Tag Archives: Biblical Interpretation

Father's Day, Sermons

SERMON: Unbelievable! Looking at Stories in the Bible.

A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
Preached on Father’s Day, Sunday, June 17, 2018

Some Passages of Scripture
 Stretch Our Believability
. Past the Credulity of Stories.

Let me begin with a quote from Loren Eiseley. Some of you might recognize the name. He was a naturalist, a philosopher, and he died 15-20 years ago. I looked up his obituary in The New York Times, where he was referred to as a modern-day Thoreau.

Here’s the quote:

“While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. ‘He doesn’t know,’ my friend whispered excitedly. ‘He is passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know.

Maybe it’s happening right now to us.’ ”

I have long known there are passages of scripture that stretch our believability and strain our credulity.

Most people venerate the Bible, and they try to believe what it says.

This is with full knowledge that at least some of the stories of the Bible are fictional from the beginning but with the intention of teaching through the story. The fable of Jonah and the Whale comes to mind, or perhaps the Book of Job.

There are also some people who simply have trouble believing certain things in the Bible, miracles, typically, such as the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection or some of the healings or turning water into wine.

Even though they might take a pass on some of the phenomena, they are just fine with the general message of the Bible.

Those aren’t what I’m talking about this morning. I’m talking about some of the things that sound okay, but the more we think about them, the more outlandish, the more impossible, and the more utterly nonsensical do they seem.

Two Examples Include the
 Peaceful Kingdom and the 
Greater Works Promised by JC.

I’m going to give you three examples. The first two won’t get me in trouble, but the third one will.

Example number one. The Peaceable Kingdom (Isaiah 11: 6-9). You hear it at Christmastime:

“The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over
the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put
its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the
knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.”

It’s hard to believe that the wolf shall live with the lamb or the lion shall eat straw, at least in a literal way.

You know wolves and leopards and lions are meat eaters. They have canine teeth well-adapted for killing, and I don’t see them eating straw anytime soon.

Neither shall a nursing child safely play over the hole of an asp.

Example number two. This is in John 14, a famous passage beginning with Jesus speaking to his disciples after having foretold his betrayal:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”

Then in response to a remark from Philip, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied, Jesus said, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?”

“Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”

This is the “greater works than these” passage.

Christ walking on the sea, by Amédée Varint, 19th Century. PD Wikimedia.

Upon sober reflection, we look at some of the things that Jesus did: He healed people who were paralyzed, and he restored sight to people who were born blind. He turned water into wine; that was pretty cool. He walked on water, also cool. Resurrection after having been slain, not so bad.

And then my absolute favorite of all Jesus’ wonders, telling one of his disciples to cast a line and catch a fish, and in the fish’s mouth was a coin large enough to pay a tax. Now I’m sorry, but that is way cool.
But then he says that you and I can do even better, and I’m just not so sure of it. I haven’t seen anybody move a mountain or pay their taxes that way.

Do not Worry; Look at the 
Birds; Consider the Lilies;
 All Things Will Be Given.
Peace Lilies of the Field. PD image courtesy of Public Domain Pictures.

Here is the third example that might get me into trouble. From the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6: 25-33). [Note: The Roman and boldface type are from the Bible; the italic type is commentary by AMS.]:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, [Everybody who hasn’t ever worried, please raise your hands.] what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; [They don’t do a lick of work, and they’re doing just fine.] they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing?

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; [They don’t do any work either, and look how beautiful they are.] they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you — you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ [Gentiles do all that stuff. Instead, keep the kingdom of God and his righteousness.] And all these things will be given to you as well.”

But this doesn’t match our experience at all.

We’ve all seen poor people who certainly don’t look or smell like lilies. Will God not much more clothe you? I want to be respectful, but apparently not, because we’ve all seen many without proper clothing, proper food, proper shelter. We know it well. Many of such poor have striven mightily for the kingdom of God.

It makes me, and maybe you, a little jaded and a bit numbed because we take these passages — the Peaceable Kingdom, the Greater Things than These, Consider the Lilies —with a grain of salt.

Maybe Jesus is exaggerating, perhaps trying to make a point with hyperbole. I don’t know, but it’s pretty hard to take such teachings seriously and literally.

Now I’m Going to Ask You
 to Combine Two Thoughts;
 One Is Easy, One Is Harder.

I want you to meld the two separate thoughts and make them into one thought.

Here is the easy one:

I want you to think about imagination. Reason about the human ability to contemplate something that isn’t in existence and imagine it as though it were in existence. Intellectualize the way in which we have that ability, and we use it every day.

Think John Lennon’s song Imagine:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/VOgFZfRVaww” frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>

“Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace, you
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world, you
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one.
(Songwriter: John Winston Lennon)
Cogitate for a moment about your personal ability to imagine something.
Now here is the second thought, the more difficult one:
This is that psychology has taught for centuries that we experience what we think. The reality we believe we have becomes the reality we experience.
For a century, physics has been saying the same thing. We don’t just experience a preexisting outside reality; rather, we’re the ones who create with our souls, with our minds, and then with our bodies the world we experience.
Cutting-edge science is articulating this truth in ever-clearer ways. From psychology, from physics, and from biology, we don’t just experience a preexisting outside reality; rather, we are the ones who are creating the world we experience.
Take that powerful idea, and add it to “imagine.”
Jesus is saying in this passage, consider the lilies, learn deeply (which is what the Greek word means) learn deeply the lilies. Imagine the lilies.
Could it be (could we imagine) . . . that some of these things might someday become literally true?
Could it be . . . that one day we might live in a Peaceful Kingdom if we imagine it? And then if we create it?
Could it be . . . that one day we might do greater works than these, where Spirit has complete control over the physical realm, as Jesus demonstrated multiple times?
Could it be . . . that the day might come when we don’t need to worry, that all these things the Father knows we need in our physical existence would be given? Can we imagine it, rather than just assuming it’s ridiculous?
Listen one more time to the Loren Eisley story with such things in mind, and try to put all this together.
“While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. ‘He doesn’t know,’ my friend whispered excitedly. ‘He is passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.’ ”
That is us, generally unaware, generally oblivious to the spiritual realm.
Our physical consciousness is that moth, ever so dimly aware of the world of Spirit, of the world of true power, of the world of true peace, of the world of true love. Allow yourself to believe. Allow yourself to imagine.
Amen
Featured Image Credit: Christ walking on the sea, by Amédée Varint, 19th Century. PD Wikimedia.
Download the PDF version of the
Lent and Easter, Sermons, The Good Book Sermon Series

SERMON: The Good Book (Pt. 1) – Enlightening the Eyes

A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
for the First Sunday of Lent, February 18, 2018

This is the first of a new series of sermons on The Good Book. Here is an excerpt from Enlightening the Eyes:

The Rev. Dr. Art Suggs begins this Lenten sermon about the origins, translations and challenges of interpreting scripture with two stories — The second story based on an awkward moment that occurred during a spiritual discussion group gathering in his backyard.

Rev. Suggs begins, though, with “a sweeping story that I’m quoting from Peter Gomes, formerly a chaplain at Harvard, who wrote a book under the title of The Good Book that I have also used as an overall name for this new series of sermons.”

The ‘sweeping story’ points to the original, admirable, virtue-centered intentions of the Puritans coming to create a ‘new model of Christianity’ in this new world.

You’ll find this ‘sweeping story’ in the full sermon (download link below), but for now, Rev. Suggs continues,

“We’re going to be looking at:

• uses and abuses of the Bible,

• the Bible and women,

• the Bible and homosexuality,

• the Bible and money (that will be interesting),

… and core principles. The series will then take us all the way through to Easter, when we’re going to look at the Bible and miracles.

Bible 101

The Bible used by Abraham Lincoln for his oath of office during his first inauguration in 1861. PD image by Michaela McNichol, Library of Congress.

Where should I begin? I wrestled with this because it’s logical to start at the beginning, and there are some fascinating stories about how the Bible came to be.

This is particularly true 
for the New Testament, up to the time of Constantine, when he finally pressed the bishops to get their act together and decide what’s scripture and what’s not. Constantine and the bishops did decide, and that led to the whole issue of Rome and the Middle Ages.”

In the full sermon, the Rev. Dr. Suggs shares more about how the bible came into being, and the various translations of it, about which he adds,

“Translations would be fun to go over in a sermon, but I can tell that you’ve had enough. There are great stories about translation in a different way.

For example, in Hebrew, there’s only one word for both “palace” and “temple.” Try to imagine that for a minute. To get a feeling for how closely church and state were united in ancient Hebrew culture, they didn’t even bother to have different words for the two of them.

Context was the only way that you could tell whether someone was talking about the palace or the temple.

Here’s where it gets tough if you want to know a problem in translation: That is, there is no one word for sexual deviancy. How do we translate that? Somebody came up with the term homosexuality, and that word for sexual deviancy, generalized, became very specifically “homosexuality” for centuries.

A Bible handwritten in Latin, on display in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England. The Bible was written in Belgium in 1407 AD, for reading aloud in a monastery. Photo by Adrian Pingstone. PD Wikimedia.

Thus, all the versions of the Bible based upon generalized sexual deviancy continued to use the word “homosexuality,” even though the deviance might actually have little or nothing to do with homosexuality.

For example, what would sexual deviancy have been in ancient Greek culture? Generally, it’s considered one of three things: Somehow or other, it was sex mixed in with violence like rape or bestiality or pedophilia. But no, it was decided that the best thing to do was just to call it homosexuality, therefore creating some of the pain and anger and hatred of the church by the homosexual community for centuries because of unwise and unthoughtful translations.

There’s great teaching about the organization of the Bible. You have the Torah and then the writings and the prophets in the Old Testament.

Saint Paul Writing His Epistles, 16th-century painting, c1618-1620, Valentin de Boulogne, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. PD Wikimedia.

In the New Testament you have the gospels and then Acts, which is sort of like Volume 2 of the Gospel of Luke and written by the same person, in all probability. Then follow the Pauline Epistles, and the scribes didn’t know whether Paul wrote Hebrews or not, so they tacked Hebrews at the end of what they thought were the Pauline Epistles.

Then it was followed by the general epistles, Titus, Timothy, Peter, James, and John and their shorter letters, followed by the book of Revelations.

We also have the Apocrypha, a whole bunch of other scriptures that come from the latter years but before Christ. These were accepted by the Catholics but generally not by the Protestants. And then, of course, the Gnostic documents came to light in the 20th Century from the discoveries of the Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

What Ended My Long Love Affair 
with the Bible?

To speak personally, I have had a long love affair with the Bible. I have studied it. I have memorized many verses. I learned Greek and Hebrew, and got an A in Greek and 100 in Hebrew, meaning that I did perfectly on every homework assignment and every test. I was the only one. I bought commentaries. I have preached from the Bible faithfully for over 30 years.

One thing I haven’t mastered: Some of my fellow students told me you need to preach with one hand and hold the Bible in the other, and you must buy a very expensive, floppy, leather-bound King James Version of the Bible, and you need to be able to grab it and flip it open. You need to flip it open to the middle, and I can’t do it to save my soul because you open up to the middle, and 
then you hold it while you’re preaching, regardless what verse it opened to. I never could learn the lesson.

So I’ve had a love affair with the Bible, but the love affair actually ended due to unfaithfulness.

It was all about three forms of unfaithfulness. One had to do with women, one had to do with gays, and one had to do with slaves. It is crystal clear that the Bible treats women in a second-class way.

It is also crystal clear that the Bible believes homosexuality is a sin. There are places where the text doesn’t use the word for sexual deviancy, but they describe it. A man with a man, for example, and they condemn it.

St. Peter Preaching in the Catacombs. Jan Styka, PD Wikimedia.

And it was hard for me to come to this decision, but I have decided that the Bible is just plain wrong. Men and women are to be treated equally, no matter what, and this is especially true in church. Women are not to be kept silent. They are not to have to cover their heads. They are to be treated equally with men.

Science has shown in so many different ways that there is a Bell curve of different types of sexuality, not just in human beings but across the mammalian phyla. Homosexuality is found in well over 400 different versions of mammals, not just among human beings.

And so the Bible is wrong. It’s just plain wrong. I will not preach from those passages ever again.

To Be Fair, the Bible Is a Product
 of Time and Place. We Divorced,
 Nevertheless Remain Amicable

Every single culture out of which the Bible emerged — ancient Hebrew, ancient Greece, ancient Israel — was anti-woman, anti-gay, and pro-slavery. So of course, it’s going to reflect that kind of moral compass.

The Second Letter of Paul to Timothy, 3: 16-17 says:

“All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

And I have been hit over the head whenever I have expressed my doubts with that verse. “All scripture,” it says, and it’s infuriating. It brings tears to my eyes.

Because what do you think scripture meant at the time that it was written? It meant the Torah. The first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. It might have meant maybe the Prophets as well and things like the Psalms and the Proverbs, but it probably meant the Torah.

I’m being beaten over the head because I expressed doubt about a New Testament document.

A page from the Gutenberg bible. Scanned by Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. PD Wikimedia.

In that love-affair analogy, we fell in love, 
we got married, and we had many happy years. But then there was this emerging unfaithfulness, and so we divorced but in an amicable way. We became friends, and we shall remain friends, at least from my end, to my dying day.

I look with amusement at churches in particular that like to venerate the Bible.

For example, some churches have processions in which the Bible is held high, while somebody walks around with it. There are churches that want you to stand when the gospel is read, and you can stay seated for the rest of it, 
for some reason. There are churches that emphasize the red-letter edition of the Bible because what Jesus says is more important than what other Biblical figures have to say.

There are churches that put the Bible on the communion table and show that it is precious and worthy of being on the communion table. And of course, there are some people who make sure that, in a stack of books, the Bible is always on top.

My present understanding after all these years is that the Bible is a fine tool, but like any kind of tool there are things for which it’s useful and other things for which it’s useless.

The Buddha told a story when some of his disciples wanted to venerate his words. (Find the Buddha’s story in the full version of this sermon – download below.)

I would answer, “Like a makeshift raft, the answer is yes, it does do that, not perfectly, not completely, not always reliably, but yes, it does.”

The passage that Judy Giblin read during the Lectionary was the beautiful and eloquent Psalm 19, verses 1-10 and 14.

Here, she reads again the central portion of it, verses 7 through 10:

“The law of the Lord is perfect, 
 reviving the soul;

the decrees of the Lord are sure, 
 making wise the simple;

the precepts of the Lord are right, 
 rejoicing the heart;

the commandment of the Lord is 
 clear, enlightening the eyes;

the fear of the Lord is pure, 
 enduring for ever;
the ordinances of the Lord are true 
 and righteous altogether.

More to be desired are they than 
 gold, even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey, 
 and drippings of the honeycomb.”

Amen.

Download the full Enlightening the Eyes sermon (PDF)

** *The series title of The Good Book is borrowed from Peter Gomes’ book by the same title.
**The raft parable appears in the “Alagaddupama” Sutta of the Sutta-pitaka (Majjhima Nikaya 22).

Featured Image Credit: The Gutenberg Bible, 1455, Johann Gutenberg; Rare Books Division, the Lenox Library. Image by Kevin Eng, CC-PD Wikimedia.