Proper 8 C - 6/30/13 Grace St. Paul s A couple years ago, a tiny church in Canton, N.C. grabbed the national spotlight. Their Pastor, Marc Grizzard, announced that his congregation was going to have a bonfire. Not a fire to roast weenies or marshmallows, but one to burn something...books. And not just any books, but, get this, bibles. Despite the fact that the media far outnumbered the participants and there was no bonfire because it rained, forcing the group to use scissors instead, the Pastor declared the event successful. He scheduled it again the following year. Like any proper southern event, the burning and/or cutting was concluded both years with a comforting meal of fried chicken and all of the fixins. You got it, finger lickin bible burnin good! Now, why pray tell, would a self proclaimed bible based church burn the very book that is the centerpiece of their faith? Let me allow Pastor Grizzard to explain that in his own words. We are burning books, he said, that we believe to be Satanic. Translations like the NIV, RSV, TLB, NASB, ESV, NEV, NRSV, ASV, NWT, Good News, even the New King James version, are all, according to the Pastor, perversions of God s Word. And what is the only inerrant, perfect form of God s word for Pastor Grizzard? The King James Version, of course. When Bishop Smith made his annual visitation here a couple months ago, he mentioned the famous joke about the congregant who, upon hearing that the minister was going to use the NIV translation of the Bible said, If the King James was good enough for Jesus, then it is good enough for me. As best as I can tell, that joke is a combination of two historical statements. A London publication quotes a young Deacon in 1901 who, when preaching against the advocates of a revised translation of the Bible, startled his congregation by saying, If the King James was good enough for St. Paul, it was good enough for him. 1
Then in 1982, Texas Governor Ma Ferguson said this when Spanish was proposed a second language in school, Not while I m Governor! If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it is good enough for Texas children. It is always fun to imagine first century Hebrews speaking a language that did not exist for another 500 years. But the truth is, many people other than Pastor Grizzard continue to insist that the King James text is the only pure version of our sacred scripture. The issue, of course, is that there is no pure version of the Bible, or for that matter, a pure version of religion. Whether we are speaking of translations of our sacred text, our liturgy, or our tradition, nothing within the church formed in a vacuum. All of it is a product of the culture within which it formed. In fact, everything within our church must be influenced by, and be a response to, the culture that surrounds us. If it is not, religion becomes irrelevant. Certainly, you cannot beat the rhythms and the beauty of the King James. Psalm 23 is never going to sound better than it does in the King s English. As Episcopalians, we are also very tied to the King James. After all, it was translated by 47 Anglicans. But the problem is that the texts from which those Anglicans translated, were already hundreds of years separated from original manuscripts. Today s Gospel is the perfect example. Let s take a listen to today s words in that poetic language. What I would like you to do is try to follow along with the NRSV version in your bulletins. Go to the end of line six, where it begins But they did not receive him... And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. And they went to another 2
village.and it came to pass, that, as they went in the way, a certain man said unto him, Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. Did you get lost? It s difficult enough trying to equate all those these and thous to today s English, but this particular Gospel has another land mine. The King James has an entire sentence and a half that does not exist in later translations. You do not know what spirit you are of, for the Son of Man has not come to destroy the lives of human beings, but to save them. From where did that come? And where did it go? Well, it seems that by the time of the NRSV, some 350 plus years after the King James, archaeologists had discovered earlier manuscripts of the Bible. And surprise, in none of those earlier versions do the words in the King James exist. They were apparently added by a scribe much later. So if by accuracy, we mean the closest English translation to the most ancient copies of the Hebrew and Greek texts, there is no question that the King James version is not very literal at all. The translations are often flawed and meanings are lost. That is why we most often use the NRSV translation here. It is not that it is better, but the consensus of scholars believe it is the closest English we have to the oldest versions. But we continue to use the King James on occasion, as well as other translations, exactly because of Gospels like today. The problem with believing that an original version of the Bible would be the most accurate, if such a thing existed, is that this is all Enlightenment thinking. We need to remember that these stories began as oral tradition. Just as an indigenous story teller today adds and subtracts from someone else s version of the same tale to fit the cultural context, people did the same with our Gospels. An original version is not necessarily better than a later one. It is just different. No one in antiquity ever asked, Who wrote this?, because such a question would have made no sense in that communitarian world. Everyone knew that the 3
tribe s stories were a group effort. The addition we just heard to the King James text was not plagiarism, it was a contribution. The Bible was not a fixed product, but a fluid one that people changed constantly. It was only after the Council of Nicea that we began freezing the canon and never editing again. In this context, suddenly all the contradictions in scripture are no longer problems, but a means of learning more about the way others have experienced God. A quick look at today s Gospel, with and without the extra sentence, suggests that the story teller was trying to help us understand why Jesus was so upset with James and John. Without the sentence, we are left to guess. With it, we hear that Jesus was sick of sectarian violence and a world broken up into groups of people who could not accept one another s differences. We learn of a Jesus who breaks down the walls of intolerance by suggesting that God s grace is universal. When we are not afraid to admit that the Bible was a living, changing document, we suddenly have no difficulty dealing with all the diametrically different positions expressed, including the one that slaps us in the face in our reading from First Kings compared to the Gospel. In that first lesson, Yahweh has chosen Elisha to be Elijah s replacement as prophet. Elisha asks permission to spend time with his parents before he goes off into the world. And Elijah happily grants his request. But then we get to the Gospel and that famously difficult response of Jesus to a very similar question posed by a potential disciple. No, Jesus says, you cannot live up to your sacred duty as a Jewish son and go bury your father. Leave the dead to bury the dead. Beyond our difficulties with Jesus seemingly callous response, we are faced with the fact that he directly contradicts the actions of Elijah. James and John accurately remember the 1 Kings story and remind Jesus that the Biblical precedent has also been set for handling 4
enemies like the Samaritans. They are supposed to be torched, like all those bibles in North Carolina. But Jesus rejects the notion that we can just read the Bible and do whatever it says. Instead, we have to interpret it for our own situation and time. When we remember that the Bible was written by multiple people in multiple settings, it allows us to see that Jesus is not rejecting the notion of family and community when he suggests that the dead bury the dead. He is not rejecting Elijah s handling of Elisha and his family in the Hebrew text. Instead, what I believe he is doing is 1) pointing out that the Bible is not a Tarot deck; 2) the difficulty in choosing the right thing and; 3) the difficulty in being his disciple. Sometimes, he says, you are going to have to choose between the gifts of family and community and other things just as important. Sometimes, loving the Samaritan, loving your enemy, is going to be so difficult that it is going to mean rejecting your own family, your own tribe, your own culture. Despite what we seem to constantly hear in our polarized world, life is not about choosing between right and wrong, blue and red, the right church and the wrong church, community rights and individual rights. Following Christ is rarely that simple. Instead, following Christ is about discernment. It is about making the extremely difficult choices between one good over another or the lesser of two evils. For example, we love to talk about the importance of community here at GSP. You may have heard me say before that the term individual Christian is an oxymoron. None of us can be Christian by ourselves. But Jesus makes it clear today that love of the disenfranchised trumps community. Our job, according to Jesus, is to embrace the other, whoever they are, even when our community will not, even if we have to walk away from our family to accomplish it. What Jesus is telling us is that sometimes, following his lead will mean choosing between the only security we have known and doing the best thing. Sometimes it will mean letting go of 5
the best community we have ever experienced, traveling to some foreign place and starting all over again. Leaving the dead to bury the dead is harsh. It is going to make us weep when we let go of what we had. But it is our calling as Christians and it will take us home to Jesus. It is this balance between the needs of the community and individual freedom that Paul also speaks about in today s letter to the Galatians. Freedom is what we have, Paul tells us, Christ has set us free. Stand then as free people - and do not allow yourselves to be slaves again. But Paul also reminds us that individual freedom does not mean that we are called to abandon community. Do not let this freedom, he says, become an excuse for self indulgence. Freedom, as Paul and Jesus understand it, is a freedom that allows us to love and serve others. Being an individual with no sense of community is like being a dolphin in the desert. This Thursday, we will celebrate our American freedom. And no where is there a better model for living into what that means than today s lessons. That is no accident. Our forefathers, who met in Philadelphia to draw up the grand experiment of America, were very familiar with these biblical stories. In fact, nearly half of them finished their work writing our country s Constitution, and then walked across the street to write the constitution of this Episcopal Church. They put together a country and a church that had individual freedom and conscience at its center, but was surrounded by a deep sense of community. It was only the combination of these two that created a unique way to govern in a new cultural setting and also created the best understanding of church I have ever experienced. No one believed it could work, a bunch of individuals all in it for themselves, all allowed to do whatever they wanted. That is why in the 1830's, a Frenchmen named Alexis de 6
Tocqueville came here. 50 years after the Revolution, he wanted to understand how such a strange society did not blow itself up. What he discovered, is that Americans had, as he put it, an ingrained sense of community responsibility. They not only seek their own well being, he wrote, they are motivated to seek the well being of their neighbors. De Toqueville also notes that the Church plays an indispensable role in maintaining the morality that makes democracy work, because churches encourage free men and women to discipline their freedom in order to serve other people. This, beloved, is both our legacy and our calling as American Episcopalians. We are the ones who must continue to point out to our church and political leaders that these systems can only work when we look beyond our own good. We must continually remind our presidents, senators, bishops, priests and lay leaders that our system will collapse in a heap if we, as individuals, do not embrace the ENTIRE community. This past week, our Supreme Court took a step living into that legacy by striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, bringing a new sense of distributive justice to another segment of our society that had been left out. We applaud their living into today s Gospel. But as American Episcopalians, we are in the unique position to see the hypocrisy of the same Supreme Court striking down part of the Voting Rights Act that brought another segment of our society into the big tent. We have a sacred duty to correct that. We also have an obligation as the historical founders of this system of church and government, to hold our leaders to the same standard when it comes to undocumented foreigners in our land. Today s Gospel and our faith tradition require us to hold our leaders accountable until we pass an immigration law that creates the same sense of community for our Latino sisters and brothers and offers a clear path to citizenship. 7
When this country strays too far toward individuality, you and I are called to bring it back into the circle of community. And when this country s communitarian voice suggests that someone is not welcome because they are not one of us, or that we should firebomb our enemies or burn our books, we are called to stand up against it. May each of us have the courage to live into Jesus calling to make the hard decisions, to discern the better good among all the goods. May we have the courage to leave the securities of our lives to do the most difficult things we must do. In the words of the song we will sing in a few minutes, may each of us have the courage to go where we don t know and never be the same. Amen. Alleluia. 8