Embracing Progressive Christianity - The Bible

Sermon given by Rev. Shawn Coons on January 22, 2023

Last week we started our series on embracing progressive Christianity, and we discussed a little bit about why do we have to label our Christianity? And we said, yes, we are all Christians and we all have some common unity. But since the beginning of Christian history, we have interpreted Jesus' teachings in different ways and that it can actually help us to articulate, and sometimes when appropriate, use labels to talk about our similarities and our differences.

We talked a little bit about what is progressive Christianity, and we used one major metaphor of windows. We talked about how God is beyond our sight, God is beyond our comprehension. But God and God's graciousness has been revealed to us in a number of ways. And we have windows onto God, windows onto the divine, and it shows us just a little bit of God, each window does, or some more than others. Just like different windows show us different views, different windows in our faith, whether they come from the Bible, whether they come from our own spirituality, whether they come from church tradition, give us a little bit more of a view of God. Some windows are better than others and some may be even a little distorted, but they all can be helpful and we honor the views of all of those windows.

We talked about the Bible as one of those windows, actually a collection of windows. The different passages and different parts of the Bible provide insight, provide a view of God and we can see different things. And sometimes some Bible passages are more helpful than others, but we don't throw out any part of the Bible. We don't throw out any passage of the Bible just because we don't like that view.

Today we're going to talk a little bit more in depth about how we approach the Bible, how progressive Christianity approaches the Bible, and we're going to do that by looking at one particular window, if you will, one particular passage. Second Samuel starting with chapter six, verse one, and this is in Israel's early history when David was king. And we're reading about transporting the Ark of the Covenant, a very holy relic for the Israelites back into Jerusalem.

David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel, 30,000. David and all the people with him set out and went from Baale-Judah to bring up from there the Ark of God, which is called by the name of the Lord of hosts who is enthroned on the cherubim. They carry the Ark of God on a new cart and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart with the Ark of God and Ahio went in front of the Ark and David and all the House of Israel dancing before the Lord with all their might with songs and liars and harps and tambourines and casted nets and symbols.

When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out his hand to the Ark of God and took hold of it for the oxen, shook it. The anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him there because he reached out his hand to the Ark and he died there beside the Ark of God. David was angry because the Lord had burst forth with an outburst upon Uzzah." So that place is called Perez-uzzah to this day.

I'm willing to place a small bet that you are not familiar with Uzzah, the son of Abinadab, that this is not a Sunday school story you grew up hearing. This is Uzzah's only mention in all of scripture. And so it's understandable if this is an unfamiliar story, if we didn't know that God killed Uzzah because he reached out and touched the Ark of the Covenant, because he tried to steady it.

Let's go into a little bit more detail. What is the Ark of the Covenant? At this point in Jewish history, there were no temple. There were really weren't synagogues. There weren't established places that people gathered for religious purposes. And so the Ark of the Covenant was all that the Hebrew people had as a physical symbol of where God dwelled. And the Ark of the Covenant was made just shortly after the Hebrew people left Egypt and there are very detailed instructions for how it was to be created, so much so that we can kind of render what it would look like.

This was an important thing for the Hebrew people. This was, important isn't even the right word, sacred for the people of Israel. In some ways they believe God's presence, dwelt in and among the Ark in a unique way. And so this was a very important day, bringing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem. And this was quite a procession. We heard there were 30,000 of the chosen men. There would've been others besides those chosen men as well, and they're dancing and they're singing and they're playing all these instruments. There's another part of scripture that says every six paces they stopped to sacrifice a cow or an oxen. So it did not move very quickly either. This was a really big deal.

Uzzah and his brother, Ahio are in charge of leading this team of oxen, leading the Ark on this cart, pulling it along the road into Jerusalem. There were not paved roads at this point. There were well worn roads, but they're not going to be exactly smooth and they're going to be some sections that are bumpier than other. And they come across one of these sections, and out of concern for the Ark, this holy relic of the Israelites. When it's bumpy and the Ark looks like it's maybe going to fall off, Uzzah reaches out his hand to steady it, a very natural thing to do, very protective thing to do, and as he does, God strikes him dead.

Why? I mean, what do we do with that? There are several answers that scholars have offered throughout the centuries. A traditional answer is under the category of holiness. That there is a holiness about the Ark that is the holiness of God. God is holy in such a way that God can't stand impurities. It's like a physical impossibility for impurity to be in the presence of God. And Uzzah was not ritually prepared to interact with the Ark. And so it wasn't that so much that God chose to kill him that, but that the holiness killed him at that moment.

Another explanation is that Uzzah should have known that God would protect the Ark, that the Ark needed no protection from mortal hands and Uzzah's reaching out shows Uzzah's, lack of faith, lack of trust in God.

I don't know about you, but I'm not happy with either of those answers or the variations that show up there. It does not sit right with me. Why would God kill someone for lack of faith or lack of trust? If that is the case, please don't stand too close to me on certain days. God doesn't find someone who's struggling and doubting and punish them for that. There are plenty of other places in scripture where God honors people's doubt and struggles. The Bible's full of these stories. Moses doubted God. Miriam doubted God, Abraham and Sarah the disciples. Jesus even has a moment or two of questioning God. So what about this holiness thing? Well, if it's like anti-matter and matter kind of, if you're in that sci-fi Star Trek world and the two can't meet otherwise they annihilate each other. I don't think God is a property like that. Where sin is one physical substance and God is another physical substance, and when they come together in any way, shape or form, there's this reaction and there's obliteration.

How do we make sense of this today? And I think this is where we're going to come back to the Bible as a collection of windows, as different passages of scripture, different accounts of scripture, different books of the Bible even show us a certain window of God, a certain view on God of how the people at that time viewed God and how God was revealing God's self to them. So we ask ourselves if this is a window of view on God and it only shows part of the picture, but we honor nonetheless, what can we see through this window? What can we honor through this window?

Before we go further, I want to name a truth, a truth about biblical interpretation for progressive Christians, and actually not just progressive Christians but many Christians across other traditions. We don't always take every story in the Bible, every word in the Bible as 100% accurate, 100% historically accurate. We don't believe that the Bible is the dictated words of God. That God said to someone or God said to a number of people, “write this down word for word. Don't change a thing. These are my exact words. This is exactly how everything happened.”

When we say the Word of God in our tradition and we use a capital W, Word of God, we mean Jesus. We heard Richard read just a moment ago from John chapter one, "In the beginning was the word and the word was God, and the word was with God." There's some Greek going on there and interaction with some Greek philosophy of the day. But when we say Word of God and we capitalize that word, we mean Jesus Christ. That Jesus Christ is the ultimate revelation to us of who God is, that if we want to know most clearly who God is, we look to Jesus. Now, that's tricky because our best understanding of Jesus comes through the Bible, and so sometimes we will say word of God with a lowercase w and we'll be talking about the Bible, but we don't mean in progressive Christianity that it is the dictated, 100% accurate, perfect, without error word of God, but it still shows us the window. It's the best window we have on God. It is the best collection of windows we have on Jesus.

If you've studied the Bible, you realize these windows on God, the various parts of the Bible, they don't always agree with one another. There aren't huge discrepancies, but there are some things, Amy-Jill Levine puts it this way, "In some churches today there's a problem. People are hesitant to voice questions, to say, this doesn't quite cohere. In Matthew and Mark and Luke, the Last Supper's a Passover meal, but in the Gospel of John, it's not, did something go wrong? What about, did Jesus cleanse a temple at the beginning of his ministry? That's in John, or did he do it at the beginning of the passion like in Matthew and Mark? Or maybe he did it twice and it didn't take the first time."

It's true. The Gospel of John has the cleansing the temple three years before Matthew and Mark have it. We can use this. We can do two things. We can do one thing and say, well, which one is right and which one is wrong, and I need to find the right one. Or we can say, you know what? The author of the Gospel of John put that event in Jesus life in his narrative at this point for a reason. I wonder why he did that. The author of the other gospels, they put it at the end of Jesus ministry, say, I wonder why they did that. Let's look at the narrative truth, even if it's not the historical truth. Let's look at the narrative truth and say, why did whomever put this in the Bible, put this story together? Why did they do that? What does that tell us about their understanding of God?

The Jewish people told the story of Uzzah, the son of Abinadab who was killed by God for touching the Ark. We can affirm that we don't think God would do that, but at the same time we can say, well, I wonder why they told this story. I wonder what truth they are trying to share. I wonder why they found it so important to record it. First, pass it on told orally, and then writing it down as part of their holy scriptures.

Now we can continue to use this tricky word “true”, what is true. We can ask if a passage may not be historically true, but is there narrative truth? Can we believe that God did not kill Uzzah for lack of faith? Can we affirm maybe even that God did not kill Uzzah, period, but also affirm that this story shows us a holy truth about the nature of God, something beyond us, something other than human? Can we affirm a view through this window that shows us a powerful God, a God beyond our comprehension, deserving of our awe?

For me, when I start to ask questions like this, there's a voice in my head because of how I was raised in the faith in a little bit different tradition, there's this voice that says, "Shawn, does that mean the Bible isn't true?"

There's a wonderful quote I want to read you here from William Placher suggesting that maybe “is the Bible true” isn't the question we should ask, but maybe “can we trust the Bible?” Placher writes, "Trust provides a good category for thinking about the special attitude Christians take to the Bible. When we trust people, we recognize their jokes as jokes, their metaphors as metaphors, their fishing stories for the tall tales that they are. We also recognize the things they say that really matter, that they won't lead us astray. So it is with the Bible, with all the qualifications duly noted, we can still think that as a guide to Christian faith and life, the Bible won't lead us fundamentally astray. Turning the question, is the Bible true to a question of trust is faithful to the Bible itself. For the Hebrew word we translate as truth carries that connotation of trustworthiness, steadiness, faithfulness, the true person in Hebrew is the one you can trust. So is the true book as well."

The trustworthiness of the Bible relies not on the specific words in scripture, not on the historical details of the story. It relies on the character of God. We trust the Bible because we trust God. So then, it is fair to ask, okay, well, which scriptures are trustworthy? Which passages are jokes and metaphors? And which one can we say, okay, maybe that didn't happen exactly the way? I'm just going to brush through these, but I'll reference where I can find some guidelines for interpreting scriptures from a book I come back to over and over again, probably maybe more than any book that I have in my ministry called Christian Doctrine by Shirley Guthrie. And Dr. Guthrie leaves us with these kind of guidelines.

Scripture is to be in interpreted in light of its own purpose. It's a book of faith. It's a book about God. We don't read the Bible to learn astronomy or biology or economics or philosophy, we read it to learn about God and faith. Scripture finds its fullest expression in the person and works of Jesus. If we read conflicts or tensions or contradictions in the Bible, we look to the life, to the death, to the resurrection of Jesus for clarity. The witness of Christ is the lens that helps us see the rest of scripture clearly.

The Bible is best read in a community. We certainly want to read the Bible in our own personal lives, but not just that, we understand God's words best when we hear other voices helping us interpret.

All of the Bible, all of what we take from the Bible should reflect the rule of love. Love your God and love your neighbor. A trustworthy interpretation of scripture will never promote hatred or anything else but love towards everyone in every situation. And as best we can, we need to understand the time and the place and the context of where scripture was written. Those are those windows into God and into God's people.

So maybe a little bit of homework for you in closing. Maybe sometime today, maybe sometime this week, find 10 to 20 minutes, go somewhere we can relax and not be disturbed. Pick up a Bible and just read from it a little bit. You can read just to a random spot, I would suggest maybe being a little more intentional. Start with one of the gospels or some of the Psalms, maybe a favorite story or passage you have. But just spend some time with reading the Bible. Reading and studying the Bible opens windows into how we view God, it opens windows into our own lives where the spirit can work within us. So I invite you this week and going forward to let God work through you in this way.