it seemed impossible before.

Context matters.

When I am frustrated with someone almost beyond words, I am reminded of their struggles, of the pain they carry.  That pain may have nothing at all to do with my frustrations, but knowing that they struggle too somehow makes the frustrations of the moment seem like what they are . . . trivialities in the face of the enormity of life.

I hate that I forgot my friend’s context of pain.