A Fresh Perspective

In your worship bulletin I have included a quote by Richard Rohr who points out that biblical texts mirror the nature of human consciousness. He says the Bible “includes within itself passages that develop the prime ideas and passages that fight and resist those very advances.” He says that we might even call it “faith and unfaith.” I would not not call it “unfaith” I would call it unhealthy faith, or bad faith. Both good faith and bad faith, says Rohr, are “locked into the text.” The Bible mirrors or own faith struggles. In other words, good faith and bad faith are both part of our sacred tradition , which is why it is so important to read a text critically before we read it spiritually. I think it’s time for churches and Christian leaders to admit that we have done a poor job teaching people how to read a biblical text critically. Many Christians have never even attempted it and wouldn’t know how to start. The result has been that we end up believing a lot of contradictory thi...

What can Jesus teach us about appropriating scripture for the purpose of discovering and fulfilling God’s will today? The passage in Luke 4:16-30, which sets forth Jesus’s program, is very instructive in this regard. It’s difficult to know how much of this passage, if any, is historical and how much is purely theological, since the passage is unique to Luke. Luke is setting forth the mission and agenda of Jesus as he understands it. What I find fascinating is how Luke presents Jesus’s use of scripture and what we can learn from it. First, we learn from Jesus that there are scriptures we need to let go of because they simply do not apply to us and they have nothing to do with God’s will for us today.  Luke says, When Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “Th...

The story of Jesus presented in our canonical Gospels has transformative power. Minister and author John Ortburg tells about a friend of the family who became really upset when her daughter told her that someone at school had been talking to her about God. She wanted nothing to do with God, or so she thought. Nor did she want her daughter to have anything to do with God. That night, however, she couldn’t sleep. For some reason around midnight she got up, went downstairs, and picked up a Bible. She couldn’t remember the last time she had even held a Bible, let alone read one. But like many folks who are not religious she did have a Bible in the house. When she opened it she noticed it was divided between an “old” part and a “new” part. She decided to start with the new part. So, in the still of the night she began to read the Gospel of Matthew. Several hours later when she was half-way through the Gospel of John she realized that “she had fallen in love with the character of Jesus.” Sh...

When our president issued his executive order giving deportation relief to millions of undocumented people in our country, as part of his explanation he quoted Scripture: “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9; also 22:21). This angered a number of conservative Christians who apparently felt they had a monopoly on the Bible. Mark Coppenger, professor of Christian apologetics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote a piece for the Religion News Service claiming that the President misused Scripture by running “roughshod over context.” The irony of this is that the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution in 2011 quoting this very Scripture as a basis for compassionate action. The resolution declared: “The Scriptures call us, in imitation of God Himself, to show compassion and justice for the sojourner and alien among us.” Following that declaration the Scripture the Pr...

There are some Christians who give the Bible godlike homage. It might as well have come floating down from heaven on the wings of angels. Should we ascribe to the Bible divine status? In Nazi Germany a Jewish fugitive fleeing for his life came to a small town. He sought out the house of the Christian pastor, hoping to find refuge. He knocked on the door and when the pastor opened it, he told his story and asked if he could stay a few days until it was safe to travel again. The pastor invited him to step inside and wait. The pastor knew that if this young man was caught hiding there the whole town would be held accountable and suffer greatly. So immediately he withdrew to his prayer room and closed the door. He asked God for guidance and then opened his Bible. He happened to come upon the verse in John’s Gospel that says, “It is better for one man to die, than for the whole people to parish.” He knew he had his answer. So he sent the man away. Later that night an angel appear...

Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan argues in his book, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now , that in the biblical tradition, both Old and New Testaments, two incompatible and contradictory explanations of God’s final victory over the evil and injustice of the world run side by side, often in the same biblical books. One explanation is extermination. It is reflected in the Noachic solution to evil in the world, namely, the complete destruction of the wicked.  Crossan writes, "In this vision, God’s solution to the problem of human violence is the Great Final Battle in which good triumphs over evil—and triumphs, let us be clear, by divine violence. The symbolic place of that cosmic cleanup as cosmic slaughter is at Har Magiddo in Hebrew (hence our English “Armageddon”), the mountain pass where the spine of Israel’s hill country cuts westward toward the coast and skirts a great plain suitable for battle." Examples of this approach can be found in Mica...

Prejudice disguises itself as holiness when passages such as Romans 1:26-27 are employed to clobber LGBTQ persons. The text reads as follows: “For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” Here is the problem with turning Paul into an anti-gay proponent: Paul, along with most ancient moralists, would have regarded same sex relations as an expression of excessive or exploitive sexual behavior by heterosexuals. It is not likely that he would have had any understanding at all of same sex attraction as a sexual orientation set early in life. Paul’s knowing about sexual orientation is about as likely as his knowing of atoms and electrons as basic elements of our universe. He would have be...

This is a kind of reverse reversal story. Much of Luke’s Gospel is about Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem , but these two disciples, possibly a husband and wife, are leaving Jerusalem . They are on the road to Emmaus, but it’s not like they were going anywhere in particular, they are simply leaving Jerusalem , because for them the story of Jesus had ended, and it ended badly, it ended in tragedy. The one in whom they had placed their hope for the redemption of Israel was rejected and crucified. But then something happens. They meet a stranger along the way. And as a result of this encounter, hope is reborn, a new faith is ignited that reverses the reversal – that turns them around and sets them on a new direction. How many times has the direction of your life changed because of an encounter with God, because you met the living Christ? Hopefully, at least once. Possibly, many times. This appearance story, I believe, sketches out the contexts where such encounters can occur, whe...