What’s the Bible to Us?

Sermon by: Rev. Dr. Mary Alice Mulligan

Scripture: Nehemiah 8:1-12, Luke 4:14-21

Perhaps you know the story. The Babylonian Empire sweeps across Judah. Priests and leaders and society’s powerful are hauled off into exile in Babylon, where they are kept for 70 years. Then suddenly, after several generations of living in captivity, people are sent back to Judah. You can easily imagine confusion in their religious identity, after decades in a strange land with foreign gods being worshipped around them. Back in Judah, they gather to listen to the priest, Ezra, read the holy words of torah, God’s holy teaching. They hear, as if for the first time, the words which shaped their ancestors centuries earlier, calling them from a loose conglomeration of tribes into a single nation. As they listen, thousands of them begin to weep, perhaps because they had forgotten, perhaps because the compassionate love of God for them is overwhelming, perhaps because they are ashamed for how they lived in Babylon. As they listen, they must rethink what the promises of Yahweh mean for them in their new age. 

For Judah and many others through the millennia since, after dramatic change, communities must rethink who they are now in relation to the God of their ancestors. Ezra and Nehemiah call the people not to weep, but to rejoice in torah. Rejoice in God’s word. Take time to read from the First Testament, considering how the Word of God assists in people’s thinking about how to move into the future as a crisis passes, Nehemiah 8: 1-12.

Judah faced a new day when they returned from exile. They had to learn again how to be God’s people in their homeland, which was very different from when they were last there. Sounds a little like how we might be feeling as we yearn to be released from the captivity of Covid. But perhaps we need to re-interpret the situation. In truth, we have returned from exile. This is home; we live here now. Our return is to a church-landscape quite different from before Covid. So we must learn how to be the community of St Andrew UCC once again, even as Covid numbers trip us up and down once again. Let’s ask ourselves: How is God wanting to shape us for this new season? How are we going to be church now? An essential tool to figuring out our identity now is the Bible.

The Bible is our Guidebook. For Christian communities of faith, scripture is our “How to” manual. Religious authorities for centuries have claimed the Bible contains God’s living Word, although we must not confuse the Bible with God. We do not worship the Bible; that’s bibliolatry. However, the Bible is not “just another book” either. Christians claim a priority for the Bible; our most important book. An evangelical theologian explains: Scripture “is both God’s self-witness and a human witness to divine revelation in history…It has a divine ground but a human form.” (1) So, we rightly listen for the Word of God through the text, which means the Bible is “normative,” but shaped by the Word of God which speaks through scripture. 

We might think of the Bible as a faucet, through which we receive the divine reality of water. A faucet is not water but is essential for us to get the water. As we read and hear the Bible, we hold out our hands to receive the living water, the Word of God, which flows from it. The Bible speaks to us as a community of faith. For millennia, these texts have been at the center of our worship. We listen for God’s voice through the scripture together. What we hear is not a legal proclamation dishing out laws, but loving instructions for living together as God’s community. A helpful thought perhaps as we near the end of our stewardship season. How is God calling us to live as stewards of what has been entrusted to us now? But not just as individuals.We are called together to listen again to God’s voice coming through Scripture. We hold out our hands together; we drink together of God’s word as a worshipping community and trust the word of God will move through the community to refresh and nourish our faith together. We listen to the Bible to hear God through it. Scripture is our guiding text.

But scripture must be interpreted. As the words go in our ears, we want to figure out what they mean. Ancient texts from extinct societies. Not an easy task. Texts are not self-explanatory. English translations of biblical texts are scholarly; carefully passed to us by experts in languages, customs, and religious tradition. But still we are left with the need to translate the words into ideas that make sense in our world.

Today we heard as Ezra read torah, Levitical priests clarified the meaning for the listeners, many who had been born in exile. Of course they could not understand from just hearing the scripture. Others were needed to interpret for them. Whenever any of us hears historic words, we need interpreters. 

How many couples easily say the words: “For better or worse, in sickness and in health,” on their wedding day, but when life get tough, money runs out, someone gets very ill, those words take on a whole new meaning. So it is with our faith in God. In every period of our life together as church, we rightly spend time re-interpreting the meaning of scripture and how it applies to the life we have in God now. In each season, we must renew our covenant with God, according to our new circumstances and new interpretations of God’s word. 

I heard something this week in the passage I never heard before; something especially for St. Andrew. Did you hear how many times “all the people” were invited to listen? And the writer clarifies who is meant by “all the people.” Men and women and all who could understand. Not just men and women who could understand, but men, women, and all the others who could understand. Could it be an invitation from ancient Judah to think beyond binary gender divisions? 

Anytime we think about what we hear, we are interpreting. So especially when we claim a text has particular “authority,” like something from the Bible, the interpretation becomes simultaneously more important and more difficult. Another theologian says: “[I]n order for a classic document that is timeless to be timely, it must be interpreted.”(2)  Together we listen and study to decipher contemporary meanings. Scripture has to be interpreted.

But then, scripture interprets our community. Sounds funny, but as we listen, scripture is shaping who we are as a people of faith. If scripture is at the heart of our worship, the Bible is always re-defining who we are; but especially when circumstances change, our identity will be reshaped by listening to what the Bible says. Take the congregation who firmly believed God forbade women to have leadership over men, until Joyce sensed she was called into ordained ministry. When she talked with her pastor and the elders (all men), they were firm. She might be called to music ministry or Christian education, but not ordained ministry. However, when she explained her firm conviction she was called, they agreed to read scripture together, studying the passages about women, for as long as it took to reach consensus. They trusted the Holy Spirit would show them God’s understanding of the role of women in the church. At the end of a year, Joyce was ordained. This group depended on scripture to tell them who they were through decades of church life, but when a new situation arose, they came together to figure out who they are now, even as they remained under God’s very same covenant. 

As the faithful read and interpret scripture in light of new circumstances, they find new answers to the question: “Who are we now as God’s covenant people?” The covenant is perpetual, but we reinterpret it in light of new information, new wisdom, and new circumstances. And as we re-interpret scripture, scripture is re-shaping us. It happened when the people gathered together before Ezra and Nehemiah, asking for a shared hearing of torah (God’s teachings). As part of the assembly, the scriptures were interpreted by the Levitical priests. They were people of the Covenant – before, during, and after the exile, but their understanding of how scripture revealed their relationship with God necessarily needed rethinking in each setting. In each setting, the meaning of the texts then helped re-shape their identity again.

Especially as we learn to live in Covidland, the need for interpretation continues, since our circumstances, our knowledge, and our gifts continue to change. As we study scripture together in new situations, we find those new understandings alter who we are. Re-interpreting scripture invites re-interpreting ourselves. Scripture reinterprets who we are as community.

The Bible is an eternal treasure chest for the faith community. Whenever we open it together, we are invited to learn something new. As we share each idea, we are always interpreting, always thinking about what difference these teachings make in our lives. When we open our experiences to think about our new circumstances, as well as listening to what other scholars and common people, ancient voices and contemporary, say about these texts, our own understandings are broadened. We hear more clearly the Word of God (the voice of Jesus some might say) coming through to shape us. Who is God calling us to be now? Scripture allows us to follow God’s lead into new circumstances, for the Word of the LORD is our strength.

1 Donald Bloesch, “An Evangelical Perspective on Authority,” in Prism, vol. 1, 9.

2 David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (1981), quoted in Walter Breuggemann, “Biblical Authority and the Church’s Task of Interpretation,” in Prism: A Theological Forum for the United Church of Christ, vol. 1, Spring 1986, 13.