John Morris
June 15, 2024
Trinity
Deborah gave us a sermon a few weeks back called “Listening for the Word of God.” As always, she said so many excellent things that I’m tempted to just reshuffle them and call them my sermon. But I’ll resist, and quote just one statement that really got my attention and led to my volunteering to preach today. Here it is:
“Rather than simply ignoring the parts of the biblical record that today seem immoral, unjust, or downright cruel, we can acknowledge the whole truth of our past and use that knowledge to move forward into a more just, merciful, and inclusive future.”
Deborah was addressing the fact that, when we read scripture together on Sunday, we not infrequently find ourselves reading about people and cultures that did not share our values — about women, slavery, and animals, to name three prominent differences. She recommended that we shouldn’t excise those passages and pretend they weren’t written as part of “the Word of God.” Instead, she described a response that could “acknowledge” these ethical differences, and use that acknowledgment to “move forward” toward a future that is more just, merciful, and inclusive.
I agree heartily with the spirit of this. In my word today, I want to try to understand what that would mean in practice.
I’ll start with some basic thoughts about what the Word of God is not.
The Word of God is not every single sentence in the Bible, taken out of context. How silly would that be?! We find Herod saying, “Kill all the boys in Bethlehem who are two years old and under,” we pull that out of context and declare, “That must be the word of God, it’s in the Bible.” But we all know that the Word of God is bigger than a sentence, and that sentences occur in a context.
OK, and the Word of God is not every single sentence in the Bible, end of story, no further words accepted. Or so it seems to me, and that is how Seekers understands this as well. We believe that each of us continues to hear the word of God, and when we preach, we are bringing that word, perhaps saying something for the first time, or at any rate something not in scripture. One obvious way in which this occurs is when we preach about issues that no one in Biblical times could have spoken about, because they didn’t exist – AI, for instance, or global heating. We also look for truth in other written-down words . . . we ponder them and quote them constantly, seeking God’s word in poetry, in humor, in memoir, even in philosophy!
This leads us to the important understanding that, therefore, other faith traditions may also speak the Word of God, in their holy scriptures.
The Word of God is not written in English. Though there are fundamentalist churches that claim to know that the King James Version is specifically mandated by God as the one true scripture.
The Bible is written in several original languages. But the Word is not the language – the word is what the language means. It isn’t any more the Word of God in the original Greek than it is in Bengali. The Word is supposed to be some kind of wisdom, not just the sentences and paragraphs. The word of God is the truth of God.
Mentioning wisdom brings me to our reading from Proverbs. This is Sophia, wisdom, speaking:
“The LORD created me at the beginning of the LORD’s work, the first of the LORD’s acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth.
Don’t you wonder why this wasn’t mentioned in Genesis? I’m serious. In the Genesis account, we have God making matter, but God never makes spirit or rationality or wisdom. The Proverbs story, from Sophia’s own lips, sounds much more likely to me. And it fits with John 1, in which we’re told “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.”
So here’s the Word of God again, in quite a different context. A lot of you have heard me go on before about the Greek word logos, which is translated here as “word,” so I’ll be brief. But it’s important to know that logos captured a concept that we need several English words for: the truth as it can be known or expressed in language; logic, or structure of thought, from which we get our word “logic”; the way things are, the hidden plan. All of this would have been present for a Greek reader of John’s gospel. And isn’t this what Sophia is telling us, in Proverbs?: “The Lord created me at the beginning of the Lord’s work, the first of the Lord’s acts of long ago.”
So we have a sort of tension here – we have the Word of God as a truth that was there at the beginning, a deep structure of everything that is and could be – but we also have the Word of God as evolving, requiring understanding and interpretation, not the kind of Word we can point to in a piece of scripture and say, “It’s written there, so it must be true.”
How do we live in that tension? How do we seek the truth of God’s word in the very human and limited expressions of language that we find in scripture, and everywhere else?
Deborah introduced us to the term “hermeneutics,” which is a technical term for interpreting a text so as to understand its meanings. You are now fortunate enough to be hearing the second sermon in less than a month that also talks about hermeneutics! Let’s look at one of those “difficult texts” from scripture and see what we can learn.
I think Paul is always a good subject – or victim – here, because unlike Herod, when Paul speaks we have a tendency to assume that he is speaking the Word of God, just because he’s Saint Paul. So let’s look at the notorious passage about women, from First Corinthians 14: 34-35:
“As in all the congregations of the Lord’s people, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.”
Some scholars believe that Paul did not actually say this – that it was added later. Others believe Paul was quoting a “Corinthian slogan” about women and church, so as to refute it in the next passage, where he says: “What! Did the word of God originate with you, or are you the only ones it has reached?”
There is even a suggestion that the original Greek has been mistranslated, and that Paul was actually speaking about spouses rather than wives! Why he would be warning a gender-neutral “silent one”, as this translation goes, that it is “disgraceful for a spouse to speak improperly in church” is a mystery. But even our Inclusive Bible tries to politically correct Paul this way. I read some transliterated Greek, however, and I can assure you, the Greek words are gynakes, women, and andras, men or husbands. The idea, I suppose, is that from our enlightened vantage point in 2025, Paul should have spoken this way, so we’ll change the words so he does. As Australian theologian Marg Mowczko charitably puts it, “There are several issues with this translation, which doesn’t come close to reflecting the Greek.”
So these are three examples of how to avoid the obnoxious and unethical face-value interpretation of the Corinthians passage: We can deny that Paul said it, or we can deny that it was said at face value, or we can invent an inoffensive English paraphrase so there’s nothing difficult to deal with at all.
Another, more promising hermeneutic approach is to contextualize and discriminate Paul’s words. You’ll find this approach in various scholars, who offer things such as: Paul only meant “wives,” not women in general, because the wives in the Corinthian church had a reputation as chatterboxes and prevented others from hearing what was being said; or, Paul was responding realistically to what Kenneth Bailey claims as a fact of Corinthian life: “Due to their cultural upbringing, women were handicapped with a very short attention span, as short as fifteen seconds.” Or: “Men and women may have sat separately. If this was the case, wives may have shouted across the divide to their husbands to ask them to explain,” and this would have been disruptive.
Carla Works, in her book “The Least of These: Paul and the Marginalized,” takes a different and more interesting approach. She emphasizes the role of women as leaders in the Corinthian church, which Paul actually encouraged, and suggests that Paul in this passage was trying to find a way to satisfy both conservative and progressive responses to this unprecedented advance for women.
Let’s say we think the passage is genuine, and that it means more or less what it says. Let’s say we believe that Paul was just not as evolved as we are when it came to women’s roles, or was unwilling to validate out loud what he saw happening all around him. He may have welcomed female Christians, and found important work for them to do in the churches, including preaching, but when it came to speaking during worship, he thought that was a bad idea, or at least felt he had to say he did.
OK – is this the Word of God, meaning God’s truth, something we should discern and cherish and try to live by? I’m going to say no – it would certainly mean that Seekers Church is doing the Devil’s work big-time. So what is it? And why should we read it aloud in a Sunday service, when the words from the pulpit are meant to be, if not eternally true, at least edifying and inspiring?
My suggestion about this is kind of simple-minded, but I hope you’ll see something in it. I think that reading passages in which Paul seems to screw up, to put it bluntly, encourages our humility. We all make mistakes, maybe especially about God. Our current cherished ethical beliefs about many things are likely to seem equally screwed up to Christians two thousand years from now, if God willing, there are any. Let’s not read the Bible as a story in which all the people we admire say nothing but true things, and never make mistakes, and confidently channel God’s word. Instead, let’s read it as a story about people like us – trying really hard to figure out how to respond to God’s call, and not always succeeding. If there is a truth about God here – a Word of God we can discern and talk about – I think it’s a story about how communities try to follow Jesus, not a story about how God writes a book in which some of the characters always speak for God.
Again, Carla Works seems to suggest as much when she writes, “What we see in these letters [of Paul] are the struggles of real believers who are trying to navigate life in the tension of their conventional roles and in the freedom of their service to Christ.”
Before leaving this thought, I should point out one thing: If we do take this approach, and see the Bible stories as narratives about fallible people, we are going against the current of a lot of centuries of Christian interpretation. Let’s face it: Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians about women did not win a place in scripture because they were a good teachable moment. They were almost certainly taken as God’s word about how women ought to behave. And I think this is true of all the ethically problematic passages of scripture: They have been used, over and over, to prop up patriarchy, slavery, destruction of animals and their environment, authoritarianism, and anti-Semitism. And, more often than not, it seems to me that is exactly how they were meant.
Let me close with a reflection on the reading from John. I want to tie it in to the idea that we, here and now, are still looking for and trying to speak the Word of God. Here’s the passage:
I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you into all the truth; for she will not speak on her own, but will speak whatever she hears, and she will declare to you the things that are to come.
Consider that phrase, “you cannot bear them now.” That’s really provocative, for me. What were some truths about God that the early Christians might not have been able to bear? That being equally loved in the eyes of God means that slavery is wrong? Hard to bear. That women should not be prevented from full participation in their lives, and the life of the Church? Hard to bear. That animals are no longer needed as sacrifices, and that a day will come when we can no longer claim them as ours, to use as we please? Wow, hard to even conceive of, for a herding and fishing community with no other sources of food. But Sophia does still have many things to say to us, and she will guide us into all the truth. She speaks through us, here on Sunday and all the other days of the week. So let’s listen, and speak. And remember to be humble. Getting it wrong is not just possible, it’s actually kind of likely. And gee, that means me too, in this very sermon! But we keep trying, with God’s grace. Amen