Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. Nigel Taber-Hamilton, Rector
As you may know, we have been using the Revised Common Lectionary of Sunday readings rather than the Book of Common Prayer version for about two years - General Convention made the RCL the official Lectionary of the Episcopal Church (which is not the same thing as Visa being the official credit card of the Olympics! We're actually supposed to use the RCL!)
During Ordinary Time - the season after the Day of Pentecost that runs for about six months - we're offered two tracks from Hebrew Scripture. One is a continuous set of readings from the Torah - mostly Genesis and Exodus which carry the theme for each Sunday. The other ties the Hebrew scripture reading to the gospel reading.
I tell you this because of two things:
- The "other" Hebrew scripture reading is Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac, and
- Most folk writing about the readings for today are drawn to that story like moths to a camping lantern!
I think its because they feel the need to explain exactly how a brutal act of violence that would today result in a murder or attempted murder charge could and the incarceration of the "perp" - Abraham - for a 72 hour hold to see if he was certifiable be described as a command from God!
That story is perhaps the best reminder for us that the Bible is not a seamless record of a God that the author of the General Letter to All Hebrew Christians describes as "the same yesterday, today, and for ever"! If that's the only God of the Bible then I'm an atheist!
When it comes to studying God in scripture - or just studying scripture itself - we encounter more disconnections than connections, as many contradictions as confirmations, and quite a bit more blood than grace.
This shouldn't surprise us, of course - as long as we remember that the Bible is a record of human understanding and human interpretation - the record of humanity's dealing with God subject to every human foible and failing since the dawn of human time.
And also subject to every human insight, every human grace, all human wisdom.
The bible is, as Phyllis Trible has said, "...a mixture of blessings and curses. It doesn't speak with a single voice. It has competing voices, contradictions in it. As it moves through history, it encounters new settings and new occasions and we're ever called upon to do something with this text.[in our own contexts]"
Scripture is a mixed bag! That's why we should continually remind ourselves of the remarkable insights of the great Anglican theologian Richard Hooker: that while scripture contains "all things necessary to our salvation" it is valueless without the application of human reason, and the continually developing insights of human tradition.
So what about the Old Testament? What about the Hebrew Scriptures? Here are a few reflections.
Hebrew scripture spans a period of nearly a thousand years. Different theological perspectives held sway at different times. For instance, early on the Jews were not monotheists - they didn't believe in one God only. They just thought that their own God - Elohim, Jehovah, Yahweh - was better than the gods of the surrounding peoples. We need to remember that there is growth in understanding in Hebrew scripture - Jewish ethics and law are not "written in stone" in quite the way we think! The religious self-understanding and the "words about God" (literally 'theolgy') of the Jewish people evolved.
Hebrew scripture scholars tell us that Jewish dietary prohibitions - to take but one, rather harmless example - weren't adopted because the Jews knew something important about the danger of eating pork or raw oysters but because having unique dietary rules made the Jews fell unique. And don't' they still do that? "Kosher" is a unique cultural identity. So how we understand Hebrew scripture and law has to be cultural.
Then there are the relational prohibitions. The prohibition against homosexual activity was introduced during the time when the Jews were trying to takeover what they called the Promised Land - but what the inhabitants called lots of other things: "Canaan", "Palestine", and so on. When you engage in that sort of ethnic cleansing its really important to have a superior military force - you need soldiers. The prohibition was based primarily on the need for more soldiers, and not on some intrinsic moral rejection of same-sex relationships. So we have to understand Hebrew scripture and law as situational, as contextual.
All of this is not to say we should ignore the bible as too confused and contradictory. But it is to say that we need to make sure we're using the right lens with which to read it.
For us as Anglican Christians one of the more important lenses is to begin with Jesus. Who Jesus was - and is for us - was formed by his Jewish faith, and by Hebrew scripture. That makes Hebrew scripture vital to our understanding.
It does not, however, mean that we interpret our faith through Hebrew Scripture's eyes. We don't take the proscriptions of Jewish law and adopt them wholesale as Christians - if we did we would be refusing to eat shell-fish, rejecting footballs because they're made of pig-skin, and executing those who ignored such prohibitions!
There are, today, some Anglicans - mostly from Africa but some from North America and England - who are seeking to interpret Jesus through the lens of Hebrew Scripture. They proclaim the old Puritan battle-cry last heard during the Reformation: "Sola Scriptura" - scripture simply and only. They claim they allow for no interpretation beyond the obvious meaning, no cultural interpretation or contextual lens, just the literal meaning of what scripture says.
This has never been the Anglican way. With this approach the Bible can so easily end up as a tool used by individuals to reinforce their own prejudice.
The Anglican way is to understand Hebrew scripture the way we understand all scripture: as the developing story of human understanding refining itself through self-reflection and common reflection on the shared experience of the community of faith.
The Anglican way is to look to the core of what Jesus said: that we should love God and our neighbor as ourselves, that we should be compassionate to those in need, witnessed by the example in today's Gospel about giving "even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones.."
So where do we go from here?
We need to allow those who wish to interpret biblical truth in their literal, narrow way the room and the right to do so.
But we also must be clear that we will not allow them to impose their view on us - if the great Anglican tent of inclusion means anything it means that we can agree to disagree but still remain in relationship, still remain in eucharistic fellowship, still remain Anglican together.
What I've been talking about this morning is particularly relevant to us for two reasons. The first is that the once-every-ten-year Lambeth Conference of the Bishops of the Anglican Communion takes place in England in three weeks, and at the core of the conversations will be issues of biblical interpretation.
The second is that this fall we will be doing an eight week program on the Episcopal Church called "Via Media" which will bring these issues to the fore.
It is also another tool for us as we seek to understand the meaning of Jesus for us on this journey that not only takes us to the start of a new Christian year but is also the journey of understanding that is our lives. Amen.
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