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Rev. Chris Jimmerson and AJ Juraska
June 30, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
So often, we recoil against overly literal interpretations of the bible that at best seem irrational and at worst harmful. What if rather than a “literal- factual” understanding of biblical scripture, we embraced scholar and theologian Marcus Borg’s “historical-metaphorical” approach instead? Might then the bible become poetry of love and justice?
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
READING THE BIBLE AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME;
TAKING THE BIBLE SERIOUSLY BUT NOT LITERALLY
by Marcus J Borg“… stories can be true without being literally and factually true … A metaphorical approach to the bible thus emphasizes metaphors and their associations … metaphors can be profoundly true, even though they are not literally true. Metaphor is poetry plus, not factuality minus.”
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
“The Bible is like Santa Claus and sex. Children hear about it on the playground or on the street, whether or not their parents discuss it with them. And as an adult, if you don’t enjoy it and wish to abstain, you can successfully avoid it only by taking extreme measures such as total social deprivation or profound isolation.
The Bible is holy scripture because it is the living document and foundation of many important faiths, including Unitarian Universalist. To abandon the Bible would mean alienation from one of the world’s most important influences on religious thought-liberal and otherwise …. Our concept of respect for the web of existence, for instance, emanates from a stream of thought that flows through the Psalms and the Prophets from that same God of Genesis who declared the goodness of creation.”
– Rev. David McFarland
Sermon
AJ Juraska’s Homily
I just finished my first year of seminary. If you had told me five years ago I would be in seminary, I would have been shocked. Even more so by the fact that I am attending a Christian seminary.
I wanted to attend a Christian seminary in part because I knew that whether I end up being a chaplain, a parish minister, or working on social justice issues, living in Texas means that I will be exposed to Christian viewpoints and references to the Bible. The more I learn about the Bible, the more I realize that the Bible is hidden in plain sight all around us – in song lyrics, art, writing, common sayings, and so much more. The song we heard earlier, Turn Turn Turn by Pete Seager, is from Ecclesiastes Chapter 3. While working on this homily, I learned that Emily Dickenson’s works reference the Bible.
A part of me also hoped that, by going to a Christian seminary maybe I would find myself identifying as a Christian again. I grew up in a Christian church and I miss some of the magic I found there, and the belonging in having a shared text. Being a UU can be hard in that way. When I used to play roller derby I would often get asked “but where is the ball.” I think the equivalent in UUism is “where is the central text that you all read and agree on.”
As it turns out, though, even the Christians don’t agree on a central text. Catholics include different books of the bible than Protestants. So we’re not even all reading the same Bible. It took hundreds of years after Jesus’ death before there was even a semblance of agreement on what books to include, and the order to read them in.
The books of the Bible were written in a time and a place. As my New Testament professor says, some of what we are reading is essentially someone else’s mail. Paul is writing to early Christian churches to try to guide them in how to be successful in this new endeavor, especially at a time when Christians were persecuted and there was debate over who could be included in this new church.
So why should we read something written nearly two thousand years ago that has context and meaning for a time so long in the past? Unitarian Universalist Minister John A Buehrens answers us in his book Understanding the Bible: An Introduction for Skeptics, Seekers, and Religious Liberals. He says, “Progressive people simply cede their power to opponents when they leave interpretation of our religious heritage, or the meaning of our nation, or authentic ‘family values,’ to the reactionaries, the chauvinists, and the bigots.” He goes on to say that if we reject the Bible, it, quote “doesn’t mean that it ever goes away. Rather it simply means that it ends up only in the hands and on the lips of others – often reactionary others-where it can and will be used against you.”
Buehrens is right. Louisiana just passed a law requiring public school classrooms to display the ten commandments. Texas tried to pass a similar bill last session, and we can bet it will be on the docket again come next year’s session. We can shout about separation of church and state all we want, but the Bible isn’t going to leave our political dialogue any time soon.
While the ten commandments are a part of the bible, they are cherry-picked, in that, according to Jewish tradition, there are actually 613 commandments or mitsvot in the Bible. Most of these mitsvot cannot be followed for a variety of reasons, including that they require being in the temple which was destroyed.
One of the big questions in the early Christian church was whether the early Christians needed to follow the law, in other words the commandments. The New Testament in part is grappling with this question, and there are different interpretations of whether the Jews and the Gentiles, the Christians who do not have Jewish heritage, need to follow the law.
Laws to post the ten commandments might still get passed, but imagine if more teachers knew this context, and could explain that the ten commandments are just a selection of the 613 laws that one ancient group thought were appropriate for governing themselves.
For all my humanist friends in the audience, I promise we haven’t forgotten about you. In fact, Buehrens calls himself a Biblical humanist. He points out that one can have a foundation in the Bible without believing it reveals something about the supernatural.
The Bible has a lot for us to learn. I took a class on the book of Judges last semester, and I’m taking a class on Revelation in the fall (fun fact, it’s Revelation without an S at the end, not Revelations as I know I had said my whole life). Judges is one of the harsher books in the Bible, with lots of violence including some of the most horrific violence against women in the text. Through analyzing the book, I came to learn all the ways it can be read, including as a feminist piece, one that in talking about violence against women is in fact speaking out against it. It can also be read as a tract against kingship, and many parts of the Bible are speaking out against empire.
Like much of the Bible, Revelation chapter 13 was written in a way that people of that time and place would have understood, but we do not if we try to read it literally. It talks about beasts but is in fact coded writing against the Roman empire. This is the chapter that includes a reference to 666, or 616 in some of the manuscripts. 666 and 616 are actually codes for Emperor Nero, not a literal devil.
So where do we go from here? I don’t have all the answers, and I know Rev. Chris has some more to share with us as well. I don’t necessarily recommend trying to sit down and read the whole Bible. I do recommend looking at a study bible and learning how to use the footnotes and references. If you’d like to learn more about how to do that, I’ll be teaching a workshop called Reclaiming the Bible on July 14th from 1-3pm here in the church. We’ll go over how to look up passages and the meanings behind them using study bibles and other reference tools. An announcement will be going out soon about that workshop if you are interested.
There are also great books like John A Buehrens’s book, which I have here if you’re here in person and would like to look at it. I also have a few other books up here that you’re welcome to look through after the service. If you want to take a deeper dive, you can audit a class at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary or another seminary. There will be a class in the fall on the Hebrew Bible taught by one of my favorite professors that is mostly asynchronous, for example.
The Bible that I have discovered in seminary is not the one that I was taught as a child growing up in a Christian church. It is both more violent and more beautiful and poetic than the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, and Jesus from my childhood had led me to believe. If you find yourself afraid of or unsure about the Christian Bible, know that you are not alone. There are many of us who share those concerns.
I know that many come here with religious trauma from Christianity and the Bible. If engaging with the Bible is painful for you, honor that. No one should have to engage with religious or spiritual practices that cause harm. I am still on my own journey when it comes to the Bible. I have discovered some verses that I really like, such as James chapter 2 which talks about how faith without works is dead, or James chapter 5 which warns rich oppressors that God sees the harm they have caused. I have yet to draw the spiritual comfort from the Bible that I see so many others have-something a part of me wishes I had too.
I’m grateful for the UU value of pluralism, which celebrates diverse theology and honors that we can draw from more than one source of spiritual wisdom. The Christian Bible is one source of spiritual wisdom, but it is not the only source, and I appreciate the opportunity to explore all these wisdom traditions in this religious community. Thank you.
Rev. Chris Jimmerson’s Homily
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
That’s the Gospel of John chapter 3, verse 16 of the New testament.
King James Version. Don’t you just love the King James language? “Believeth.” “Begotten.”
Some of you have heard me talk before about how I was raised as a Southern Baptist and said I wanted to be a minister when I was a very young child, even preached sermons into the cassette tape recorder my parents had given me.
One such “baby” sermon was based upon that bible verse.
It is amazing to me that all of these years later and having rejected the fundamentalist religion of my childhood, I can still remember John 3: 16 word for word. King James version, no less.
Here’s why I think that matters.
Regardless of our religious upbringing, despite a culture that has gown more and more secular over time, the words and images and metaphors of our largely bible-based religious history have become embedded within our our cultural symbols, mythologies, values, rituals, traditions – indeed the very language with which we think and communicate, and therefore imbedded within our individual subconsciouses as well.
So, as our reading earlier describes, the bible is still pervasive in our society, and is a large a part of our Unitarian Universalist liberal religious heritage.
So to though, are more fundamentalist interpretations of the bible, like that of my Southern Baptist childhood, also imbedded within our cultural landscape.
And so part of my spiritual journey through adulthood has been to reclaim the biblical narratives that got so implanted into my formational inner psyche in ways that parallel my evolving values and understandings of life.
I have learned to reinterpret and re-embrace the sacred texts of my younger self – like that one from John 3:16.
More on that shortly!
Marcus J. Borg, author of our Call to Worship earlier, urges us to read the bible as poetry plus rather than factuality minus.
Instead of interpreting the bible as literally and factually true, we may find greater wisdom if we mine it for historical and metaphorical truths.
So, if for example we take the well known story of Noah and the flood, and has so often been done, try to accept it as literally true, we are forced to either reject it entirely as defying rational belief or to read it as a fantastical tale of an angry and vengeful God extinguishing almost all life on earth, as retribution for the wickedness of humankind.
But, if we understand that historically, civilizations that predated the origins of the Noah story had similar mythology about floods – floods that were both terribly destructive but also in some way washed cleaned the world and created circumstances through which new life might arise, then, then, we might come to understand the Noah story in a quite different way, metaphorically.
Brothers were killing brothers. Injustice prevailed. Violence had grown rampant.
Humans were engaging in physical relations with the angels.
We were filled with hubris and disregard for our fellow humans. We had moved away from love and justice.
And so, symbolically, the story may be seen as humankind cleansing itself of these violations of our deepest, most life-giving and fulfilling values and rebirthing a rootedness in love and justice.
God, then, becomes a profound inner calling toward our deepest values that move us toward thriving and fulfillment.
And over and over again throughout the bible, a literal-factual approach, too often leads to using the bible to inflict a vengeful God upon other people we don’t like or want to dominate.
But if we move instead toward this historical-metaphorical approach, then over and over again, we find story after story in the bible that becomes a poetry of love and justice – over and over again, a calling to cleanse ourselves of greed, violence, and injustice – over and over again a fervent cry for living lives of love and justice.
And I think developing our ability to return the bible to its poetic grounding in love and justice is vital for at least two reasons:
The first is that, as already mentioned, the bible is a fundamental part of Unitarian Universalist heritage. If we throw it out, we lose a rich metaphorical inspiration for many of our most cherished concepts and values.
The second though, it that we are seeing in this country an eruption of mostly white, Christian Nationalism that would brandish literalistic interpretations of this scared text to banish love and justice for all but themselves and turn our government into a white, Christofacist patriarchy.
And lest we think that is hyperbole, just consider that Louisiana has made in mandatory to post the ten commandments in every school classroom, and Oklahoma has just required that the bible be taught in every classroom.
I can only cringe at what literalistic, fundamentalist take on the bible will get taught.
I want to ask them just how they plan to teach commandments such as “Thou shall not commit adultery” or “Thous shalt not covet thy neighbors wife … nor his manservant.”
I know I’m always telling my neighbors, “don’t you go coveting my manservant.”
Once again, gotta love the King James.
The editor and chief of Christianity Today recently told of several pastors relating to him how after preaching about the sermon on the mount, several of their church goers complained that it was too “woke”.
And that returns me to the Christ story encapsulated by John 3:16 with which we began.
You see my beloveds, we have to be able to counter these selectively factual, fundamentalist readings of the bible with our own metaphorical perspective, proclaiming love and justice.
We have to proclaim and reclaim Jesus as the preacher of that sermon on the mount where he declared:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, those who mourn, those who hunger, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peace makers, those who are persecuted for righteousness.
Jesus was no blond haired, blue eyed, white, Christian nationalist warrior. He was a dark skinned, ultra woke, anti-empire, champion for love and justice, who over-turned the tables of the money changers in the temple, expressed a preference for the poor, and disenfranchised and hung out with prostitutes, tax collectors and the chronically unemployed, also know as his disciples.
For me, John 3:16 is a poem about a love so powerful, so selfless and boundless that we’re willing to give all of ourselves all we have begotten to create love and justice for all in our world so that humankind may flourish and thrive.
And that, is our life everlasting. Amen.
Extinguishing the Chalice
We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.
Benediction
And now, as we go out into our world today, may we see the poetry in our lives.
May we find the holy metaphors in all of the sacred texts of our tradition.
May we encounter the sacred in all that surrounds us.
May center ourselves in love and justice.
May the congregation say, “Amen” and “blessed be”.
Go in peace.
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