Honest Struggle
ESTERDAY At Church, the preacher (whose sermon is not yet online) took the assigned readings and paraphrased them. In the paraphrase (which I don’t have to hand here) he left out all the difficult parts.
In the sermon, he answered my objections (again, it’s not online yet) – but he never addressed the difficult part. As I put it, he dodged the bullet by not firing the gun.
A lot of parishes (across the spectrum) will have read those same readings and not preached on the hard bits. They will just dodge the bullet the normal way: Oh, let’s talk about something else!
Now… here’s my question: is it more honest to ignore the hard bits by not commenting on them, or to not read them at all? Or by coming up with some “Scholarly” excuse about why they can be ignored? Why is it so easy to treat the text in a dishonest manner?
To be certain: this isn’t a modern problem! Martin Luther dissed a whole set of books that proved him wrong on Sola Fide, John Chrysostom and John Wesley both – in their “Verse by Verse” way usually skip right over the verses that make me stumble.
Tags: difficulty, preaching, scripture | Category: church geekery
Discussion: You came too late to this party
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I think we all have a tendency to “not see” those verses that make life hard for us. Interestingly enough, some practice “not seeing” by making way too much of the verses. For instance the “scholarly” discussions on the provenance of a certain verse, which school it came from, and in what century it was “added” are ways to also avoid verses that trouble one by simply disposing of them, a la Luther.
This is one of the reasons why it is always good to read books from different cultures and not simply from different schools of thought. Sometimes what another culture “sees” and does “not see” is very instructive.
I know of a convent of very traditional nuns where the sacristan was instructed by the prioress to select optional readings for a votive Mass in order to replace daily readings that she (prioress) felt were inappropriate of the nuns to hear: David and Bathsheba, for example, or pretty much anything that remotely mentioned sex and so on.
Even the present Roman Breviary omits the disturbing verses near the end of Psalm 139: “God, if only you would kill the wicked! etc.” Not to mention the truly problematic ones at the end of Psalm 137: “Destructive Daughter of Babel, a blessing on the man who treats you as you have treated us, a blessing on him who takes and dashes your babies against the rock!”
It is easier to skip over things that we cannot accept or explain than honestly confront the questions that these may raise about our fundamental understanding of revelation and scripture as a vehicle of God’s communication.
But it’s so much fun!!!
I don’t mean that in the flip way of, say, Betty Bowers either.
A) Our past is a mess. And Jews really did want God to bash the heads of Babylonian Babies.
B) Our coverups are fun: one saint or another (I forget whom) said that baby-head bashing refers to sins. As in, smash the idea of sin when they first appear.
And we can look at all of them and realise God was working even when we were being pretty stupid. I’m rather happy the Eastern Rite sings that psalm several times every Lent (a perfect time to admit how stupid we are). Because it gave every priest I have had a chance to ignore it…
I rather like the Patristic way of finding useful visual imagery in the Bible. It doesn’t have to mean *anything-like-the-text* so long as you can draw a good sermon out of it!
Hi Huw,
This is the preacher of whom you wrote. In my defense it should be noted that I was preaching on the Hebrew Scripture not the gospel and that I am rarely accused of avoiding the difficulties in Scripture.
I have begun to change my attitude about the Lectionary. I used to think along your lines but I have decided that 12 minutes on Sunday morning is not primarily for teaching but to evoke an experience. I am inclined to manipulate the Lectionary in the same way we manipulate the music to serve the goal of worship which is to provide and experience of the holy. Let Biblical scholarship guide the preacher but let the academic rigidities remain in the seminaries. Cam
Hey Cam – Thanks for commenting!
I think you’re right about the experience evocation: that’s why the text worked with your sermon.
I disagree about the seminaries though: I think that knowledge needs to be the property of all the people. Not through 12 mins on Sunday! We all should be involved in the conversation with the text that produces (in part) the sermon and so much else. That’s an education thing, I know: SUnday school, whatever.
I was more wondering about the whole tendency to avoid wrestling with it at all which, as I note, is something we get from Chrysostom and Wesley (and Paul, too!, skipping over the parts of the OT that didn’t line up w/ his vision of Messiah.) Again – not in 12 mins on Sunday!
Sermon online!
Sermon, in full text, PDF, and mp3 format.