2 Timothy 3:10-17

Now you have observed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions, and my suffering the things that happened to me in Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra. What persecutions I endured! Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. Indeed, all who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. But wicked people and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving others and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

THE MODERN LESSON Howard Thurman

Two or three times a week I read the Bible aloud to her. I was deeply impressed by the fact that she was most particular about the choice of Scripture. For instance, I might read many of the more devotional Psalms, some of Isaiah, the Gospels again, and again; but the Pauline epistles, never—except, at long intervals, the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians…With a feeling of great temerity I asked her one day why it was she would not let me read any of the Pauline letters. What she told me I shall never forget. “During the days of slavery,” she said, “the master’s minister would occasionally hold services for the slaves. Old man McGhee was so mean that he would not let a Negro minister preach to his slaves. Always the white minister used as his text something from Paul. At least three or four times a year he used as a text: ‘Slaves, be obedient to them that are your master….as unto Christ.’ Then he would go on to show how it was God’s will that we were slaves and how, if we were good and happy slaves, God would bless us. I promised my Maker that if I ever learned to read and if freedom ever came, I would never read that part of the Bible”

We continue today on this World Communion Sunday with an unlikely look at another great Reformation principle, Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone, this profound re-centering that happened 500 years ago back onto the ancient texts that had been church’s bedrock, almost from the beginning. That re-centering was away from church tradition or those tasked with interpreting church tradition, away from those who decided for the rest of the church what the will of God was for the people of God. Scripture was not available to the masses for three reasons: first, generally members of the church were quite literally forbidden to read the text itself without the guidance of a priest or direction from the hierarchy about what the text meant. Secondly, the text itself was only in the Latin Vulgate, a language that few lay people could understand apart from the priests and the doctors of the church. And third, until around the time of Luther’s life, Scripture was hand copied, so there were few actual Bibles to read anyway since it took great time and manpower to produce a copy. But a few years after Luther posted his 95 theses against the practice of indulgences, he published a German translation of the Bible for the masses, which opened a new world to many German Christians, a world in which they had a chance to read for themselves the stories that some had rarely heard, or had just seen depicted in the stain glass of churches, which were themselves a way of sharing the biblical story visually to the largely illiterate masses.

Now, we Protestants, it was thought, now we can go back to the source material, go back to the stories and the teachings of Jesus himself, rather than having someone tell us what those teachings were, and how they should be understood. This was no minor shift, no minor re-centering, and it allowed the people of the church access to the texts that had formed them, formed them unaware, perhaps, but formed them nonetheless. But with more access to the Scriptures comes something else, something else that shouldn’t surprise any of us, and that was the emergence of different interpretations of the same text. Just because people could read the text for themselves, just because they could read Jesus’ words for themselves, or the stories of the Jewish Bible for themselves, it didn’t mean that people could AGREE on what those texts mean. Unlike the Jewish tradition, in which multiple and varied and sometimes contradictory interpretations of the texts were welcomed and embraced, we in the Christian churches had been told for hundreds and hundreds of years that there was only correct interpretation of the text, the one promulgated by the official church. We Christians had no tradition of being able to handle differences when it came to interpretations, no way of being to be comfortable with a multitude of contradictory voices argueing that their understanding of this or that Scriptural text was the right and correct one. And hence, not surprisingly, Protestantism begins to do its own splitting apart internally, and today we have so many different kinds of Protestants that its actually, quite literally, hard to count them all.

But something else also happened, something perhaps deeply unexpected. Some have noted that we Protestants ended up switching from one Pope to another, one central authority to another central authority, re-centering ourselves away back from Rome to the Christian and Jewish Scriptures, as the decider of what was it meant to be a Christian, a follower of this Jesus of Nazareth. Instead of the Pope or representatives of the Western Church deciding for us what correct doctrine or ideas were, we simply substituted another authority to decide for us what were the right and wrong ways of being a Christian, the new authority being the Scriptures themselves. And that instinct seems to make sense, except, of course, for the fact people of good will can simply disagree with each other on what Jesus meant when he is said to have uttered some particular words, or what an Apostle meant by his wording on this or that matter. Despite our Protestant desire to finalize authority in the Scriptures, we ended up diffusing authority, spreading it around, and causing, at least for some, a confusing cacophony of voices claiming to have the right interpretation of a particular text or doctrine. Is that a good thing? Well, for those of us who are comfortable with differences, of all sorts, it is, because it honors a reality that we’ve all experienced – you get five people interpreting a text or an event, and you’ll get 7 different opinions about what those words, or what that event means. But for those who desire just one final reading, one final interpretation of a text, or a story, its deeply uncomfortable, and often from them you see an eventual embrace of some sort of fundamentalism, some sort of absolutism that attempts to dictate to others the correct interpretation of ideas, doctrines, and stories.

Still, I think that turn towards Scripture in the Protestant Reformation was a good thing, despite the tendency of those who simply switched from the Pope in Rome to the Pope of Scripture. For those of us in the liberal Protestant tradition, we continue to embrace this idea of “Scripture alone,” but I would argue that we’ve done it in a way that avoids the absolutism that infects those enamored by a final and absolute reading of a text. We took the Reformation challenge of re-centering the church back towards its ancient voices, especially back to the testimony of who Jesus was and is, and we practiced it in a way that brought integrity to the process. Unlike some who think that Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone means that Scripture is the final arbiter of how we live our lives as disciples of Christ, we liberal Christians generally understand Scripture as the beginning point of that journey, of that attempt to figure out what it might mean to actual live out Christ’s words about love and grace and forgiveness. But just because we begin our journey in Scripture it does not mean we always end with the Scriptures, which in practice is the way the Scriptures have always been practically understood for two thousand years. For example, you heard that story a few minutes ago by the great Howard Thurman about how his mother, who was once a slave, refused to listen to the texts in the Bible that support chattel slavery, the buying and selling of other human beings, texts found in both the Old and New Testaments. When the Christians in this country argued with each other about the rightness and the wrongness of human slavery before the Civil War, the side with the more biblical argument, the one that could seemingly claim clarity on the issue in Scripture was the pro-slavery South. The evangelical historian Mark Knoll explains it this way in his book – The Civil War as Theological Crisis: The power of the proslavery scriptural position…lay in its simplicity. [Thomas] Thompson defense could not have been more direct. In effect: open the Bible, read it, believe it. After conceding that in ancient times God had set strict limits to Hebrew enslavement of other Hebrews, he then quoted Leviticus 25:45-46a: “Moreover the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall you buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land, and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance…” Then after acknowledging New Testament injunctions to piety, charity and respect for others, Thompson turned to the book of Philemon, the brief letter of St. Paul in which the apostle instructed an escaped slave, Onesimus, to return to his master. Thompson’s message was straightforward: if God through divine revelation so clearly sanctioned slavery, and even the trade in “strangers,” how could genuine Christians attack modern slavery, or even the slave trade, as an evil. (33)

Despite the great harm that sometimes comes when we Protestants do what some have accused us of doing, of simply substituting one pope for another pope, of substituting one final authority, the Pope or church, for another final authority, the Holy Scriptures, despite the harm that comes from that sleight of hand, eventually, eventually we the church come around to our senses, we come to see that God is not done with humanity yet, that God has not finished speaking, despite the unwillingness of some believers to hear God through sources other than the Scriptures or the Church itself. That’s why it’s so important to keep an open mind to the change that God is still fomenting in the world, that God might be doing a new thing even now, both within the church, but also in the larger world. I’ve often said that sometimes God has to go around the church in order to reach the church, that God has to use whatever means necessarily in the larger world to get the church to see what God sees, and to do what God wants the church to do.

Paul, in his letter to his young disciple Timothy, writes this: All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. And you know what, I think he’s right, though, to be clear, the Scripture he speaks of here is not his own writings, which would later be understood as sacred themselves, but the Tanak, the Jewish Scriptures that molded and shaped him, the ones he hopes will do the same for his disciple Timothy and the nascent church. But Paul is also right in an unexpected way, unexpected, of course, being the way that God often works in this world. When we readers go to our holy texts, we go to seek what our ancient forbearers wrote and said about some topic, some idea, or we go to see what Jesus said and did about such matters. Often we are uplifted, challenged, moved, convicted, but there are also times when we Christians have had to set ourselves against those ancient voices, those ancient words, and so we in the church have come to reject Paul’s understanding of human slavery, a view he held that was common and unremarkable for its time, we have had to reject his words just as Howard Thurman’s mother did in the story we heard earlier today. That rejection of certain parts of Scripture, the parts that seem to endorse human genocide in God’s name, the parts that seem to denigrate and dismiss women, even that act of saying “no” to these texts is a result of that very same Scripture continuing to inspire, continuing to reprove us, correction us, and continuing to train in righteousness – even in our saying “no” to certain parts Scripture, even then that very same scripture continues to shape us- it helps us clarify what God really does want of us and of justice. Positive change can happen when we Christians do as the Reformers ask us to do, which is to go to those ancient voices and listen for the voice of God in them. Sometimes, though, the voice of God isn’t found in the words themselves, in the text themselves, but is discovered in us wrestling with particular texts that may not be God’s words, or God’s will in the first place. Even in moments when we stand against Scripture, it too teaches, trains us, reproves, shapes us, so that we can be followers of the Way that Jesus calls us into, the way of love and justice. Begin at the beginning, the Reformers says, and so we shall, but where we end up, well, that may be an altogether surprising thing, and a reminder that God is still doing a thing in this world, even now, changing the world even now, and maybe, if we allow ourselves to be, maybe changing us as well. Amen.