Text: Luke 11: 27-28
Over these last few weeks in Bible 101, we have explored how our scriptures were put together, translated, and some of the creative tension that was baked into the text itself.
Today, our focus is on interpretation. Once we understand what a scripture meant in the time and place it was written, how do we then live and apply it today.
After all, Jesus said that blessed are those who hear God’s word and obey it, who put it into practice, who allow it to shape how they think and live.
There is part of me that wants to offer you six simple rules for interpretation.
To give you a set of guidelines to follow.
To say this is the United Methodist way of approaching scripture.
But the reality is, interpretation is messier than a list of how-to instructions.
It is as much an art as it is a science.
It is as much about the mystery of the Holy Spirit as it is about the rigid teachings of our ancestors.
And because of that, faithful United Methodists today disagree about how to read and apply scripture.
That was the struggle lifted up by our friend, Al Lockin, near the beginning of our Bible 101 series. What are we to make of our differences? How can we read the same text and come to such different conclusions?
When we hear the word, but our interpretation of scripture leads us to obey, to practice, to live out the teaching of Jesus in different ways, what do we do about it?
This particular question is so important for this moment in the life of our church, because in just two weeks, our denomination will hold a four-day conference in St. Louis. The reason we need to have this big meeting is because we don’t agree on how to interpret and live out the scriptures as they relate to LGBTQ+ persons. As I shared with you last summer during our series on A Way Forward, faithful Christians read the same six scriptures and come to different conclusions about what they mean for us today.
And while in some ways what we are debating in St. Louis is that interpretation, the deeper question, the bigger question is actually this: are we willing to continue to be a part of a church, of a community, of a denomination with people who disagree with us?
So today, I want to step back from the rules and guidelines of interpretation. I want to offer a reminder that confronting differences in how we live and apply scriptures is not something new.
In fact, scripture itself lifts up the reality that faithful people interpret things differently.
As we have shared these past few weeks, even the Torah itself, those first five books of scripture, hold within them contradictions and tensions and different interpretations of events.
Were there two of every kind of animal, or for some animals on Noah’s ark were there actually seven pairs? Well… it depends on if you are reading the interpretation of the priests or of the other oral traditions.
Our biblical canon even contains different historical accounts – in the books of Kings and Chronicles, we find different takes on the same events, told from different perspectives. It would be like holding in your hands two different histories on George Washington – one told from a military expert writing in the 1800s and the other from a modern day expert in leadership… you are going to get different stories… but its all about the same set of events.
When we get to the time of Jesus, the recognized and agreed upon texts of the Jewish faith were fairly established… but there were different schools of thoughts and ways of understanding what those texts meant and how we were called to live them out.
Earlier this week, I posted in our facebook group a video from Rob Bell that talks about what it meant to be a disciple in the time of Jesus.
While all children would have learned and would have memorized the torah… the first five books of scripture… after the age of ten, most children would finish their education and would go and learn their family trade.
But what Bell describes as “the best of the best of the best” would embark on a new phase of education.
They would go and apply to become a disciple of a particular rabbi whose teaching that student wanted to embody. One rabbi might look at a verse and say that this is what it means…. But a different rabbi from a different town might look at it slightly differently. And they would commit their life to learning from that rabbi.
One of the things that tends to happen, however, when you have different ways of interpreting God’s message is those differences can become institutionalized.
In the gospels, we see a number of schools of thought present… kind of like different denominations today.
The Pharisees held together the written law of the scriptures with an oral tradition of interpretation called the Talmud. They believed in an after life and that a messiah was coming to usher in a new age. Much of their practice was shaped not around the temple, but around gatherings in synagogues.
The Sadducees rejected that oral teaching and focused only on what was written in the law. And since there is no mention of an afterlife in the Torah, they didn’t believe in one. They also focused their practice around the Temple. A unique feature for a group that held close to a literal interpretation of their texts is that they were open to much of Greek thought and incorporated it into their teaching.
You’ll also find descriptions of the Essenes in this time. This was a sort of monastic movement with strict dietary laws and a commitment to celibacy. Their relationship to the written and oral law was often more spiritualized and we have discovered writings like the Dead Sea Scrolls from communities like the Essenes that show us very different ways of approaching the life of faith.
Much of our New Testament, aside from the gospels, was written by Paul – a Pharisee, taught by the Rabbi Gamaliel, who was a student of Hillel. One of the more fascinating things that I found as I was doing research for this message is that Hillel was known for his seven rules of interpretation… and many have worked to draw parallels between those seven rules and the writings of Paul and how Paul himself worked to interpret Jewish scriptures into early Christian teaching.
As the church began to be established, one of the things that the early Christian leaders did was to try to form a standard, a core set of beliefs that we all hold in common together. We call these creeds. For example, the apostle’s creed was not written by the apostles, but summarizes the core of that teaching. Let’s turn to page 881 and read aloud the traditional version together.
I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth;
And in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;*
the third day he rose from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic** church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.
But as time has moved on from this time of creedal confessions, we have watched as time after time, our different ways of understanding God and the scriptures have created new schools of thought, and fractures and splinters and new denominations and movements… including the United Methodist Church.
In our core scripture for today, Jesus has been teaching the disciples and was casting out demons. Even in the midst of that miracle – there were different interpretations happening in the crowd around what was happening.
One woman finally shouts out – Blessed is the woman who gave birth to you!
I find this a really thing to shout out in this moment, but perhaps one of the reasons she felt the need to raise her voice is that in the midst of all of the conflict and chaos of interpretation, she wanted to affirm where Jesus was coming from.
She wanted to celebrate his particular brand… his line of thinking… the people who formed and taught and shaped the way he was approaching scripture.
What I find really fascinating here is that Jesus challenges her words… It’s those who hear God’s word and live it, obey it, put it into practice that are blessed.
Our work is not to focus on the people who formed us, or the rabbis we follow or the perspectives we belong to. Our job is not to get so stuck in one school of thought or to be focused on the past.
Our job is to take God’s word and live it out.
Our responsibility is to take ownership ourselves for how we put into practice the faith that has been handed down to us.
In fact, one of the core teachings of the United Methodist Church is that we believe it is the theological task of each and every single person not to regurgitate the work of others, but to engage with the scriptures and to wrestle with what they mean today.
In the past, we have talked about some of general framework in the United Methodist tradition for approaching scripture and applying it to faith today.
You’ve heard about the quadrilateral – scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.
But guess what… even faithful United Methodists don’t agree on THAT as a general framework… or how to apply it… or what to do when faced with disagreement between tradition and something like experience.
When we go back farther to the writings of John Wesley, I find some very helpful advice as we encounter our differences today.
One… he talked about being a man of one book… but he always had a number of other books in his hands…. Other translations of scripture… writings and teachings from history and tradition… wisdom from the natural sciences of his day… even a manual for how to heal people who were sick.
But over and over, he also reminded us that as we each engage in our work of interpretation, that personal responsibility, we are not called to do it alone. He formed people into groups of accountability. He reminded people of their call to be the church. And in various ways he reminded us that we are called to embrace humility and love and compassion when we are confronted with conflict in our interpretations.
As he wrote in his sermon on the Catholic Spirit “If your heart is as my heart, take my hand.”
In essentials unity, in non-essentials, liberty, in all things love.
No Comments