Coming Out
January 03, 2010
January 3, 2010
Rev. Susan E. Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6, John 1:1-18
Don’t beginnings fascinate us? Surely we know we are entering a place of wonder when we hear words such as “Once upon a time…” or “In the beginning….” And our own new beginnings are places of wonder, too – a new year, a new home, a new job, a new chapter in our lives – each of these seems to hold such promise. There’s a sense of possibility and hope. And so here we are at the beginning of a new journey around the sun on this fragile planet, and it is a time of new hope for many of us. And this Sunday, the Gospel reading for our New Year beginning is the beginning of the Gospel of John – a beginning that, in approaching the beginning of Jesus, takes us back to the beginning of beginnings. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. These verses have inspired many, and also have confounded many – what does it mean?
First of all, let’s understand that this passage is as much poetry as it is analysis. And in being both at once, it is still theology. This passage is a great example of how the Bible baffles and bothers many modern folks, and why some simply can’t take it seriously. But, putting my cards on the table, I will argue in this sermon that it is entirely appropriate for reasonable, intelligent people to take the Bible…and Jesus…seriously. For me, this passage is a beautiful – poetic – affirmation about the Word of God as it is found in the Bible and in Jesus.
Today is a beginning of another sort for some of our members – it is the beginning of their terms or second terms as church officers. Each of our officers will be ordained – which is for life – and installed – which is for the term of their office. And when they are ordained or installed, as in every ordination or installation of a Deacon, Elder or Minister, they will answer the ordination questions. And the first two questions are about Jesus and the Bible. They are: Do you trust in Jesus Christ your Savior, acknowledge him Lord of all and Head of the Church, and through him believe in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? And: Do you accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and God’s Word to you?
Recently, in the feedback from our Frame the Future strategic planning, many folks said that they understood Frame to be a theologically liberal church – can those who are liberal or progressive theologically say yes to these questions? Yes, we can.
Part of our problem with the Bible is the way others regard it. Those of us who are theologically liberal or progressive find the literalist approach to be both intellectually and personally distasteful. We can’t imagine ever having such a naïve, unquestioning approach as those who are of the “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” camp. How can people think that way, we wonder – don’t they notice the inconsistencies in the Bible? After all, there are many – most easily noticed in the Gospels where we have parallel accounts of events that simply don’t agree.
In addition to that, there are a number of stories in both Old and New Testaments that seem too fantastic to be believable to some folks. While one response to these stories is to say - yes, they are fantastic, that’s why they were recorded in the Bible, and that’s certainly an appropriate response – for some folks, the miracle stories in the Bible are not believable under any circumstances, and that creates another barrier to the Bible.
And, some of us are offended by the way some folks, often those who read the Bible from a more literal perspective, will use the Bible as a weapon against others – against women, against gays, against non-Christians – and we are offended that the same folks who take the occasional injunction against gays or lesbians literally will rarely find themselves challenged to a more open stance on immigration, despite the Bible’s consistent and repetitive injunction to welcome the stranger and the alien among us. This habit of plucking out certain passages, usually disregarding their context, and using them as a moral authority is called “proof-texting” and it is an irresponsible, and indeed abusive, way of using the Bible. It takes a couple of verses and uses them in ways that are inconsistent with the broader Biblical witness of love, inclusion, and ministry at the margins – ministry to and by folks who have not always been validated by the broader society.
But then some go to the other extreme and reason that if the Bible is inconsistent in places, or if it can’t be read as a checklist, or if it doesn’t seem reliable factually, then how can it be a valuable, much less authoritative book for us in our times? And yet, in a few moments, our church officers are (I presume) going to answer affirmatively when asked, whether the Bible is a unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ and God’s word to them, as indeed I said “I do” when I was asked the same question during my installation here almost 4 years ago.
How is it possible to take the Bible seriously but not literally? How is it possible to regard this ancient book as authoritative in these modern times? And especially how is it possible for a modern, intelligent person to think of the Bible as God’s Word to us?
First of all, regarding the issue of the factuality of the Bible – often people confuse truth with facts. While in the case of legal testimony, they may be equivalent, it is not the case in all kinds of testimony. In the case of the Biblical witness, much of it is written as parable – in fact, the book The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan argues that the birth narratives are parables rather than history. They are not intended as a reporting of the facts of the birth of Jesus so much as they are a narrative describing the meaning of this gifted and unique person, Jesus. Crossan and Borg describe a challenge for us in the post-Enlightenment culture that is grounded in rationalism in that we are vulnerable to what scholar Huston Smith calls “fact fundamentalism” in which modern folks often believe that truth is limited to what can be verified, and that facts and truth are identical. This is a smaller view of truth than has come to us in the Bible. In the Bible, as in literature and poetry, allegory and metaphor help us to understand truth even though they may be devoid of facts. When the poet says, “My love is a red red rose” we don’t imagine for a moment that the beloved is tall, spiky, and has a large red head – we understand that the lover is making a comparison between the delight in the beauty of the rose, and the delight in the person or beauty of the beloved.
And as we recognize our own rationalist worldview, we need to remember that the writers of the Bible during a period of over a thousand years, ending not quite two thousand years ago did not write from that worldview, and we should not read it as if it were written with the same assumptions that we usually bring to a modern text.
It is precisely because I take the Bible seriously that I do not limit myself to understanding it literally or as a simple reporting of facts. It is bigger than that – the Bible doesn’t so much purport to tell us what exactly has happened as the meaning of what has happened. Did the Red Sea part before the Hebrew people as they fled from Egypt? Did manna fall from the skies every night? Was God visually present as a pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know what the facts were. I do know that the Hebrew people had a profound experience of being substantively cared for and guided by God, and that is the meaning of the stories, whether they are factual or not. Be clear about what I am saying please – I am not saying that I believe those stories are not factual. I am saying that the important dimension of their truth is for me, not about the facts so much as it is about their meaning. I , too, have experienced times of being miraculously substantively cared for and guided by God – I won‘t bore you with the facts but I can totally affirm the meaning of these stories as being an experience that is familiar to me, and deeply definitive of my identity as a person of God. And I know some of you have similar experiences.
Regarding the consistency of the Bible – we find that it is, in fact, largely consistent if we understand that God is always pulling God’s people forward. Some of you have heard me say this before, but it’s important and brief enough to say again. When we take the time, and effort, to learn about the context into which an original story was told, we often learn that it was progressive in its time. As an example, when in the Old Testament, the teaching was given of an eye for an eye, a life for a life, it was given as a limiting teaching – people were no longer permitted to destroy an entire family in retribution, but were only permitted to punish the person who committed the crime. Then later, Jesus pushed humanity forward again, teaching “You have heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also….” And so Jesus taught an assertive, yet non-violent way to respond to violence.
One of the problems we have in the Christian tradition is that, perhaps because of the Emperor Constantine’s efforts to establish in Christianity a consistent philosophy to guide his empire, we’ve taken a simple approach to the Bible, and looked for THE meaning in any given passage, as though it only contained a single version of wisdom. As Ched Myers wrote in an article in Sojourners’ Magazine, “Questing after (or insisting upon) the ‘one true reading’ is neither the only nor the best way to honor the authority of scripture. Indeed it may concede too much power to the interpreter. We Christians might do better to rediscover a more Jewish approach. The rabbinic tradition, broadly speaking, has seemed more comfortable with the notion that only a multiplicity of approaches can do justice to the marvelously deep and wide spectrum of meaning(s) in the sacred texts. This both preserves the text as the center of the community and allows us to offer our various interpretive efforts to the body for discernment.” There is a saying that gets at this rabbinic tradition: when you have 5 Jews there are 6 opinions. This is not a critique or an accusation of argumentativeness, it is a description of the fertile ground of discussions that permit more than one meaning to surface. And when we recognize that the Bible itself is really a conversation – a collection of different experiences of God – we can find truth in that conversation. The Bible is the Living Word of God, because the people of God can, in conversation with each other and in reflection with God continually find new truth in its stories – it is a deep well of meaning.
And so is the prologue to the Gospel of John. Logos is the Greek word translated as “Word” in the prologue to John – and it is a term that is richer than simply ‘word’. The Stoics, earlier than Jesus, understood Logos as reason, which they understood as being the creative force in the world, and they also understood as being physical – an incarnate, organized, creative mind. Philo, a Greek Jew writing at about the time of Jesus, understood ‘logos’ to be the mediator between the imperfect world and the perfection of God. John used the term ‘logos’, in describing both the Word of God in the world and describing Jesus – suggesting that just as a word articulates a thought, so too did Jesus communicate the meaning of God into the world through his life. It is a different kind of beginning than we get in Matthew or Luke, but it is similar in that its intent is to describe the meaning of Jesus to the world.
Yes, I take the Bible and Jesus seriously. Yes, I am a liberal, or progressive, Christian. I believe in inclusion, I believe in social justice, and I believe that Jesus shows us how humans are created to live. I remember an interview on NPR some time back with a woman who was described as a moderate Muslim. It was a fascinating interview and at one point she said something like, “I do not like being described as a moderate Muslim, because I am not moderate about my faith – I am passionately and totally committed to it.” I agree – for too long, liberal has seemed to mean ‘casual’ in describing Christians. About 15 years ago, when I was doing my student ministry, one of my supervisors in that church described me as a “liberal evangelical” – meaning that I am passionate about my faith and immoderate in my commitment to it, while being in a faith stance that is welcoming, inclusive, and committed to pluralism, ecumenism, and social justice. In this community that describes itself as theologically liberal; I am coming out as an evangelical, in the original sense of the word as one who centers their life in the Word of God – in Jesus, the Word living; in the Bible that testifies to a variety of human experiences of God, the Word written; and in seeking to be transformed in my own life by God, the Word proclaimed. In this sense, evangelical means someone for whom the Good News of God’s love is central, not peripheral. It has nothing to do with being literal, or self-righteous, or proselytizing.
I tend to stand with Gandhi, who said “I came to the conclusion long ago … that all religions were true and also that all had some error in them, and whilst I hold by my own, I should hold others as dear as Hinduism. So we can only pray, if we are Hindus, not that a Christian should become a Hindu … But our innermost prayer should be a Hindu should be a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim, a Christian a better Christian.”
This Wednesday will be Epiphany, and this is the Sunday closest to it, when we celebrate the Epiphany in two dimensions. One is that it describes the arrival of the Magi, visiting the young Jesus and presenting gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. In this sense epiphany describes the dimension of Christianity that reaches out beyond the original Jewish community in openness to the whole world. The other sense of epiphany is its meaning as a sudden realization of the meaning of reality – a new insight into life. And in that sense, our celebration of Epiphany celebrates the new understandings that we occasionally receive in our journeys with God – arise, shine, for your light has come, says the prophet Isaiah, and we, too, find ourselves enlightened from time to time by God, experiencing our own epiphanies. In the coming year may we find ourselves both seeing and bearing new light in God. Amen.
Rev. Susan E. Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6, John 1:1-18
Don’t beginnings fascinate us? Surely we know we are entering a place of wonder when we hear words such as “Once upon a time…” or “In the beginning….” And our own new beginnings are places of wonder, too – a new year, a new home, a new job, a new chapter in our lives – each of these seems to hold such promise. There’s a sense of possibility and hope. And so here we are at the beginning of a new journey around the sun on this fragile planet, and it is a time of new hope for many of us. And this Sunday, the Gospel reading for our New Year beginning is the beginning of the Gospel of John – a beginning that, in approaching the beginning of Jesus, takes us back to the beginning of beginnings. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. These verses have inspired many, and also have confounded many – what does it mean?
First of all, let’s understand that this passage is as much poetry as it is analysis. And in being both at once, it is still theology. This passage is a great example of how the Bible baffles and bothers many modern folks, and why some simply can’t take it seriously. But, putting my cards on the table, I will argue in this sermon that it is entirely appropriate for reasonable, intelligent people to take the Bible…and Jesus…seriously. For me, this passage is a beautiful – poetic – affirmation about the Word of God as it is found in the Bible and in Jesus.
Today is a beginning of another sort for some of our members – it is the beginning of their terms or second terms as church officers. Each of our officers will be ordained – which is for life – and installed – which is for the term of their office. And when they are ordained or installed, as in every ordination or installation of a Deacon, Elder or Minister, they will answer the ordination questions. And the first two questions are about Jesus and the Bible. They are: Do you trust in Jesus Christ your Savior, acknowledge him Lord of all and Head of the Church, and through him believe in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? And: Do you accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and God’s Word to you?
Recently, in the feedback from our Frame the Future strategic planning, many folks said that they understood Frame to be a theologically liberal church – can those who are liberal or progressive theologically say yes to these questions? Yes, we can.
Part of our problem with the Bible is the way others regard it. Those of us who are theologically liberal or progressive find the literalist approach to be both intellectually and personally distasteful. We can’t imagine ever having such a naïve, unquestioning approach as those who are of the “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” camp. How can people think that way, we wonder – don’t they notice the inconsistencies in the Bible? After all, there are many – most easily noticed in the Gospels where we have parallel accounts of events that simply don’t agree.
In addition to that, there are a number of stories in both Old and New Testaments that seem too fantastic to be believable to some folks. While one response to these stories is to say - yes, they are fantastic, that’s why they were recorded in the Bible, and that’s certainly an appropriate response – for some folks, the miracle stories in the Bible are not believable under any circumstances, and that creates another barrier to the Bible.
And, some of us are offended by the way some folks, often those who read the Bible from a more literal perspective, will use the Bible as a weapon against others – against women, against gays, against non-Christians – and we are offended that the same folks who take the occasional injunction against gays or lesbians literally will rarely find themselves challenged to a more open stance on immigration, despite the Bible’s consistent and repetitive injunction to welcome the stranger and the alien among us. This habit of plucking out certain passages, usually disregarding their context, and using them as a moral authority is called “proof-texting” and it is an irresponsible, and indeed abusive, way of using the Bible. It takes a couple of verses and uses them in ways that are inconsistent with the broader Biblical witness of love, inclusion, and ministry at the margins – ministry to and by folks who have not always been validated by the broader society.
But then some go to the other extreme and reason that if the Bible is inconsistent in places, or if it can’t be read as a checklist, or if it doesn’t seem reliable factually, then how can it be a valuable, much less authoritative book for us in our times? And yet, in a few moments, our church officers are (I presume) going to answer affirmatively when asked, whether the Bible is a unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ and God’s word to them, as indeed I said “I do” when I was asked the same question during my installation here almost 4 years ago.
How is it possible to take the Bible seriously but not literally? How is it possible to regard this ancient book as authoritative in these modern times? And especially how is it possible for a modern, intelligent person to think of the Bible as God’s Word to us?
First of all, regarding the issue of the factuality of the Bible – often people confuse truth with facts. While in the case of legal testimony, they may be equivalent, it is not the case in all kinds of testimony. In the case of the Biblical witness, much of it is written as parable – in fact, the book The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan argues that the birth narratives are parables rather than history. They are not intended as a reporting of the facts of the birth of Jesus so much as they are a narrative describing the meaning of this gifted and unique person, Jesus. Crossan and Borg describe a challenge for us in the post-Enlightenment culture that is grounded in rationalism in that we are vulnerable to what scholar Huston Smith calls “fact fundamentalism” in which modern folks often believe that truth is limited to what can be verified, and that facts and truth are identical. This is a smaller view of truth than has come to us in the Bible. In the Bible, as in literature and poetry, allegory and metaphor help us to understand truth even though they may be devoid of facts. When the poet says, “My love is a red red rose” we don’t imagine for a moment that the beloved is tall, spiky, and has a large red head – we understand that the lover is making a comparison between the delight in the beauty of the rose, and the delight in the person or beauty of the beloved.
And as we recognize our own rationalist worldview, we need to remember that the writers of the Bible during a period of over a thousand years, ending not quite two thousand years ago did not write from that worldview, and we should not read it as if it were written with the same assumptions that we usually bring to a modern text.
It is precisely because I take the Bible seriously that I do not limit myself to understanding it literally or as a simple reporting of facts. It is bigger than that – the Bible doesn’t so much purport to tell us what exactly has happened as the meaning of what has happened. Did the Red Sea part before the Hebrew people as they fled from Egypt? Did manna fall from the skies every night? Was God visually present as a pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know what the facts were. I do know that the Hebrew people had a profound experience of being substantively cared for and guided by God, and that is the meaning of the stories, whether they are factual or not. Be clear about what I am saying please – I am not saying that I believe those stories are not factual. I am saying that the important dimension of their truth is for me, not about the facts so much as it is about their meaning. I , too, have experienced times of being miraculously substantively cared for and guided by God – I won‘t bore you with the facts but I can totally affirm the meaning of these stories as being an experience that is familiar to me, and deeply definitive of my identity as a person of God. And I know some of you have similar experiences.
Regarding the consistency of the Bible – we find that it is, in fact, largely consistent if we understand that God is always pulling God’s people forward. Some of you have heard me say this before, but it’s important and brief enough to say again. When we take the time, and effort, to learn about the context into which an original story was told, we often learn that it was progressive in its time. As an example, when in the Old Testament, the teaching was given of an eye for an eye, a life for a life, it was given as a limiting teaching – people were no longer permitted to destroy an entire family in retribution, but were only permitted to punish the person who committed the crime. Then later, Jesus pushed humanity forward again, teaching “You have heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also….” And so Jesus taught an assertive, yet non-violent way to respond to violence.
One of the problems we have in the Christian tradition is that, perhaps because of the Emperor Constantine’s efforts to establish in Christianity a consistent philosophy to guide his empire, we’ve taken a simple approach to the Bible, and looked for THE meaning in any given passage, as though it only contained a single version of wisdom. As Ched Myers wrote in an article in Sojourners’ Magazine, “Questing after (or insisting upon) the ‘one true reading’ is neither the only nor the best way to honor the authority of scripture. Indeed it may concede too much power to the interpreter. We Christians might do better to rediscover a more Jewish approach. The rabbinic tradition, broadly speaking, has seemed more comfortable with the notion that only a multiplicity of approaches can do justice to the marvelously deep and wide spectrum of meaning(s) in the sacred texts. This both preserves the text as the center of the community and allows us to offer our various interpretive efforts to the body for discernment.” There is a saying that gets at this rabbinic tradition: when you have 5 Jews there are 6 opinions. This is not a critique or an accusation of argumentativeness, it is a description of the fertile ground of discussions that permit more than one meaning to surface. And when we recognize that the Bible itself is really a conversation – a collection of different experiences of God – we can find truth in that conversation. The Bible is the Living Word of God, because the people of God can, in conversation with each other and in reflection with God continually find new truth in its stories – it is a deep well of meaning.
And so is the prologue to the Gospel of John. Logos is the Greek word translated as “Word” in the prologue to John – and it is a term that is richer than simply ‘word’. The Stoics, earlier than Jesus, understood Logos as reason, which they understood as being the creative force in the world, and they also understood as being physical – an incarnate, organized, creative mind. Philo, a Greek Jew writing at about the time of Jesus, understood ‘logos’ to be the mediator between the imperfect world and the perfection of God. John used the term ‘logos’, in describing both the Word of God in the world and describing Jesus – suggesting that just as a word articulates a thought, so too did Jesus communicate the meaning of God into the world through his life. It is a different kind of beginning than we get in Matthew or Luke, but it is similar in that its intent is to describe the meaning of Jesus to the world.
Yes, I take the Bible and Jesus seriously. Yes, I am a liberal, or progressive, Christian. I believe in inclusion, I believe in social justice, and I believe that Jesus shows us how humans are created to live. I remember an interview on NPR some time back with a woman who was described as a moderate Muslim. It was a fascinating interview and at one point she said something like, “I do not like being described as a moderate Muslim, because I am not moderate about my faith – I am passionately and totally committed to it.” I agree – for too long, liberal has seemed to mean ‘casual’ in describing Christians. About 15 years ago, when I was doing my student ministry, one of my supervisors in that church described me as a “liberal evangelical” – meaning that I am passionate about my faith and immoderate in my commitment to it, while being in a faith stance that is welcoming, inclusive, and committed to pluralism, ecumenism, and social justice. In this community that describes itself as theologically liberal; I am coming out as an evangelical, in the original sense of the word as one who centers their life in the Word of God – in Jesus, the Word living; in the Bible that testifies to a variety of human experiences of God, the Word written; and in seeking to be transformed in my own life by God, the Word proclaimed. In this sense, evangelical means someone for whom the Good News of God’s love is central, not peripheral. It has nothing to do with being literal, or self-righteous, or proselytizing.
I tend to stand with Gandhi, who said “I came to the conclusion long ago … that all religions were true and also that all had some error in them, and whilst I hold by my own, I should hold others as dear as Hinduism. So we can only pray, if we are Hindus, not that a Christian should become a Hindu … But our innermost prayer should be a Hindu should be a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim, a Christian a better Christian.”
This Wednesday will be Epiphany, and this is the Sunday closest to it, when we celebrate the Epiphany in two dimensions. One is that it describes the arrival of the Magi, visiting the young Jesus and presenting gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. In this sense epiphany describes the dimension of Christianity that reaches out beyond the original Jewish community in openness to the whole world. The other sense of epiphany is its meaning as a sudden realization of the meaning of reality – a new insight into life. And in that sense, our celebration of Epiphany celebrates the new understandings that we occasionally receive in our journeys with God – arise, shine, for your light has come, says the prophet Isaiah, and we, too, find ourselves enlightened from time to time by God, experiencing our own epiphanies. In the coming year may we find ourselves both seeing and bearing new light in God. Amen.