Rev Molly Phinney-Baskette Preaching
Last week Laura Ruth kicked off our sermon series on the Bible with a whirlwind tour of the 66 books of the Old Testament and the New Testament. She did a remarkable job of summing up the WHAT of the Bible, and began to get us into the HOW. HOW should we read it? Is there a right way, a wrong way?
My doorbell rang in the middle of the weekday last week. I am an extrovert when I’m out, but an introvert when I’m in, and I live in dread of the doorbell ringing, jealous of any intrusion into my monkishness. But since sabbatical, I’ve been trying to be more open, to be attentive to the divine in each moment, and that means rolling with it, and answering the doorbell. You never know who it might be.
This time, it was a young man with beautiful black curly hair and an intense gaze beaming out of his brown face. A deep scar raked his forehead, impossible to ignore; this was a man with stories. He began to speak quickly in broken English, the Brazilian Portuguese occasionally cutting through, and gesticulated wildly at my roof. After looking anxiously to make sure that there were no cat-burglers or low-flying planes up there, I listened. I got enough of what he was saying to learn that he was by trade a chimney-fixer, and had gotten a good look at the state of Parsonage chimney, and was rescuing us from certain chimney-apocalypse. I explained that the house was in fact part of the church’s property, and I would need to consult with them about his services. His eyes lit up at the word “church” and he asked me if I went to that church, and did I love Jesus? How do you answer that to someone with limited English skills? I said yes, yes, that is my church, and I’m the pastor, and I love Jesus, very much. He became excited, and began to tell me about his own church, gesturing vaguely away from my chimney and toward the other side of Davis Square, a good church, with a good pastor, all of which he found when he arrived in Somerville from Brazil with no money, no job, no family. They had saved his life, he said, praise Jesus.
We chatted for a few more minutes, about chimneys and about Jesus, and he asked, “Do they preach the Bible at your church?” “Sure, sure, we preach the Bible,” I said lamely. But I felt like a hypocrite because I suspected the question he was really asking, if he’d had the language for it, was “Do you preach the inerrancy of Scripture? Do you believe that every single word of the Bible has proceeded directly from the mouth of God, and is literally true?” And, because my inner monk was calling me back into the office, and because I didn’t know how to say it in Portuguese, and because even I, after 3 years of seminary and eleven years of pastoring dread these conversations of theological one-upmanship, I said yes, yes, we preach the Bible. His ravaged face melted into an expression of fierce joy to hear that answer. “I could see, I could see you have Jesus in your heart. I have Jesus in my heart, too. I’m so glad for you, for this church. You know,” he lowered his voice conspiratorially, “there are churches that don’t preach the Bible. They not like your church and my church. Listen, I love your church; I come do the work for free. You call me, you CALL me!” he said, and he pressed his number into my hand, and went on his way.
Last Sunday, during the prayers, a woman I’d never met before stood up and spoke gently, fluidly, about the Bible. She said, the judgment against us unspoken, that the Bible was not fairy tales or fantasy, that every word was true, and that when she was ill, several years ago, it had saved her life. Then she blessed us, and walked out of worship slowly, with great dignity. No one knew what to think or say—should we feel sorry for her, for her obvious mental illness that led her from church to church, monomaniacally preaching inerrancy? Should we be angry that she had disrupted worship in this way, that she had shaken the dust off her sandals at us? Judge not, lady, and ye shall not be judged. Or perhaps we should feel corrected, take her words to heart—could she have been Jesus in disguise?
That man at the door, with Jesus in his heart; that woman in our church, who shook the dust from her sandals: are they really saying that if we don’t take the Bible literally, we have no place in the kingdom of Heaven? If it is so, that is just the kind of ‘you’re in or you’re out’ theology that has driven so many people away from Christianity entirely. And yet, these two people were full of love and gentleness, full of testimony to how God and God’s word had changed their lives. Doesn’t a part of you want what they have?
The culture wars over Christianity in the last 40 years have set us up for a false choice, between taking the Bible literally on the one hand, or taking the Bible as literature on the other. As for taking the Bible literally, I wouldn’t know how to begin to do that. In seminary, we read the Song of Solomon, a love letter. My professor handed out a representation of the author’s lover, with her neck like a stone tower of Lebanon, her teeth like lambs, her breasts like two gazelles, and we all had a good laugh. Clearly, the Bible’s authors used figures of speech to texture their language, to give it layers and depth, as all good writers do. So when I am told that I have to take the Bible literally, it’s not that I disagree per se—I just have no idea on earth how I would do that, even if I wanted to.
But on the other side of the scriptural football field, rooting for their team, are those who would reduce the Bible to literature, literature good or literature bad. When I was a younger, greener preacher, I’d get myself into a lot of trouble with my mouth. I once preached a sermon debunking the Nativity story as a fiction: there was no star, no corroboration of Caesar’s census near that time; even the dating of Jesus’ birth was wrong: my Harper Collins Study Bible notes that Jesus was likely born in the year 4 BC, that is, four years Before Christ. In the sermon I extolled the beauty of the Nativity as story: allusion, alliteration, chiasmus, o lovely chiasmus! The point of the sermon, if I remember correctly, was something about how the stories of the Bible don’t need to be historically true to have power for us, to be, spiritually true, the way a poem is. What I didn’t realize, while I preached it, was that I was stripping away the naïve faith of many who sat in the pews. It was worse than taking Santa away from them. One woman was angry at me for a whole year before she found the courage to tell me: simmering with anger at me through every coffee hour, every deacons’ meeting.
Of course, once that innocence is gone, it’s gone. And who among us would want to un-eat the apple? Our ability to interpret, digest, draw conclusions, our critical faculty is as much a gift from God as our childhood faith. But when we read the Bible only as literature, we find out that something precious is missing, the mystical experience. Because I can’t help but fit things into my own tidy dualisms, I might put it like this: literalists take the Bible as all mystic, no mind; literary types as all mind, no mystic.
So how are we to read it, bringing, as we do, our biases and our thickheadedness and our unique perspectives? Augustine, one of the great saints with feet of clay, said this about scripture. He said that if ever we read the word of God and in it we seem to hear judgment and hatred, we are to read it again. We are to look at it again, and again, until all we can see is love, because that is the sum total of God’s message. (reference Luke, turn to it) At least the lawyer testing Jesus got that part right: he answered Jesus’ question about the most important part of the Law with the Great Commandment, “To love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.”
Augustine gives us another example, which might help us understand when to take the Bible literally, and when to take it figuratively. It involves the letter to the Romans, which, incidentally, you can read with friends at New Old Fashioned Bible Study with Althea after worship today. Augustine tells us that when Romans says in Chapter 12 (verse 20) “if your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink,” we are to take that part literally, we are to literally tend to the physical needs of our enemies. But when scripture goes on to say, “…for by doing so you will heap burning coals upon his head,” we are not to take that literally, because then someone might have to call the authorities; plus it would defeat the purpose of feeding our enemy to begin with. Augustine goes on to say “We cannot even take the expression figuratively, but unlovingly—as meaning that our act of goodness will shame the enemy, but rather, ‘love should call us to generous action, so that you understand the coals of burning fire to be burning sighs of penitence that heal the pride of one who grieves that he was an enemy to the one who relieved his suffering.” In other words, we are to love our enemies, because our love will be a refining fire that transforms them into friends. Everything in the Bible should be read in this light: read and read and read again, until our reading finally produces an interpretation that contributes to the reign of love.
If Augustine is right, if any way you slice it the only message in the Bible is love, how do we get past all of the other stuff, to that message?
Here is the thing. The Bible won’t yield its loveliness unless you love it. It won’t be trustworthy until you trust it. I love people, but I strive to love God above all people, to love God better than people, so that I may love people better, too. And I love books: I’d rather read than eat. But I love this book that God gave us above all books, so that the wisdom and insight it offers me may shed light on wisdom from every other book. The Bible is like any person—it will only reveal its secrets to you if you trust it; it only gives itself up to the person who pursues it in love. Maybe that is what the chimney-man and our guest in church last week were talking about.
There’s a phrase that has never let me go since I first hear it. It’s not from the Bible, but from a Bible wanna-be, another Gospel that the early church fathers chose not to include in the canon, the Gospel of Thomas. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was given to mystical statements about himself, and one such statement is, “Split a piece of wood, and I am there.”
This phrase says something to me about the elemental nature of God: that whatever Jesus embodied, we can see, encoded in all the bits of Creation, at a molecular level. And I’ve always experienced this in the Bible, too! That in spite of the surface contradictions and errors and widely diverging viewpoints; it has its own integrity, an order, a single Word underneath all of those words. If I could only take an electron microscope to the Bible, if I could just look deep enough, I would see a kind of cosmic code, not a series of zeroes and ones, but a single word, repeated over and over, the best word you can think of, a word that if said aloud would bring peace to the nations, cast out all fear. The word that says it all, that makes it all come right, all come clear.
