Red Bison Faith: Akbaakuxshé: Sermon Series, Responding to the Religious Right 5, "The Bible Is Diverse"

Friday, May 11, 2018

Sermon Series, Responding to the Religious Right 5, "The Bible Is Diverse"

Responses to Violent Christendom 5

Proverbs 5:3-8; Proverbs 31:30-31; Ruth 3:3-4; Jonah 4:11

October 22, 2017

Throughout this fall I have been preaching on our necessary responses to the Religious Right, what I refer to as Violent Christendom. I believe that evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity, though diverse in its many incarnations, has largely made a deal with the devil to secure power and wealth while refusing to be critical of its violent, arrogant, racist, and misogynistic core. To illustrate, way back in February of this year, Pastor John Pavlovitz tweeted out a response to President’s Trump’s Muslim ban, “Equality means believing that a child living 5,000 miles away is a precious as the one sleeping in your nursery right now.”[1] The tweet was shared by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and Pavlovitz was greeted with all kinds of vulgarity and threat. Pavlovitz shared that Amy, a Conservative white Christian mom responded to his tweet by writing, “If you have children, I feel sorry for them.”[2] Pavlovitz’s call to love thy neighbor is greeted with Amy’s call to family values.

Evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity has been co-opted by the very imperial narrative that was the foil for Jesus of Nazareth’s life, teaching, and ministry. For that reason, I have argued that we must break out of the frames provided by the father strict disciplinarian model espoused by people like Dr. James Dobson and Focus on the Family. We must remember that the faith taught and lived out by Jesus is not about having all the answers but having the humility of a Socratic faith—a faith based on salient questions and always on a road of uncertainty. Finally, two weeks ago I suggested that all of those difficult conversations with family members and friends around the upcoming holiday season should be punctuated with not the name of Jesus but the content of his life, teaching, and ministry—particularly his faith in a non-violent God and his focus on the economically poor.

In all of those conversations, one of the regular things I hear from people who try to engage their fundamentalist family and friends is the dreaded Bible quotes. The blood drains out of our face as we realize we will never have that kind of Biblical acumen. What should we do? My first response is . . . don’t. That is their frame, they have learned a circular Biblical worldview, and you will never win within that frame. Reason, experience, historical Christian witness (like Dr. King, Julian of Norwich, or St. Francis of Assissi) all provide other discernment tools for how Christian life is to be lived. You can merely say, “Yeah, I have used reason, or experience, or lives of other Christian saints to help me learn how to live faithfully. I think they are just as important as Bible.” And you would be right.

But if you are going to go there with Bible, here is another faithful response. The Bible is incredibly diverse. Within the Bible are all kinds of factual contradictions: historical contradictions in the order of kings, different accounts of Jesus’s resurrection, and even Biblical teaching that is intentionally contradictive.

The Scripture Ron read for this morning provided perfect examples. Hebrew Scripture scholar, Timothy J. Sandoval shares how the book of Proverbs speaks in a recurring way about two different women. One was the strange or foreign woman. With explicit sexual language, young men are warned about the foreign woman whose lips drip with the words of seduction. She will lead you to foreign gods, godless idols, and destruction. The patriarch also speaks of woman wisdom or the woman of worth. She is the ideal Jewish woman who can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan. The kind of woman described in Proverbs 31 reminds me of my favorite song by the band Cake, “Short Skirt, Long Jacket.”

With fingernails that shine like justice
And a voice that is dark like tinted glass
She is fast, thorough, and sharp as a tack
She's touring the facilities and picking up slack
I want a girl with a short skirt and a long, long jacket[3]

This is a woman of worth and virtue, not like those strange and foreign woman who live outside of Israel. Right? So, Proverbs seems to say, if you want life to go well for you, young man, do not marry any of those foreign women.

Intentionally, right after the book of Proverbs, is the book of Ruth. Naomi and her husband leave Israel in the middle of a famine to the country of Moab. There in Moab, their sons take foreign women, Moabite women, for their wives. When Naomi’s husband and sons all die, she decides to head back to Israel without any of the power necessary to make it in a patriarchal culture—a man connected to you. She encourages her daughters-in-law to remain in Moab. They are young enough to remarry. But Ruth, Ruth, that foreign or strange woman, acts more like woman wisdom, a woman of worth, and refuses to leave the side of her mother-in-law in steadfast love. Ruth returns with Naomi back to Israel and supports her and will not leave her side. Ruth is sent by her mother-in-law to the bed of Boaz, a relative who could redeem Naomi, by taking Ruth as his bride. There is no other way to say it. Ruth is sent by Naomi to seduce Naomi’s relative, Boaz. The book of Ruth ends with the strange and foreign woman giving birth to a son who will be an ancestor to King David. Ruth is therefore included in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus.

Ok, is the Bible a warning against strange or foreign women? Or is the Bible a critique of teaching against those who warn against strange or foreign women? Yes.

The Bible is diverse. Throughout Scripture are these warnings against foreign idolaters. Throughout Scripture is the teaching that God cares about the salvation of those outside the nation of Israel.

The book of Jonah is one of those stories that flips the Jewish story. The Jewish story is that God calls the prophet and the prophet responds by faithfully saying, however reluctantly, “Here I am!” In this story, however, Jonah is asked to go the mortal enemies of the Jewish people, the Ninevites, to preach for their repentance. Jonah wants nothing to do with this. He runs away. The sea, thought to be outside God’s control and love, is used by God to get Jonah back on track. The sea monster, thought to be a tool of God’s judgment in story and song, became a creature of God’s mercy, swallowing Jonah and then spitting him up on the beach on the way to Nineveh. Ok, is God an enemy of those who have historically oppressed Israel? Or does God seek to extend mercy to them? Yes.

The Bible is an ancient book filled with diverse and sometimes contradictory teaching. Too often progressive Christians have thrown the whole thing out because we cannot understand it like our evangelical and fundamentalist sisters and brothers do. But within its pages, when engaged critically, are mythologies, stories, songs, and teachings that can help us discern how to move through this age. The Bible is a tool. What I want to encourage all of us to do, as we engage in those holiday conversations, is not to get wrapped up in believing that, if you do not know Bible like someone else does, it makes you any less of a Christian. For, at our core, we are all spiritual beings. And there are many authentic paths. But if you do engage, you can easily say, “You know, the Bible is a diverse book with diverse teachings, sometimes contradictory in nature. I know you think you have it down pat. But the fact that you think the Bible only says one thing, means you really don’t know. While I, I think faith is living with that ambiguity and diversity and discerning, as I grow, the wonderful words of life found in its pages.” May it be so. Amen.