The Way I Am Reading

Friends--

This is the longer post I promised earlier this evening. I think it will be the last post anywhere near this length, and it may or may not interest you to know "how I am reading" what "is written in the Law." Or it may.

A couple of weeks ago I noted that the way Jesus responded to the lawyer, when the lawyer stood to  "test" him with a question regarding the Commandments--"What is written in the Law? How do you read?"--comprise two really different questions.  It is one thing to be able to quote chapter and verse; but when verses disagree, or when there is ambiguity and confusion as to how we might apply those verses, then the second question is crucial: HOW we read what is written there.

So, here it is. The best I can do right now to make sense of all that is written.

Pray for the General Conference.

I

              “What is written in the Law? How do you read?”

              Jesus asked that of a lawyer who came to interrogate and test him about the Greatest of the Commandments (Luke 10:25-37).

“What is written in the Law?” Jesus replied. “How do you read?”

Which are two really different questions, actually.

What is written in the law is one thing. But how we understand and apply what is written can make all the difference.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind. And your neighbor as yourself,” the Lawyer said.

“Yes,” Jesus said. “You have answered rightly. Do that and you shall live.”

But the lawyer was confused at least as to who his neighbor might in fact be. While he quoted Leviticus 19:18, his reaction to the story of the Good Samaritan indicates he had chosen to ignore Leviticus 19:33-34. He read selectively, in other words—that is how he read.

As we ourselves too often do.

Which is why it is important to consider why we think the way we do…about anything. And for Christians, especially important now: how do we read “the Law”? How shall we read what is written?

Begin with the Great Commandment itself.

I think we all do want to do both things—to love God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind; to love our neighbors as ourselves. But as my friend Ashley says, We just have trouble discerning a way to do both, equally, at the same time.

To all appearances, those who love God (as evidenced by a more or less strict reading of the Bible) find themselves accused of mitigating or diminishing love of some of their neighbors, at least.

Conversely, those who spend their heart, soul, strength and mind in the name of neighbor-love (and all are neighbors), are often accused of disregarding the Bible, the faith once-delivered to the saints, the word of truth.

It is a dilemma. Such a dilemma that we might well ask ourselves if it is even possible to obey both commands simultaneously?

And that may be at the heart of what gets debated and decided in St. Louis.

Or, as Jesus asked the disciples, “What are you arguing about on the way?”

“We are arguing about the Great Commandment, Lord.”

 

 

II

There is a wonderful essay in the January 21, 2019, issue of The New Yorker, entitled “Choose Wisely.” Joshua Rothman is the author. The subtitle is this: “Do We Make the Big Decisions, or Do They Make Us?”

Which is another great question as we anticipate St. Louis.

Rothman notes that “one of the paradoxes of life” is that the big decisions, sometimes, occasion easy decisions; while the little decisions, oftentimes, do not. Couples may decide, for instance, whether to get married at all more easily than they can settle on where to eat dinner to celebrate their engagement.  

Likewise, it may be that some of our delegates in St. Louis have already made-up their minds on the “divorce,” but will agonize over the various “exit plans.”

              I hope not. Which is to say, I want to believe that people are still listening, still praying, truly agonizing over the big decision—and the other big questions that are looming before us.

But still it begs the question: how do we decide? About anything?

              It would be nice if it were simple.

              Just last night, one of my dearest friends pleaded with me to tell her the verses and books I am using right now to guide my own thinking about all that is before us. She would very much like there to be a rule, a single statement that puts it all to rest. Something she could point to and say, “There! That’s what I believe! That’s what the church practices.”

              “Ah, but there is!” some would say. There are laws against homosexual practice, at least, if not homosexual orientation, and the most clear-cut of them in the books of Moses. And even if we “unhitch” ourselves from the Old Testament (as Andy Stanley recently, infamously, perhaps heretically said), there are passages in the New Testament that can be read in much the same way: three Pauline texts: Romans 1:26-27; I Corinthians 6:9; I Timothy 1:9-10 (the last of which may not be from Paul’s own hand); and Jude 1:7.

Don’t these verses make it clear?

              And the Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church… real clarity there, too. Only, no. Not exactly.

              All I will say is that, as to Scripture, Rowan Williams points out that the questions we are asking right now about human sexuality (and even “gay marriage”) are not necessarily the questions the NT is answering (see Holy Living: The Christian Tradition for today, pp. 81-89). Our insistence on reading what is written in those verses through “current” lenses is one of the “how we read” questions that we each need to carefully, prayerfully examine.

Further, how does one interpret the restrictive language in the above-mentioned texts alongside other authentically Pauline texts such as Galatians 3 and II Corinthians 5, where the “new creation” means we no longer regard anyone from a “human” or “previous” point of view? Grace qualified is grace nullified, or so it would seem to Paul.

In short, the matter at hand It is not just “what is written in the law?” (lots of different things), but “how do you read” those things.  

Likewise, it is precisely because of the ambiguity in the Discipline that there is confusion on what we United Methodists really stand for and why (“…all persons have sacred worth… but…”).

That very ambiguity is why some of our delegates want us to clamp-down, to tighten the restrictive language and make it less equivocal.

Only, others want us to open-up: drop the restrictive language altogether: if we are to err, let us err on the side of grace and love.  

And everybody, it seems, fears we are at an impasse.

III

Mr. Rothman’s article was really helpful to me in thinking about how we think about the decisions we make and why we decide what we decide, one way or the other.  

Every day, and always, we have to make decisions. Of course. Some of them we make in accord with the values we already possess. Psychologists call it “motivated reasoning,” where we begin with a foregone conclusion and build a case backwards, marshaling from the available evidence only those things that buttress our position (see, Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Vintage, 2013).

Decision theorists call it “Values-based decision making.” In sum, individually, or collectively, we decide to act in a way that extends and expresses my/our given, dearly-held values, many of them honed over generations. We work to restore what we feel is in disrepair, for the sake of what we already think or feel, or believe, about a situation or person or issue or group.

We have already decided how to decide, in other words. We say “Yes” to things that correspond or coincide with who, what we think we are; we say “No” to the things that do not fit.

              And maybe it is just that simple. Perhaps more moral decisions (in particular) need to be just that clear-cut: the law of the land (or the church), the same yesterday, today and forever.

But such decision-making can be limiting, too: if I am stuck in what I already believe or think, how can I grow?  If I am a priest or rabbi, a Sadducee or Pharisee, and determined to stay that way, how can I ever believe in Jesus? Well, many didn’t.

This week I found myself thinking about my friend Keith. One of the really good guys. Keith was a high school graduate and a UPS driver, who decided to start listening to opera as he drove—not because he liked opera. He didn’t. Not at first. Not at all.

But because he wanted to be the kind of person who appreciated opera.

So… “Aspiration-based decision making”: aspiring to more, or different, than we are, in order to grow. Which is to say, sometimes, the decisions we make don’t confirm our existing values, at all, but serve instead to reconfigure them. We “rewrite the equations,” Rothman says, by which we currently live our lives.

Mr. Rothman cites an example profounder than my friend Keith: the late Israeli philosopher Edna Ullman-Margalit, who marveled at the European Jews who moved to Israel after WW II—there to help found the new Israel. In their old life, she said, they may have been “browsing bookshops in Budapest.” But in their new life, they were working dry fields in the desert, in hopes for a life they could as yet only imagine. They aspired to a different, better life, for themselves and their posterity.

Old life. New life. Old Person, New Person.

You make a decision: say Yes or No: do something: not to reiterate yourself, or to show who you are already, but to reinvent yourself, to begin the journey to who you want to become.

In St. Louis, will we decide what we decide because this is who we have always been? Or will we aspire to make Jesus’ and Mr. Wesley’s church more of what we want it to become?

And not just what “we” want it to become—on either side that would be idolatrous and disastrous. Rather, will we decide in accord with what the Spirit wants the church to become?

IV

“It is the spirit that gives life.” Paul says in II Corinthians 3.

He writes, “Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. 

Imagine! God has given us credentials, the authority and authorization to be ministers of a new covenant. Elsewhere Paul says that God has entrusted us with a ministry and a message of reconciliation (II Cor 5:18-19). That ministry and message, born of that Spirit, gives life beyond “the words chiseled in letters on stone tablets” (II Cor 3:7).

(As an aside, Jesus also gave the church the authority of “binding and loosing,” which we have used to good effect in view of slavery, for instance, and women clergy. I don’t understand why that piece of God’s Word, there in black and white, is absent from the discussion.)  

My pleading friend replied to what I sent her by saying that it was all very scary.

I reminded her Philippians 2, where Paul wrote, “…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

I added that we might wish, in St. Louis and otherwise, that we could “do all things without murmuring and arguing, so that (we might) be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, in which (we) shine like stars in the world. It is by your holding fast to the word of life that I can boast on the day of Christ that I did not run in vain or labor in vain.

              Holding fast to the word of life… and some would say, “Well, of course! Read the Bible. It may be only a handful of verses, but it is right there in black and white.”

              But what is written may be less compelling than how we read it. And not being so selective may prove key.  

As evidenced by a different example. A different, “black and white,” question:

Are eunuchs allowed in the tabernacle or Temple? This is a matter of some importance in the OT, not unrelated to the fact that circumcision was the mark of the covenant.

Leviticus 21:18-20, Deuteronomy 21:18-20 say no. Absolutely not.

But Isaiah 56:1-8 says Absolutely, yes! And not only that, that they will be honored with a special place in the Temple. So, which is it? No, or Yes? Both are right there in black and white.

The Sadducees, in charge of the Temple, had no difficulty with the exclusion of eunuchs because they did not accept the authority of the prophets anyway. But Jesus did. And so do we.

And so the Spirit told Philip to “join the chariot” of the Ethiopian eunuch, who had gone up to Jerusalem to worship but had, one assumes, been excluded from the Temple (Acts 8). Philip, commissioned by the Spirit as a minister of the New Covenant, baptized him. Welcomed him into the Way.

I believe we have been given such inspiration and commission, too.

As Tom Long says, “how we read” is not just a matter of knowing the words of scripture, but in knowing the loving heart of the One who inspired scripture—most clearly evidenced in Jesus, who constantly drew circles, not lines, who broke down societal barriers and conventional wisdom in order to effect and proclaim the Kingdom of God.  

Who also criticized, relentlessly, the excluding practices of his day’s Sadducees (and Pharisees!), all the while welcoming-in the sinners and tax collectors.

And why did he do that? Excoriate the excluders and extend such a welcome?

Because the Spirit of the Lord was upon him… to preach Good News to the poor, to bind-up the broken-hearted, to set the prisoners free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. And recovery of sight to the blind.

 

              May we shine like lights in the darkness, and may our decisions reflect a real love of God, a real love of our neighbors, a sense of new covenant, and a real evidence of restored vision.