“What I Learned in Confirmation: What Is the Bible?”
Rev. Leah Lyman Waldron
Park Avenue Congregational Church, UCC
June 23, 2024
Jacob sent his family across the river and stayed behind by himself, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he couldn’t get the best of Jacob as they wrestled, he deliberately threw Jacob’s hip out of joint.
The man said, “Let me go; it’s daybreak.”
Jacob said, “I’m not letting you go ’til you bless me.”
The man said, “What’s your name?”
He answered, “Jacob.”
The man said, “Not any longer. From now on your name is Israel (God-Wrestler); you’ve wrestled with God and you’ve come through.”
Jacob asked, “And what’s your name?”
The man said, “Why do you want to know my name?” And then, right then and there, he blessed him.
Jacob named the place Peniel (God’s Face) because, he said, “I saw God face-to-face and lived to tell the story!” The sun came up as he left Peniel, limping because of his hip.
Matthew 22:34-40
When the Pharisees heard how Jesus had bested the Sadducees, they gathered their forces to test him. One of their religion scholars spoke for them, posing a question they hoped would show him up: “Teacher, which command in God’s Law is the most important?”
Jesus said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’ This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’ These two commands are pegs; everything in God’s Law and the Prophets hangs from them.”
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I grew up in the 1990s, when What Would Jesus Do? bracelets and Christian pop music spread beyond the confines of the evangelical circles where they had started, and so I, a child of the theologically liberal mainline Protestant church, found myself listening to bands like DC Talk, Jars of Clay, and a group called Burlap to Cashmere, with a song titled “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” If you’re writing down acronyms at home, you’ll find this stands for BIBLE: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.
I don’t remember much of the song other than its title and its Mediterranean beat, but it represents a pretty common way Christians talk about our sacred scripture: as an instruction manual or a guidebook where we can find the right answers for how to live our lives now and how to get to heaven after we die (hence the “before leaving Earth” part of the catchphrase).
But the Bible is not an instruction manual, a guide book, or even a book at all; it’s a library, a collection of books in very different genres, written by lots of different people from lots of different perspectives, hundreds of years apart, for all sorts of reasons: origin stories to explain why things are the way they are; historical records of which kings ruled when; prophetic speeches calling out the rich and powerful; laments over great tragedies; satires to reflect our foibles; letters to encourage new churches; collections of wise sayings; and lots of poetry–including a book of pretty steamy love poems. It’s not meant to tell us just one way to do things; it’s meant to get us to see how other people of faith have lived out their relationships with God, and to pull us deeper into our own relationship with God.
Sometimes well-meaning people who want us to read the Bible more often say that we can just open the Bible and dive in and we’ll magically feel closer to God; but because of this diversity, it’s not that straightforward. Some parts of the Bible are pretty accessible, like the Psalms with their poetry exploring the human condition through universal feelings, from sorrow to fear to despair to contentment to joy; you can flip to many of them and find a connection both with the poet and with the God about whom the poet writes so passionately.
But if you happen to flip open to Paul’s letter to the Romans, which is a masterpiece of first-century Hellenist rhetoric that sometimes reads to us in modern-day America like one of those M. C. Escher drawings that loops back in on itself; or to John’s gospel, some of which is so lovely–and some of which sounds like M.C. Escher got really deep into mysticism and then drew staircases that all collapse on each other; or if you hit Numbers, which features endless genealogies and a remix of the Ten Commandments that’s different from the one in Exodus; and you don’t know the historical or cultural or religious or literary context, or you don’t realize that the English language editors of the particular version you’re reading chose one translation of a key word over another – you may very well miss the point.
For example: do you remember that story in Genesis about God telling Abraham to cut up a bunch of animals and walk through them, only to have just a torch and a smoking firepot go through, and it makes absolutely no sense until you know that that’s how ancient people used to seal covenants, and God is demonstrating that God is going to be responsible for upholding both ends of this new covenant, even when Abraham or his descendants (that’s us) mess things up? Then there’s Jonah, which often gets mistaken for a morality tale about how if you don’t do what God wants, God will hunt you down and make you obey; but really it’s a hilarious satire about our willingness to hate our enemies so much we don’t want even want them to stop their bad behavior, lest they be forgiven. And don’t get me started on the number of times a Bible story mentions “feet” but really means something else entirely–like when Ruth, who is trying to convince Boaz to marry her, lays down next to him while he’s asleep on the threshing floor and uncovers his “feet”; if you think they’re talking about literal feet, you will be very confused.
Ruth is actually one of my favorite books for demonstrating that there is a lot going on behind the scenes in the Bible. Scholars believe it was written in response to another book in the Bible– well, a two-parter, Ezra-Nehemiah–about, in part, how the Israelites should view foreigners. In Ezra-Nehemiah, the religious, social, and political elite had finally returned home to Israel after half a century of exile, and they were confronted with the fact that the people who had remained behind had intermarried with women from neighboring countries who had brought their own religious practices with them and thus were introducing the Israelites to other gods. (It’s so convenient to blame the women, isn’t it?) So in the name of re-establishing the purity of their religion, the leaders of the recent returnees declare that the men who had married these foreign, idolatrous women must divorce them and cast out any children born from their unions. Thanks to the patriarchal culture of the time, that left a lot of women and children not just heartbroken, but destitute.
The author of Ruth must have read Ezra-Nehemiah and decided this approach was nonsense, because they wrote a rebuttal: the story of Ruth, who hails from Israel’s sworn enemy Moab. Ruth follows her mother-in-law Naomi back to Israel, where she not only becomes a faithful follower of Yahweh but, through that little incident with the “feet” I mentioned earlier, marries Boaz and becomes the great-grandmother of King David. The idea that David–the man after God’s own heart, the messianic archetype, the most important king, the one whose dynasty Ezra-Nehemiah is trying to reestablish–would not exist if not for the faith of this foreign, formerly idol-worshiping woman–the exact kind of person the authors of Ezra-Nehemiah blamed for Israel’s woes–is meant to remind the audience that in their religion there are bigger, more foundational themes at work than the xenophobia Ezra-Nehemiah is promoting: themes like hesed, the divine, compassionate loving-kindness we’re supposed to emulate; or like God’s repeated insistence, enshrined in law, that the people of Israel must care for widows, orphans, and the stranger, for they were once strangers themselves, and through strangers many blessings have come to them; not to mention their call to become a blessing to all other nations regardless of which ones they’d like to call enemies.
So here we have two completely opposing agendas: to cast foreigners as a threat to the monotheism at the heart of Judaism; and to cast foreigners as an asset, a gift, indeed as the very lifeblood without which the Jewish faith as they knew it would have fallen apart (because after all, if there’s no Ruth, there is no King David, and no Solomon after him to build the Temple).
It’s fascinating to me that Christians can look at the Bible, this library that has two books arguing against each other–not to mention two versions of the creation story, two versions of the ten commandments and the Exodus; and four versions of the gospel, each of which sometimes directly repudiates their counterparts–and think that there is one clear, consistent, literal way to interpret scripture because the Word of God is inerrant and does not contradict itself.
So what do we do with the places where scripture disagrees with itself, or when we disagree with scripture–where the Bible speaks both for and against slavery, for example, or where Paul or Leviticus says something clearly homophobic, but from our experience of each of our belovedness in God’s eyes, as we talked about last week, we just don’t believe that that’s how God sees queer people?
We choose what’s called a hermeneutical key. “Hermeneutical” is a fancy way to say “interpretive,” so when we choose a hermeneutical key, we are choosing an interpretive lens through which we want to see the Bible–a set of values that help us decide which narratives, which voices we prioritize above others. Because whether they realize it or not, every Christian does this, even–maybe especially–when they insist they are being objective, because we all bring our own perspectives and priorities to this wildly diverse library.
Because of that diversity, there are lots of big, overarching themes in the Bible, and thus lots of different hermeneutical keys, lots of interpretive lenses, you could choose to help shape the way you engage it: obedience, purity, trust, hospitality, judgment, justice, grace, righteousness, hesed (that divine loving-kindness we mentioned before); and more.
I have two, overlapping favorite hermeneutical keys, both of which come right on out and scream “Here is the point, people!” in flashing lights: one is Micah 6:8, where the prophet asks this trenchant question: “What does the Lord your God require from you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” A juicy little justice-hesed-humility combo.
The other is our Gospel passage from this morning, where a religious scholar–some versions say a lawyer; sorry, Mike–tries to trap Jesus by asking him to choose the most important commandment. Jesus responds with his hermeneutical key: “Love God, and your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang everything else.”
So if anything in scripture–or anyone’s interpretation of scripture–seems to be encouraging me to shy away from justice, or to act cruelly or arrogantly; to harm or hate my neighbor or myself, or to relate to God out of fear or rote obedience or anything besides love and deep companionship–I know it’s time for a closer look.
I say a closer look because choosing a hermeneutical key, an interpretive lens doesn’t mean we just refuse to see the bits of the Bible that don’t fit our lens; that’s dishonest, because those bits have been part of the Chrisitan tradition for almost two thousand years, and we have to reckon with the ways they have informed, and sometimes de-formed, our faith. Instead, it means we wrestle with those distasteful or uncomfortable bits, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, and we decide whether they call us to confront a truth we’d rather not face (like Jacob realizing he had wronged his brother and needed to make it right, or Jonah about hating our enemies, or Jesus’ teachings on money which we so often sweep conveniently under the rug)–or whether they are part of a legacy of oppression or shame that we can confidently reject.
And when it comes to a part we’ve decided we want to reject, we can do a few things: we can hold it up as a record of a time when God’s people didn’t relate to God or to one another rightly, and we can consciously work to avoid repeating it; and we can do what Peter did when God told him it was time to open the early church to Gentiles: we can recognize God is doing a new thing that we can choose to be a part of it. (That’s another favorite hermeneutical key of mine, by the way: looking for where in the Bible and in our world God’s liberative love is at work, even–maybe especially if–it contradicts our previous understandings.)
In our tradition, we often say we take the Bible seriously but not literally, which means we engage and wrestle with it because we believe it has something to say to us about living life with God and in God’s way; but we also believe that when we insist that it all literally had to happen exactly as the Bible says, or we confine it to just one unyielding interpretation, we rob the Bible of a lot of its beauty and power to help us understand things metaphorically and to speak to us in different ways as we grow and change as people.
Because as we told our confirmands, neither the Bible nor our faith is about having one right set of answers. They’re about having a good set of questions. When you are asking good questions–“How can I be a truer, better version of who God has made me to be?” “How can we change our relationship to care for Creation instead of exploiting it?” “Who is benefitting from the way our society is organized and who is getting left out?” “What makes me feel more alive and what makes me feel closed off from God and others?” “How can I live God’s grace-filled love in this difficult situation?”–you will get better and better at evolving your answers as you go along, and at being flexible when God surprises you with a new answer you hadn’t thought of before. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke says it this way: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” Don’t fixate on figuring out one answer, but “Live the questions now.”
May we live the questions, together, through the stories of scripture and in the stories of our lives, now. Amen.