Bible Sunday - a sermon by Fr James, 23 October 2016
Life brings some rather delightful ironies. Here’s one:
The French philosopher Voltaire once said, ‘A hundred years from my death the
Bible will be a museum piece.’ A hundred years after his death the French Bible
Society set up its headquarters in Voltaire’s old home in Paris.
The Bible has proved to be remarkably enduring. It’s the
book on which civilisations have been founded, for which people have given
their lives to the flames; in the 1990s I was part of an organising that
smuggled Bibles into repressive countries.
Bible Sunday invites us to return to our core document
with the same enthusiasm that Jesus had in today’s Gospel reading. Yes, the
Bible is complex. It’s a library of 66 books written over hundreds of years. It
has many different genres – law, history, poetry, prayers, love songs, visions
in the night, letters and apocalyptic, as well as the thrilling form of
narrative we call gospel. But complexity invites engagement, not avoidance.
We don’t believe that it has been divine dictated – it’s
not, as it were, an email or text message from heaven. However, we do recognise
that it is ‘God-breathed’, with shafts of beauty and truth breaking through
everywhere.
So, how shall we read it? One answer is, with head, heart
and hands – head to grapple with it, heart to love God through it, hands to
obey what God says in it. The former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks puts it like
this: ‘The Bible isn’t a book to be read and put down. It’s God’s invitation to
join the conversation between heaven and earth.’ The idea of a conversation is
a particularly fruitful one. The Bible might be viewed as a friend and
companion. And the way we relate to friends is to love them, debate with them,
enjoy them, learn from them, sometimes be annoyed by them, and sometimes to
challenge them. This is something we could learn from the Jewish community –
one rabbi asked, ‘Why don’t you Christians argue with God more?’ He’s quite
right; we’re far too polite.
My first Bible Sunday here I referred to the American
theologian Marcus Borg who describes three dimensions to biblical faith:
· Pre-critical
naiveté – here the stories of the Bible are viewed as
historically and factually true.
· Second
is critical thinking where one starts to question, pull part, critique.
It’s what the Jewish community do so well. And it’s a very important dimension
although some churches are nervous about such critical thinking and discourage
it.
· Thirdly
is post-critical naiveté – this is where the biblical stories are once again
heard as ‘true stories’, recognising multiple layers of meaning and different
genre. This latter dimension brings critical thinking with it, but integrates
it into a larger whole.
The Hebrew biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann presents a similar understanding in
the way he connects the development of the Hebrew Scriptures with the
development of human consciousness. He describes three major parts of the
Hebrew Scriptures: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Wisdom literature.
The Torah, or the
first five books, is the period in which the people of Israel were given their
identity through law, tradition, structure, certitude, group ritual, clarity.
They have a very strong sense of their chosenness. It’s a very important
dimension… to begin with. As individuals, we each must begin with some clear
structure and predictability for normal healthy development. It’s what parents
give to their little ones – containment, security, safety, specialness.
Ideally, you first learn you are loved by being mirrored in the loving gaze of
your parents - particularly your mother. Many artists have depicted the Madonna
and Jesus with this close, intimate gaze. Through this you sense that you are
special and life is good – you feel ‘safe’. That’s the Torah, the first
dimension.
The Prophets are the
second major section of the Hebrew Scriptures. This includes the necessary
suffering, including the failures, that initiate you into the next dimension of
maturation. Prophetic thinking includes the capacity for healthy
self-criticism, the ability to recognize your own dark side, as the prophets
did for Israel. Without failure, without suffering, most people (and most of
religion) never move beyond narcissism and tribalism. Healthy self-criticism
helps us to realize that we are not that good and neither is our group. It
begins to break down either/or, dualistic thinking, as we realize all things
are both good and bad. This makes all idolatry, and all the delusions that go
with it, impossible.
Then the third
dimension of the Hebrew Scriptures: the Wisdom literature (which includes many
of the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and the Book of Job). This is
where the leaven of self-criticism, added to the certainty of your own
specialness, helps us to discover the language of mystery and paradox. It’s a
dimension where we become robust enough to hold together contradictions, even
within ourself, even in others. And we can do so with compassion, forgiveness,
patience, and tolerance. We have moved from the Torah’s tribal exclusivity, and
"separation as holiness" to inclusivity, seeing God in other tribes
and communities.
Brueggemann suggests
that the three-fold sequence is one of order-disorder-reorder. And you must go
through disorder or there is no reorder! It’s a particularly uncomfortable
part.
I experienced a
profound sense of disorder, having come from a rather fundamentalist
background, where questions and doubt were not welcomed. I had my worldview
shattered by doing a theology degree. I left with a BA certificate but as an
agnostic. It was a rather traumatic time. But the questions I had didn’t
go away. I went on to do an MA in theology – and alongside other things (like
counselling) began my journey of reorientation.
I have found that many people become stuck at the
disorder dimension – to take an extreme example, Richard Dawkins’ view on the
Bible is a critique, a quite right critique, of the exclusivism we find in the
Bible. This was my frustration too. But instead of probing further, of going
deeper, he completely writes off religion.
To take a different example, one might hear the story of
Jonah and, with a scientific hat on, conclude what an impossible story this is.
Again, the invitation isn’t to view the whole thing as rubbish, as a fairy tale
for children. Rather, the invitation is to go deeper. Jesus uses this story as
a metaphor for the mystery of transformation (Matthew 12:39, 16:4; Luke 11:29).
The graphic story of Jonah is about him running from God, being swallowed by a
large fish, and taken where he would rather not go. This was Jesus’ metaphor
for death and rebirth. It may be our story. Perhaps we too must go inside the
belly of the whale for a while where we experience disorientation. Only after
experiencing this will we be spit out on to a new shore and find our ourselves
with a renewed vocation, a refocused purpose.
So whatever you do on your journey of faith, don’t give
up on the Bible, don’t ignore it, but don’t be afraid of challenging it too. We
are encouraged this week to pick up the Bible and, as our collect puts it, ‘to
read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them’.
Reference:
John Pritchard, www.biblesociety.org.uk
Walter Brueggemann