More Sifting

Every part of Scripture is God breathed and useful in one way or another - 

showing us truth, exposing our rebellion, correcting our mistakes, training us to live God's way.

Through the Word we are put together and shaped up for the tasks God has for us.

-2 Timothy 3: 16-17 (The Message)

Here's some not so nice baggage I have had to sift through with this Timothy reading: I have used this text as a weapon against other people, and I have had others use it as a weapon against me.  I admit and confess that I have misunderstood what Paul was actually saying to Timothy and I thought that the "God breathed" Word was some sort of infallible support for my own (all too fleeting) sense of orthodoxy.  So first of all, I would like to repent of my own idolatry of the Bible.  I would like to repent of all the times when I felt that God's Word justified some prejudice or opinion of mine.  I would like to repent of any and all times that I tried to strangle the breath out of the Word.

I would also like to lay this burden down: I have come to a place where I cringe when I hear someone say the word biblical.  Which is kind of tricky in my line of work, sort of like a doctor who doesn't like the sight of blood.  None of this is because I have rejected the Scripture, or because I no longer bind myself under the authority of the Word, but because I get the sense that a lot of times people use that word too lightly, they use it to mean "traditional," or "moral," or "ethical," or maybe even "righteous," in short they are not adequately acknowledging how complex and alive the actual God breathed Word truly is.

I will turn to Psalm 137 as my example, because it is personal and beloved to me.  This was one of the Scriptures read at my brother's funeral.  Of all the memories of that day, one of my Dad's friends reading: "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and we wept when we remembered Zion." But he didn't read all the way to the end of the Psalm, for good reason, the last verse of the Psalm reads: "Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks!"  That part always seems to get left out of the reading of that Psalm, the bitterness and the anger at the oppressor that has so twisted the singer of songs that he would delight in the killing of infants.  We have a hard enough time acknowledging lament in the Scripture without that sort of brutal image. 

And this is not an isolated incident.  The Bible is full of stories that I would not tell my children: Judah and Tamar, the Levite's concubine, David and Bathsheba (and poor Uriah), Amnon raping Tamar (different Tamar this time) and David, good old king David, not doing anything about it.  I could go on, but if you have even a passing familiarity with the stories I'm talking about you will notice that justice is rarely done, the innocent are not protected and all of the people suffer for the sins of a few.

So when you say something is "biblical," my snarkiest response is likely to be, "you mean like rape and incest and the killing of children?"

But I get it, you just mean the good parts, where the baby Jesus is smiling at the Blessed Virgin as the cattle are lowing and the wise men are bringing gifts.  But Herod kills a bunch of kids in that story too!

How am I supposed to deal with this in any sort of beatific fashion?

Well, the fact of the matter is, I can deal with those rough edges.  I can learn something about God, and about humanity in all of them, but what I learn may lead me to hang up my harp on the branches and not exactly want to sing any more songs.  I don't always like this book that sits open in front of me every day, but I have chosen to wrestle with it, yell at it, slam it shut and eventually come back to it again and again. So when I say biblical, I am not being simple minded or naive.  When I say biblical, I could be talking about a soaring vision of light, or black, knotted pit in my stomach, it just depends.  But I'll tell you what, I take this Word very seriously, and because I do people that accuse me of being one of the "itching ears" gang that Paul talked about in his letter to Timothy, because of my progressive politics, it forces me to practice forgiveness of a very certain type. 

See, here's the thing, my inclusive stance towards LGBTQ people, my support of marriage equality, my desire for a more just system of laws, the fact that I actually want to protect the environment or work to end racism or poverty instead of just hoping that Jesus will come back soon, all that stuff is a result of my working with and wrestling my way through these Scriptures.

I have, in fact, changed my opinion on several of the things on that list as a result of a convicting moment that I had while reading Scripture or preparing a sermon. It's pretty safe to say that there is almost nothing I think, write or talk about that isn't in some way touched by my on-going relationship with the Scripture.

If you tell me something like: "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it," you are essentially like that person who thinks that they can tell a Navy fighter pilot something about flying because you were super good at playing WWII Fighter Ace on Nintendo. It's not that I would dishonor your conclusions, you may even be right about something, it's that I don't think you have actually put in the time or the honest struggle in coming to those conclusions.  You are not treating the Scripture as God breathed you are treating it like the rules of Monopoly (and probably cheating) or a self-help book that mostly just validates your own sinful biases.

I do not believe that my interpretation of Scripture is infallible, or even that it might not change more down the road.  I do not expect that everyone will agree with me about how to live with and in the God breathed Word, I'm not the Pope, nor do I want to be. I would just like people to stop implying or even insisting that I'm not paying attention to this Word, as much as I would like to live otherwise, I just can't get away from it.

Baggage down, sermon ready.