Bible Sunday

Date: 17th August 2008

Preacher: Revd. Carol Wardman

'People of the Book'

With all the other 'People of the Book', the faiths that share a belief in the 1 true creator God, and who derive much of that faith from the revelation of God in written form, we Christians have an occasion of special celebration to honour our holy scriptures. Around about this time of year, the Jews celebrate Simchat Torah, the Rejoicing of the Law, when the scrolls of the scriptures are carried shoulder-high in procession round the synagogue, and the people (or at least, the men!) first reach out to touch the scrolls with their prayer-shawls as they pass, kissing them to receive a special blessing, and then follow the scriptures out into the street or at least into the community hall, where exuberant singing and dancing ensue. The Moslems celebrate during Ramadan the Night of Power, the holiest and most solemn night of the year, on which they recall the giving of the Koran to the prophet Mohammed – some believe in its entirety, dictated straight off by the Archangel Gabriel, and to honour this momentous and founding occasion, and the Holy Koran, pious Moslims stay up all night to read the entire Koran through.

And we, in the Church of England, on the last Sunday of Trinity, if we choose to observe it, have – Bible Sunday. I have to say, brothers and sisters, that I think we're missing out! If ever there was an excuse to have an exuberant procession, with music and singing and clapping and cheering, all of us dancing round the church in a sort of holy conga, following the Bible, I think this is it. Next year, maybe!!

Interestingly, the term People of the book was coined by the Prophet Mohammed himself; certainly it's a Moslem term, and 1 which reflects what at least the early Moslems saw as the close, even the truly family, relationship between the 3 monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Which is also interesting because, of course, we don't all 3 use exactly the same book!

The Jews, of course, have the Hebrew Bible; it's highly politically incorrect to call it the Old Testament [OT], because of course it isn't old – even to us – in the sense of being old-fashioned or outdated or even being replaced by what we call the New. (On the other hand, working as I do at Age Concern, I do have some more positive connotations of the word 'old', to do with being experienced, valued, carrying a weight of tradition and holding the comm together – so maybe in some cases 'old' is OK.) When I was training for ordination, our (so-called) OT Lecturer, who was a gt fan of the Heb scriptures, used to call it 'the Bible and the Supplement' – of which I rather think Jesus might approve!

After all, what Jesus himself used was the Hebrew Bible – he knew nothing else. Most of Jesus' teachings are rooted and grounded in the teachings of the so-called OT: sometimes he brought out a subtle commentary on it, but actually not very often changing it completely, unless to expand it. So Jesus when alluded to the crime of murder, he expanded that to say that it's not only the final act of violence that is liable to judgement, but the verbal insults and denigration of other people as well: [Mat 5:22] But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council. In relation to the commandment that forbade taking the name of God in vain by swearing an oath, Jesus not only approved of the restriction against using the name of God, but added that we shouldn't swear by anything at all – we should let our word be our bond, our 'yea be yea and our nay be nay' [Mat 5:35]. When Jesus disapprovingly quoted the Hebrew scriptures as allowing a man to divorce his wife, he didn't so much abolish the provision, as introduce the idea that women had similar rights and responsibilities as men in marriage, and given that women were unable to instigate divorce proceedings against their husbands, it was also wrong for men to divorce their wives. And (in the case of on of the most famous of Jesus' scriptural quotes) he said that it wasn't just the literal act of adultery that was criminal, but the whole process of lusting after another woman (or, presumably, man)!

Jesus said, [Mat 5:17] "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill;” but his very use of scripture took it far away from the simplistic literal interpretation that reduced the word of God to a set of proof texts and rules with black-and-white answers. Jesus pointed out that the word of God is much more subtle than that.

Ironically, nowadays it sometimes seems to me that the Jewish tradition has a much more developed sense of the subtlety and different types of literature that are present in the Bible than many Christians have. The Hebrew Bible came together over many 100s, if not 1000s, of years, worked on by many different scholars in different times and places and circumstances. 1 of the great periods in ancient times when the Bible was worked on and put together was during the Israelites' exile in Babylon, when their homeland had been conquered, their Temple destroyed, and they were forced to migrate away from their beloved Jerusalem. They were then forced to find a new way of relating to God without the physical presence of the Temple and the Ark of the Covenant and even the Promised Land; and so they started to worship in synagogues, and set their scholars to research and revise and collate the body of traditional writings, so that in the end they had a set of scriptures which covered the essentials of their faith and practice, and which – unlike a Temple – could travel about with them and meet their needs wherever they went.

So there has always been an awareness that there are many different types of literature in the Bible - and the Jewish tradition doesn't refer to them all in exactly the same way. There is history, and law, poetry, wisdom (the closest thing to ancient Hebrew philosophy), and commentary. The word we all know – Torah - doesn't mean the whole Hebrew Bible, but only the books of the Law; and in fact there is an acronym often used for the Hebrew Bible, which is TANAK – standing for the initial letters, in Hebrew, of all those different types of book – law, history, poetry, and so on – reminding us that the Bible is not an homogenous whole, with all discrepancies ironed out.

There is a saying in the Hebrew Bible that 'God has a controversy with the people' - and certainly, there is no shying away from controversy in the compilation of our holy book. You can trace, for example, the development of the idea of the 1 true universal God throughout the Heb Bible, developing from the God (maybe one amongst many – God is often called 'God of Gods' in some of the early writings: the superior God, but not the only one), who was only present in certain places, to the 1 who travelled with the people on their journeys – remember Jacob's dream in the wilderness of a ladder going up from earth to heaven? - even in the middle of nowhere, far from home, God was present! And even up to the truly ground-breaking notion that the God of the Israelites was actually available to all people, and the highest vision being that one day, all nations would come to worship the same God.

And in the history books, you get more than 1 pt of view on the great developments of the day – rather as if you were reading versions in the Guardian and the Telegraph, perhaps! So the 'Guardian' version of the establishment of the Israelite monarchy was that it was a dodgy idea, leading to high taxes, military service and a widening gap between rich and poor; whereas the more conservative 'Telegraph' readership learned that the monarchy would unite the nation, give them a say in world affairs, and that Kings were chosen by God, and tasked with doing God's will – even as servants of the people. The 2 ideas are definitely recorded in the scriptures, in the contrasting accounts of Chronicles and Samuel!

Again, when the Israelites returned from Exile and re-established themselves in their homeland, some went so far in re-introducing the old laws that those who had married non-Israelites were told to divorce their gentile partners; and whilst these rules are recorded, the heartbreak and dissent this caused gave rise the writing and inclusion in the scriptures of the book of Ruth, which tells the story of how a gentile, Moabite woman, became the ancestor of the most famous of the Israelite Kings, David.

Even when it comes to the New Testament [NT], which – compared with the Hebrew Bible! - was scrambled tog by Jesus' followers in the 1^st few decades after Jesus walked the earth, more than 1 pt of view is represented. The old chestnut of an argument against it, by atheists, is that we have 4 versions of the story with significant differences between them, especially in regard to the Resurrection. But when I was running an adult nurture group in my 1^st parish, Hebden Bridge, 1 member of the group was a policeman; and he said that far from casting doubt on the credibility of the stories, the discrepancies had rather the opposite effect on him. He said that at an early stage in police training, you were taught to be suspicious of accounts from different witnesses which had too high a degree of correlation between them: they would all have seen the event from different angles and if they agreed too strongly, you should immediately suspect collusion. I must say I found it reassuring that after all this time, our Bible can stand up to modern standards of police evidence!

All this sort of thing should remind us that the Bible is not something monolithic, but something that has evolved and grown with the development of our faith. It is supremely dangerous – as we can see from many examples around the world today – to use the Bible to support 1 pt of view, as if there were no debate about it. Whatever the Bible is, it is not a totalitarian document, toeing only 1 party line all the way through, and never allowing for a fresh interpretation. The Holy Spirit is present not only in the original writings, but also in the work of the editors and scholars who put it together, decided what to include, commented on it as they went along, and handed it down to us – to follow in their footsteps.

And I can't resist ending by quoting to you a description of the Simchat Torah celebrations as they take place in Jerusalem. This is what we should be aiming for as we celebrate Bible Sunday today!