Scripture: Matthew 5:17-20
This is a sermon on “The Bible”. Not a verse or a passage in the Bible, mind you. The whole Bible! So get comfortable in these pews, if you can; we may be here a while.
Just kidding, of course. What I mean, I’m sure you understand, is that this will be a sermon on how we relate to the Bible and how it relates to us and what place it has or ought to have in the life of a Christian community, specifically this Christian community, not to mention the lives of individuals.
This is not the first time we’ve addressed this in worship. Several years ago I remember Jim Gibson and I did a dialogue sermon on how we approached the Bible or related to it. Often in my preaching, when for one reason or another I have chosen to preach on a passage from the Bible that I find to be particularly difficult or offensive, and we all know there are more than a few of those, I have had to step back and ask myself why it is that we endow the Bible with such mystical significance when it is so often so difficult to deal with, either because it can be obscure and hard to understand or because it can be apparently very clear, but say things that are frankly difficult to swallow. So there have been a number of occasions where I have spent a few minutes in a sermon dealing with issues like that—how we look at the Bible, and why—but except for the dialogue with Jim Gibson, never a whole sermon just on “the Bible” and its place in our worship and in our spiritual lives in general. That’s what I’m up to this morning, and it’s again in connection with our conversations on Christianity, which will be dealing with this at their next meetings as well.
Let me begin with a testimony. I consider myself to have a pretty close relationship to the Bible. I have spent a lot of time with it over the years. When I was finding my way into Christianity, I had to get comfortable with the Bible, just as I had to get comfortable with God and with Jesus. Well, “getting comfortable” isn’t quite the right phrase because I’m still not comfortable with God or with Jesus or with the Bible, nor do I think we’re supposed to be. Comfortable isn’t the point. But I felt I had to embrace the Bible as my traveling companion in this journey of faith, along with God and with Jesus. That’s one way for me of describing what it means to be a Christian: to embrace God and Jesus and the scriptures as my traveling companions in my journey of faith. And I did, and I do, embrace the scriptures in that way. And I have read them and studied them and thought about them quite a bit because of preaching or teaching college courses or leading Bible study, but I have also read them and studied them and thought about them sometimes when there was no particular point in doing so, that is, when I didn’t have to in order to prepare a sermon or a lecture or a Bible study group. I would now find it hard to stop…reading, studying, thinking about the Bible. It would be like saying good-bye to a traveling companion. I consider my faith to be grounded in the Bible. At the very least the Bible is all mixed up in the ways I think about who I am and what I believe and what my faith consists of and how I go about my journey. Let me repeat though. This is a testimony. These are not “ought” statements. They are not finger-shaking statements, as in “if you’re not best friends with the Bible then you’re just not a very good Christian”—nothing like that. I’m just trying to describe where I am in relationship to the Bible, maybe partly so you don’t think that some of the other things I may say this morning are motivated by some desire to dismiss or disregard or diss the Bible in any way. The scriptures for me are a treasured friend.
They are also—this is now observation, not testimony—the source of much contentious debate inside and even outside the church these days. There are a great many people, as we all know, who believe the Bible to be, and want other people who call themselves Christian to believe, that the Bible is the literal word of God, all of it, every book, every chapter, every verse, inspired by God and without error. Those who tend toward this position, and I say “tend toward” this position because there are lots of differences among people who tend toward this position and they shouldn’t be caricatured as all being rigid and dogmatic, those who tend toward this position I think it is fair to say, in general are afraid that if Christians give up the idea that the Bible is the inspired word of God, the Bible will cease to play much of a role at all in the Christian life. And in my observation of things, they have a point.
An example. There is an organization called the Center for Progressive Christianity. It is not a tremendously large or influential organization, but it has gathered together some people who are prominent in what might be loosely called the progressive movement within the church and have invited both local congregations and individuals to join. I joined, just because I thought it would be a good thing to be part of this network of people whose approach to Christianity seems similar to mine. The group has a list of 8 points that they put forward to describe what they mean by progressive Christianity, and since I agree with all of the 8 points, I had no problem joining. Just quickly the 8 points are:
By calling ourselves progressive, we mean that we are Christians who…
- Have found an approach to God through the life and teachings of Jesus;
- Recognize the faithfulness of other people who have other names for the way to God’s realm, and acknowledge that their ways are true for them, as our ways are true for us;
- Understand the sharing of bread and wine in Jesus’s name to be a representation of an ancient vision of God’s feast for all peoples;
- Invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable (including but not limited to):
believers and agnostics, conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, women and men, those of all sexual orientations and gender identities, those of all races and cultures, those of all classes and abilities, those who hope for a better world and those who have lost hope; - Know that the way we behave toward one another and toward other people is the fullest expression of what we believe;
- Find more grace in the search for understanding than we do in dogmatic certainty – more value in questioning than in absolutes;
- Form ourselves into communities dedicated to equipping one another for the work we feel called to do: striving for peace and justice among all people, protecting and restoring the integrity of all God’s creation, and bringing hope to those Jesus called the least of his sisters and brothers; and
- Recognize that being followers of Jesus is costly, and entails selfless love, conscientious resistance to evil, and renunciation of privilege.
Although, as I say, I agree with this list, there is a lot in it that is worth some discussion and that I would have something to say about and probably someday will say, maybe doing a sermon series on these eight points. For today I raise them not because of what they say but because of what they don’t say. They don’t include any statement about the Bible. My guess is that the reason there is no statement at all about the Bible is not that the framers of these eight points forgot there was such a thing as the Bible but that this was an issue they couldn’t come to enough agreement on to make a statement of any kind. But I don’t know that to be true. For whatever reason, when the Center for Progressive Christianity describes what it is that progressive Christians stand for, the Bible is not mentioned. Which might well lead people who want to hold on to a more literal authoritative view of the Bible to say, “See, I told you so.” I am not pointing an accusing finger at the Center for Progressive Christianity. It is not sinful for them to leave the Bible off of their list. It does point up the fact that we have some thinking and reflecting and praying to do around this whole question of what role the Bible does have for us. And I’ll be straightforward about this. I don’t want the Bible to disappear from our communal life, any more than I want it disappear from my personal life. I am not terribly troubled that it doesn’t make the 8 points of the Center for Progressive Christianity. I would be very troubled if it stopped being part of the fabric of our life at Sojourners.
But why do I say that? It is not because I see the Bible as authoritative in all matters related to the Christian faith. I realize in saying that that I open myself up to charges of heresy from people who do see the Bible as authoritative in matters of faith. I don’t mind being open to charges of heresy; I frankly don’t think heresy is necessarily a bad thing. But I want to make clear that I am not trying to pick a fight with people who have a different view of scripture than I do. My concern this morning is not to critique someone else’s point of view. It is to reflect on what my own view is and how we might think about the Bible together here at Sojourners.
I do sense that the Bible is problematic for many of us here at Sojourners. It is for me, as much as I cherish it. I think one reason the Bible can be problematic for many of us is not that it can be hard to read, that some versions use antiquated language, that it’s set in a different time and culture, that it refers to historical events that we don’t know very much about without a lot of research and sometimes not even then. It’s not even that it includes stories that are violent, characters who are scoundrels and sometimes passed off as heroes, and sayings that, to say the least, are unhelpful in their attitudes toward women and homosexuality. All that is true and we do struggle to understand the Bible better, to try to see if there are better or deeper meanings, or at least not so troubling meanings, as may at first appear.
But beyond all that is something even more basic, the deeply ingrained idea that the Bible is a book that is supposed to have control over our lives, that it is supposed to be authoritative, that it is there to tell us in some direct way what is right, or good, or true, that it is there to dictate our attitudes and behaviors, that it is there to coerce us into being right thinking, right believing, right acting people. Though I cherish the Bible, I do not acknowledge it to have that kind of authority.
But that view is very deeply ingrained in us. In common language when we say that a certain document or resource is someone’s “Bible”—for instance, if we were to say Roberts Rules of Order is the bible for people leading meetings, or that Dr. Spock (I realize this dates me) was at one time the Bible for new parents—we would mean that it is the authority; it tells you how to do it; if you have a question, you go there for the answer; and so forth. As I say, I think this attitude, that this is what the Bible is all about, is deeply ingrained in us and we suffer from it, and I believe the Bible suffers from it.
For some, it causes them to reject the Bible outright because they see it as a flawed document that is not worthy of that kind of allegiance. Others may have a more passive-aggressive approach, fighting back at the Bible by basically ignoring it. Some go to great lengths to interpret, adjust, or twist the meaning of passages so that they say pretty much what we would like them to say and therefore don’t seem coercive at all but rather confirm what we have thought all along. Of course, when we do this, when anyone does this, they very seldom recognize or admit that they’re doing this because all they see themselves as doing is correcting the twisted meanings others have found in the scriptures.
I suggest that we would avoid all those difficulties and open up more possibilities in our relationship to the Bible if we stopped thinking of ourselves as being in a kind of master-servant relationship to the Bible and began to see our relationship to it as more complicated but also richer and even more loving. I suggest that the Bible does not ask of us our allegiance, that just as Jesus does not ask us to turn our hearts toward him but rather toward the kingdom of God, so the Bible does not ask us to turn our spirits toward the writings themselves but toward the God who is present in, through, and behind the stories, the same God who is present in, through, and behind your story and mine. I suggest that we put aside this notion that the scriptures are some external authority trying to convince, cajole, or threaten us into doing what it says, that we give up the notion that the scriptures are meant to be a power over us but instead are meant to be a source of power for us, a source of power working through us.
I suggest that to understand the Bible as sacred story is to open ourselves to the possibility that our stories, yours and mine, are sacred too. It is not our job to repeat, obey, or imitate the stories we find in the Bible. What we are about, trying to be faithful people, is fulfilling those stories. Jesus said so. I have not come to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill them. And by “fulfill” he did not mean, and I do not mean, making certain predictions some people think are contained in the Bible come true, but rather living toward having God’s dreams for us come true. That is a long, hard, winding road. The Bible testifies to that and so do our own lives. Nevertheless, we say in faith that that is the road we are on. And for that reason we can see ourselves in the Biblical stories and we can see those Biblical stories echoing in us.
This story that I am involved in, this story I call “my” story, though it doesn’t really belong to me, is God-infused. That is a statement of faith on my part. My life is a story, not just a series of random, meaningless events, and God is involved in that story. In just the same way the stories of scripture are God-infused. That too is a statement of faith but it is no harder to accept than it is to believe that our own stories are God-infused. And I do pray for all of us that we may understand, perhaps inarticulately, but nevertheless understand somewhere in the core of our being, in our soul, that the journey we are embarked upon, each one of us, that journey is a sacred story. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 23. 2005