Bulletin

Scripture

“Black and White and Read All Over” by Pastor Rosanna McFadden

Good morning!  Today we are continuing, with a week of interruption, the sermon series Going Gray in a black and white world. As I mentioned in the first sermon, this series is inspired by the writing of Adam Hamilton, Pastor of United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City. Two weeks ago I spoke about looking for what is true and just and excellent and worthy of praise in other people — especially those people with whom we disagree.  This morning we’re going to consider the Bible: what we believe about it how we interpret it and how we apply it.

When I was a kid, there were a series of jokes making the rounds which started with the question: what is black and white and red all over? Anwers varied from an embarrassed zebra, a penguin with a sunburn, etc.  And then one of the answers was a phone book — which was puzzling, because you had to figure out that it wasn’t red the color, it was read the past tense of read.  Get it?  Of course this is even more puzzling now for generations of youth and young adults who are wondering, “What’s a phone book?” It was probably a stretch even when I was a kid to say that phone books were “read all over.”  Almost every household had one, and they were referenced when needed, but I don’t think anyone sat and read them.

I wonder if this describes how many people use the Bible, as well.  For most of us, there’s probably at least one around the house or available online, and we’re familiar enough with it to find favorite passages, but it would be a stretch to say that it’s read all over.  I don’t have time here to go into all the history of how the Bible came to be, but for much of its history it couldn’t be read at all — at least by most people.  The earliest biblical material was stories told be pre-literate people; once things were written down they became the province of scholars and those who had the time and education to study and interpret the text and share it with a mostly illiterate population.  In Europe, the Bible was written and read in Latin — a language which only priests spoke, and hand-copied manuscripts were guarded treasures, not part of ordinary homes.  It was not until the invention of the printing press and the Bible being translated into the languages which people spoke that wide-spread reading of the Bible was even possible.  The work of translation and communicating the gospel continues today through the work of organization such as Wycliffe International and SonSet Solutions, which bring linguistics and technology to sharing the Bible around the world.

For most of us, the Bible is black and white — at least the literal print is black on a white page.  But there are spaces within those letters and between those words.  Without that space, the text would be illegible. I believe that the black and white text provides foundational truth and the Holy Spirit moves in the “white spaces” — the context, the silences, the interpretation, and the application to life.   Image  This image captures that sense for me.

There were a lot of texts I could have chosen for this Sunday, but much of what we know as “the Bible” was not written with the assumption that it was the inerrant Word of God.  It was laws to hold society together, poetry for worship, visions of the future, and letters to churches who were squabbling.  This last was the reason I chose our text from 1 Corinthians.  The church at Corinth was not fighting about the Bible, because that collection of New Testament books as we know it did not yet exist.  But the church at Corinth was fighting about spiritual gifts: who had them and what authority those gifts conferred.  And the Apostle Paul notes in verse 13 that “we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit,” and then again in verse 16 Paul quotes the prophet Isaiah, “For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” In other words, who are we to tell God God’s business?  And then Paul adds, But we have the mind of Christ.

I don’t have time this morning to present the variety and polarity of opinions and understanding about the Bible — Adam Hamilton has a readable and even-handed, summary of this in his book, Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White.  But I do want to give and overview of a Church of the Brethren/Anabaptist perspective on the Bible, and a very quick case study on the complexity of seeking the mind of Christ in a black and white world.  I’m going to be packing in a lot of information, beginning the writing of Stuart Murray from his essay in the Anabaptist Community Bible.  Murray says early Anabaptists — spiritual forerunners of the early Brethren — had six principles for biblical interpretation:

1. The Bible can be understood and applied by people with out special education: it is accessible to ordinary believers.
2. The Holy Spirit is the interpreter of scripture, and followers of Jesus can expect the Spirit to help them as they read.
3. The main purpose of reading scripture is to encounter God and discover God’s will for faithful discipleship.  Interpretation involves application.
4. The Christian community is the main context for understanding scripture — the Spirit is at work, insights are shared, and applications are tested in community [this understanding is new with the Anabaptist movement]
5. The life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the focal point of the biblical story; the Bible should be read from a Christian perspective.
6. The Old Testament is an essential foundation of the New Testament, but it does not override the New Testament, and must be interpreted in light of it.

There’s a lot to unpack there.  I hope those principles sound familiar to you, and I trust that all or many of them are things you agree with, because I believe they honor the black and white of the biblical text but take us into the spaces where the Spirit is at work.

The first principle says that the Bible can be understood without seminary education: it is accessible to ordinary folks — no interpretation should contradict the a clear reading of the text. It says what it says.  Simple enough, right?  I’m going to share a verse which seems pretty simple and straightforward and consider how we can become divided over things which seem obvious to one set of people not the other.  Exodus 20:13 is part of the law of Moses, and this particular law is You shall not kill.  That seems obvious.  It’s helpful to know that the original Hebrew is You shall not murder, which narrows this to the taking of human life, and gets those of us who are not vegetarians off the hook.  You shall not take another human life.  But nations and governments have made all kinds of exceptions to this — some of which we take for granted, and some which people are unhappy about.  Most nations have a standing army, or military forces, which are trained to kill other people.  Soldiers who do not obey an order to kill are subject to discipline.  Many countries, including the United States, have laws which allow for capital punishment, or state execution of people whose crimes — usually including murder — are so terrible that they are out of reach of rehabilitation.  We allow law enforcement officers to kill in self-defense, and even private citizens to kill in defense of property.  But what happens when that police officer kneels on the neck of an unarmed man, or the private citizen shoots a teen-ager who was taking a short-cut through the yard? What about women who end a pregnancy before the baby is viable? What about girls who have been raped by family members and want to end a pregnancy?

I believe there are other passages in the Bible besides one verse in Exodus which speak to these issues and should be considered as part of a faithful response. I don’t have to tell you that Christians of good will disagree on how society could or should handle some of the questions I posed above.  Seeking the mind of Christ should be a high value for every Christian, not because it’s a way to prove that I am right and you are wrong, but because seeking the mind of Christ affirms that we are playing on the same team: Christ is Lord, and Christ alone. How do we live in the light of that truth?Next week be the final week of the Going Gray series.  We’ll consider what scriptures and emphasis about character of Jesus Christ guide our thinking and how that impacts our belief and action as we seek the mind of Christ in a black and white world.  God bless you.