Scripture: Isaiah 6:1-9
I want to begin by thanking the various people who have stepped in to share in leading worship the last couple of weeks: Lee Walters and the Bible study group, Lynn Litchfield, Karen Wilcox and Jeanine Woodruff, Padma Gallup and Beverly Heyworth, who is helping out again this morning, and now the Lyons family this morning, and any others who I may be leaving out. I should probably add Rebecca West and Judy Freeman as well, not sure I specifically thanked them. Also a word of appreciation for Millie’s continued thorough reporting of what happens here on Sunday morning. Being away brings home how helpful it is to have that summary when you haven’t been in church, though I will quickly add that it is always better to actually be there—here.
I got in a lot of reading over the past two weeks, which is what I planned to do, since it was supposed to be a time set aside for continuing education, so I caught up on some faith-based reading I had been meaning to do, much of it in preparation for the small groups we’ll be having this fall around basic themes of what it means to be a Christian these days—Christian a la Sojourners. I chose the books to read because their authors were all people who saw themselves as living in a kind of creative tension with the Christian church and the Christian faith, recognizing how toxic it has often been and continues to be, but also not wanting to give up on it and wanting it to be something different. So they were all similar in the sense that they were coming from the same general place I feel like I’m coming from, and Sojourners is coming from, with regard to the Christian faith, this place of creative tension. But I was also trying to look at resources that came from different places in the theological and religious landscape so that they weren’t all saying pretty much the same thing in the same way.
One thing they all did say though, maybe not in the same way, but that they all did clearly say was that in any kind of re-imagining or re-forming of the Christian faith, the Bible would not be taken literally, actually that not much of anything about the Christian faith should be taken literally, Bible, creeds, words, anything.
Now, this is not a new thought for me. The last time I can remember thinking that the Bible was something that should be taken literally was many years ago—many, many years ago—in my pre-Christian days. And it was not that I took the Bible literally. It was that for some reason it got into my head that that’s what Christians did—took the Bible literally—and since that’s what Christians did, I was not a Christian. When I finally got it through my thick skull that Christians didn’t have to do that, it made the Bible available to me and opened up a whole new world, not just the Biblical world but the world of the Christian faith. The non-literal approach to the Bible has since become a kind of a given for me. It’s not something I struggle with or debate about, and so it’s not very surprising that books I would choose to read would have that non-literal approach.
But I must say that even if it was not surprising, it was very welcome and I was grateful for these very clear statements about our need not to be literal in our approach coming as they did from people who saw themselves in very different places in the Christian community, including one person who located himself mostly in the—roughly speaking—conservative, evangelical world. They could have avoided the issue. They could have written about it in ways that sort of implied a non-literal approach but that didn’t come right out and say it. They didn’t. They confronted the issue directly, and I appreciated that very much. They also caused a few thoughts to occur to me that I decided to pass along to you as the sermon for this morning. I appreciated that as well.
As far as thoughts specifically about the Bible go, beyond the little bit I’ve already said and am about to say, I’m going to leave that mostly for another time. I plan in October to come back to this question of what role the Bible plays, or should play, in our life together at Sojourners—not just to say that we don’t need to take it literally but to think about how we do take it and what importance is to be attached to it in a positive way.
I think it is fair to say that for many of those who want to hold on to literal interpretations of the Bible, the fear is that if Christians give up the belief that the Bible is literally true they will be on a slippery slope that leads them to give up the Bible altogether. And if we are honest about it—well, I will speak for myself—if I am honest about it, I have to admit that I think their fear is not unreasonable. It does have some basis to it. Among people who have come to the conclusion not to take the Bible literally, there is a tendency not only not to take the Bible literally, but not to take it very much at all. If the Bible does not stand as this absolute authority relating to us the literal word of God, then maybe there is less incentive to spend a lot of energy studying and interpreting the Bible or even having a very good idea of what’s in it.
And maybe that’s all right. But we need to be honest about it and reflect on whether that’s the way we want things to be—or not. All of which is to say that there’s a lot more to say about the place of the Bible in the life of individual Christians and in the life of the church than simply to say “I don’t take it literally.” And as long as we continue to debate literalism as the main question about the Bible, we are not free of it. It controls our approach in our need to continually rebel against it. That’s one thought I have, and as I say, I’ll be coming back to this in a sermon later on.
Another thought I have was inspired by thinking about this whole question of literalism, but it doesn’t have a lot to do with the Bible. Somewhere in the middle of a lot of pages of reading where the message was all about the importance of symbols and metaphors and stories and poetry and how our language about God, or any religious language for that matter, is never going to be precisely accurate because we’re talking about things that by their nature can’t be precisely described—somewhere in the midst of a lot of that kind of reading the thought occurred to me…Wait a minute there is something to be said for literalism, or at least for plain speaking. There are some things the church, and we Christians, need to learn to speak plainly about. I don’t know whether that’s literalism exactly, but I think there are some things we need to try to say in a way that can be understood pretty much literally—plainly—without the need for too much spin or guesswork as to what is really being said.
It was helpful, for instance, when these authors spoke clearly and plainly—literally, if you will—about what one of them called the headache of literalism.
Also, Christians need to learn to speak plainly on matters of racial justice and justice for women and justice for sexual minorities. Not metaphorically or symbolically but plainly, in ways that are not wishy-washy and that don’t require explanation and clarification.
Christians need to learn to speak plainly about the arrogance of nationalism and the need to challenge the use of war as an instrument of foreign policy.
Christians need to learn to speak in a down-to-earth way about the need to care for the earth.
I am not suggesting that Christians should, would, or could all say the same things about subjects such as these. I’m not saying that there is some uniform message that is the only Christian message and that there should be no dissent so that the message can be very plain. But I am suggesting that there are some matters we need, all of us, to speak as plainly as we can about. I am suggesting that we ought not to speak in pious platitudes or in vague language whose meaning gets lost in ambiguity. I am suggesting that we not speak of peace in such a way that it can be a nice sounding word that can mean almost anything and therefore doesn’t really mean anything. I am suggesting that if we are to talk about the kinship of human beings that we don’t do it with our fingers crossed, knowing in the back of our minds that we don’t really mean it. I am suggesting that if we use that kind of language that we try to mean it as literally as we can. I hope I am making myself understood here. I am feeling the need for the church and for Christians on some matters not to be vague, mysterious, or ambiguous at all.
At the same time, as I was reading various people urging us not to be literal in the way we approach the Bible, it also occurred to me how important it is not to be literal in the way we approach almost anything. Even with regard to the issues that I have just been suggesting we need to be clear about, I also know that I need to say some things that may make it sound like I am contradicting myself. And maybe I am, but they need to be said nonetheless.
Because while it’s important to be clear about some things, it’s also important not to reduce weighty matters—like war or racism, for instance—to positions where people line up on one side or the other of some issue. It is, the way I’m thinking about it today, a literalistic mentality that insists on reducing important questions to the single question of whether one is for or against something, that sees things in blacks and whites (or reds and blues) with no greys or purples, that defines ideas as right or wrong, good or bad, that leaves no room for partial truths, for uncertainties or ambiguities, or for further discussion. The Bible either says what it says or it doesn’t. You either believe in the Bible or you don’t. With regard to the Bible…or the war in Iraq…or racism, you are either part of the solution or part of the problem. It is important to resist that kind of literalism. It is important to try to speak plainly on issues, but at the same time to speak lovingly, to speak in a way that allows for the possibility of finding common ground, that opens up the possibility of further discussion and deeper thought.
When we reduce very large questions to simple propositions and ask people to say whether they are pro or con, two things happen. We oversimplify issues and we oversimplify people. It is good not to be literal or simplistic in the way we approach the Bible or in the way we approach any contemporary issue. It is even more important not to be literal or simplistic in the way we approach people. The temptation is great. It is so easy to think we have people pegged. We label people on the basis of all sorts of things. Someone may think they have you pegged when they find out you go to Sojourners. Oh, ok. I know who you are. And of course they do know something about you, assuming that what they know of Sojourners is pretty accurate and that what they think they know about you is therefore at least approximately true. But they don’t know everything about you, any more than I know who a person is because she goes to Trinity Presbyterian or has a pro-life bumper sticker on his car. The problem of course when we think we have someone pegged is that at best we really don’t need to find out any more, and at worst we can just dismiss them. Not taking people literally means being able to look beyond a person’s opinions, or the groups a person belongs to, or all the other things we use to identify each other. It also means looking beyond what a person says and trying to understand what they mean. Or at least being aware that the anger or the defensiveness a person is expressing is coming from somewhere we do not understand. Sometimes when the anger or defensiveness is our own, we ourselves don’t understand where it is coming from. It is important sometimes not to take even ourselves literally.
More than that not taking people literally is to see in other people, and in ourselves, the image of God. I hope that doesn’t sound like some trite religious yada yada. If it does, I’ll have to live with it, because I don’t know how else to say it for now. And the reason I’m bothering to say what I’ve been saying for the last few minutes about not taking people literally is not only that it’s a good thing to try to understand more of people than what they seem to be at any given time, but even more than that—that if we look with enough attention and love, that God is present in the faces all around, in all the faces all around. I don’t present that as some new insight I have come to, just as a thought I was led to reflecting on Biblical literalism and then the other kinds of literalism we are subject to. We are not just ourselves. We are alive with the glory of God.
And not just every person, but every creature, and every part and particle of creation is alive with the glory of God, if we can get out of our literalism long enough to see that what we see is not just what we see. Everything is alive with the glory of God. And the thought I have been led to relay to you this week—coming from the reading and thinking about literalism—is different in spirit from what I may say on some other Sundays when I am in a different frame of mind, but I am led today to try to say in these very roundabout words how important it is for me, I believe for us, to be able simply to stand in wonder and reverence before one another and this God-given creation we are a part of.
I didn’t know what scripture to choose for this morning. I settled on one I remembered from Isaiah because of the one verse that says, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of God’s glory.” And I knew I wanted somehow to try to say that. The whole earth is full, is alive, with the glory of God. I didn’t remember, however, the verse that follows that and that I chose to end the reading with. It says, “And God said, ‘Go and say to this people: ‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’”
Now I may be taking the Lord’s words out of context here, and if I am I rely on the Lord’s forgiveness, but I am taking those words to heart. Keep listening but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand. I am to keep listening to the voices of those I need to hear, keep listening for the word God speaks through the Bible or through people all around, but don’t pretend to comprehend. Resist the temptation to say, Ah, I got it. Keep looking at all I can take in of the mysterious, holy sights of creation. Keep looking, but do not pretend to understand. Just listen. And look. And stand in wonder. And give thanks. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 28, 2005