Hanging the biblical laundry
Thumbnail image: Michael Gäbler, used under license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
October 6, 2019—Proper 22C
Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10
My favorite Canadian Unitarian, Liz James, recently reflected on the difference between talent and what she calls “love soaked mediocrity.” She describes how in her youth, she was really good at math … but what she LOVED was singing and dancing. And so she worked really hard at dancing, and at singing, and at playing guitar. But it was always difficult. She wasn’t blessed with that natural talent that earns praise from adults. No-one raved: "you're good at that", or "that's beautiful".
But still, she loved it. Which made her wish that we spent more time asking young people, asking ALL people: “‘Do you love doing that enough to stick with it for years, with little evidence of success?’. Because if the answer is ‘yes’, you've found your thing. Even if you suck. In fact, the sucking is a great test, because if you love something even when you're failing at it, that's a precious gift. That's a thing you are built to do.”[i]
I think the disciples in today’s gospel could use that question. Because clearly, they are asking Jesus for talent: make us good at this faith thing. Make us better at this faith thing, so that we can be better followers.
And Jesus essentially says: that’s the wrong request. It’s not an issue of getting more faith, as though faith is a magic power. Faith isn’t a magic power; it’s just a way of living in the world. It’s putting your trust in God. It’s trusting that God had a reason to create you, a reason to use you as a messenger and a worker in the fields. And it doesn’t really matter whether you are talented at it, whether you will win acclaim, and be hailed as a saint or something. You just need to do it, and you need to love it somehow.
For me, the challenge begins with the Bible. Because the bible is a complicated gift to have been given. It’s full of all kinds of things: things that are liberating and life-giving, things that are just plain confusing, things that honestly seem death-dealing. Things that point towards God, and things that point to humanity’s tendency to stray from God. The Bible is not easy. Not just because it asks me to do things like love my enemies (that sounds like God to me, even though it is so difficult I want to pretend it isn’t there), but because sometimes it does things like command me to kill my enemies (or, at least, those who are living in the land that I would rather like to inhabit).
That’s a different kind of difficult. That’s a kind of difficult that anyone who wants to read the bible as sacred text will need to grapple with.
This past week, I was fortunate enough to be in the presence of Dr. Shively Smith, a professor of New Testament. And she challenged us all to consider the crucial question of how we read the Bible: how we study historical context, literary form and rhetorical purpose; how we listen to the thoughts and feelings of a wider community reading the text; how we feel the movement of the Spirit within us as we encounter God in the text; and how we bring ALL of that together to allow the text to speak into the current moment.
She suggested several useful images to help us understand our own process: moving around a circle, ascending a spiral staircase, putting together a jigsaw puzzle. But the one that brought things into clearest perspective for me was the image of hanging laundry on a line. Because the most important thing is the posts that anchor the line.
When I approach the bible as sacred text, it’s crucial to remember the God who anchors it. God, and Jesus, and the things we learn about their purpose for the world when we read the whole dang thing. Those over-arching themes, those key characteristics about the nature of God, the priorities of God, the dream of God. Those are the poles on which the laundry of scripture hangs, and they are what determines which sheets are firmly pegged, and which ones have been poorly attached.
Which is useful to remember, as we read passages like today’s gospel, comparing our relationship to God to that of a slave to his or her master. This one, straight out of the mouth of Jesus, is not necessarily problematic on its face: he is, after all, simply emphasizing our obedience to God, reiterating that we should follow no-one, belong to no-one, put our life in the hands of no-one but God.
Which, granted, might ruffle our rugged American individualism a little. We don’t really want to be in anyone’s hands, thank you very much. But what really makes this complicated is the history of interpretation. Is the ways in which passages like this have been used by Christian ministers to justify slavery. As though Jesus is somehow giving an okay to people owning other people, when he suggests that we are God’s possession.
And that’s when you need to remember the posts on which the laundry is hung. That’s when you need to look at the whole sweep of the bible, and see the constant themes of liberation. See the raising up of the downtrodden and marginalized. See the way in which ALL people are chosen and beloved of God. Look at all that, and know that the bible cannot with any integrity be used to justify chattel slavery, cannot be used to support the ideas of racial superiority that underpinned slavery in this country.
Why then, do we see casual mentions of slavery in its books? Why do the letters to Timothy we’ve been reading speak of household codes that underscore a hierarchical order of God, then Jesus, then men, then women, then children and slaves? Well, a lot of it hinges on the values of the time. In Old Testament times, it was simply their social structure. In the New Testament epistles, they were letters written to a vulnerable community seeking to avoid persecution by the wider culture. So, in order that Christians might live a “quiet and peaceable life,” (1 Tim 2:2) Paul suggests following a more conventional social ethos than the one that Jesus and his disciples practiced. Not because it was so right and godly, but because it was … prudent.
This, however, has been hardened into divine intention and used over the centuries to justify all manner of compromises with worldly values: used, as noted, to justify slavery. Used to force women back out of the role given by Jesus to all the Marys and Martha and the Samaritan woman; out of the formative role we see in today’s epistle for Timothy’s mother and grandmother; and into a fully subservient role. A role that simply does not hang well on the radical egalitarianism that runs through the New Testament.
We have to know scripture well enough to know what those through-lines are. We have to love scripture enough to go deep with it, and let it tell us who God really is. We have to trust the God we encounter there, trust God enough to learn the difference between a Biblical call that is challenging but true to God, and a call that doesn’t ring true to the whole. You may not feel you have a talent for it. You just need to let yourself love it. Let yourself trust it. Give yourself to it.
That’s a love and a faith worth increasing. May it be so. Amen.
[i] Liz James, Facebook post, January 8, 2019 https://www.facebook.com/LizJamesWrites/posts/2250403991914195?__tn__=-R