“Would You Kindly Turn Your Head While I Swallow My Spit?”

“Would You Kindly Turn Your Head While I Swallow My Spit?”

Easter 2    April 23, 2017   Community Christian Church          Roger Ray, pastor

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I Peter 1:17-23       ¹⁷If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. ¹⁸You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, ¹⁹but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. ²⁰He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. ²¹Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God. ²²Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. ²³You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.  

I was in the fifth grade when I was given my first Bible. That was nearly 50 years ago, back in the days when public schools still allowed Gideon Society evangelists to come into classrooms to hand out Bibles and give little sermons. Because it was 50 years ago, what they gave us was a King James Version of the New Testament and the Psalms.

It was delivered with the story that Gideons have told in many versions for nearly a hundred years: A soldier carried his bible next to his heart inside of his jacket and one day when his troop was under enemy fire and soldiers why dying all around him, he was struck in the chest by a bullet but, thankfully, the bullet struck his little Gideon Bible and the bullet pierced the layers of paper to end like a molten lead finger pointing to Psalm 91:7, “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.”     

These grown men told groups of children stories like this to both frighten and indoctrinate them.

We were left to assume that the soldiers who failed to carry their New Testaments were killed…. And they probably wouldn’t have been killed if they had been more faithful. The Bible carried a certain magic with it that undergirded the claim that God had written it and that everything it said was true.

I am also quite fond of the story that Woody Allen told about the rough neighborhood where he grew up. To give him courage, his mother put a large rifle shell on a chain that he could wear as a necklace under his shirt. And, Allen said, one day it saved his life when a crazed Gideon threw a Bible right at him. It would have gone right through his heart if it had not been stopped by the bullet he was wearing under his shirt.

But the world in which many of us grew up was a world that assumed that the Bible was God’s word and we went to Sunday School for years trying to understand it. And several of us here went on to college to study it, paying intense attention to matters of translation, we even studied Greek and Hebrew, and Ancient Near Eastern history.

The more conservative among us tried every kind of logical gymnastics to make it all fit together, to explain how the more difficult and absurd parts of the Bible fit into some acceptable and divine whole. The more progressive were willing to focus on what we call a “cannon within the cannon.” That is, we focused on the more plausible, agreeable, and useful parts of the Bible and we interpreted everything else from the perspective of those favorite passages.

For decades, many of us put on what amounted to a Kellyanne Conway attitude and tried to insist that the Bible didn’t really say, that Paul didn’t really mean it, that these hard passages were taken out of context, or misunderstood. Look folks, the Bible praised Jephthah for sacrificing his daughter to fulfill a pledge. The Bible ordered the slaughter of the Midianites, and the stoning of folks for doing stuff that most of us have done more than once.

When we encountered a text like the one we read today from I Peter, a text that sums up the core of evangelical Christian witness saying that we have been saved from eternal damnation by the blood sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, many of us with more progressive leanings would try to say that substitutionary death is only one way to understand the life and death of Jesus and that the Bible offers us several alternative interpretations.

We would say that the scriptures speak in many different voices, from many perspectives, and so we try to push such ugly images to the side, and focus on what is more helpful, more relevant, more acceptable to our modern views. But what I was not willing to say for the first two decades that I was preaching and what I’m still waiting to hear from many of my peers, is that in very many cases the theology we encounter in the Bible is just wrong.

For many of us who grew up with a giant Bible sitting on a Olive wood stand on the coffee table in the living room and a Gideon New Testament in the hip pocket of our Levi’s, who went to Sunday School, and college Bible Studies, and especially for those of us who went to seminary and beyond, that was too much.

You could study it, dissect it, interpret it, argue with it, but to publicly say, “look, the Bible says a whole lot of stuff that is not just wrong and if taken seriously is really psychologically and morally damaging,” that was just a bridge too far.

Not all scholars agree on this point, but I am persuaded that all of the New Testament was written in conversation with the letters of Paul. Everyone agrees that Paul certainly wrote his core letters before any other New Testament author had set quill to paper. And his letters to Corinth, Rome, Galatia, and Philippi formed the earliest definition of the Christian faith. The gospels, which give us our best source of Jesus material, were all written under an umbrella, a theological assumption, of Paul’s view of the meaning of Jesus’ death. The other Catholic epistles offered some departure from Paul’s views but, in the overall scope of things, they didn’t give themselves much permission to question his core teachings.

Paul lived in the last days of the Jewish temple. He was executed in Rome less than a decade before the temple was to be destroyed, never to be rebuilt. The whole aspect of Judaism as an animal sacrifice cult was passing out of vogue even during the time of Jesus as Synagogues were being built that owed no allegiance to the temple or its priesthood.

In Paul’s mind, the Jesus he never met, because the Jewish faith that was about to be ended by Roman occupation and Greek influence, was a sign of a new way to be Jewish. What Jesus said, what Jesus believed in, what motivated Jesus to place himself in harm’s way and finally to be executed was of no interest to Paul.

For Paul, Jesus was an eschatological figure, a symbol, a sacrifice that ushered in a new age. Realistically, the religion of Paul had virtually nothing to do with Jesus.

There is a great deal to praise about the Christian religion, both historically and in our present day. There is a great deal to praise about the genius of Paul who literally shaped the culture of the western world, may I say, more even than did Jesus because most of what we know about or think we know about Jesus is really an invention of a religion based on Paul’s thinking.

Jesus may have been a radically anti-empire reformer whose beliefs the empire sought to snuff out quickly. But Paul offered a religion that not only did not threaten the empire, it was, in fact, very useful to the empire. The Christian faith as Paul and the Catholic epistles taught personal piety, a confident faith in an after-life, and obedience to the state.

And, as it is interpreted in this passage we read from 1^st Peter, it taught that you need to be afraid of God, “live in reverential fear,” and that your redemption from a very bad outcome on judgment day was based on the sacrifice of the innocent life of Jesus. Literally, “You are so bad that God had to kill himself.” We were taught to believe in a God who was concerned with the minutia of, not only what you ate and wore but even what you thought about. The God of our Sunday School classes was worse than Santa Claus because he not only knew when we had been bad or good in the weeks leading up to Christmas, he was watching us all of the time.

 

One of my favorite passages of scripture is found in the book of Job, chapter 7, verse 19, where Job’s friends have been trying to convince him that all of the bad things in his life have happened because God knows of some private sin that deserved to be punished. Job rejects this hyper judgmental God and screams at the sky, “Would you kindly turn your head while I swallow my spit.” It is colorful but even from the ancient world we have this poet saying that a God who is that watchful, that judgmental, does not deserve our respect.

If religion has a lasting value in a scientific age, surely its value rests in a passionate search for truth. A lot of what you read in the Hebrew scriptures, in the New Testament, and in the Quran could be said to be correctives of our narcissistic and greedy tendencies.

Clearly, while I object to the kind of neurotic guilt that is present in so much of traditional religions, we all know some folks who could use a bit more of a conscience. Clearly, our governor could stand to feel some guilt about our state not expanding health care to more of our poor citizens. Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, and Bill O’Reilly could stand to feel some personal guilt, some shame, some remorse. And our president, who very quickly came to Bill O’Reilly’s defense saying, “I don’t think he did anything wrong.” And I would even rearrange that sentence a bit because it seems to me that what Trump really means is that he does not believe that what O’Reilly did was wrong.

Guilt is not always neurotic. We have a conscience for a reason and we should try to train it to be honest…. Somewhere between the narcissism of these public figures who seem to assume that no moral rules apply to them, and the cowering supplicant who is crippled with neurotic guilt, there is an honest and true path. 

Lewis Black claims that Jews basically invented guilt, Catholics codified it, and Protestants turned it into a perpetual feeling of tension. All of our world religions could stand to be updated with a dose of psychological sophistication.

God does not keep a list of sins nor is there any reasonable sense in which any of us owe a blood debt to God. There is no “final judgment” but there is, in a very real sense, a daily judgment… a moment by moment call for good judgment.

Sin is a social construct. There is no sin if you live on an island all alone. Sin is when you do preventable harm to others. Even what is and what is not social good can never be nailed down. The needs of society change and our ability to empathize changes… hopefully towards greater empathy though that is not always certain.

Religion has often burdened society with horribly ill-informed sexual guilt. Repression often leads to sexual perversion rather than the intended goal of sexual abstinence. A healthy spirituality should promote a healthy sexuality but understanding what is and what is not healthy is a topic that requires constant revision. Most of us in the 21^st century have come to the conclusion that sex between consenting adult partners is not a sin but clearly, people like Trump, Ailes, O’Reilly, and especially Bill Cosby, totally miss the “consent” part of this.

And as much as I want churches, mosques, and synagogues to come into the 21^st century, if Trump makes another sexual comment about his daughter then I may go all medieval on him and call for a renewal of public stoning of perverts.

And even when there is adult consent, there are social and health concerns that should be a part of an informed conscience…. We should respect the exclusive promises that couples generally make to one another. We should be concerned about taking precautions against spreading diseases or causing unplanned pregnancies. But we absolutely should not teach young men and women to loath their bodies or feel guilt for their very normal and natural desires.

The Catholic Church must come out of the 16^th century and reconsider this whole celibate priesthood thing… can they still be collecting evidence for what a bad idea this has been for them? 

And Islam absolutely must stop pretending that they are not a misogynistic faith…. They don’t have to continue to be misogynistic but there is a growing pressure on Muslim women to cloak their bodies in a way that implies sexual guilt. And Protestants that still promote these abstinence only programs and especially their cruel “exodus” programs must take a scientific course on human reproduction and just stop with your silly and uninformed fear and guilt.

I want to respect the faiths of all other people but I also want faith communities to be respectable and in our scientifically, medically, and psychologically aware age, any religion that still condemns homosexuality, that wants to treat women as being somehow either inferior to or personally responsible for the sexual urges of men, or any religion that leads you to believe that you are inherently evil so that you must live in fear of divine judgment…. That’s just not worthy of respect.

An illumined spiritual life joyfully embraces the fruit of scientific discovery and both in what we know and in what we do not yet understand; we commit to live out the claim that love is our religion.