“What About the bible?”
| by Rev. Ken Sawyer ~ January 31st, 2010 | Options | |  Print This Sermon
|
“WHAT ABOUT THE BIBLE?”
A Sermon Preached at the First Parish in Wayland, Mass.
by the Rev. Ken Sawyer
on January 31, 2010
It seems that about every ten years it occurs to me that I haven’t discussed the role of the Bible in a typical Unitarian Universalist church like our own, that the newer among us here may wonder about that, that longer-time members may appreciate a retelling, and that I might have something new to say – and I will eventually, having recently read the latest edition of the book of Genesis, one illustrated by the cartoonist R. Crumb. Then we will return again this morning to one of the most beloved of Bible texts. [The 23rd Psalm was both the responsive reading, in a modernized version, and a choir number.]
First, some historical context. When this congregation was begun, back in 1640, not only was the Bible read at every service, elucidating the text and relating it to their lives was largely the point of the service. The minister would take a single sentence from the Bible and over the course of the next few hours he or she … well, he … would ruminate about it aloud, in the style of the time, saying that there were two interpretations of the text; and upon choosing one, that there were two possible interpretations of that interpretation; and so forth. And then after lunch, the congregation would be back to hear another bit of scripture explained, at equal length, using the same method.
After all, these were people who understood their whole existence, as individuals and as a community, in biblical terms. They saw themselves like the Israelites of old, in a covenant with God to settle a new land if they would abide by God’s laws, as set forth in the Bible. Even as the churches of eastern Massachusetts became more liberal in the course of the eighteenth century, even as they drifted away from the harsher doctrines of Calvinism, there was little apparent weakening of their belief that the Bible was the source of all truth, wisdom, and guidance.
By the 1820s, when the old system called the Massachusetts Standing Order began to come apart, with liberal and conservative congregations declaring themselves for the Unitarian or Trinitarian side, both sides turned to the Bible to support their views. And so in the covenant of this congregation adopted in 1829, a year after the conservative members of the First Parish had pulled out to form the Trinitarian Church across the street, the liberals here would still declare that membership meant, among other things, acknowledging “the divine authority and sufficiency of Sacred Scriptures….”
When they revised their covenant in 1845, it still included the expectation that in joining, new members were declaring that they would “take the Bible as [their] rule of faith and practice[,] prayerfully search for its holy teachings and conscientiously follow its light.” Indeed, that had become the only requirement to be welcomed into the congregation’s fellowship.
But by then, dramatic changes were underway. Unitarianism was confronting its first internal dispute, as to whether the truth of its message depended on its grounding in the Bible, as the old guard contended, or whether its message wasn’t simply true, eternally, everywhere true, whether one encountered it in the Bible, in nature, in one’s own soul, or even in the sacred texts of other religious traditions, Hinduism being the first that came to be known to New England minds.
The New England minds in particular were those of the Transcendentalists, headquartered up the road in Concord, led by the former Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and representing the American wing of German Romanticism. But by then, another German development was gathering power that would also dramatically alter the place of the Bible in the life of the church, a scholarly effort called “higher criticism,” that took the Bible as a text to be explored like any other historical set of documents and studied by critical means.
What head-spinning changes! And there were more: While the Bible was becoming just one way of knowing truth among many to many people, including churchgoers and their clergy, while it was becoming just another book that could be studied to some scholars, along came scientists, Darwin among them, to undermine claims that the Bible was at all an accurate guide in biology, anthropology, geology, cosmology, history, or many another area of knowledge.
By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, less than a half-century after the covenant of 1845, ministers of First Parish still cited the Bible, but without the sense of its being a singular or even necessarily a powerful source of inspiration or guidance. One of our ministers wondered why we even bothered pretending any more that the Bible had any significant role to play in religious understanding, and left the denomination to join the Ethical Culture Society. Another minister was much less impressed with anything the Bible had to say than he was with the writings of the economic theorist, Lloyd George.
And that was over a century ago. In the years since, the Bible has not recaptured its normative place at the center of our common faith, even though it remains very much a normative source of wisdom for many individual members, and even though many an effort has been made by ministers and others to keep some of its importance alive.
I have lent myself to that effort over the years. In fact, when I gave a sermon like this one in the 1980s, I quoted the nineteenth century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who said, “As a master, the Bible were a tyrant; as a help, I have not time to tell its worth.” I said I wanted to take time to make better friends with the Bible, gain easier access to its wisdom by better understanding its parts, and hear again “the beauty and inspiration of words that people have turned to for centuries.” So I began giving sermons devoted to the books of the Bible, in order, one per every season.
In my version of this service from the ‘90s, I had to admit that with the years those efforts had grown less frequent. But I was still saying, “I do not want to let the Bible fade too far from our congregational awareness,” and I gave lots of reasons why.
I don’t seem to have gotten very far in convincing even myself, though, for I have turned to the Bible since then no more than before and probably less. We did have a study group just a few years ago that I led that met monthly and read through the three synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke). We read Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus every Christmastime at the tableau.
And as I said, I read Genesis again recently. Reading it again reminds me what happened years ago when I set off into that series of sermons on the books of the Bible I had promised to give. Right off one has Genesis to deal with, and its tales of murder, betrayal, incest, polygamy, the flood God uses to kill all humans except one family, Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham’s willingness to murder his son – I tell you, it isn’t easy to find a story I could imagine using with the children here.
All these episodes are graphically illustrated by R. Crumb, whom many will have not heard of while others can remember “Keep On Truckin’,” Fritz the Cat, or a character in the movie “American Splendor.” And I do mean all the episodes – he spent five years and illustrated the entire book, including the racy scenes, some of the genealogies, otherwise know as the begats, and lists like, “These are the sons of Reuel, son of Esau: the Chieftain Nahath, the Chieftain Zerah, the Chieftain Shammah, and the Chieftain Mizzah.” Crumb draws a face for every one, hundred upon hundreds of bearded Semitic faces, and women, and landscapes, and animals.
In his introduction, Crumb points out that he has faithfully reproduced every word of the original text, and he notes: “Every other comic book version of the Bible that I’ve seen contains passages of completely made-up narrative and dialogue, in an attempt to streamline and ‘modernize’ the old scriptures, and still, these various comic book Bibles all claim to adhere to the belief that the Bible is “the word of God,” or “inspired by God,” whereas I, ironically, do not believe the Bible is the word of God. I believe it is the words of men.
“It is, nonetheless,” he goes on, “a powerful text with levels of meaning that reach deeply into our collective consciousness, our historical consciousness, if you will.” He believes the various stories evolved over time, some being variations of earlier stories from other religions of the area, like the Sumerian flood story; and that they were compiled and edited by the priesthood during the Babylonian Captivity, about 2600 years ago, who quite possibly altered the stories to serve their own political purposes.
And then in his commentary on the text, he makes clear that he thinks those purposes included strengthening not just their own power but also the patriarchal model that had taken over a society that had previously been a mixture of male and female leadership. He finds that over and again power is exercised by women if you pay attention, and an odd story makes sense if you see through to what the original might have been.
A case in point: three times in Genesis one of our male heroes, traveling with his wife, arrives in a foreign country and passes his wife off as his sister to the king, so the king can add her to his wives. This is explained as a way of gaining safety for the man, who would otherwise be killed, so beautiful was the wife.
Crumb prefers to believe we are seeing, though disguised, a remnant of a “sacred marriage,” which was a ritual that high priestesses performed to invest power on men whom they favored. So that would have been the reason why Sarah, for instance, was paired off with the Pharaoh, who would ordinarily not even have know she had arrived in his vast territory. It is because high priestesses women had that kind of authority, though the priests have covered that over in the retelling.
So ideas keep bubbling up about the Bible, and one thing about Unitarian Universalists, we are not afraid to give them a hearing. Maybe there is more to find there than is commonly noticed. Rereading Genesis with Crumb’s brief commentary in mind, one starts seeing how powerful the women are, along with the men, how often the women make the decisions and the men go along, how the women manipulate matters to their children’s advantage, how the Bible at times provides a genealogy or story that gives away that this society was once matriarchal, too, as when the begats pay more attention to the wife’s offspring than to the husband’s.
And then there are in the Bible for many of us a character, a story, a lesson, or maybe just a phrase that speaks to your heart, your mind, or the depths of your soul from that ancient collection of texts. (It may even be in Genesis.) Maybe it is one that we read together today.
The sometimes, somewhat Unitarian Universalist, existentialist novelist the late Kurt Vonnegut, dared to say in print, as regards William Shakespeare, that “I am here to suggest that the greatest writer in the English language so far was Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), and not the Bard of Avon (1564-1616). Poetry certainly was in the air back then. Try this:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want;
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still
waters,
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear
no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I
will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
“Lancelot Andrewes was the chief translator and paraphraser among the scholars who gave us the King James Bible.” [Timequake 131-2]
Subsequent scholarship has revealed quite a number of errors, or at the very least, a goodly number of disputable translations in the Elizabethan version. But when someone has died, as often as not the one text that I am requested to say is the 23rd psalm – and in the King James Version, if I would, please. And I would, and I do.
Because I know how potent and decent and healing are both the text and the cause of its request. A memorial service is often a time to listen to words that help, maybe ones that that are ancient and communal, that comfort and heal. In our particular branch of the human family, the 23rd Psalm often seems to do the trick.
The Bible can boring, inaccurate, and even unhealthy, even stupid, even venal, but it has carried across the century words and images with a power deeper than argument or reason.
As Unitarian Universalists, we are free to say both things: that the book has much that is wonderful, and much that isn’t at all. There is many a passage, a story, a lesson, well worth holding to heart, even while we are free to reject what does not serve religion’s great goal of adding to the world’s supply of love and kindness, justice and wisdom.
And we are free to say something just as important: not only does the Bible not contain only truth, there is much truth it does not contain. “Revelation is not sealed,” in the words of the hymn; “truth and right are still revealed” and they always have been in other places than biblical writ.
So that’s how it is here, and has been for a while: open to the Bible’s haunting dreams of peace and justice, its insights into human behavior, and the loveliness of its language, even if we know that not all its words are lovely, insightful, or pacific, or just.
And we try to value the richness elsewhere — in other faith traditions, in contemporary arts and sciences, in the unfolding thought and drama of our own lives — hoping with effort and good fortune to find — from the Bible perhaps, but from many another source as well — texts that strive to be as sacred, sustaining, and sufficient as the Bible alone was to those who sat here back in 1829.
So may it be.