BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH
Sermon and Readings: “What the Bible has to offer”
by John Kennison
September 17, 2023
Added page numbers refer to the book Reading the Bible again, for the First Time by Borg. Also, the two readings are excerpts from this book.
First Reading: The Conflict over the Bible. by Marcus Borg (pp 4-5)
Conflict about how to see and read the Bible is the single greatest issue dividing Christians in North America today. On one side of the divide are fundamentalists and . . . many conservative evangelical Christians.
. . . For these Christians, the Bible is to be interpreted literally unless the language of a particular passage is clearly metaphorical. From their point of view, allowing nonliteral interpretations opens the doors to evading the Bible’s authority and making it say what we want it to say. They typically see themselves [approaching] the Bible with utmost seriousness and often criticize moderate-to-liberal Christians for watering it down. They also commonly see themselves as affirming “the old time religion”—that is Christianity as it was before the modern period. . . . In fact, as we will see, their approach is itself modern and largely the product of a particular form of . . . twentieth century Protestant theology
The second group of Christians, most of whom are found in mainline churches, are less clear about how they . ,. , see the Bible than about how they do not. They are strongly convinced that many parts of the Bible cannot be taken literally, either as historically factual or as expressing the will of God. Though they reject grounding the Bible’s authority in its infallibility, they are unsure what “Biblical authority” might mean.
The conflicts about the Bible are most publicly visible in discussions of three issues. First, in some Christian circles, "creation vs evolution” is the primary litmus test of loyalty to the Bible. The second issue is homosexuality (I note that this book was written in 2001, today the issue would probably include transgenderism.) The third issue concerns the question of the historical Jesus.
Second Reading: The Historical-Metaphorical approach to the Bible by Borg (p.14)
Both adjectives in the phrase “historical-metaphorical approach” are crucially important. . . . I will compactly define each before describing them [further].
By the “historical approach” I mean all the methods that are relevant to discerning the ancient historical meanings of biblical texts. The chief concern of the historical approach is the past tense question “What did the text mean in the ancient historical framework in which it is written?”
By the “metaphorical approach,” I mean most broadly a nonliteral way of reading biblical texts. A metaphorical reading does not confine itself to the literal, factual, and historical meanings of a text. It moves beyond to the question, “What does the story mean as a story independent of its historical factuality. . . .,
The historical study of the Bible is one of the glories of modern scholarship. It has been immensely illuminating, . . . setting biblical passages in their ancient context makes them come alive. . . ,.
A metaphorical approach to the Bible emphasizes seeing, not believing. The point is not to believe in a metaphor, but to see in light of it.
Sermon: What does the Bible have to Offer? By John Kennison
Marcus Borg feels that the Bible is far too good a book to be read only by ultraconservative Christians. Moreover, Borg feels that these Christians don’t know how to read the bible. The stories in the Bible contain wisdom when read metaphorically. The fundamentalist doctrine of taking the Bible literally was formulated in the early twentieth century as a reaction to modernity, with its discounting of stories involving miracles.(pp. 14-18, Borg on Modernity and Post-Modernity) The ancient Christians knew how to be uplifted and made wiser by the Bible, without feeling that an effective faith demanded literal acceptance of these enchanting tales.
Borg’s approach to reading the Bible involves being aware of the historical context of the stories and being on the look out for metaphors. To see how this works, we will start by examining the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and the creation of the world in 6 days. The Bible actually presents two versions of the story. In one version Adam is created on the sixth day but in the other version Adam is created on the first day.(p.63) For a while this turned out to be a stumbling block for me because I couldn’t resist thinking about the many ways I could prove that the story cannot be literally true. I could start by pointing out that the two versions cannot both be factual.
But this was a false move on my part. I was supposed to be looking for the powerful message in this story, instead of refuting the fundamentalists.
To get a sense of the point of the story, I needed to think about why the story was important to the ancient Israelis. They believed in God, but back in the 500’s BC, almost everyone believed in God or even in many Gods. There was no need to tell a story to emphasize that God existed. Origen, a leading Christian theologian, pointed out in 300 AD, that the story doesn’t make sense unless it is taken symbolically. Otherwise, what was God thinking of when he put the forbidden fruit in the middle of a garden paradise for the first humans?(p.70-71) So, what was the point of the story for people in 500 BC?
One clue to the meaning of the story can be found in the names. Neither “Adam” nor “Eve” is a name in ancient Hebrew. Rather “Adam” is based on an old Hebrew word “Ahdam” which means ”humankind”. Similarly, “Eve” means “mother of all living”.(pp.69-70) This suggests that the story is telling us what the world is like for human beings. It is a story of human potential and human weakness and loss. As with any story, we may react to it in different ways. We might see the human potential as our capacity to be compassionate, or as an inner spark inside each human being or as our spirituality or as a relationship with our Creator. It is pointless to argue about which interpretation is correct. Stories like this are meant to be interpreted differently by different readers. To find out what the story means to you, it is not necessary to construct a theological meaning. Become engaged in the story, let it speak to you and tell you how it applies to you.
In this story, God plants the Garden of Eden, a paradise that can meet all our needs. But because a talking snake convinces Adam and Eve to eat some forbidden fruit, we can no longer live there. Similarly, in ancient Israel, the people believed that God promised to lead them to a paradise called the Land of Milk and Honey?At the time that the story of Adam and Eve was being written, the people of Israel were in danger of being driven from the promised land. So the Garden of Eden might be a metaphor for the promised land. The nation of Israel seemed to be falling apart.
It had been defeated in a series of wars and most of its population had been exiled to foreign lands. Moreover, the homeland of the Jewish people, the land of Milk and Honey, which God had promised, was largely occupied by people with different cultural backgrounds. There is another Bible story which describes how the nation of Israel weathered these very hard times.
The account of the Babylonian captivity is a story of what the people of Judea had to endure. In reading this story, it is important to remember that Jerusalem, the main city of Judea, is sometimes called “Zion” because King Solomon’s temple was there, on top of Mount Zion. This story is also about the role of the Prophets, who are passionate about social justice and about keeping Israel true to its heritage. When Israel strays from that heritage, the prophets speak out.
For example, the prophet Amos, speaking to the wealthy said:(p. 119)
You trample the needy and bring ruin to the poor.
One prophet, named “Second Isaiah” put new life in the Judeans after they met with disaster.
The disaster happened in the early 500’s when the Babylonians conquered Judea, laid waste to the city of Jerusalem, tore down Solomon’s temple and rounded up many of the Judean citizens. These captive people were marched to Babylon where they were forced to live about a thousand miles from their homeland. Their anguish is recorded Psalm 137:(p.131)
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down
and we wept when we remembered Zion
On the willows there, we hung up our harps
For there our captors asked for songs
and our tormentors asked for mirth,
saying “sing us the songs of Zion”
How could we sing the Lord’s songs in a foreign land?
The transported Judeans stayed in Babylon for 53 years until that city was defeated by the Persians and the exiles had a chance to escape and return to Mount Zion. But would they? Jerusalem was almost 1000 miles away. Actually, it was 900 miles away as the crow flies, but more like 1600 miles if you stay close to the rivers and the shore of Mediterranean Sea, as recommended. The exiles felt that God had abandoned them and that they were being punished. Maybe it would be better to stay in Babylon where they had put down roots.
The prophet Second Isaiah passionately wanted the captives to return to Judea. The land of milk and honey that God had given to the people of Israel was now full of other people. To get a sense of the depth of the problem, recall that Israel had been organized into 12 tribes. Judea held only two of these tribes. In a previous invasion, the other 10 tribes were captured by the Assyrians (p.112), were taken away and never returned. They are called the ten lost tribes of Israel.
The prophet Second Isaiah felt it was up to him to inspire the discouraged Judeans to return to Zion in large numbers
Second Isaiah prayed aloud the following words: (p.134)
Comfort O comfort my people says your God
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem
And cry out to her that she has served her term.
Her penalty has been paid.
To convince everyone that the trip back to Zion wouldn’t be that bad Second Isaiah spoke the words (p.134):
Every valley shall be lifted up,
And every mountain and hill be made low
The uneven ground shall become level
And the rough places plain.
If these words sound familiar, it is probably because they can be found in Handel’s Christmas Oratorio, called The Messiah. It might look like Handel took the words that were used to encourage the exiled Judeans and reinterpreted them as a prediction of the coming of Jesus along that smooth highway. But actually it was the author of the gospel of Matthew who made the imaginative interpretation of the speeches of Second Isaiah.
Borg writes (p.137):
A significant number of the Jewish exiles returned to their homeland, though some remained in Babylon. Within a generation, the returning remnant had rebuilt the temple —a temple that, because of the relatively impoverished status of the exiles was more modest in size and splendor than the earlier temple built by Solomon. Though the exiles continued for several centuries to be under political control of a series of foreign empires, they were back in the promised land. They were home.
Borg is a liberal Christian who feels that Christianity has lost much of its vitality. And that maybe a deeper reading of the troubles of ancient Israel, the passion of the prophets and the resolve of the exiled Judeans could help put the vigor back into the Christian message. As Unitarian-Universalists, perhaps we can each see how the Bible stories might reinvigorate our own religious ideas. But Borg warns that as residents of an affluent society, we may find that a passion for social justice will make us feel uncomfortable (p.138). But even if it costs us some discomfort, there is a lot we can learn from the resiliency of Israel, the actions of the prophets and the courage of some long ago people who lived in Judea.
MAY IT BE SO
Added page numbers refer to the book Reading the Bible again, for the First Time by Borg. Also, the two readings are excerpts from this book.
First Reading: The Conflict over the Bible. by Marcus Borg (pp 4-5)
Conflict about how to see and read the Bible is the single greatest issue dividing Christians in North America today. On one side of the divide are fundamentalists and . . . many conservative evangelical Christians.
. . . For these Christians, the Bible is to be interpreted literally unless the language of a particular passage is clearly metaphorical. From their point of view, allowing nonliteral interpretations opens the doors to evading the Bible’s authority and making it say what we want it to say. They typically see themselves [approaching] the Bible with utmost seriousness and often criticize moderate-to-liberal Christians for watering it down. They also commonly see themselves as affirming “the old time religion”—that is Christianity as it was before the modern period. . . . In fact, as we will see, their approach is itself modern and largely the product of a particular form of . . . twentieth century Protestant theology
The second group of Christians, most of whom are found in mainline churches, are less clear about how they . ,. , see the Bible than about how they do not. They are strongly convinced that many parts of the Bible cannot be taken literally, either as historically factual or as expressing the will of God. Though they reject grounding the Bible’s authority in its infallibility, they are unsure what “Biblical authority” might mean.
The conflicts about the Bible are most publicly visible in discussions of three issues. First, in some Christian circles, "creation vs evolution” is the primary litmus test of loyalty to the Bible. The second issue is homosexuality (I note that this book was written in 2001, today the issue would probably include transgenderism.) The third issue concerns the question of the historical Jesus.
Second Reading: The Historical-Metaphorical approach to the Bible by Borg (p.14)
Both adjectives in the phrase “historical-metaphorical approach” are crucially important. . . . I will compactly define each before describing them [further].
By the “historical approach” I mean all the methods that are relevant to discerning the ancient historical meanings of biblical texts. The chief concern of the historical approach is the past tense question “What did the text mean in the ancient historical framework in which it is written?”
By the “metaphorical approach,” I mean most broadly a nonliteral way of reading biblical texts. A metaphorical reading does not confine itself to the literal, factual, and historical meanings of a text. It moves beyond to the question, “What does the story mean as a story independent of its historical factuality. . . .,
The historical study of the Bible is one of the glories of modern scholarship. It has been immensely illuminating, . . . setting biblical passages in their ancient context makes them come alive. . . ,.
A metaphorical approach to the Bible emphasizes seeing, not believing. The point is not to believe in a metaphor, but to see in light of it.
Sermon: What does the Bible have to Offer? By John Kennison
Marcus Borg feels that the Bible is far too good a book to be read only by ultraconservative Christians. Moreover, Borg feels that these Christians don’t know how to read the bible. The stories in the Bible contain wisdom when read metaphorically. The fundamentalist doctrine of taking the Bible literally was formulated in the early twentieth century as a reaction to modernity, with its discounting of stories involving miracles.(pp. 14-18, Borg on Modernity and Post-Modernity) The ancient Christians knew how to be uplifted and made wiser by the Bible, without feeling that an effective faith demanded literal acceptance of these enchanting tales.
Borg’s approach to reading the Bible involves being aware of the historical context of the stories and being on the look out for metaphors. To see how this works, we will start by examining the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and the creation of the world in 6 days. The Bible actually presents two versions of the story. In one version Adam is created on the sixth day but in the other version Adam is created on the first day.(p.63) For a while this turned out to be a stumbling block for me because I couldn’t resist thinking about the many ways I could prove that the story cannot be literally true. I could start by pointing out that the two versions cannot both be factual.
But this was a false move on my part. I was supposed to be looking for the powerful message in this story, instead of refuting the fundamentalists.
To get a sense of the point of the story, I needed to think about why the story was important to the ancient Israelis. They believed in God, but back in the 500’s BC, almost everyone believed in God or even in many Gods. There was no need to tell a story to emphasize that God existed. Origen, a leading Christian theologian, pointed out in 300 AD, that the story doesn’t make sense unless it is taken symbolically. Otherwise, what was God thinking of when he put the forbidden fruit in the middle of a garden paradise for the first humans?(p.70-71) So, what was the point of the story for people in 500 BC?
One clue to the meaning of the story can be found in the names. Neither “Adam” nor “Eve” is a name in ancient Hebrew. Rather “Adam” is based on an old Hebrew word “Ahdam” which means ”humankind”. Similarly, “Eve” means “mother of all living”.(pp.69-70) This suggests that the story is telling us what the world is like for human beings. It is a story of human potential and human weakness and loss. As with any story, we may react to it in different ways. We might see the human potential as our capacity to be compassionate, or as an inner spark inside each human being or as our spirituality or as a relationship with our Creator. It is pointless to argue about which interpretation is correct. Stories like this are meant to be interpreted differently by different readers. To find out what the story means to you, it is not necessary to construct a theological meaning. Become engaged in the story, let it speak to you and tell you how it applies to you.
In this story, God plants the Garden of Eden, a paradise that can meet all our needs. But because a talking snake convinces Adam and Eve to eat some forbidden fruit, we can no longer live there. Similarly, in ancient Israel, the people believed that God promised to lead them to a paradise called the Land of Milk and Honey?At the time that the story of Adam and Eve was being written, the people of Israel were in danger of being driven from the promised land. So the Garden of Eden might be a metaphor for the promised land. The nation of Israel seemed to be falling apart.
It had been defeated in a series of wars and most of its population had been exiled to foreign lands. Moreover, the homeland of the Jewish people, the land of Milk and Honey, which God had promised, was largely occupied by people with different cultural backgrounds. There is another Bible story which describes how the nation of Israel weathered these very hard times.
The account of the Babylonian captivity is a story of what the people of Judea had to endure. In reading this story, it is important to remember that Jerusalem, the main city of Judea, is sometimes called “Zion” because King Solomon’s temple was there, on top of Mount Zion. This story is also about the role of the Prophets, who are passionate about social justice and about keeping Israel true to its heritage. When Israel strays from that heritage, the prophets speak out.
For example, the prophet Amos, speaking to the wealthy said:(p. 119)
You trample the needy and bring ruin to the poor.
One prophet, named “Second Isaiah” put new life in the Judeans after they met with disaster.
The disaster happened in the early 500’s when the Babylonians conquered Judea, laid waste to the city of Jerusalem, tore down Solomon’s temple and rounded up many of the Judean citizens. These captive people were marched to Babylon where they were forced to live about a thousand miles from their homeland. Their anguish is recorded Psalm 137:(p.131)
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down
and we wept when we remembered Zion
On the willows there, we hung up our harps
For there our captors asked for songs
and our tormentors asked for mirth,
saying “sing us the songs of Zion”
How could we sing the Lord’s songs in a foreign land?
The transported Judeans stayed in Babylon for 53 years until that city was defeated by the Persians and the exiles had a chance to escape and return to Mount Zion. But would they? Jerusalem was almost 1000 miles away. Actually, it was 900 miles away as the crow flies, but more like 1600 miles if you stay close to the rivers and the shore of Mediterranean Sea, as recommended. The exiles felt that God had abandoned them and that they were being punished. Maybe it would be better to stay in Babylon where they had put down roots.
The prophet Second Isaiah passionately wanted the captives to return to Judea. The land of milk and honey that God had given to the people of Israel was now full of other people. To get a sense of the depth of the problem, recall that Israel had been organized into 12 tribes. Judea held only two of these tribes. In a previous invasion, the other 10 tribes were captured by the Assyrians (p.112), were taken away and never returned. They are called the ten lost tribes of Israel.
The prophet Second Isaiah felt it was up to him to inspire the discouraged Judeans to return to Zion in large numbers
Second Isaiah prayed aloud the following words: (p.134)
Comfort O comfort my people says your God
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem
And cry out to her that she has served her term.
Her penalty has been paid.
To convince everyone that the trip back to Zion wouldn’t be that bad Second Isaiah spoke the words (p.134):
Every valley shall be lifted up,
And every mountain and hill be made low
The uneven ground shall become level
And the rough places plain.
If these words sound familiar, it is probably because they can be found in Handel’s Christmas Oratorio, called The Messiah. It might look like Handel took the words that were used to encourage the exiled Judeans and reinterpreted them as a prediction of the coming of Jesus along that smooth highway. But actually it was the author of the gospel of Matthew who made the imaginative interpretation of the speeches of Second Isaiah.
Borg writes (p.137):
A significant number of the Jewish exiles returned to their homeland, though some remained in Babylon. Within a generation, the returning remnant had rebuilt the temple —a temple that, because of the relatively impoverished status of the exiles was more modest in size and splendor than the earlier temple built by Solomon. Though the exiles continued for several centuries to be under political control of a series of foreign empires, they were back in the promised land. They were home.
Borg is a liberal Christian who feels that Christianity has lost much of its vitality. And that maybe a deeper reading of the troubles of ancient Israel, the passion of the prophets and the resolve of the exiled Judeans could help put the vigor back into the Christian message. As Unitarian-Universalists, perhaps we can each see how the Bible stories might reinvigorate our own religious ideas. But Borg warns that as residents of an affluent society, we may find that a passion for social justice will make us feel uncomfortable (p.138). But even if it costs us some discomfort, there is a lot we can learn from the resiliency of Israel, the actions of the prophets and the courage of some long ago people who lived in Judea.
MAY IT BE SO
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