So They Could Understand

So They Could Understand

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 24, 2016

Scripture: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-10; Luke 4:14-21

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Once years ago, when I was still quite new to being a pastor, a woman told me she wanted her Bible straight, with no interpretation. When my wife Jane was serving as pastor of a congregation in Wenatchee someone asked her for a translation that would make the Bible simple. Now, I know these were good people expressing a sincere wish. I mean, sure, we’d all like the Bible to be simple; and we’d all like it if we could just pick it up, read it, and immediately understand all that it has to say to us. So perhaps you’ll forgive me if my first reaction to these requests is a bit of a professional chuckle. If you really want to know why those requests make me chuckle read Part One of my book Liberating the Bible, especially chapters (they’re called stops in the book) 2, 3, and 4. There’s a copy of it on the bookshelf downstairs, or I’d be happy to tell you how you can buy a copy of it. Here’s the shorter version of what I say there.

The Bible isn’t a simple book. It is in fact an immensely complex book. It consists of a great many different parts, the newest of which were written nearly two thousand years ago, with some of it going back three thousand years or more. It was written by and for people in cultures very different from ours, cultures that spoke languages now long dead and that had fundamental understandings of the nature of the world and of human beings very, very different from ours. We can’t really understand much of the Bible without knowing at least something about how those cultures differed from ours, about how the fundamental understandings of the biblical authors differed from ours. Moreover, it simply isn’t possible to read anything without interpreting it. We may not be aware that we’re interpreting a text when we read it, but we are. Try reading almost any text with a few other people, then ask each of them what they read. You’ll probably get as many answers as there are people who read the text. That’s just how it is with us humans. When we read we interpret. We have to. It is in our interpreting that any text comes alive and has meaning for us. Without a human reader, any text is just dead letters on a page. Every reader brings herself to the reading, and that makes all the difference. Now, I don’t mean to suggest that reading is so subjective that anything goes. It isn’t. For more about that, read my book.

And I won’t be at all surprised if what I just said surprises and even shocks some of you, so let me assure me of something: What I just said is supported by the Bible itself. We heard the Bible doing that in the two passages we just heard. Let’s start with the Luke. In that passage Jesus reads from the Bible. He reads some lines from the prophet Isaiah. For our purposes this morning it doesn’t really matter what lines. What matters is that when Jesus finishes reading he doesn’t just sit down. He doesn’t say there’s with word of God and leave it at that. Rather, he interprets the passage for his listeners. He tells them what it means for them and for him. He says “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Now, it may not be really clear to you what he meant by that, just as it isn’t really clear to me what he meant by that, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he interpreted the scripture for his audience, for the time and place in which he spoke.. He didn’t just leave the biblical text alone.

Our passage from Nehemiah is even clearer on the point than is our passage from Luke. The setting of that passage is Jerusalem after the people had returned from the Babylonian Exile. There we read that all the people of Jerusalem gathered together and that the scribe Ezra read to them what the text calls “the Book of the Law of Moses.” That probably means the entire Torah of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.” Or maybe it just means Deuteronomy, but in any event Ezra read scripture to the people. Again here, as in the Luke, the religious leaders of the people didn’t just read the text and leave it at that. Our text tells us that people called Levites, who were sort of assistant priests, “instructed the people in the Law while the people were standing there. They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read.” There’s a clear assumption being made here, and a correct one. Left to their own devices the people would not understand the texts that were being read to them. Those texts are just too obscure. They’re too complex. They’re too subject to misinterpretation, that is, to interpreting them in a way that they just won’t support when they are more fully understood.

Some varieties of Christianity understand this need for guidance when people read the Bible better than others do. The Roman Catholic Church for example has never strongly encouraged individual Bible reading. It has always said that the people’s reading of the Bible must be guided by the priests. Now, there are some reasons why they haven’t encouraged individual Bible reading that I find disturbing, such as a desire to preserve the power of the Catholic hierarchy. But there is also some wisdom behind the Catholic Church’s reluctance to have everyone read the Bible on their own. Catholic priests, or at least most of them, have had significant training in the Bible. They know more of its history, its linguistic and cultural issues, and translation problems than do most lay people. So they can give some good guidance in how to understand the Bible. They may also lead the people into some understandings that we wouldn’t agree with, but that doesn’t change the truth of my statement. Reading with informed guidance is always better than reading with no guidance at all.

Now let me give you a few caveats here. Most people can get some good understanding when reading the Bible on their own. It’s not that no meaning arises for untrained people when they read the Bible. It does, or at least some does. And neither every person nor every book that claims to be able to assist people with reading the Bible is reliable. There are charlatans or at least badly misguided people or misinformed people out there claiming to be experts. Franklin Graham comes to mind as one of them. I suppose that’s why I wrote my guide to the Bible. I think it gives better information and better direction than most things out there. If you hear someone claiming to give instruction on the Bible whose words strike you as just plain wrong, find someone else. If you’re reading something that doesn’t make sense or that seems to you to contradict the Bible’s basic teachings of love and forgiveness, find something else. There are no guarantees. Be careful.

Now, I know that sermons are, for the most part, supposed to be about proclaiming the Good News of the Gospel, and I know that I haven’t really done that yet this morning. Bear with me. I think there really is good news in our scripture lessons this morning in which first the Levites and then Jesus interpret scripture for their people. See, the fact that scripture needs interpretation means that it doesn’t have only one, fixed, obvious meaning. Scripture has to be interpreted because people read it in a vast variety of cultures and historical-cultural circumstances. Ezra’s Levites interpreted what our text calls the Book of the law of Moses to people living in Jerusalem after many of them had returned to Jerusalem after the Babylonian Exile. They made the scripture come alive for those people in that time and place.

We have virtually nothing in common with those people other than that we’re all people and we all believe in God. We live in a different world with different understandings and different issues. Yet the Law of Moses, that is, the books of the Torah, can still come alive for people today through informed interpretation. We’re talking here about the foundational books of Judaism, and trust me, Jewish rabbis over the centuries have been immensely creative in interpreting those scriptures so that they come alive and have profound meaning for Jewish people no matter what their historical circumstances. They can come alive for us too when they’re properly interpreted, as they were in our story from Nehemiah.

Consider this: The hymn we’re about to sing, “We Limit Not the Truth of God,” has a line that it repeats after every verse. That line is “The Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from His holy word.” The hymn doesn’t tell you this, but that line comes from a man named John Robinson. This isn’t the old coach of the USC football team. This John Robinson was the pastor of the Pilgrims when they sailed from Holland for the new world in 1620. He was a Congregationalist, as are we. As he sent them off for a wholly uncertain future in a strange and possibly hostile place he said to them: “The Lord hath yet more truth to break forth from His holy word.” That is the great good news of the Bible. It’s never exhausted. It’s never stale.

Or at least it can be unexhausted and un-stale. The way we keep it unexhausted and un-stale is through the art and skill of interpretation. We all need voices who have the gift of reading the Bible anew for our time and place. I know some of you may react pretty strongly against that idea, but here’s the thing. The Bible itself proclaims that idea, as it does in the passages we heard where the Levites interpret the Law for the people and Jesus proclaims a new meaning to lines from Isaiah for his time and place. And the notion that new truth is always breaking forth from the Bible is bedrock Congregationalist teaching.

So this morning I ask you this: Stay open. Keep listening. Keep listening to me but more importantly keep listening for new moving of the Holy Spirit among us. The Lord hath indeed more truth to break forth from our holy scripture. Yes, that can be a bit scary and unsettling, but I assure you that it really is good news. It keeps the Bible alive. It keeps our faith alive. It keeps us alive to new challenges and new understandings that the Holy Spirit is trying to impart to us. The Lord hath more light and truth to break forth from his holy word. That’s the good news of our Bible passages this morning. Thanks be to God. Amen.