4/29/18 “The Last Frontier for Religion” by Nancy Petty
Text: Acts 8:26-40
In my parent’s home were many bibles, or so it seemed to me. I’m not sure why we possessed the collection we did. Maybe some of them had been family bibles handed down through the generations. Or maybe, as a family, we were in such need of something to save us that we thought maybe having one more bible would help. I know for certain my father loved to read the bible, still does, so it’s possible he was collecting them, placing each one carefully on the built in bookcase to the left of the fireplace in the family living room. Most of them still remain there. If it is true, that my father enjoyed collecting bibles, he passed his hobby on to me. From the time I was a young teenager I loved collecting bibles. While I don’t recall the first bible I was given, here on the communion table are some of the ones I have gathered over my lifetime.
• The New International Version, slim edition, was one of the first bibles I bought with my own money.
• I no longer have my The Way Bible that I got as a teenager but this is my Good News edition.
• This little red one with a snap on it, I got it when I became active in my youth group and Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
• Then there is this wooden one from Jerusalem that a family friend brought back to me from their trip to Israel.
• At some point in college I bought and used this New Oxford Annotated Bible.
• In my grandmother’s home there was one bible that sat religiously on the coffee table in the living room. This is it. It is the bible my grandmother read daily and where she kept the family history.
• This one is my Uncle Herman’s bible. You’ve heard me speak of Herman. He studied religion at Wake Forest. I found it in a closet at my grandmother’s home when she died.
• This little bible the staff gave to me on my 25th anniversary at Pullen. Cathy Tamsberg found it at an antique shop somewhere. In the front it is inscribed: Josephine Shipwall, with best wishes John T. Pullen, 1912.
• There are more that I could tell you about but I will end show-and-tell with this one—the bible I have read and studied and carry these past 26 years. When I came to Pullen, I did not own a New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. It had only been in circulation two years when I arrived at Pullen. But several people here at Pullen had one, and it being the first edition to work on inclusive language for God, I made sure to get my own.
I love the bible. It holds the stories that were read to me as a child before I could read. It holds the stories that shaped my faith as a teenager. Its pages hold the sacred literature that I studied in college and seminary and now preach about. The bible contains the stories of my faith: a faith that was handed down to me but one I affirm as my own.
The summer after my freshman year in college I was a camp counselor at Mundo Vista—the Southern Baptist Women’s Missionary Union camp for girls. At the end of each week, we would ask the girls to fill out an evaluation form. It asked questions like: What was your favorite activity? Did you like the food? Were you happy with your cabin and camp counselor? The last question on the form was, “What was your favorite part of the week?” To which one of my campers wrote: “Reading the Holly Bibble.” I’m not sure if that reflected on her spelling abilities or my teaching abilities. Regardless, if someone asked me now what my favorite part of my week is I would have to answer, “Reading the stories of the bible with my Wednesday lectionary group.”
Yes, I love the bible: the stories and poetry and prose that it contains holds profound meaning for me. But, there is a problem with the bible. At some point in history, it seems to me, Christians stopped loving the bible and started worshiping the bible. It was Deborah Steely that first named this truth for me when she did a Wednesday night session years ago on the topic: the idolatry of the bible. I had never heard of such but I instantly recognized the truth she spoke of. One of the things she said that night that I have never forgotten is that we have to honestly and authentically confront the bible’s inconsistency. To do so, she continued, will require us to stop worshiping the bible and start holding it accountable to its relevancy for our times by applying critical scholarship.
As if Deborah and John Shelby Spong had been conversing about the Bible, Spong writes in his 1998 book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die just a few years after the program Deborah did “…honesty requires that we confront the Bible’s limited grasp on truth. No doctor would treat an epileptic child today by ordering the demon out of him or her in the name of God.”
Deborah and Spong’s words came to mind several months ago. A mother whose son had just come out to her stood in my office and demanded that I show her where in the bible it said that it is not a sin to be homosexual. Behind her anger, I could see the fear on her face. Fear for her child’s salvation based on what she believes the bible says about homosexuality. Fear rooted in what the church has taught her about what the Bible “says” about homosexuality. She kept saying to me, “The Bible says…but the Bible says…” I tried to channel Deborah and John Shelby Spong and point out that the bible has a limited grasp on the truth about some issues. It didn’t go well. You would think that after over 30 years in ministry I would know better. I tried to re-group and asked if we could start at a different place with our conversation and maybe work our way up to talking about the bible and homosexuality. She left moments later clutching her Bible in hand as if someone might try and snatch it from her on the way out. My heart went out to her. Actually, my heart broke for her. She was in pain, real pain, and it was her faith and specifically how she had been taught to view the bible that was causing that pain. Not that her child was gay. But that she had been taught that the Bible was more important than having a relationship with her gay child.
Robert Funk, who was the director of the Jesus Seminar fifteen years ago, wrote: “We have been betrayed by the Bible. In the half-century just ending, there is belated recognition that biblically based Christianity has espoused causes that no thinking person or caring person is any longer willing to endorse. We have had enough of the persecution of the Jews and witches; of the justification of black slavery; of the suppression of women, sex and sexuality; and of the stubborn defense of a male dominated, self-serving clergy…We cannot, we must not shrink from engagement with the ignorance and misunderstanding that fuels such egregious misuse of scripture.” Strong words about the bible.
Our lectionary text from Acts is a strange, weird, even wacky story about an Ethiopian eunuch who is trying to understand scripture. This Ethiopian eunuch meets Philip, who had been sent by an angel of the Lord, on the wilderness road from Jerusalem to Gaza. The storyteller wants us to understand that this Ethiopian eunuch is an important person: a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. We are told that he had traveled to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home, seated in his chariot, reading the prophet Isaiah when the Spirit sends Philip over to him. Doing as the Spirit told him, Philip ran up to the Ethiopian eunuch’s chariot and asked what seems like an odd question for someone to ask a total stranger, “Do you understand what you are reading?” To which the Ethiopian eunuch responded, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” With that, he invites Philip to get in and sit beside him in his chariot. From that point on, they began a discussion about the passage of scripture that the Ethiopian eunuch was reading.
I want for a minute to think with you about the question that Philip asked the Ethiopian eunuch. He asked: “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip was asking about the specific text from Isaiah that the traveler was reading. I want to expand the context of that question for us and ask: “Do we understand what we are reading when we read the bible?”
Do we understand that the bible is not a rulebook and cannot be read as such? While the bible can offer guidance for living a faithful life, it does not and was never meant to give clear, direct, black and white answers to life’s complex questions and situations. The bible reflects to us the human experience of what it means to live in relationship with God and with one another. It tells the story of a people’s journey to make meaning out of life through their joys and sorrows, their sins and struggles, their hopes and dreams, their faithfulness and unfaithfulness. When we read the bible as if it is a rulebook, we miss the richness of the ever-evolving relationship between God and God’s people. And when we try and fit the human experience with God as described in our sacred text into right and wrong, black and white, sinful and non-sinful, fixed and final categories we miss the whole point of the biblical witness. The bible is a story that is still unfolding among God’s people. It shapes us and we shape it. It is ongoing, ever evolving, never static. And when we read and understand and teach that the bible is fixed and final—that it holds specific answers to all of life’s complex questions today—we are, in essence, saying that God is dead—that God’s activity in humanity and in the world these last hundreds of years doesn’t matter.
Christianity is not the only religion that is faced with this question of “do we understand what we are reading” when we read our sacred texts. All of the faith traditions are struggling with how to understand their sacred scriptures in a world that is drastically different from the world in which those sacred scriptures were written. How the religions of the world understand and read their sacred texts in today’s world is, in my opinion, the last frontier for religion. Our ability or inability to honestly and authentically confront our sacred texts as people of all faiths, and to hold them accountable by applying critical scholarship will either strengthen all of our faith traditions or be that terrible hindrance that will keep us fighting and killing one another. Yes, our sacred texts are that powerful.
How we choose to read and understand our sacred texts will either stop the fighting in the Middle East or increase the killing. How we choose to read and understand our sacred texts will either stop the church from marginalizing those who are seen as “other” or it will empower the church to continue heaping spiritual abuse upon those who are considered different. How we choose to read and understand our sacred texts will either begin to heal racial and ethnic wounds or cut them deeper. Religion, of all traditions, must deal honestly and critically with their sacred texts and hold them accountable to the world we live in today. Otherwise, our religions based on our sacred writings will continue to do more harm than good. We cannot afford to leave God between the pages of the Christian Bible or the Hebrew Bible or the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita or the Tripitaka or the Vedas or any other sacred text. We can no longer betray God and our sacred scriptures by locking them in the past and turning away from the hard work of understanding not what they say, but what they mean.
The Ethiopian eunuch and Philip may have something to teach us as we face this last frontier for religion. The story says that the Ethiopian invited Philip to get in his chariot with him and sit beside him. From that place, sitting beside one another, they began to discuss the scripture that the Ethiopian eunuch was reading. I submit to you, as we engage one another, within our own faith traditions and within our interfaith/inter-religious relationships, we must find ways to sit down beside each other and discuss our sacred texts with one another honestly and critically. In so doing, we must confront our sacred texts—all of them—in the places where they divide us. And we must allow our sacred texts—all of us—to be the continuing and ongoing revelation of God’s justice love in the world. Anything less, well, we would do well then to dispose of our sacred texts. We must approach our sacred texts with the understanding that our sacred stories are still being written through the Holy One who is still working in us and through us today.
In the end, we mustn’t give up on our sacred texts. They show us what we a capable of—the good and the bad. Like all great literature, they ground us in stories that help us understand who we are as a people. And ultimately, they give us a framework to keep on writing God’s story with God’s creation. May we once again learn to love the Bible without worshiping it.
