Meeting the Episcopal Church again for the first time, Week 2, 12/9/2018

The Lord be with you.

Let's pray.

Blessed Lord who caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning.

Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.

Amen.

Well, welcome back, you bold folks who are back.

And if you're here for the first time, welcome.

What we want to talk about today, I think, is Holy Scripture, that the point of the prayer.

What it is exactly, what it isn't, perhaps, and what we do with it as episcopal people, and even greater than that, as Christians.

Okay?

As always, permission from me to interrupt me and say, This is not helpful.

Let's talk about something else.

You have that permission.

What I want to do, I think, is uh sort of lay this out.

Um depending on the tradition you grew up in or uh the Christian aid you grew uh up in as a kid, we we sort of all process this differently.

And I and I just want to share with you, uh I grew up in a tradition.

Remember last week I told you that Episcopalians in general tend to say scripture is one of the three ways that we sort of look for guiding principles in our liturgy, our faith practice, our discipleship, and know what to do in the world alongside reason and tradition.

Well, reminder, um, some of us grew up in in different practices, Roman Catholic, scripture and tradition, and tradition might be more important than scripture.

I grew up in a in what we'd consider an evangelical uh tradition in which we said, nope scripture alone, that's it.

And and what is scripture?

Uh it's really about the Bible, right?

And um a couple things about the Bible.

Uh it's interesting that we put this in uh in singular, because in Greek it's actually and and and the beta is like the B, right?

Uh this is a lambda that's an L.

It's not the book.

In Greek, it's the books plural, the books.

How many books uh there are?

66 books.

And this is an interesting thing that we didn't always get as young kids, or I didn't get as young kids, is it um really it's always been called not the book, but the books.

It's the book of books.

And um the books within the book aren't chapters, they're not like to be continued.

In some ways, they're like discrete monographs.

And just to give you an idea, if you know any of your biblical books, see, we had to learn a song when I was a kid, so we put them in order.

Um now, you know, there's little helpful tabs you can put on the side.

I really recommend the tabs anyway, so that you know where it is.

But, you know, as a little boy, uh I got like a treat, if I could say Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

Joshua judges Ruth.

First and 2 Samuel.

I'm not going to inflict that on you.

But what's interesting is even from the beginning, there's these five books that starts Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Five different books in the book.

And the only reason that they are books is because in the ancient way of making documents, which was scrolls, you couldn't fit them all on one.

If you're Jewish, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy is one book divided in five, because there was no binding.

Everything was written on an animal skin.

That's it.

And animal skins aren't big enough to write all those words down, if that sort of makes sense.

A little bit more on how we how we got this book in a second, but Bible is books, 66 books.

We subdivide this into a couple of different categories.

Um, there's 27 in what we call the New Testament, also referred to as the Christian Bible.

And then, of course, there's I've got to work backward here, 39, in what we either call the Old Testament, or honestly, I think a little bit better, we call the Hebrew Bible.

So at the time of Jesus, and this is important to know, Scripture was that, more or less, to give you an idea, there wasn't a real Hebrew Bible all put together until the year 100-ish, and some people say 91, but 100-ish of our common era, that's A.D.

And we didn't have the Christian Bible, which includes these books in a different order.

We didn't have this one for sure until 381.

Okay, so that's 350 years after Jesus, the Christian Bible is sort of finished.

And then, of course, depending on what kind of Christian you are, there's a variety of number of books here in something called the Apocrypha.

As I mentioned last week, if you're Roman Catholic, those are part of your Bible.

If you're not, those are either in your appendix included, or just not there at all.

And those are actually written probably around, they're written around uh maybe this time period, and about events in that time period.

Maybe we should start though uh come back to this idea of bad books.

See, um, there's a couple of ways we can look at scripture.

One is that it's monolithic, that all, like I mentioned, all the books are chapters in the same novel, all saying the same thing.

Um as a kid, I was taught actually that there are no contradictions in the Bible whatsoever.

If there seemed to be, it's because we're misreading it.

But another way to read actually the books is that the books are actually drawing out conversation with each other.

Now, this sounds a little bit strange, right?

But but I want to offer to you some ways in which we uh we we can see that.

And this is all about choices that we make about what the scriptures are for.

So in the Hebrew Bible, there's a book called Ezra and another book called Nehemiah.

These books say, really, they don't say this figuratively, they're they're extremely upfront.

The people who are not of Jewish descent, ethnic descent, people who live around Jerusalem particularly, but are from places like Moab and Edom and Egypt, other little countries, are not good.

They should be avoided.

And if you've married one of those people, they're dangerous because they don't believe the right things.

And you know what happens when you're married to somebody who doesn't believe the right things, they'll corrupt you.

So, this is the strong message of Ezra and Nehemiah.

If you've married one of those people, get rid of them.

Then there's a couple of other books, like this one, Jonah, and uh the book of Ruth, that are certainly written after these that say, well, not all of those people are actually that bad.

I mean, some of them may be, but uh, Ruth is a really nice lady, and she's not Jewish.

She actually becomes Jewish.

And you know, one way we could say it is these books are disagreeing and they contradict, but another way to read these books is saying, you know, difficult things are usually pretty difficult to explain and difficult to conclude.

So maybe these books are instead of disagreeing, they're having really a conversation with each other.

Which we are invited to join.

One way to look at scripture at the Bible is it's like the manual in your car tells you exactly what to do.

Another is it's a conversation opener to which you are invited to add your own voice.

The middle of Mark's gospel, now we're talking about a book in the Christian Bible, the absolute middle verse in the Bible, and there weren't, you know, the verses came in the 800s.

Regardless of the verses, the middle sentence is where Jesus looks at his disciples.

First he says, Who do other people say I am?

And you know the answer.

Some people say one of the prophets or John the Baptist, and Jesus says, middle sentence, who do you say I am?

It's as if Mark, the point of Mark, is for the reader to answer that question.

Who do you say Jesus is?

Now, you may know we've got four gospels in the Bible Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

But it's almost like Mark is saying, you are meant to add your own gospel.

What's the gospel according to Jim?

What's the gospel according to Sophie?

Who do you say Jesus is, and what's the good news about him?

Conversation starter or conversation closer.

I think those are two very different options we have when we read the Bible.

I want to, without boring you, and I probably will bore you, tell you a little bit about how we got what we got, if that makes sense.

Is that okay?

If you're bored, you'll tell me.

You might say, I would much rather you recite verses from the Bible, because that's what I did as a little kid in church.

The more I got, the more MMs I got.

And I happened to like MMs back then.

How we got what we got.

You know what's interesting is, as I told you, we've got 66 different books, and sometimes we make the mistake of thinking, oh, Genesis is the oldest book, and then the newest book must be the book of Revelation, because we like to put things in chronological order.

And that's not the case at all.

And uh, beyond that, where did it even come from?

This is where we ask the question in faith of this word inspiration.

All right, and you know, this is really great because this word, spire, is the word that's behind breath, and you hear it in the word holy spirit.

Spirit in the Bible is a word that either means it really just means moving air.

Any kind of moving air.

So that could be wind or that could be breath.

Um, and of course, this is just breathing in.

It sort of means that there was this Holy Spirit going around and it was breathed in, and then the Bible got written.

People do this a couple of different ways.

The way I learned in the evangelical tradition is this way that people, uh inspiration was mantic, which means God seized somebody and eliminated their human faculties, so basically, God dictated the Bible word for word and punctuation for punctuation.

Therefore, there can be no human error in it.

Because God did all the writing just through a human hand.

Does this make sense?

There's another opportunity, though, about inspiration, which is not that it's manic, but instead that it's more like an epiphany.

An epiphany, of course, is when we discover an idea that is so strong and compelling that it's essentially world-changing.

Like it changed, it's like when you get lenses.

You used to see 2100 and you put on a corrective lens, and now you see 2020.

The world looks completely different and you interact with it completely different.

It's sort of like when you were a kid and you had no idea how to read.

This is really good because we're talking about a written book.

So you'd look at these letters and they meant really nothing to you.

And the day you learn to read, you couldn't really go by letters again without reading them.

I mean, reading just changed you.

You can't go back to your pre-literate state.

An epiphany is not like cool ranch Doritos are worth buying.

Uh, an epiphany means you look at the world differently, right?

So something happened in people's lives.

They had an epiphany, they recorded their epiphany, which may or may not be equally an epiphany to you, but offers this opportunity to receive the inspiration other people had and maybe breathe in some of your own.

I don't know if that makes sense.

I have no doubt that in a time of duress, uh, when you're really feeling exhausted, very few of you will turn to the book of Leviticus and feel refreshed.

Because, you know, like, boy, when you're feeling like lonely and you don't have a friend in the world, you probably don't want to read about how you can't eat rock badgers and fruit bats.

That is probably not going to make you feel better about your loneliness.

It might.

And you probably would like to read that the Lord is your comforting shield, right?

A help and cause in times of trouble.

And this, I think, is part of the interesting thing, is that not every part of the Bible is equally inspirational to us at different times of our lives.

And just so in the composition as well, perhaps.

I do want to say there's not just two options.

There's maybe a third option, that these are humans writing stories that try to help them figure out who God is in the world and who they are, and it's a completely human product.

I will tell you, in the position of the Episcopal Church is more like this one, right?

More like this one.

Remember, we don't, we're not united in doctrine, we're united in worship, but this is our anchor in worship, and we sort of say, we have to take this oath when we become members of the clergy, that we believe that the Bible, Hebrew Bible, Christian Bible, contains all things necessary for salvation.

All things necessary.

Doesn't mean contains all things, just all things necessary.

This is sort of what we say.

The Holy Spirit has breathed into these books, and we can read that secondhand.

How did we get it?

Well, you may know a long, long, long time ago, people in general were not educated.

They didn't have time for that.

They were sharecroppers and farmers.

They pretty much worked all the time.

Less than 1% of the population could read or write.

And most of what they read or they read and wrote were things like contracts, how many bushels of wheat were owed to the king, or how many, how many barrels of olive oil.

So, what all scholars will tell you is that the Bible existed before it was written in stories that were to be not just read aloud rigidly, but performed.

The Bible was perfect, don't hear this in the wrong way, but performance art.

And as any good speaker knows, you have to change the way you present a story depending on who you are speaking to.

You can insist that's not the case, and I promise you, you will not succeed speaking to kindergartners and then speaking to Navy admirals.

It just well, actually, those anyway.

It just won't work.

It's audience dependent.

It's audience dependent.

So most scholars will tell you that a lot of our oldest stories, right, were sort of the things that you did when there wasn't daylight.

When when you couldn't see, like maybe around a campfire or at the end of the day, especially in times like this when the day is actually very short.

The daylight hours are short, and you can't work in the field.

You don't have electric lights, you don't have flashlights, uh, candles are actually relatively precious.

Um you're sort of told these stories, and you'll particularly see that in books like Genesis.

I tell you, as a young kid, the stories of Genesis are great because they've got characters and plot lines, they've got action and betrayal and a lot of humanity.

A lot easier to remember a story than it is a legal code about which animals you can't eat.

I just, this is the case, right?

Most scholars say what happened is there were a lot of different stories circulated, but you know, uh we even nationally have stories we like, like George Washington and the Cherry Tree.

Anybody ever heard that story about George Washington and the Cherry Tree?

I will not tell a lie, I cut down the tree.

We're not really sure that story's true, by the way.

But we tell it, we tell it, and it has a really important lesson about honesty, doesn't it?

I mean, it's got a great story.

Um, and and interestingly enough, even though many of us doubt the veracity of the story, like we're not really sure that happened, probably didn't happen, that cherry tree incident, we still tell it.

I mean, it's part of American folklore.

Now, I'm not going to put down the truth claims about scripture, but what I want to say is stories like the cherry tree, uh, they had different stories.

They were stories like the formation of the human being, or Joseph and the coat, or Jacob and Esau.

These are stories that not just one family thought were really interesting.

These were stories that clans found interesting.

They circulated big time.

And if the whole clan didn't like it or find it interesting or compelling, they kind of quit telling it.

That's sort of the understanding here, right?

I mean, every family's got its own stories, but cities, you know, have different bigger stories.

The big stories were the ones that eventually got written down.

That that's that's sort of the the goal, right?

And uh particularly when you read books about stories about Genesis, uh, from Genesis, these are stories that sort of uh people found extremely useful.

Uh as with the George Washington story, it's hard to tell.

Did they find it like a science book, or did they find it a useful story about where they came from, who people were, who God was, and how we were supposed to be related.

So I'll tell you, interestingly enough, if you've ever read Genesis, if you haven't, this is really easy to do.

Read Genesis chapter 1 and then read Genesis chapter 2.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention Genesis 2 · chapter mention

They're both about the creation of the world.

They have an entirely different feel to them, and they tell the same story twice in two different ways.

Some people say no, they don't, no, they don't, uh, because that'd be weird.

The Bible doesn't reduplicate itself.

But in general, what we say is actually the stories are telling us some really, really different and interesting things about who people are.

So if you if you don't mind me doing this, um in Genesis chapter 1, God looks at the world and it's a big mess, and God does things like say, let there be light and there's light.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

And then God separates the sky from the water, which means it used to be one thing.

Can you imagine that?

Well, people back then could.

And then God separates the land from the water, and then God starts making living things, and the last living thing God makes is human beings.

And God makes human beings in God's image and likeness.

That's the order, that's the story.

God tells the human beings, you're going to be shepherds of everything on the earth.

So you're supposed to take care of the world, and then God rests.

That's chapter one.

In chapter two, God makes a garden, and then God makes a human being to take care of the garden.

And then uh God sees the human beings lonely, so God makes all the animals.

And none of them are really good partners because, after all, uh, when you're working with a saber toothed tiger, uh your days are going to be limited.

So Then God digs out of the human being, digs out of the side, and makes, well, the woman, and then the people then they get married, they have kids, and they can't live in paradise anymore because they choose to eat from the tree of knowledge instead of the tree of life.

It would be hard for both of those events to be exactly true, don't you think?

There's a way you can do it, I want you to know.

This is the way that Jewish scholars and Christian scholars alike have figured it out.

It's this thing called Midrash, where they said, hey, God actually did it just like this in chapter 1, and something went wrong, so God had to do it again in chapter 2.

You can do that.

This is the great thing about the Bible, is we have so many ways we can read the Bible.

At a certain point, it's hard to say we're reading the Bible or it's reading us.

Or you could say, Genesis chapter 1 is telling us something really interesting.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

It's about God making order out of chaos, and it sort of suggests that people, having been created last, have the responsibility of caring for the rest of the thing.

For animals and plants, etc.

It's a pretty obvious reading, you know?

And that people are created in God's image and likeness, and therefore we're supposed to treat each other certain ways.

In Genesis 2, it's really quite different.

God doesn't just order things to happen.

God gets down to the dirt and makes a clay person, and it's not alive until God gives it mouth to mouth.

God breathes into the clay figure, and it is inspired and comes to life.

And the human beings name all the animals, and the human beings are separated into two, and they come back together.

And hey, God really is interested in separate people living in community.

And God made us out of the dirt, and guess what?

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

That's why the prayer book reads that way.

God made us out of the dirt, we return to the dirt.

Humans aren't meant to live forever, so make the most of the life that you have.

You see, uh, those are different things, but aren't they all true?

These are options when we read scripture.

There are books in the Bible that are legal codes.

Anybody ever read a legal code before?

Are there any lawyers in here?

My wife's a lawyer.

Let me tell you how undelightful it is to sit down and read a legal code when you were hoping you were going to read an entertaining story.

Legal codes, like in the book of Leviticus.

Again, I return to what you can eat and what you can't eat.

There are narrative stories, some of them which go chapters and chapters and chapters, like the story of Joseph and the Dream Coat.

So inspirational.

Andrew Lloyd Weber made a musical of it when he was 17 years old.

There are books criticizing politicians.

This is not new to us.

Those are called the prophets.

You can read Isaiah, and it is a it is a political commentary, a moral commentary, an editorial.

There are books that are have hyperboles, of course, there's letters, there's all different kinds of genre.

This is why I return to what we have is different books, a book of different books, not one type.

And of course, you know, you read a literary, a legal code differently than you read a poem.

It would be a mistake for you to do otherwise.

You don't read the Sunday comics like you read an essay.

That would be a mistake.

They're different kinds of literature.

These are options we have when we read the Bible is to recognize the wealth of diversity in it, or we can say, nope, it's all just one sort of thing.

I'm worried I'm being really, really boring.

Returning to what happens, people write down meaningful stories, and over time, over time those sort of coalesce to these are the most meaningful stories.

How we got, what we got, essentially, is that it would cost something like$10,000 to make one of the books in the Bible?

That is, to make the book of Genesis would have been a$10,000 at least creation.

And that's in like 1965 currency.

Does anybody know how inflations work?

Is that$50,000 today?

$10,000 in the 60s, is that like$50,000 today?

And you've got to think about this.

It's not just that people didn't really know how to make paper in the printing press, that you've got one person writing down the whole bit.

But actually, you know, the documents we have are written on a veal skin.

That's called vellum.

You hear it?

Veal and vellum.

Extremely valuable, extremely stretchy and pliable, and that's why we still have some of them.

And again, you're taking about a whole year to write down a book.

You can actually still do this.

You can buy a Bible sort of written by or handwritten copied by a rabbi, and you're going to spend in excess of$100,000 on that today.

That'll be on paper, it won't be on veal skin, right?

People start copying these and distributing them so that there is sort of a common bank.

It's not so that everybody can read the parchment.

Most people still can't read.

It's so that a common story can be communicated, even though it's well known that everybody reads differently.

You want proof of that?

Go in there on Sunday morning when we do the lections.

Every reader decides what they emphasize differently, even if they're emphasizing nothing.

If you read flatly and think you're emphasizing nothing, you are in fact emphasizing something.

So these common stories get passed down.

People decide which ones, in some ways, are the most meaningful.

Tell them the most about who they're supposed to be and who God is.

And there becomes this bank of copiers.

And you can think again about how copying works.

You can go word to word like this.

This is how many of us copy or we type, you know.

Mistakes happen, you know, a lot.

Particularly when you're tired or when you're hungry, or you've been doing it a long time.

There are safeguards in place to make sure that people don't make mistakes.

Like when people are copying the text, there's a number of letters per line that are written there, and after each line, they're supposed to go back and count.

But it turns out that some letters, just like in English, can look very similar in Hebrew.

Like the letter B, that's the bait, looks like this, and the letter kof looks like that.

And the only difference between them is what we call a jot.

Or a tittle.

If you ever heard jot and tittle in Jesus, that's the kind of bit he's describing, right?

So, man, when you're sitting there at candlelight, it's really easy for a bait to become a cough.

The other thing that happens sometimes is that people start to, well, sometimes they copy the line right, but they go back and they're not really thinking about what they're doing.

They're just thinking about copying, and they copy the same line again.

Like twice in a row.

It gets even more interesting when they decide that there's a better way to do it than eye to eye to eye to eye.

It's better if I've got a whole room of monks who know how to read, and there's me, the abbot, I read out loud and you write down while I read.

See, that way we can get 25 with one enunciation.

It should be much faster, right?

Except there's things like homophones, you know.

No, says the Lord.

Which one?

What's interesting, right, is whether you're doing it this way to that way, or you're doing it orally, there start to become differences in the documents.

The other thing that's interesting is some people read part of this that they're copying and they're like, what?

That doesn't make sense.

And they'll make a little note in the side, like, that doesn't make sense.

And the next person will copy that note right into the Bible.

God stood before Abraham, and that doesn't make sense.

Becomes a verse.

So what we have, this is a really interesting thing.

Uh we've got not the original, we've got copies of an original, but we don't really have that.

We've got copies of copies of copies, of copies of copies, of copies, of copies to an original book.

That's what we've got as scripture.

And um, interestingly enough, if we had the original book, like the one Jeremiah dictated or the first Genesis scroll, how would we even know it was the first one?

Would it say this is the first one?

Unlikely.

Unlikely.

I do want to tell you what's neat about this.

Despite all those differences I described, the textual variation is really small.

Very, very small.

And what's interesting as episcopal folk, and I think this is really, really important, is we sort of say, I mean, it depends how you go.

If this is what we say, that God wrote every word through a human hand, then there's a problem with what we have, don't you see?

Because we don't have what God originally gave us.

Think through that God didn't dictate the Bible in English.

Because there wasn't English.

The first manuscripts are written in biblical Hebrew, which was a dead language even when it was written.

People weren't even speaking it then, they were speaking Aramaic.

You know, if anytime you learned a foreign language, you learned that when you go from Spanish to English or English to Spanish, you can translate all the words, but it doesn't always make sense.

You know, if I told a German person to not cry over spilled milk, let me tell you the response would be, why would you do that?

Well, I mean, in English, that's the point of the phrase, right?

Is that one should not do that with full recognition that we do.

Idioms don't translate.

The other thing that's interesting, and I've told you this before in church, Biblical Hebrew's got 10,000 words in the whole dictionary.

English has 540,000 words.

So how translators go from the 10 to the 540 is not just a translation, it's an interpretation.

Every translation is an interpretation.

And people who aren't born speaking biblical Hebrew, by the way, no one is, are always reading a second language.

So these are some of the challenges we have when we read the Bible that way.

Instead, I think the episcopal position is listen, um, translators might have put the comma in the wrong spot.

Nonetheless, these books offer to begin a conversation about who we are and who God is and how we're supposed to live out this Christian journey.

And the interesting thing about Scripture, I think, as I've grown, is that every time I read it, I, if I'm open, I often get a different perspective.

And that's where we say these aren't just regular books, these are holy books.

They're extraordinary.

They're not ordinary books, they're extraordinary ones, because they offer to constantly reshape us and reform us.

And sometimes in the Episcopal tradition, we may say that's not reasonable.

That's not reasonable.

And sometimes we disagree.

Shall I give you an example of one of these?

You can't eat the following major mammals if you're Jewish.

You can't eat a camel or a pig or a horse or a bunny, and depending which book, it's either uh the camel or it's the rock badger.

Also called the Hyrax.

It's kind of like a marmot.

Now, you probably know you couldn't eat the pig.

And do you know why you can't eat the pig?

You know, there's a common understanding that it's trichinotes, but you know, ancient people are pretty smart.

They figure out when you eat a berry that's poisonous, don't eat that berry anymore, you know?

And and people are pretty clever when their life's on the line, you know, and undercooked meat is dangerous.

And people probably did figure that out pretty fast.

So actually, uh could be because of public health like trichinosis.

There's a worm in pork, but if you get it to 155 degrees, it's gone.

You know?

It doesn't live past the heating point, which is why.

If you're cooking a pork tenderloin, make sure it's 155, whether that's today or 3,000 years ago.

Uh the rabbis say, no, it has nothing to do with trichinosis.

It's not even about the dirt.

It has to do with the rabbis say it's all about categories.

The animals we're allowed to eat and that are called meat are animals that are vegetarians and more so ruminants, animals that eat grass.

So if you're Jewish, this is meat for you.

Cows, deer, which are wild things.

You know, they can't really be, can't really be cultivated quite like cows can.

Sheep and goats.

That's meat.

A chicken's not meat because, well, it's not a mammal, it's a bird.

You can therefore combine milk with a chicken, because it's not meat.

These are the three things you can eat.

And why can't, and notice what they do.

They eat grass or they eat shrubs, and they all have a split hoof.

A pig has a split hoof, but it's an omnivore.

Pigs will eat meat in the wild.

They they will.

The rabbis say, that's why you can't eat them, because a carnivore can't eat another carnivore.

That's why you can't eat a predatory bird, say the rabbis.

We all understand eagles are majestic, that's why you don't eat them.

We only think that because of our heritage, which says you don't eat carnivores.

In China, let me tell you, they eat eagles.

And they eat pigs.

In fact, uh, anything they can find, they eat.

Why can't you eat a camel?

Because even though it's an herbivore, it's not the same kind of rumina.

Why can't you eat a bunny doesn't even have hooves?

Uh why can't you eat a rock badger also doesn't have hooves?

And why can't you eat a horse it doesn't have a split hoof?

So it's all about keeping the category clean.

That's why you don't eat that.

Now look, here's what we decided as Western Christian folk.

We decided that's not reasonable, frankly.

We could say, well, God said you could later, but the bottom line is we decided that's not reasonable.

If you cook pork to 155 degrees, it's nourishing.

We eat that.

Horse is a much enjoyed meal in France.

It's kind of lean, to be honest with you, you know.

Bunnies, you can grow bunnies in a jiffy.

I'll tell you what, if you're poor folk, you can make bunnies like that.

And they taste, what do you know, a lot like chicken.

We decided because of reason, and frankly, because of things like we're hungry and there's these animals we could eat, um, that these would be acceptable foods.

That's sort of how we do this as episcopal people.

Right?

Now you could say, well, Mike, the real reason we decided is because in the New Testament, God tells Peter there's nothing unclean God has made.

Right?

Nothing's unclean.

We still don't eat eagles.

Can I point that out?

And we don't eat whales in this country.

We think that's really kind of yucky.

People in Iceland love the whale, and so do people in Japan.

I mean, they love the whale.

Um, we don't eat dolphins.

Doesn't that seem very gross to you?

Because they're like smart, right?

And they're mammals in the water.

We don't eat those.

And that has a lot to do with our tradition, not with our reason.

You see how all of this goes, right?

I mean, if God said we can eat it all, then we can, and we choose not to because we think that stuff's gross because of this and this.

And this is sort of how we we parse out things like food.

I'm not sure if you know, but in Leviticus, we're forbidden from wearing clothes made of more than one kind of fabric.

I am positive all of you are breaking that command, and let me tell you why you are.

Because it is so much easier to wear the cotton polyester blend.

So much easier to iron.

You can iron that in a dryer.

Anyone have linen garments?

100% linen?

I mean, good luck getting that thing unwrinkled.

I don't care who you are.

I mean, that's part of the point.

You know it's linen because it's wrinkled, right?

I mean, that's what they had.

And we sort of said, listen, there's nothing inherently bad with rayon.

In fact, better living through chemicals.

That's like the Houston slogan, isn't it?

That's reasonable, right?

I mean, that's kind of how we've decided on some things like that.

And we have these conversations about, well, okay, that was written at a time in a particular perspective for a particular people.

Is that still binding on us?

What did it mean to them?

What does it mean for us?

These are the kinds of conversations that Scripture hopefully not only has with us, but I promise you, is already having with itself.

Are all foreign people bad?

Are they all bad?

Or are some of them okay?

And I'll tell you how this story went for me, and this is where I think we live in tandem with Scripture.

Once upon a time, I was an exchange student in the country of Malta, and I lived in a youth hostel because there was no student housing.

And it was the first time I went to a little Baptist school, it was the first time in my life I met a Muslim person.

Well, because Muslims didn't go to Baptist colleges, you know, I'm not sure why.

And because uh I lived in, and frankly, a very small town.

And there may have been Muslims in my class, but we didn't know it.

Nobody wore hijabs to class.

They just didn't, they wouldn't have felt safe doing that, honestly.

So I met these Muslim people, and I knew they were terrible people going to hell because they were idolaters.

That's what church taught me.

And they were like the nicest people in the hostel.

I mean, they were so not hostile.

They had this like air of grace around them.

You ever met somebody that just has like an aura of welcome?

And I really had the first time had to think like, how can it be that these terrible people are better people than I am?

Because I don't have that.

I still don't have that, right?

I don't have this aura of like welcome and plenty, you know?

And so, boy, I had to really think through this.

Like maybe they were faking it.

Every time I met them, they were like that.

I mean, they were like really kind, really accessible.

I thought, you know, shucks, like maybe I've got this wrong a little bit.

And this is where it starts.

Maybe they're not all bad.

I think this is how we start.

Maybe they're not all bad.

And now, of course, you know, I think we get to the point where we can say, as Episcopal folk, or, you know, as grown up people, actually, people are kind of people.

People are kind of people.

We've all got good in us somewhere, right?

R regardless of how it is we we read this.

So it's incumbent upon us to have this constant conversation.

That even though these people have very different spiritual beliefs, beliefs, the question is what do we do with our beliefs?

How do we practice?

Where is grace to be found?

And I think the scriptures often try to tease that out of us.

So I'll tell you, I grew up in Ezra and Nehemiah, that were no good Muslim folks, and then I met some, you see.

I met Ruth.

I met Jonah.

I met Jesus' ancestors, Tamar and Rahab.

And they weren't just kind of alright.

They were better people than I was.

Inspired me to want to be better people.

And that's how the conversation sort of evolved for me.

And often can with us biblically.

Well, I talked way too long, and I probably put you.

Yeah, I did.

I did.

I see it.

So this is an interesting thing that we get to consider, quite honestly, and this is part of our heritage, I think, as Episcopalians and as Christians, particularly as Protestants from the Reformation, is we sort of often talk about the Word of God.

And usually when we do that, we put a big capital on that to show it's real important, right?

And you know, I sort of learned as a young boy the Bible's the word of God.

The Bible's the word of God.

And in uh, that man who was so critical to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

We memorized whole patches of it.

But you know, the Bible has a different understanding about the word of God.

It happens in John 1.

Do you know what the Word of God is?

According to the Bible.

It's Jesus.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

And it's not talking about the Bible, it's talking about Jesus.

And this is this interesting thing that we say, right?

Is the Word of God is Jesus Christ, particularly the resurrected Jesus, and the Bible is a way to help us get our hearts and our heads and our spirits around who the Word of God is and who the Word of God asks us to be.

As a boy, when I said the Bible was the Word of God, I was worshiping the wrong thing.

There's something called idolatry, and there's something called bibliolatry.

Bibliolatry is when we worship the Bible, mistaking it for the Word of God when in fact that's Jesus Christ.

And that is the episcopal position because that's the biblical position.

I hope that's okay to say.

So what do we do with the Bible?

And I do want to tell you, maybe it's because I grew up Southern Baptist, I think we read it carefully and frequently.

And it's an interesting thing in my experience that Episcopalians don't know much about the Bible, even though we read more of it on Sundays than I ever read as a Southern Baptist person.

Sermons would be based about one verse in the Baptist church, and we get four readings every week.

I don't know if you know this though.

Every Sunday we read the four readings.

The person who put those together, the group of folks who put those together, think you know what they're all about already.

Do you?

This is a great thing to do, is to have Episcopalians study the Bible because we're so good at these things.

The thing we're missing is that one.

If we just had a good handle on it, man, I think we'd be in a great spot.

Offers to take us places outside ourselves.

You know, good, good Episcopal theologian C.

S.

Lewis sort of says that God is the breaker of images, which means once we get really comfortable with who God is, God makes it God's own duty to smash that so we can get something better.

Lady Anne Lamotte says, We know we've made God in our image when God hates the same people we do.

This is what the Bible often offers to take us out of our comfortable places, I think into new and greater ones and more open ones.

Which is why we have every Sunday, I don't know if you notice in worship, we have two parts.

We have the liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Sacrament.

Now, it's very likely you've been in Episcopal churches in which you walk in in the morning and there's the chalice under the bursen veil.

Right there on the Lord's table.

Has anybody seen that before?

It's there the whole service.

I want to tell you why we do it different here at St.

Thomas, and some other churches do it differently.

The liturgy of the sacrament comes second.

The gift of the Protestant Reformations is that first you get the liturgy of the Word, which is why the Bible is open for you.

The goal of preaching in the Episcopal Church is that we hear one, two, three, four readings from Scripture.

It's the preacher's job to weave those together and open the word to you.

And once the word is open, then the sacrament is open as well.

So we good Episcopal folks have the liturgy of the word and then the liturgy of the sacrament, and neither one trumps the other.

You notice when we parade the gospel out, we don't put the cross in front of it.

Because at the procession, the word is more important than the cross.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

They go together.

They go together.

The cross opens and closes, and in the middle we process the word, and of course we read it in the middle of the people, the gospel, because it is for all the people in their midst.

And that's what we've traditionally done with this.

Okay, I know I skipped things that you're wondering about.

Do you have questions or ways you share in which scripture has formed you?

That's a tough one.

I know I'm asking a lot all of a sudden.

Questions about Scripture, based on my really kind of awful lecture, or anybody willing to say ways in which Scripture has and continues to form you.

And the really neat thing is we've got through the scripture and through the rites, I'm like, you know, throw those in my law.

When you read when you read those, all of these rites that we do, my favorite is baptism, I'll love baptism.

They're always refreshing every time we do it.

And the writer to these to both is those stories come right out of Scripture.

The whole liturgy is mined out of Scripture and thoughtfully re-put together.

It represents the reader's digest version from many of the books in the book.

Cohesively put together.

Yeah, it's really a special part of the service and people practice.

Yeah.

And I want to offer to you just a few images, if I can, that you'll see in church and ways in which images and scripture interact, and make this my last case about why you should read the Bible and know it.

If you look in the Columbarium chapel, you'll see three different things, and I'm going to talk about two of them.

One is Christ the Good Shepherd, arms open, lamb jumping.

Right?

And this, of course, comes from John chapter 15, in which Jesus says, I am the good shepherd.

John 15 · chapter mention

And he talks about the difference between good shepherds and regular ones.

Or to say, the difference between holy shepherds and ordinary ones.

Every other picture I've seen of Jesus the Good Shepherd, he's holding the lamb on his shoulders.

There's one of those in the chapel, and usually to be honest, they both don't look very happy.

Oh man, this is a heavy one.

But I'll hold it.

In this picture, on the other hand, and keep in mind, this is in a chapel where people's human remains are interred, right?

There's this scene about the difference between ordinary and extraordinary shepherding.

The Lamb comes not just willingly, but joyfully.

And of course, that's not a translation, it's an interpretation.

And a fantastic way to think about the difference between ordinary shepherding and extraordinary, right?

Is that scene and what it might mean for us now and one day, and for who God is.

The Good Shepherd calls, and we come with joy instead of uh, which means we get to live our lives backward.

If we know that's the end, then the goal is to follow Christ the Good Shepherd with joy now.

That's an interplay between art and scripture.

But if you don't know the scripture, you might miss that.

There's the other picture where Thomas, the apostle, is touching Jesus, you see, in the side, and it's a flower.

Now, if you didn't know the story, Thomas touches Jesus in the wound.

Jesus dies and he comes back and he's got wounds, and Thomas says, I won't even believe he's back unless I put my hands in the death spaces where the nails went.

And Jesus shows up and says, Thomas, go ahead, put your hands there.

Now we don't know if he ever does, but in the picture, Thomas, and this I think is the interesting bit, Thomas puts his hands in this place that should be full of death.

He puts his fingers in mortal wounds, and instead of feeling death, he feels surrounded by new life.

That's the hope of the resurrection, as best as I can understand it.

And there's a picture of that.

It offers to not translate the scene, it offers to interpret it.

And then with that interpretation, I think what's great about the Bible is often I find in its own stories my own or opportunities for my own.

And uh the the best one in my head, not best, the biggest one in my head for years, it's like the most impossible thing, because it's it's impossible.

Is the story in Isaiah that the wolf will lie down with the lamb, and the calf will lie down with the bear, and the leopard with the kid.

Natural enemies will rest with each other.

God's going to accomplish that.

I mean, this is why I think we say this is inspired, because in my mind, enemies just get wiped out.

Or we get put in different corrals, you know, so that we don't have to interact.

And God's got something greater than we can ask or imagine, and that's in Holy Scripture.

And the question is then, we're called to be those people.

We're called to cultivate relationships in which there's reconciliation and rest, even among people who are estranged.

How does that not reform you?

If we don't read it, we we we don't know.

I will tell you, do not start with Leviticus, because you will quit.

We approach it in in good time.

And again, as Episcopalians, we always start with what did it mean when it was written?

So, how can it inform us now?

Um, I don't know.

I'm I'm afraid I've just wasted 50 minutes of your life.

But I I I I do hope you will find Scripture to be nourishing and reforming and to offer, you see, once you get the fact pattern, you come to the liturgy and it becomes alive in new ways.

The liturgy interprets the Bible for you.

It doesn't just translate it.

People die in the Bible, and people die sad in the Bible, and at the funeral service, though, we reinterpret that through the rest of the story.

There aren't a lot of weddings in the Bible.

I'll tell you, there's not a lot.

The wedding rite interprets marriage for us.

It tells us this is God's gift.

It's meant for joy, it's meant for unity, and for people to be reconciled even when they hurt each other.

That's the gift of the scriptures to us.

Okay.

Um thanks for listening.

Thanks for being here.

And next week we'll talk about history.