"Throwing Out the Bible with the Baptismal Water"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 13^th of January, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
gathered freely, to worship.
We worship when we praise the praiseworthy
and question everything in love and humility.
We worship when we let the silence sing,
and think with our deepest heart.
Word, be set free in this hour, that no
cage or habit may hold you.
Silence, enrobe us with glory equal to
noon sun on new-fallen snow.
Music, quicken us like the embrace of a close friend.

And may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves,
true to each other, and true to those shared visions of what we can together become…

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

Let the sky above me unroll like a scroll,
and let me read upon it today's text for my life:
"You are alive, here and now. Love boldly and always tell the truth."
Let the wind arrange the naked branches of the maples and aspens and oaks into letters which proclaim this sacred text:
"Your heart beats now, not tomorrow or yesterday.
Love your life and do no harm."
Let the eyes and hands and faces of all men and women and children with whom I share this earth be chapter and verse in this great scripture text:
"Life is struggle and loss, and also tenderness and joy. Live all of your life, not just part of it.

And now let all the poems and scriptures and novels and films and songs and cries and lullabies and prayers and anthems open up before our free hearts like a torah, like a psalm, like a gospel, like an apocalypse and proclaim:

"Do not think you can take away each other's troubles, but try to be with each other in them.

Remember that you are part, not all, great, but not by far the greatest, small, precious brief breaths in the great whirlwind of creation.

And remember that every single human word is finally and divinely cradled in the strong and secure arms of Silence.

Silence

Blest is the scripture of the world
which unfolds before us ever.
Blest is the scripture of our lives,
read daily in our tears, our dances,
our sorrows and hopes.
Blest are all those with whom we share our lives,
and have shared our lives, and will share our lives,
gifts of companionship and love and challenge.
We make communion with them now
by naming them aloud
or quietly in the sanctuary of our hearts,
never forgetting that we are not who we are
save that they are, were or will be.

Naming

O sing a new song,
or sing an old song,
sing a psalm of our ancestors or a psalm of our children.
No matter when in this world of joy and woe,
remember to sing, and sing, and sing.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from the writing of the Korean Presbyterian theologian, Hyung Kyung Chung, from the book Questions of Faith, published in 1990

In the past, the Bible has been used against Asian women to justify abuse. But the Bible only has power when WE interpret it as life-giving. The Bible is a reference, a context for my people which WE use for inspiration and wisdom. It is the reference and WE are the text.

The Bible does not give us all the answers, like how to prevent a nuclear war, how to deal with issues of battered women, or whether America should intervene in Asian countries. The norm in interpreting the Bible is to ask, "Is this life-giving for us, or is this death-giving?"

Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
is a familiar story from the Gospel of Luke, familiar even to people who have never cracked the book. It's become a byword in English, the Good Samaritan. But since no one knows any more what a Samaritan is, I have translated this story not just from Greek word to English word, but from ancient culture to modern culture.

One night there was a fellow who was travelling from Columbus up to Delaware. On the way, while stopping to change a flat, another car stopped behind him, and some thugs got out, beat him severely, robbed him, and took his car, leaving him half-dead by the side of the road. The next morning, the senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church was driving past, and saw the fellow still lying unconscious in the ditch, but he was late for an important District meeting where he was preaching, and

went on by, vowing to call the Highway Patrol as soon as he got there. Not long later, the Board Chair from the Unitarian Universalist Church was driving past on her way to some important new work. Fearing for her own safety, she too drove past, vowing to call the Highway Patrol as soon as she got to her place of work. Not many minutes later, the secretary from Ephesians Southern Baptist Church in Grove City, on her way to visit her sick uncle Cassius, saw the man prone in the ditch, and immediately stopped her car. She called the Highway Patrol on her cell phone, and then 911. Once she gave them the information, she immediately got out and attended to the hurt man, propping his head on her folded jacket like a pillow, wiping his wounds with a kerchief. When the ambulance came, she followed it to the hospital to accompany the poor fellow to the emergency room. She stayed with him till he gained consciousness, holding his hand, then calling his family, and making sure he would be well taken care of.

Sermon: Throwing Out the Bible with the Baptismal Water [Next][back to top]

Since so many of us in this early twenty-first century are "on-line," I suspect that a large number of you may have found something like this in your mail box during the last year or so. Rich Humenick forwarded this latest version to me this past week, although I have seen several different versions of the same thing. It's a list of what some children in a parochial school supposedly wrote about various stories found in the Bible. Personally, I have some doubts about its authenticity because of internal evidence, (Catholic school children do not confuse the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception with virginal conception, nor do parochial school students use the Protestant enumeration of the commandments, as in this particular list.) Nevertheless, I think it's hilarious no matter who wrote it, something like the funny things Art Linkletter and Bill Cosby got kids to say on their TV show "Kids Say the Darn'dest Things."

• Noah's wife was a woman called Joan of Ark.
• Samson slayed the Philistines with the Axe of the Apostles.
• Moses led the people to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients.
• The seventh commandment is thou shalt not admit adultery.
• David was a Hebrew king who fought with the Finklesteins, a race of people in Biblical times.
• When Mary heard she was going to be the mother of Jesus, she sang the Magna Carta.
• King Solomon had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.
• The epistles were the wives of the apostles.
• St. Paul cavorted to Christianity. He preached holy acrimony, which is another name for marriage. He said you were only supposed to have one spouse. This practice is called monotony.

Now, I know that not everyone in this room will find these cute children's confusions equally funny, NOT because they have no sense of humor, but because they may not get the joke. For example, the statement about Mary and the Magna Carta. It's funnier, I suppose, when you realize that Magnificat is the Latin phrase for the song Mary sang, according to Luke. Some of us heard a portion of that piece sung magnificently on Christmas Eve. You know, Magnificat/ Magna Carta. Cute. But Magnificat is not a word in the Bible, it's a Latin name for a poem found in the Bible. And really, there is no reason why half the people in this room should have that knowledge in their head, unless they tend to sing Bach chorales in the shower all the time or unless they were raised in a parochial school, like I was, for at least 12 years.

And, yes, I am equally sure that some folks may not know what the Magna Carta is either, that great charter signed by King John in Crusader England. Oh, folks surely read about the Carta once, in High School (didn't we all have to?), but maybe it didn't stick with them, like calculus didn't stick with me. For though, true enough, we each had different educational experiences growing up, it's more important to stress we also were fascinated by different interests during our schooling. So the history lessons that I found fascinating, others may have found uninteresting. Magnificat? Magna Carta? some will say. "Who cares?"

The same variety of personal experiences is true of the Bible, too. Except that the Bible, somehow, creates a lot more intense reaction. And that is what I want to explore this morning.

I personally was raised with a rather liberal understanding of the Bible, although I didn't read it much until I was an adult. The church I grew up in wasn't too hot on children reading it much.

But others I have met in my career as a minister had a very different upbringing than I did. The Bible, for them, was The One and Only Answer Book for all questions, the Source of Threats that controlled their lives, the supposed Fountain of prejudice against women and sexual minorities. I know many folks among my friends, and among the people of every Unitarian Universalist congregation I have ever served, who were raised in congregations where the Bible was, quite literally, the supreme authority, "the paper pope," as one critic put it during the Protestant Reformation. Many of these folks who were raised in "hell-fire and damnation" Bible churches tell me that they absolutely detest the book. They squirm in their seat when they hear biblical passages read in church, or at a wedding or funeral. They find it hard to sing biblical texts in a song or anthem. One guy I knew in college even refused to listen to the famous song sung by "The Birds" whenever it came on the radio, "To every thing, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn." Why? Because he found out it was a passage from the Bible (from the Book of Qoholeth/Ecclesiastes).

I have to admit that I was surprised, even dumbfounded, when I came to serve my first Unitarian Universalist church. There I found that some members had come to believe that the historical figure Jesus, the Galilean peasant sage, never even existed, anymore than Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox used to exist.

Since modern rational scholarly consensus rejects that possibility utterly, I asked these folks why they accepted such a belief since it was without any scholarly foundation. More often than not, they would quote some pamphlet they had found listed in the want ads of some skeptical magazine or another, many of which I always read myself. So I would ask if I could read the pamphlet or booklet they had ordered. Unfortunately, when I was done, I would have to tell the folks who lent me the materials, something they didn't really like me saying: "Look, folks, idiosyncratic folks like these authors who deliberately ignore the scholarly work of the last hundred years have an axe to grind, not a proof to offer. They are not using historical methods, or conversing with other scholars, which seems basic to me. Worse, far too often they rely on spurious documents and false reasoning. Footnotes on the typed page do not indicate scholarship; critical and collabora-tive thinking does. I am a pretty skeptical person myself, but I still recognize blurry thinking, disguised as hard skepticism, when I see it."

Now this surely sounds very harsh of me, but as some of you know, biblical scholarship is an area of my expertise. My passion for thorough, reasoned, critical thinking in this area, supported by good evidence, has been a strong spiritual commitment burning in me for thirty years.

But passion like mine, I think you'll agree, can at least recognize the reality of other sorts of passions too.

And so, convinced that a deep passion lay behind all the frantic skepticism I encountered, I interviewed a good number of the folks who expressed their opinion about Jesus. And wouldn't you know it, every single one of them grew up in churches where the Bible, "plainly interpreted," ruled. It was the Absolute Truth.

Thus, when they grew up and began to question their religious faith, and eventually stopped believing in supernatural miracles, they simply gave up the whole thing. They threw out the proverbial baby with the baptismal water. If, they reasoned, Jesus could only be a human being, a mere teacher, and he couldn't be the literal Savior and Son of God who worked wonders and came back to life, then, by God, there simply could be no Jesus.

I reasoned they had been obviously raised on the dictum of the late Christian theologian C.S. Lewis, who fifty years ago came up with this amazingly perverse dissection of reality: "Either Jesus was who He said he was, the Son of God, or else He was a lunatic, like a man who claims to be poached egg."

No, Mr. Lewis. You were very, very wrong about this. It's not either "the evangelical way" or "it's not true at all." I, for one, can think of a thousand other possibilities about whom Jesus could fairly be without even breaking into a sweat.

And so, about ten years ago, when I quoted those words from C.S. Lewis to one of the folks who had come to believe that Jesus was a fiction, she thought about what I said, then responded after a few minutes with an amazingly clear realization: "O my God. I think I am still being a fundamentalist in my thinking, even though I am a complete skeptic about any and all religion. I am still walking around thinking the world breaks on the either/or line. I gave up the content, but not the form. Jesus." Jesus, indeed.

Well, as far as I am concerned, the world is not a binary computer, a reduction to this or that, up or down, left or right. Creation is rich and diverse and alive and so is each and every human being. The flower of truth has more petals than a thousand, thousand chrysanthemums. The history of humanity is complex and deep and many layered, and is never reducible to "it all comes down to."

And so this morning, I come with a few strong things to say about this disturbing symbol called The Bible. I hope that this will be of some small help for at least a few Unitarian Universalists, in all their variety, to feel freer, and less reactive in their engagements with this phenomenon called the Bible, clearly so much a part of Western culture.

Cast your bread on the water. The root of the matter. The skin of my teeth. Am I my brother's keeper? East of Eden. Stranger in a strange land. A person after my own heart. Where there is no vision, the people perish. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die. Let the dead bury the dead. Judge not, that you not be so judged. The hairs of your head are numbered. A pearl of great price. The signs of the times. Do not be afraid. Wars and rumors of wars. They are a law unto themselves. Be not deceived. Don't let the sun go down on your anger. Labor of love.

Each of these phrases comes from the Bible, from both Testaments.

They are the names of novels, or commonly used phrases, or proverbs I hear on the street. I could have given you a thousand more, easily. Most of you, I dare say, would recognize all of them. Jewish and Muslim and secular background folks have little trouble recognizing phrases even from the New Testament, because they are in common use in every English speaking culture. Hardly anyone remembers where these phrases come from. The Bible, due to the influential and noted elegance of the King James translation, has totally suffused itself into our spoken and written language. There is, frankly, no place I can think of where any of us can get far from that book, nor matter how terrible our experiences were with it.

Ah, but that's just it. The Bible is not "a book." Never was. Never will be. The Greek word that Bible comes from, Ta Biblia, is plural. It means, therefore, The Books. The Library. That's right, a library, an anthology, a collection of books written over a thousand year period by at least 150 different authors, both men and women, and of every age and temperament and belief. It was written in three different languages, two of them drastically different in cultural nuance. Critics of the Bible like to point out all the contra-dictions they have found in it, as if this invalidates it. It does contain a thousand contradictions, sure, but you would expect in any good library. On my book shelves I have poetry by May Sarton, philosophy books by Bertrand Russell, history books, story books, essays, rants, skeptical tracts, and science texts.

They contradict each other constantly. The library called the Bible is thus no different than the library in my office, just a lot more compact.

There are also a thousand differing styles and opinions in the Bible, just as there are in my large office library. But then, I wonder, what else would anyone expect from a library but variety, contradiction, and diversity?

Now you may justifiably scoff when I suggest that there is science to be found in the Bible, since the religious Creationists, housed out in San Diego, in my opinion, have made utter buffoons of themselves by saying that the scriptures are against evolution.

Baloney. The book of Bereshith/Genesis is the only book from the entire ancient Near East which describes the sun and the moon, as lamps that help set calendar dates. In every other ancient culture, the sun and moon were gods or goddesses, but in Bereshith, they are things, objects. This is the beginning, not the cancellation, of the scientific attitude found in the West. Yes, even the scientific method. 1. They used good observation. They describe what they saw in the language they best knew. 2. And they avoided all the conventional religious interpretations of the sun and moon. These are true to modern scientific approaches, and this story was first put down long before the Greeks created their own scientific understanding of the world. These tools are still useful to Unitarian Universalists to this day.

Furthermore, how you read anything in the library called the Bible depends a lot on who you are, what your life story is, what concerns you, what you think of yourself, and what your caring communities are. There is going to be an awfully lot of you in the Bible, whenever you look at it. The skeptical journalist H.L. Mencken put this idea, as he always did, very truculently, and at the edge of good taste… "The Holy Bible," he wrote, "is like a mirror. You cannot be a jackass and look into that mirror expecting an apostle to peer back out at you."

He's rude, but he's right. For I say this library is a human book, to be read and interpreted by human beings, neither jackasses nor apostles. Our lives are the text, not ink on the page, as Hyung Kyung Chung reminded us in the first reading. "WE" need to read the library of the Bible as any other set of books…only as a reference. There we are to cherish whatsoever is life giving, and to condemn whatever is death dealing. If you were raised to think of the Bible as The Book, this will be hard to do, I am sure…it's hard to reject some portions and find wisdom in others, for it's all supposed to hang together as a unit. But it doesn't. The so-called "Old Testament" has nothing at all to do, really, with the New Testament, and can be read just fine, in a totally Jewish context, as the Tanak.

The work of freeing ourselves from either/or thinking is excellent spiritual work, I'd say.

But spiritual work doesn't mean lazy thinking. We can scoff about the kosher laws, but might not meditation on those laws help us deal with our modern "kosher" laws? You know what I mean… "Don't eat this, it will kill you with cholesterol." "Don't eat meat, if you do you'll be helping innocent people to starve to death when you do." "Eat meat…protein will make you lose weight," etc.

Or we can also recoil at the violent and terrible war stories found in the Scriptures, like the tale of the Assyrian Senacherib's army being destroyed, 185,000 strong, in a single night by a bright blast from an angel of G-d. But if we are going to climb onto our high horse about that, we had best offer the same critique to the "higher power" who replaces "Yahweh" once modern science dethroned him, to wit, Humankind. For how is the biblical tale any different from the tale of similar large numbers of people being destroyed in a single blast in Hiroshima or Dresden or, more slowly, in Auschwitz or Dachau. To condemn a god for cruelty is self-righteous unless you equally condemn human beings for their entirely equal cruelties. A lot of humanistic optimism, folks, is built on no better evidence for its use than some traditional God-talk is.

Anyway, some books in the Bible may not be asking us to approve of what we read, but rather, to disapprove. We can find our wisdom not worshipping the main characters in the book, but in critiquing them, and studying their awful relationships. The stories of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob are warnings, hardly models. No worse family disasters can be found in modern day sociological studies. And when Tamar, daughter of David, was incestually raped by her half-brother Amnon, an event so horrific that within two generations the Kingdom of Israel fell apart…how is this not a mirror for our present world, where ministers, priests, rabbis, psychologists, social workers, physicians and counselors deal daily with the exact same story, almost word for word? I personally find a sobering, unromantic wisdom in such cautionary tales, I think. This is reality, not pie in the sky fluff. This is fleshy, unashamed, get behind the politeness and deceptions exposés that put us face to face with what it means to be human in all of its omplexity…love, betrayal, venal selfishness, joy, ecstasy, bitterness, resentment, foolishness and failure.

The clever peasant Jesus told stories with multiple characters. Maybe you were told that we should identify with the Good Samaritan, but why? Most of Jesus' stories try to upend self-righteousness on its head, not create more opportunities for it. You could identify with any character in the story, as I tried to make clear in my modern, geographically local version. I could identify with the beaten-up guy, or the helper, or the folks who went past with perfectly rational reasons. There is no evidence that the peasant bard Jesus ever offered us puzzles with right answers…no, he told stories, open-ended, crisp stories…and suggested that we were free to interpret them, discuss them, question them, then question ourselves, our motivations, our dreams.

Is the Bible patriarchal? To patriarchs, yes. But feminists read this library too, and find other revelations and strengths in their critique. Gay men have found the detailed story of David kissing Jonathan and making an oath to love him forever far more compelling than the illogical philosophical spins of the apostle Paul. And Central Americans have read the books in the Bible for years as the spring-board of their dreams of liberation. Identifying with the oppressed and all the human failures in the scriptures, they found instead their strength and anger.

So whether you ever crack the cover again, or whether you find yourself wanting to learn more, I leave all of you with three Unitarian Universalist approaches that have been the hallmarks of our ways with this book for a hundred years, no, a thousand years.

1. Read it as a collection of human books written by many different human beings for human beings to read and wrestle with freely and honestly and without any external church compulsion. Read it preferably in groups.
2. Although the Tower of Babel story seems to paint the folk picture of a god jealous of human creativity, I read it differently. It says that if you want to get anything done, to build what our ancestors called the City of God, you have to stop speaking confusing dialects and find a common language. You have to work together. Sure, if you concentrate on your own aggrandizement first and ignore the common group work, you should be called to task. But to build anything great, a common language is necessary. Critical, transnational, historical scholarship by collaborative scholars has been, and still is, that language for us as Unitarian Universalists. There is no compelling reason to accept Baptist, Catholic, or Fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible as normative when we, in fact, have our own tradition, which is excellent.
3. Finally, always look for life and liberty in the scriptures, not foolishness or modern physics or expressions of hatred. Use your good and difficult lives as the text…and let the books in the Bible be only mirrors for what is in your best heart.

I conclude with this wonderful story. Elias Hicks, the founder of the Hicksite Quakers, once was seen throwing a copy of the King James into a trash can. The weighty Quakers at his Meeting saw this and complained against the blasphemy. But he responded, "If you can't find the text written here (pointing to his heart) you will never find it on sheets of paper pulp covered with printer's ink." I agree. And thus I am sure that if any of you, as a human being, choose to look into that mirror of scripture, another human being, just as amazing as you, will gaze back out at you. We may joyfully laugh at our children's misunderstanding of the ancient stories, but in the end, I hope that, as grown ups, no matter how we were raised, we can find in the Western Scriptures, if not a blueprint for our own religion, then at least a helpful, honest, spiritual exposé of what it means to be human.

Psalm 151 [back to top]

Praise the tympani of the thunder and lightning,
Praise the harp of the wind, and the strings of the rain and snow playing serenades in good season.
Praise the sunrise, soft as the solo of a flute, or praise the sunset, as loud and golden as a hundred trombones.
Praise all who sing, bright as the morning stars chorusing at the dawn of creation.
Praise the keys of the piano, and the hands that play, cooperating with the powers of creation itself.
Praise it! The freedom in our hearts to sing not matter how much we were shamed into not singing!
Praise it! The freedom to make every dissonance resolve in harmonies.
Praise it! The everlasting Liberty that harmonizes human heart with human heart.
Praise it! Praise the Liberty which sounds along the ages, today, tomorrow and until the last measure of time.

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