A Sermon by the Reverend Ellen Rowse Spero
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church,
Chelmsford, Massachusetts
October 17, 2004
Reading: From John A. Buehrens, Understanding the Bible: An Introduction for Skeptics, Seekers, and Religious Liberals, Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.
Copyright 2004, Ellen Rowse Spero. All rights reserved.
Two weeks ago, I preached about our "living canon." Our sacred texts are not set in stone, but added to by each generation as we learn from and are inspired by both ancient and modern voices. In this context, I would like to explore Unitarian Universalism’s relationship to the Bible. It is more complex than with other sacred texts. Unitarian Universalists generally have one of three reactions to the Bible: they dislike it, finding it is unenlightened, oppressive, and judgmental; or they love it, often surreptitiously, finding it moving and inspirational, and wish it was used more often in worship; or more and more the case, they know very little about it.
I recognize the reasons why the Bible presents obstacles for some, especially those who come to Unitarian Universalism from conservative Christian and Jewish backgrounds. In these traditions, the Bible is often seen as the literal word of God. It is used to justify doctrines and behaviors that are oppressive, exclusionary, and even destructive. But it is for this reason that it is important that we are at the very least knowledgeable about the Bible, even if we personally are not inspired by it. Unitarianism and Universalism came into being because our ancestors read and knew the Bible well, and challenged the orthodox doctrines of their day. They brought reason, scholarship and their human experiences to their interpretations and came to very different conclusions about God, about Jesus, and about humanity. We need to have the same knowledge to counteract the claims of moral authority the Religious Right makes in the name of the Bible. We have ceded the Bible, God, and Jesus to them. This is a huge mistake. We are failing our tradition if we allow it to continue. Our nation is divided politically and religiously. There are lots of folks in the middle, who aren’t sure what they believe. We take ourselves out of the conversation with moderate and liberal Christians and Jews, some of whom are members of our UU congregations, if we respond to religious fundamentalists by saying that the Bible is an oppressive book revered by superstitious and unenlightened folks. This past summer, after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court gave its ruling in support of gay marriage, one of the cable news channels interviewed the Reverend Scott Alexander, minister of the River Road Unitarian Church in Bethesda, Maryland and author of the "Welcoming Congregation" curriculum. The interviewer asked him how he responded to the claim by the religious right that gay marriage is wrong because the Bible condemns homosexuality. Scott did not say, "That’s why we don’t like the Bible," or "That’s right and it also says that slaves should obey their masters and women their husbands." He said something like, "The Bible says a lot of things and one can interpret it in many different ways. In our tradition, we look at the Bible as a whole and the overall spirit of it, we look at the teachings of the Prophets and of Jesus, and we find that they call for us to live our lives in the ways of justice, welcoming acceptance, and love."
The truth of our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors’ interpretations can be seen in how they live on in other traditions. Now, most mainline Christian churches preach John Murray’s message of the love, not the judgment, of God. People traditionally denied a voice in Judaism and Christianity—those marginalized because of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, economic class and ableness--are making their voices heard by bringing reason, scholarship and their own experiences to biblical interpretation. They have opened whole new ways of reading and understanding these texts. There is all this wonderful stuff happening out there that can inspire us and challenge us in ways we might not expect.
Most of you know that I am a passionate scholar of the Bible. I was jealous when I saw Buehrens’ book because it was the one I wanted to write. He points to what I love most about the Bible: it is such a human book. Its stories and its poetry cover the full range of human experience, behavior, and emotion. There are heroic people who sometimes do terrible things, and not-so-heroic people who do courageous things. There are good people who suffer unjustly, and wrongs that seem to go unpunished. There are stories about family dysfunction and family healing, about the seductiveness and consequences of power, about the inhumanity of slavery and the longing for freedom, about exile, homesickness, and the joy of homecoming, about the wonder and awesomeness of the creation, about the power and passion of love, about the terror and destruction of war, about total despair and the absence of hope and about visions of a world turned upside down by justice, peace, and transforming love. The Bible was not written by God and it was not written by one person. It was written by many people over many generations, ancient peoples who lived under very different circumstances and with different values than us. But who also struggled with the same questions, problems, doubts, fears, joys, temptations, and passions that we do, who longed for justice, healing, peace, and wholeness, just as we do. It is one set of stories of human beings striving to understand the Infinite, the Eternal, the Sacred, the source and meaning of Life itself. As Buehrens notes, "Some believe that only one of these answers can be true: either/or. A given tradition is either divinely given or humanly made. Others believe that both can be true: both/and. All religious traditions, including our own, are products of human experience and history. But they may also teach us something about the nature of both, by pointing from within to that which transcends us all: the enduring human experience of the ‘dual mystery of being alive and knowing that we will have to die,’ as Forrest Church puts it. In this, they partake of the divine, even as human beings do, touching the creative Source of life and death that gave them birth in the first place" (p. 12). This interaction in the Bible has inspired a good portion of the music, art, poetry, and literature that is an essential part of Western culture (and I mean this in a very positive sense). And it is this interaction of human experience touching transcendent inspiration in the Bible that, in the tradition of John Murray, Hosea Ballou, Olympia Brown, William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, and James Luther Adams, in the tradition of the Hebrew Prophets and Jesus of Nazareth, we need to proclaim.
Buehrens says that he is a biblical humanist. He writes, "A humanist need not be one who denies the human need for transcendence or that unimaginable ‘subversive’ God who upsets all our tribal idolatries. One can be biblically grounded and yet find that the authority of the Bible lies not in some supernatural claim to special revelation, but in the human experience of being so subverted and turned toward ‘real equality, community, and personhood’" (p. 11). The Bible need not be your primary inspiration and it should not be our only one. That is why we have a living canon, because we recognize that inspiration and wisdom come from a variety of sources. But at the very least, we need to treat the Bible with the same respect we offer other ancient texts like the Tao-te-Ching, the Buddhist Scriptures, Pagan lore, or Native American stories. We can practice the art of biblical humanism: studying and struggling with these powerful stories to challenge those who would use the Bible as a tool of oppression and instead lift up those that proclaim a radical message of justice, compassion, and transformative power of Love.