Credo: What Is the Bible? (2nd Sunday after Pentecost; Deuteronomy 26:1-11; June 3, 2018)

Credo: What Is the Bible?

2nd Sunday after Pentecost
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
June 3, 2018

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

I've always been partial to this text of Scripture. I guess it's because of the solemnity and power of the rite that lies at the center of it. At the first harvest, the people of Israel are to take some of the harvest in a basket and they are to go before Yahweh and present the basket to the priest. They are to declare to God and God's priest:

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me."

We recognize pretty quickly that this is not the one-off that it appears to be. There are signs in the text that it is meant, not just for that first generation that entered the land of promise, but for all generations to come. Each year they are to present an offering of the first harvest and make this statement as if they were their own ancestors. Or rather, they take their ancestors' words and make them their own. In much the same way that, when we break bread at the table and use the words that Jesus gave us to use, in a liturgical sense we become the followers of Jesus eating with him when he broke the bread and blessed the cup. Under the pressure of these words, time ceases to be a barrier and becomes instead the carrier of a deep connection.

The story at the center of these two rituals is powerfully told, powerfully reenacted. And we are bound ever more deeply into the story itself, the story of the God who hears the cry of distress, who sees our struggles, and who comes to bring us out with a "mighty hand and an outstretched arm."

So that they would never lose touch with the story of origins, the story that makes them who they are, this isn't a suggestion. It is God's commandment forever. The text is story. The text is liturgy. The text is commandment. I love this text for its layered effect.

I've alluded to how the text plays with time, but there is more even than that happening here. The story is set in the time just before Israel enters the land of promise. Since their marvelous deliverance from slavery in Egypt, they have wandered for more than a generation. They have wandered for so long that there are only three people left alive who remember the Exodus: Joshua, Caleb, and Moses himself. The Israelites are no longer connected to those events by personal memory; their only connection now is the collective memory of story.

But the text was not written then. No doubt the core of the story goes back to distant memory, But it was not written in this form until centuries later during Judah's exile in Babylon. And the story was written in this way to speak to the circumstances of Judah's exile. Once again, God's people found themselves living as aliens in a strange place--Babylon this time instead of Egypt. Once again they found themselves "few in number." The audacity of this text lies in its confidence that the pattern of Israel's past is the pattern of Judah's future. Exiled Judah will--like enslaved Israel--once again become "a great nation, mighty and populous." Once again, God will see "[their] affliction, [their] toil, and [their] oppression." Once again, God will bring them out with "signs and wonders." Once again, God will bring them to "a land flowing with milk and honey."

When Jesus read this text, how could he not have thought of his own beloved people and their subjugation by Rome? When our friends in Potrerillos read this text, how can they avoid claiming this hope for themselves as they struggle against the dehumanizing and culture-destroying forces of global capitalism? When our African-American sisters and brothers read this text, how can they not claim the dream of the day when they will be free from the official violence that targets them in particular?

You see how this works? How a simple story like this has power not only to celebrate deliverance in the past, but to unsettle its readers. Just when we thought it was safe to stop hoping, just when we thought it was wise to give in to the world as it is, this story congers hope out of nothing. It foments rebellion against a world that has commodified us as just one more resource to use up and discard. As Walter Brueggemann suggests, "[It] funds the post-modern imagination." And the imagination is where every revolution begins.

It is, I am convinced, this matter of layers within the text that gives the Bible its power to transform first the world of "the imaginary," then the world of social relations, and finally the physical planet itself.

I have always thought the Bible was important and powerful. There was once a time when I thought this was the case because it was "inerrant," that is, that God so guided its production that it was preserved from all errors. Oh, there were the marks of human personality on its pages. I wasn't so foolish as to believe that its human writers were merely stenographers, writing down God's words. But I believed that each part of it was true, in the factual and historical sense of the word.

I changed my mind over the years. It's hard to say precisely when or precisely why. I had a growing sense that treating the Bible this way was actually disrespectful. It became a collection of theological data that could be cataloged and manipulated. It became an armory stockpiled with ammunition for doing battle with the unbeliever and the heretic. The text became flat and uninteresting. Gradually, I became horrified by what I and others did to the Bible in the name of defending it.

When I decided that the Bible didn't need defending, the texts started to come alive. The Bible was filled with the hopes and dreams, the sufferings and disappointments, of real people who lived their lives in times that were both like and unlike mine. Historical background began to become even more important to me.

The Bible went from being a book to being a library. Like any good library, there were books about different things, by different authors. Each of them displayed a unique outlook on the world. Each of them was shot through with their own personality. When I read them carefully, I realized that sometimes the writers disagreed with each other. That realization freed me from having to force their disagreements into harmony. I could then admit that, when Paul says that works without faith is dead and James says that faith without works is dead, they are not really saying the same thing. And, as a reader, I did not have to bring them into harmony. Both of them were trying to give faithful testimony to their own experience and understanding.

The next realization was that even the individual writings of one author contain internal disagreements. Or another way to say that is to say that each text contains multiple voices. This is especially true of writings like Deuteronomy that were produced over a period of time by many writers and incorporated material from many sources. I knew these things when I came here eight years ago.

What I realized in the course of the time that I have been here is that it is more useful to image the Bible not as a single book or even a library of books. I have said that the Bible is a conversation, but even that image is lacking. The Bible is more like a conference. In the academic version of a conference there are speeches that are given to the whole body. There are question and answer sessions and they are often lively. There are meetings of smaller groups. Panels present papers. Questions are asked and answered or evaded. Debates break out, sometimes the continuation of long-term disagreements. People stay after to engage in further conversation with the presenters of papers. There are side conversations about all sorts of things, two or three people with their heads together over cups of coffee. You can't hear what they are saying, but they are all animated with vigorous gestures and head-shaking or nodding. There are others whose conversations are with authors of the books they are skimming through at the book sale tables. In some of these conversations the speakers are discovering unsuspected areas of agreement. In others, speakers are trying to clarify just what it is that they disagree about. There is a surprising amount of mutual respect. Even students with their less nuanced and more naive questions or assertions are given the space to speak their minds.

This is how I imagine the biblical conversation. And, I'll add this: when we take the Bible seriously, when we listen in that conversation, when we really try to understand, in the process we join the conversation. This really changes how I read the Bible. It's not like the old days when learning was mostly by rote. I don't read the Bible to find out what I'm supposed to think or do. I read the Bible to be a part of the its conversation. Sometimes I just listen. But if you have ever met me, you know I can't stay quiet for long. I ask a question. I talk back. I push. Sometimes I even agree. As in the best conversations, sometimes new knowledge arises, not just new to me, but new, period.

It's not that I've had to learn a new thing in order to read the Bible this way. I was actually doing this all along, but I was doing it in the background, all the while thinking that I wasn't supposed to be doing it. It turns out I was wrong to think that I was wrong.

We've been taught for all our lives that the Bible as "God's Word" is just supposed to be accepted and believed. I think we've been wrong about that in the church. In the first place, nowhere does the Bible call itself "the Word of God." There are bits and pieces that are described as "the word of Yahweh." They are found in the prophets mostly. Jesus Christ is described as "the Word of God." But Bible is not.

We could say then that at least the parts marked "the world of the Yahweh" should be obeyed without question. But in fact that's not what the prophets did. Moses, in particular, known as a great law-giver, was known for refusing to follow blindly. His arguments with God are famous. And he won most of them.

So I've come to the conclusion that God is not really interested in readers of the Bible who will simply obey rather than enter whole-heartedly into the conversation. God is not really interested in being a dictator; God expects push-back. If that wasn't God's idea at the beginning, God should know by now that that's the way it is.

There are people in the United Methodist Church, and perhaps there are even people here, who would conclude that I don't accept what they call "the authority of the Bible." When pressed, they might say that the authority of the Bible is expressed in three sentences: "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." These are three sentences not to be found in the Bible, but that doesn't stop them. It is as if they were in an Army, not like ours, in which orders are to be obeyed without question and without exception, never mind that the actual enlistment oath requires disobedience to some orders and requires that each soldier exercise judgment about whether the conditions that require that disobedience have been met. In any event, to disagree with these folks is to deny the authority of the Bible.

But I do not deny the authority of the Bible. I simply do not agree about what that authority is and how it works. For me the authority of the Bible lies in the conversations that it authorizes. Especially in those areas where the biblical conversation is contentious and unsettled, the Bible authorizes our intelligent and faithful engagement in the discussion and argument. "When are we most faithful to the covenant we have with God: when we are at home and running our own affairs? or when we are in exile and threatened in our very existence?" "How do we who are followers of Jesus live in midst of a militaristic, violent, pleasure-seeking, and acquisitive culture?" These are two of the great questions around which contentious disputes rage in the Bible. We are authorized to enter into those debates. We are to listen respectfully to the other voices, but then we are to raise our own and give testimony to our own experience and to what we think that experience means.

A careful reading of Jesus shows that this is precisely how he treated the Bible. So, we cannot be followers of Jesus without doing the same thing, without participating in the on-going, disputatious, life-giving conversation that swirls within and around this old book.

That is the tentative conclusion I've come to. You have helped me form that conclusion. Where my thinking will go from here, I have no idea. What I can say with absolute certainty is that the conversation will go on. I will leave the destination in God's hands and see where that takes me.

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