Guest Sermon by Rev. Robert D. Shofner, Jr.
St. John's UCC- Boonville Indiana
Not long ago, I was sitting in the waiting room of a
clinic while Debbie was undergoing one of her annual Coumadin tests. A trio of persons was sitting nearby, and
they started talking about a new Bible study that one of them was attending. The conversation went more or less like this.
“Oh, I’m so excited!
Our teacher is leading us through a study on Revelations.”
(I always cringe when I hear ‘Revelations’. There’s no “s” in Revelation, people!)
“Wow,” was one response.
“Yes! And we
learned all about the meaning of the phrase, ‘the abomination that causes
desolation.’ The study leader explained
that the Lord had shown him what it meant.”
(Of course, it’s always much more interesting when God Himself weighs in
on an interpretation! So I perked up!)
“He said, “I’ve discovered that it is helpful if you
break words apart when you study Scripture.
If you break down ‘abomination,’ you get a-bom-in-nation. This verse
is a prediction that a number of nations would one day get the atomic bomb. And it’s happening!”
The listening couple nodded in agreement. “Praise Jesus! We’re in the last days!”
I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair! The fact that this story even happened makes
me wonder if the Bible should come with a warning label on its cover: If you are already kind of nuts, this book
will only make things worse.
On one hand, I’m glad the Scriptures are accessible to so
many, yet on the other hand it bothers me that people treat it like a purely
existential document which they feel free to interpret through their peculiar,
and, frankly, uneducated view.
I love the Bible.
It’s full of narrative history, genealogies, laws, poetry, proverbs,
prophetic oracles, riddles, drama, biological sketches, parables, letters,
sermons, and apocalypses. It is a
mystical book that fills the believing heart with life, wonder, grace, power
and comfort. All Christian believers
treasure the Bible. It has been the
best-selling book in the world since printing began. When Guttenberg invented the printing press,
the first words he reproduced were the words of the Bible.
But, giving people the impression that the Bible is easy
to understand and easy to apply is really misleading. That’s like
saying marriage is easy. Of course marriage can be wonderful, but it
is not easy. It’s not easy to keep your
“I” on your spouse and off yourself.
It’s not easy for men to understand women (do I hear an ‘Amen’?) … or
women to understand men (do I hear a ‘Right on, preacher!’?)
Nor is it easy to understand the Bible. Truth be told, it’s often quite
difficult. Some texts seem impossible to
figure out. That’s why, throughout
history, so many have used the Bible for their own, sometimes evil, purposes.
Sacred scriptures, which have brought unspeakable comfort
and blessing to countless millions, have also been used to bring pain, horror,
and death to many. The Bible has been
used to validate the torture of so-called heretics, to justify slavery, to
justify war, to oppress women, and to perpetuate other injustices.
On a less disturbing, but equally ridiculous note,
believers throughout history have used the Bible to “prove” specifically when Jesus would return. (I guess He never got any of their memos.)
How can this be?
How can there be such divergent conviction about the “truth”?
Some would argue that the Bible doesn’t need
interpretation; it just needs to be obeyed.
In some cases that’s true. Paul
commands, “Do everything without complaining or arguing” (Philippians 2:14). That doesn’t need interpretation; it just needs
to be obeyed, plain and simple.
But not all passages are that simple. And if we are not careful, we can think our
understanding of what we read is the meaning that the Holy Spirit
intended. But that is a huge presumption
which ignores that our experience, the culture we live in, our prior
understanding of words and ideas, and so on, always inject themselves into what we read. We are just kidding ourselves if we think our
biases cannot lead us astray and cause us to read unintended ideas into a text.
Case in point: Let’s
say we grew up believing it is stupid (maybe even sinful) for people to get
tattoos and have their bodies pierced.
Maybe we heard our mom and dad say it was wrong. Or perhaps we believe that because, when we
were growing up, tattoos and body piercings were only fashionable for
mean-looking Harley riders and their biker mommas, and those on the low end of
the socioeconomic scale. Is that an
unfair prejudice? Sorry, but yeah. But if that was our experience, it impacts
how we think.
Whatever the reason, inbred opinions cause us to read
Bible texts with a predetermined selectivity.
We come across a verse such as, “Do not cut your bodies . . . or put
tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the
Lord” (Leviticus 19:28). Wow! That just leaps off the page! It’s like the voice of God – a spiritual
epiphany. No wonder tattoos and
piercings bother me so much. God feels
the same way! Never mind that in the
previous verse men are told never to “cut the hair at the sides of your head or
clip off the edges of your beard” (Leviticus 19:27). We all ignore that verse. But, logically, if we choose to harp on the
command that forbids tattoos or piercings, reason demands that we should obey
the hair rule. That means churches
should be full of men with mullets and scraggly beards!
So, why aren’t Christians fair and reasonable when it
comes to interpreting Bible texts like these?
Because something in each of us longs to emphasize the things that
resonate with our own opinions and biases, while ignoring the ones that
don’t. However, it’s one thing to
interpret Bible texts in a biased, squirrely way … it’s quite another to slap
God’s endorsement on our interpretation.
But people do it every day. It’s
no wonder that what we do saddens Jesus’s heart … the same Jesus who said, “I
give you a new command. Love one another
as I have loved you.” And that is to be
obeyed, not interpreted.
Listen,
it’s simple. If we don’t like something, we just need to be
honest about it. Example. I personally don’t like tattoos and
piercings. And when the boys were
growing up, I told them tattoos and piercings were not allowed in my
house. I said, with a smile on my face, “It
isn’t that God is against it. In fact,
God has tattoos. He has us tattooed on
His hand (Isaiah 49:16). Apparently,
He’s into tattoos. It’s just that I am
against it. I don’t want you permanently
altering your body until you are an adult and decide to do so. I’m just weird. Get used to it.”
Hey … it’s okay for a parent to be uptight about some
stuff. We just can’t project our
preferences on God and “swear . . . by heaven” (James 5:12) that God feels the
same way.
It’s not that we can’t have seemingly unreasonable
opinions about things – we just need to own up to the reality that all of us
have BluBlocker vision that affects how we see things.
Remember them? Back
in the 1980s BluBlockers were all the rage … boasting of providing UV and
blue-light protection for the eyes.
Since I have to wear glasses all the time, I couldn’t wear
BluBlockers. But the boys could, and
did.
One day we were heading out of town, and we stopped to
fill up with gas and grab some treats for the road. Debbie asked Michael to get some of her
favorite gum … Wrigley’s in the blue pack.
He brought it back to the car and tossed it to his mom. She looked at it, and asked, “Michael, how
come you didn’t get me my regular kind?”
“I did,” he answered.
“No, you didn’t,” she said as she held up the pack for
him to see.
He looked at it, and said rather sarcastically, “Mom, the
pack is blue. That’s the kind you like!”
She paused for a second and said, “Take off the
BluBlockers, Michael.”
He pulled off the glasses and instantly realized he had
bought the green gum, thinking it was the blue.
Something in the BluBlockers made the green pack look blue.
That’s what happens to us when our lives get colored by
our experience. We interpret our
surroundings through that color. That
means what looks true sometimes isn’t, and what looks untrue is sometimes
true. Our ideas, presuppositions, and
even prejudices color our reasoning and interpretive skills. We don’t see clearly.
People have been wearing BluBlockers all through history. For example, in the premodern world a violent
natural event like an earthquake or erupting volcano was thought of as some
kind of vengeance from the gods. Their
Blublocker was that they believed gods did that sort of thing. When there was a natural disaster, people
assumed someone had killed a sacred animal or had committed some nasty crime
that angered the gods and the cataclysmic event was retribution for that
immoral act.
In the modern world, we know that natural disasters brew
because of a number of natural conditions.
This is our BluBlocker. What
premoderns saw as acts of the gods, moderns see as the logical results of
nature’s adjustments. No vengeance
there.
Different BluBlockers lead to different interpretations.
Another example. My
mother-in-law believed there was no way the United States ever got those men on
the moon – not really. When asked about
the live television broadcast that captured the event, she would say, “It was
all Hollywood. They staged the whole
thing. It was fake, and a lot of people
made a lot of money from our tax dollars.”
Her BluBlocker conspiracy “glasses” made the whole thing look like a
hoax. (On the other hand, she swore up and down that “X-Files” was actually
true!)
People
who view the world as conspiratorial or interpret biblical prophecy by breaking
words apart (especially since Scripture was originally written in Hebrew and
Greek – not English) are wearing bad BluBlockers. When we use faulty methods or tools to
interpret something, the world ends up looking distorted and weird.
The
BluBlockers we wear provide a framework for processing data, just like
prescription eyeglasses from what we (who need them) see. I remember getting my first pair of
eyeglasses as a kid and being amazed at how it helped me see the world in a
whole new way – clearly! I had become
used to the blur.
Sadly,
there are many disorienting “prescription” BlueBlockers out there. Instead of clearing things up, they actually
distort and give us an inaccurate view of the world. There is no place where this is truer than in
the context of religion. When it comes
to what we believe about God (theology), how He wants us to live (doctrines),
and what we can or cannot do (commandments and injunctions), Christians have so
many different sets of glasses, we make Elton John’s eyewear collection seem
paltry.
All
kinds of things influence the way we see things: our experiences, our parents,
the History Channel, an Oprah show we once saw, friends, the churches we’ve
attended, our prejudices, expectations, hopes, failures, God, the devil, being
an American – these all color the way we interpret our world and our faith.
The
bottom line, when we want to avoid misusing and misinterpreting God’s Word, we
first want to do an honest evaluation of how we look at the world, and what
kind of BluBlockers we are wearing.
Next
time we’ll look at some various examples of BluBlockers. In the meantime, do your homework!
Let’s
pray.
Heavenly
Father, we thank you for Your Word in all its variety, style, and truth. Please accept our confession that we all wear
BluBlockers that color our perception of our world and Your Word. With our confession, open our eyes to clearly
see. Grant us honest and humble hearts
that we may love one another as You have loved us.
And
the people said, “Amen.”
No comments:
Post a Comment