How the way we read the Bible feeds very real, 2023 suffering - 'the Promised Land' and war, a sermon

 This was the sermon I gave today - 

29^th Oct 2023

Lectionary Deut 34 v 1- 12 – Death of Moses, in sight of Promised Land, Joshua to lead people in

Context – war in Middle East after huge Hamas attack on Israel; and Israeli massive military response.

There are various different reasons why people might be ready to run me out of town after this sermon, but as we have church council after, I hope you can wait until after that. The challenge to preachers of using the lectionary is that we are confronted with passages we probably wouldn’t have chosen. This week’s reading all felt like the end of the story so far. And I wandered around other options instead, but came back to this one.

The saying for polite conversation is don’t mention religion or politics, well you came here for religion, but politics is also in everything. I couldn’t refer to this passage of the Israelites being on the verge of the Promised Land without mentioning what is happening in that very land today.

Firstly terrorist attacks are wrong; always wrong; yet also the resort of the desperate when radicalised. Secondly there is always a right to respond to violence and hold people to account for their crimes. However the casualties are the innocent, to use a Biblical verse “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.“ Matt 2 referring to Jeremiah 31 The wailing comes from Palestinian and Israeli mothers; from Muslim, Jewish and Christian fathers, and those with no faith. It comes from families of fighters and families of peaceseekers.

How did we get here? Well politics are complicated, in school for History GCSE [back in 1991] we had to look at a modern conflict for one of our units. We did the Arab/Israeli conflict. There are so many factors from the ending of the Ottoman Empire and the French and British mandate in the Middle East – Britain promising self rule to both Palestinians and Jews, offering the same land! Then post WW2 western cultural guilt about the Holocaust creating Israel, regardless of the varied mix of people in the land, and enforced on the local population.  [White Europeans deciding what happens and borders in lands far from their own home, see also the carve up of Africa in 1800s]

All of that and so much more got us to here and the suffering of the most vulnerable on all sides. But our Bible and how people read it is also part of the equation. And if the politics didn’t rile you, my views on the Bible might, and I don’t expect listeners to agree with me or accept what I say without question.

The first 5 books of our Bible start with 2 creation stories, through a flood judgement, to the start of the story of ‘God’s People’. Abraham is promised to be the father of nations – Arabs link themselves to Ishmael – with Isaac as the path to the Israelites. Through all those stories covered in sunday school – Jacob vs Esau, the 12 sons of Jacob and the story of Joseph of the fancy coat, centuries in Egypt and then Moses, saved from death, raised in royal circles, but called to lead his own people out of Egypt to the land promised to Abraham. Plagues in Egypt, parting the Red Sea, getting the Ten Commandments and years of wandering in the wilderness.

And then the Promised Land is in sight and the great leader Moses dies. In the next book in our Bible we see Joshua (one of the 2 good spies back in the day- song 12 spies went to spy on Canaan, 10 were bad and 2 were good)) taking over and leading the people across the River Jordan in a variation of the Red Sea crossing with the Ark of the Covenant, symbol of God’s presence, standing in the middle until all the people crossed over. Then we move on to conquest, Joshua’s army attacking cities, including the famous falling of the walls of Jericho (Song – Joshua fought the battle of Jericho...and the walls came tumbling down)

How we understand these old stories feeds into even modern politics – it is the Promised Land theology that has underpinned both where the Jews were offered a homeland, and the expansion policy of certain groups. Not all Jews are Zionists – there is one ultra orthodox group that was against the formation of Israel, as it was man made not from God. And not all Zionists are Jews – in my first circuit as a minister there was a ‘Prayer for Israel’ group in one of the churches that the leader guided as ‘may God smite all the Muslims in the ‘promised land’. He believed that despite hundreds of years of ancestry in a place, all Palestinians should move out in favour of Jews (except Palestinian Christians), because – the Promised Land. And in case anyone thinks that Christian Zionists are pro Israel, the underlying belief is that a restored nation of Israel is a key stage in the Last Days, the End Times which involves the end of Judaism. There is even a Christian group that has collected funding to help rebuild a Jewish temple in Jerusalem, because to them that is needed before the second coming of Christ.

These maps need to be put in context - before 1947 the land was under the British mandate and included Muslims, Christians and Jews.  Palestinians would be pushed out of the area to become Israel but also Jews left the Palestinian areas (compare the religious divide and horrors with the partition of India and Pakistan - also previously under British rule...) But the territorial changes since 1947 has been through wars and 'assertive settlements'

Expansionist zionism has massively reduced the area allocated by the UN partition for the Palestinian areas since 1948. And Biblically based ideas have fed this political view, and the atrocities that grow from it. This is why I say that how we read the Bible, how we interpret the stories we read, is so important. It doesn’t just shape our view of the past but is a real and powerful factor even in 2023.

The Bible gives a story of the conquest of Canaan that is God’s will, both in that the land is promised to the Israelites and because the Canaanites are so terribly sinful that they deserve to be annihilated. These are the stories that give glorification of the victory over Jericho (in Sunday school we/I were spared from the account of all people being slaughtered); or in later battles with the Philistines – cue Samson’s attacks or Gideon winning over a much bigger army with his 300 men.

But this is one of the sections of the Bible people can have the most problems with. How is the God of love and grace that Jesus spoke of the same God demanding that whole populations be wiped out, men, women, children, animals? Or in other cases saving the young unmarried women who could be taken as wives by the fighters?

A literal reading of the Bible presents us with so many issues like this. Noah’s ark is a beloved story even outside the church, the opportunity to introduce animal names and cuteness – but is actually about a massacre of everyone and all of nature except those on the boat. There are those, including well funded US projects (eg The Ark Encounter in Kentucky) that invest all their time in justifying a literalist view of the Bible, against all the science. What if that money and time was applied to feeding the hungry, giving shelter and provisions to the most vulnerable?

I however lean a different way. I see Genesis 1 as a beautiful poem, with echoing lines, and patterned to point to a 7 day week including a Sabbath. I see in Genesis 2/3 a narrative designed to wrestle with the question of ‘if there is a perfect creator, why is there evil and suffering?’ I see in the stories of Abraham to Moses to David and Solomon an origin story of a culture, including the emergence of their understanding of God, from one among other tribal, or regional deities, to the one God across nations and generations. Much of the early books of the Bible dealing with the earliest points in time are considered by scholars to have been written much later, during the time of the exile (when Babylonians and then Persians conquered Israel, and the elite were taken to live in a strange land – Psalm 137 and hit song ‘By the rivers of Babylon…’) This was a time to reaffirm national identity and gather together stories of the past and their right to their lands. Some scholars date these texts even later.

Archaeology and records recovered from other communities around affirm the later kings of Israel and Judah, but nothing about King David and earlier. Some of the cities listed as destroyed in Joshua have been located but scientific dating puts them centuries later.

Personally I read the Bible within the insight of these questions about dating, whilst still listening to God’s voice. I find more theological trouble with a literalist position, which in reality is in itself a particular interpretation. There is no such thing as the ‘clear sense’ when reading words transferred across languages, over thousands of years when the use of words change in meaning, divorced from the injokes and cultural clues of the time. When we don’t have an actual source text, but only manuscripts copied across a hundred years with differences between them and scholars spending careers trying to follow the trails towards what an original letter of St Paul might have said.

These things can challenge our faith, but I find that they can enrich my faith through glimpses of the human writers and their reasons for writing. Our Christian faith is in (at the beginning) God the creator, Christ the word; and the Holy Spirit who moved over the chaos; in God the father who loves like a mother hen; in Jesus the man who is God incarnate; in the Holy Spirit who is with us to the end of the age. The Bible does not claim to be God speaking, but something that God can speak through.

I respect that others may not agree with my approach to the Bible, but as I see the negative impact of certain interpretations on modern lives, be it fuelling the fires in the Middle East, or condemning people for who they love, or demanding that people must trust faith or science – a choice that leads many to reject faith – then I am reminded of ‘know them by their fruits’. If my Bible interpretation causes more suffering in this world; then I ask what is broken in my interpretation, for the God I have encountered loves all people.

Whatever you feel about what I have said, if I have provoked you to think about your faith experience, then that is positive. May we always question our assumptions, to prove them or find new understanding. God is with us in the wondering.

Reading the Bible - looking beyond the words

 There are different ways of approaching how we read the Bible. This isn’t to say any way is better than another. I merely offer a view that you may want to consider. Or maybe it is a way you have been looking at the Bible for a while.  Some times it can help to know that there are different ways of relating to the Bible that are equally faithful, and still inform our relationship with God.

There are those who consider the Bible to be inerrant – this can refer to the original languages or for others the translated words too. This view believes that God has protected the exact words down the ages and the translations. However we don’t have any original texts, only a range of manuscripts that are multiple copies down the line, and with differences between them.  Translation is also tricky (see over)

There is also the approach that the Bible is Inspired by God – this gives a very wide approach, from the writers being guided directly by God, to it being their own choices to write and record things and God uses what they wrote to speak to us.

Then there is the matter of what we do with the stories we find in the Bible. How do we deal with 2 different stories of the Creation – the first poetic where everything created was good, and the second a narrative to explain why there is badness in the world, the animals in Gen 1 are created before people, and in Gen 2 there are created after Adam who is asked to name them.   Likewise there are multiple points in the Old Testament where stories are repeated, or 2 versions run together like the flood.  Scholars think that what we have today is an amalgam of different writers (eg each creation story uses a different term for God).

As well as who wrote what, there is also when. It is generally agreed that the version of Genesis we have was mostly compiled when the Jews were in exile in Babylon, many years after all the kings such as David.  It is when people are away from their roots that the need to affirm their distinctiveness as a people seems more important. This opens up a way for the early events in Genesis  - creation to flood – to be influenced by even older stories from Mesopotamia, which predated the Babylonians in that land.  Does the fact that the Epic of Gilgamesh has a flood story with a man on a boat with animals mean that Genesis has nothing to say to us? I believe in the evidence for evolution and that the world is older than 6000yrs, and recognise that cultures with written records (writing began with balancing accounts and taxes – predictable?) have noted time before and after the flood with no record of a disaster. That and the geological evidence.

Do these stories have to be historically true for the Bible to carry meaning for us? I don’t think so, and actually I think that the message behind why these stories were told, what the writers wanted to say about God still has a message for us, and changed to a different message than the version of a flood story told in Babylon.

At some point after King Solomon’s descendants the list of kings are picked up by records found in other nations around them. Before that we have no archaeological evidence for eg mass slavery in Egypt; nor the great city massacres during the book of Joshua as the Israelites conquer Canaan.  For me that insight has been really helpful since those wars against the existing residents of the land are some of the most troubling parts of the Bible for me.

We read stories of cities being attacked and all the people being slaughtered, including children and even all animals, and this is cited as some kind of offering to God.  Reading this as written leaves us asking why God is asking for that total violence. Reading it as people writing about something that happened and they thought it was what God was asking for so they wrote in that he told them to do it. But if this was part of a national origin myth, then that is a very different point from which to ponder the points being made by the authors.

In the New Testament too there are questions. The gospels were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – those names were added later. Whilst only some of Paul’s letters are considered genuine. The letters to Timothy being among those written in his name but the style of Greek is different and they talk about a church that has developed further and is more structured with ministers and overseers/bishops. Hence the commands about how church should be governed.

There are many more aspects to this, for some what I am writing is abhorrent, a denial of God’s word. For the strictly inerrant believers I am already invalid as a woman preaching and a church minister. Others may say that if I accept this range of scholarly questioning of the Bible, then do I even see it as God’s word at all.

For me these insights actually invite me to seek deeper meanings, why is the writer saying this? What is hidden under the story or poetry? How does the timing of the writing affect the meaning to the immediate culture? (The book of Ruth is dated before King David but thought to be written around the return from exile – at the time were there were issues about separating from foreign wives for national purity a writer tells a story of a foreign woman marrying into the line of David himself).

This may not be your approach, but there are many ways of hearing God’s voice through the Bible, and being a faithful disciple is possible across many ways of seeking inspiration through the Bible.

However you read it, may you find deeper knowledge of God 

Letter to my biology teacher

Dear Mrs Evans,

You inspired my interest in the wonders of life. I had long since exhausted my parents with my ‘why?’ questions, and here in science class there were answers and insights.  I cherished getting the New Scientist magazine at a special rate. Reading that and watching TV on a Thursday night – for ‘Tomorrow’s World’ rather than many classmates wanting the update of ‘Top of the Pops’ fed my curious mind.  Chemistry was cool , whilst physics never starched the itch, biology however fascinated me. I would read ahead in the textbooks. Had I been a student in the internet age I would have been devouring science content, as I do now.

However, I was ‘that child’, the one who came to you proclaiming that I wanted to opt out of the evolution classes because of my faith. I even gave you a book that suggested the fossil record merely reflected the drowning sequence of creatures during the flood of Noah’s day.   Looking back I am not sure where my anti evolutionist stance came from – it was not part of the general message of my Methodist Church I had attended since infancy. Perhaps it was the books I was reading, and my young in faith enthusiasm.  It reflected my limited understanding of faith and of science. You responded with grace and I sat in the prep room during those classes. In reality I was reading up on evolution anyway should it come up in any exams!  I guess it was my way of ‘making a stance’ from my faith.

You continued as my biology teacher for years beyond that, through GCSEs and A level, and saw me depart for a degree course in Biochemistry with Microbiology.  And such is the nature of teaching, that you work with us closely and then set us loose into the wider world, without hearing back from where we end up.

I am not sure where or when I embraced the scientific evidence of evolution, or at least when I stopped fighting it.   I suspect it was when I was still in your classes, but I just didn’t recognise it at the time, like someone wandering in the borderlands. At Uni I embraced the wonder of life without trying to define how it came to be.

You may not be surprised that I ended up as a church minister, I hope you will be affirmed that I do so as someone who affirms the beautiful insights of scientific discovery.   That discovery was something that was rooted in what you taught.