"Do you know every word, but none of the meaning?"
April 23, 2006: 2nd Sunday of Easter, Year B
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org

Scripture:
John 1:1-9. 14
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through the Word, and without the Word not one thing came into being. What has come into being in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world... And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen that glory, the glory as of a parent's only child, full of grace and truth.

John 20:30-31; 21:25
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name... But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

Sermon:
"Today is the first day of the next four weeks." That is, today is the first in our special four-part introductory sermon series. Over the next four weeks we will explore some of the central practices and approaches to our Christian faith that set apart this United Church on the Green, and the broader United Church of Christ in which we participate, from the majority of Christian communities today.

Because, let's face it, according to the ways of the world and of the wider Christian communion, we're... odd. We're a progressive Christian community seeking to follow in the way of Jesus by doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God. We endeavor to embody God's extravagant welcome for all persons, no matter who they are and no matter where they are on life's journey. More particularly, we are an Open and Affirming congregation, gladly welcoming lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons into the full life of the church. And we are a Just Peace church, prophetically renouncing the path of violence and working instead to build peaceful reconciliation. And at our best, ours is a strong faith, but non-exclusive one. We cherish our ecumenical and interfaith relationships. We're not alone in this, we're not unique—the worship service we hosted here yesterday for our fifteen colleague Welcoming Congregations of New Haven brought that home to me once again—but we are, well, odd.

And in the wider world around us, oddity is not so highly valued, and not only in secular circles. Mass market mass media mass culture has been embraced by an American church apparently hell-bent on answering the burning question "Just how many evangelicals can you cram into the Compaq Center, former home of the Houston Rockets?" Faith seems to be a tool to win votes, not heal hearts, and family values are okay, as long as your family meets the approved cookie cutter criteria. Debate is dead, as is diversity of theological expression, replaced by the more ratings-friendly format of diatribe. No, these days odd is out, and the last time I checked, queer was still a pejorative term, particularly in the church.

By contrast, we believe these very things that set us apart from the mainstream of belief come to us as gifts from God. I know United Church certainly has been a gift to me. You see, not many of us set out to find this particular oasis in what had become for us a desert of dry and dusty religion. Fewer still believed we would ever find it. Or that it existed at all. But here we are, and in church, even. And not just in church, but in a historic meeting house built long ago by our Puritan forebears in faith. Doubtless they are as surprised as we are. But regardless of what we set out to find, we know we have been found here. And we have received this particular, dare we say, peculiar way within The Way as a cool draught of water, living water, to slake our thirst and revive our parched hearts. Well friends, the well is deep and clear and will not fail, and in season of drought, there is plenty of life, abundant life, to go around.

So, to the business before us this morning: The Bible. It's the foundational text of the entire Christian community, the sourcebook of our faith, the storehouse of our sacred stories—and oddly enough, perhaps the single biggest stumbling block to faith for all too many these days. That being the case, I should take a moment to make a quick disclaimer: There are a lot of specific and troubling questions about the Bible I'm not going to answer this morning. I am not going to explain why there are not one but two distinct creation stories in Genesis. I am not going to explain just what God has against shellfish or mixed-fiber clothing or any of the other various and sundry items specifically prohibited under the laws of Leviticus. And I am most certainly not going to try to explain away the Apostle Paul's apparent deep dislike of women. In the same way, I have no interest in defending or denying the historicity of any of the many miracle stories, from the parting of the Red Sea to the feeding of the five thousand to the resurrection itself. And, oy! don't even ask me about The DaVinci Code.

Now, I know that for many of us, our faith foundered early on on just these sorts of thorny questions, and we decided then and there to throw the Biblical baby out with the bathwater. Which is unfortunate, because I believe our stumbling over these and similar passages was more symptomatic than problematic. The trouble lies not so much with the Bible itself, but with how we were taught to read it... or not read it, depending on which church you grew up in. So if we are going to come here Sunday mornings and call ourselves any kind of Christian—because, there's no way around it: we can be "spiritual" all we want, but to be Christian is to be "people of the Book," this book—we need to revisit just that question, the same question Jesus turned back on the smart-alecky legalist who tried to trap him in a debate over the nature of scripture. The lawyer asked, "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life," and Jesus replied, "What is written in the law," the torah, the Bible? "How do you read?" (Luke 10:25-26).

Now, you see, even asking that question sets us apart from the vast majority of evangelical or conservative or fundamentalist Christians, and thus, apparently, from the majority of Christians period in the United States today. To them, there is no how—You just read it. The meaning is plain... and literal... and inerrant. And why shouldn't it be? The Bible is the directly inspired Word of God, given to the authors to share with the world as is. Minimal interpretation is necessary. It's a bit like stereo instructions, only for salvation. Or, as some are found of saying, God's Little Instruction Manual for eternal life. Insert Tab A into Slot B: Do this, and live. If questions come up or you'd like a better overall picture of the finished product, or you really feel like you're missing some pieces, well, you're not doing it right. Try again, and try not to think so much this time. So, once more—Question: Noah and the Flood? Answer: Believe. Parting of the Red Sea? Again, believe. Virgin birth? Oh, c'mon now, you're not really trying. Say it with me: Just belieeeve...!

Of course, more moderate mainline Christians agree with us that the Bible is not a science text book—or really a history book, either, for that matter. We shouldn't go bending over backwards to make literal, factual sense of those miracle stories or to make the various versions of historical events dovetail together neatly, they say. But in an only slightly softer version of the inerrantist way of reading, they do believe that when it comes to matters of morality—especially sexual morality, it seems—the Bible remains without error.

The problem is this just doesn't work, not for everyone, at least. We are living proof of that. We know from hard experience that the Bible is not a set of scientific, historical, or moral stereo instructions. It's not just God's Great Big Book of "Go Thou and Do Likewise" Stories. Most of us have heard that particular un-joke somewhere along the way: A young woman is sitting on her bed upstairs in her room, wrestling with some thorny moral question—maybe she's just had sex with her boyfriend, or she's discovered her sexual attraction to other women, or she's returned from a Planned Parenthood clinic where she's had an abortion—and she's wondering what to do. And so, being a good Christian, she turns to the Bible for guidance. She blindly puts her finger on a page—Matthew 27:5—where she reads, "And Judas went and hanged himself." Next it's Luke 10:37: "Go thou and do likewise." And then finally, John 13:27: "What you do, do quickly." Here endeth the lesson.

Not that's quite a dramatic story, to be sure, but it's not an unrealistic one. It's happened Heck, it's happened to some of us. And it continues to happen to too many others day after day. But it makes the point that how we read the Bible is not an empty, academic question, but is in fact a matter of life and death. We have to face the fact that some ways of reading this Book of Books serve to nurture the life God has planted within us—nurture it and guide it and help it to bloom and bear life-giving fruit in turn, while others diminish and demean that life, seeing it not as something to be encouraged and even enjoyed but restrained, restricted, repressed. It's painfully clear we must choose wisely how we read.

But how? How are we to discern whether we should defend the widows and orphans and immigrants among us (Deuteronomy 14:29) or rather hack the Amelakites and other "enemies of God" to death, "man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey"? (1 Samuel 15:3) Both sets of instructions are there on the hallowed page, put in the mouth of God's own self, no less. Likewise, how are we to decide which version of Biblical marriage is the right one? One man/one woman, like Mary and Joseph? One man/many women, like Solomon and company? Concubinage, like Abraham and Hagar? No marriage at all, like Paul, surprise surprise? Or Levirate marriage?—oh man, you don't even want to go there. But you see the problem. Even if we limit our focus to the Bible as a moral document, what Rosetta Stone do we use to discern our way way forward through this moral morass?

Well, how did Jesus do it? How did he read? Because it's clear that while the early Christian communities who compiled the gospel accounts remembered Jesus as being very well acquainted with the Bible, they did not think of him as a literalist. He was a courageous reader. Time and again he was put to the test by conservative religious authorities, and time and again he held his ground. He clearly did not value all scripture—all the hundreds of stories and sermons and psalms and prophetic writings and rules and regulations—he did not value them equally. No, Jesus believed there was a living heart within scripture, a heart of faith. He interpreted the scriptures—and not just the small stuff about shellfish and mixed fibers but even the Ten Commandments themselves—in light of that heart, which he believed to be God's own heart.

Where did Jesus believe that heart lay? Funny you should ask. That same legalist asked that very question. And what did Jesus say? "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind'"—that is, Deuteronomy 6:5—"This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself'"—that is, Leviticus 19:18—"On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." (Matthew 22:37-40) In other words, for Jesus, the whole moral force of scripture is found in the relationship of God, self, and neighbor. For Jesus, the Bible was morally authoritative only to the degree it increased love of God and love of both self and neighbor as beloved children of God.

For us as well, this is the key to reading the Bible faith-fully. And though it is not unique to him—after all, he was quoting from the Hebrew scriptures there—we believe we see this faithful ethic of love lived out most fully in Bible stories of Jesus' life and ministry shared by the church down through the ages. Jesus shows us how much God loves us—from the cradle to the grave and beyond—and how much we are to love God—not to the exclusion of others, but in others—and how much we are to love our neighbors—a group Jesus defined broadly to include pretty much everyone else on the planet. We see Jesus healing the sick, forgiving the guilty, binding up the brokenhearted, comforting the sorrowful, rejoicing with those who rejoice, and confronting unjust systems of oppression, because as he read it, the Bible told him to.

Wherever this ethic of love of God, love of self, and love of neighbor finds expression throughout the Bible—not just in the gospel portraits of Jesus, but in the histories and the prophets and the poetry of the psalms and, God help us, in Paul—we believe those are the Go-Thou-and-Do-Likewise Bible bits that increase abundant living among all God's children and in God's creation as a whole.

But it's hard work, this sifting and sorting. It takes attention and reflection, intelligence and wit and faithfulness. And good humor—lots of that. So you can understand that it's the sort of work that's not done best alone. We need other minds, other hearts, other bodies laboring alongside us to tease out the heart-truth of the gospel for our particular time and place. Fortunately, we've got this church where we can come together week after week as a community gathered around this odd little library, this book of books, to read together and listen together for Christ's call to love.

For we do believe God's call to extravagant love and abundant life echoes still in these ancient pages, not despite the way they've been handed down from over the ages, but somehow because of just that. I mean, we know that many hands make messy work, but this is just the way God seems to prefer to work, not so much deus ex machina as through frail and faulty and more or less faithful persons in every time and place—persons more like us than we care to admit, most days. We believe that through the power of the Holy Spirit, all of those other readers—the ones who got it right and, yes, the many more who got it wrong, all the way back to that impertinent lawyer who first got up in Jesus' face to ask the question—they are all part of our wider book club, part of the on-going conversation about how we are to read for living. Their relationships with God and one another left fingerprints on the text we have inherited and the world it has helped to shape, just as ours will for the generations who come after us. That's why we come together in this community of faith, to comfort, to challenge, and to check one another's work against the measure of God's own redeeming love in Christ, because how we read is that important: it can change the world and does.

So, friends, what's the answer? How do we read? Practice, man, practice. Well, that... and more than our fair share of grace. Thanks be to God who has shared this word of love, of life, of faith even with us.