Tuesday, April 2, 2019

A Crisis of Interpretation

You will remember that Jesus once said to a lawyer, “What is written in the Law? How do you read?”

The lawyer had stood to ask Jesus’ which command was greatest in the law.

Not a bad question. Not a bad question at all. In point of fact, all of us at one time or the other, each of maybe now, might wonder the same thing. What is most important to God in how we live? What, among all other things, does God pay most attention to in terms of whether we obey, or do it or don’t?

At least let me say I would sometimes like to know.  

The lawyer was not asking Jesus for information, though. Not really. He was interrogating Jesus. Cross-examining. Trying to set Jesus up.

As would be the case later, though, when he stood before Pontius Pilate, Jesus turned the tables: proved the real Interrogator. He asked the lawyer two questions in turn:

”What is written? How do you read it?”

While we sometimes read the second as a reiteration, or paraphrase of the first, in truth they are very different questions. “What is written” can be stated clearly: is as plain as verses on a page. But how one reads what is written is a whole other matter.

The lawyer answered the first question rightly: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart soul, strength and mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”
Exactly, Jesus said. Do that and you will live.

But “Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer asked. In other words, “How do I read—how am I supposed to understand—that second part?”

“That’s what I asked you,” Jesus as might have said, for that is the deeper question: not just what is written, but how do you read what is written?   

Jesus would have the lawyer not only quote, but interpret.

Look beyond the letter to the spirit; beyond the words on the page to the heart of the Inspirer.

For us, this challenge is this—call it a crisis of interpretation: trying to figure out how both to love God with all our hearts, soul, strength and mind, and simultaneously how to love our neighbors (and for the moment, especially, our LGBTQI+ neighbors) as we love ourselves (or, better, as Jesus loves them).

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Those two questions continue to interrogate me, and they interrogate us as United Methodists  as we continue to negotiate the aftershocks of the Special General Conference in St. Louis. The subtext seems to be that whoever rightly interprets what is written, they will find themselves near to the heart of God, and not far from the Kingdom of God.

For some, loving God, first and foremost means adhering to a traditional understanding of oft-cited biblical texts (Leviticus 18:22, for instance; or Romans 1, or even Acts 15 where “acts of immorality” are equated, one-for-one, with homosexual practice). And if allegiance to that historic interpretation of what is written means we can’t bless or welcome (or marry or ordain) LGBTQI+ folk, then we will sacrifice the second great commandment for the sake of the first.

That, or claim that to love the neighbor means they have to change or repent or forego.

For others, love of neighbor means embracing emerging understandings of persons and relationships, celebrating the non-traditional as a way of affirming the ongoing and creative work of the Holy Spirit. And if that means setting aside certain scriptures or overturning traditional positions of the church, then we will sacrifice legal and traditional renderings for the sake of neighbor-love.

The positions seem intractable: this way of loving neighbor has to discount allegiance to scripture; this way of interpreting scripture mitigates love of neighbor.

I sympathize. I do not want to offend God disregarding the Word. But I do not want to think the Word is defined, qualified, by an isolated verse, or even scattered verses offered staccato and understood discreetly according to our personal lexicon—a verse here or there to define God or what is most important to God.  

Increasingly, I think that to obey God’s first and greatest commandment is honor the sweep and scope of God’s gracious hospitality and welcome—the ever-widening circle of God’s desire for justice and mercy—and then apply that back to discreet situations and moments in our lives and ministries.

And it is odd, I think, how so many preachers latch onto one thing as if that is the only thing. How even the legalists and fundamentalists among us would decry the legalism and fundamentalism of the Rabbis and Priests and never seem to see the contradiction of their own position.

Odd, too, that even among traditionalists accommodation is made for divorce and even polygamy (about which Jesus spoke plainly), and for women preachers (which, according to traditional interpretation of isolated texts, are disallowed), and for the abolition of slavery (which scripture never advocates but just moves on, as if to say those old categories no longer apply)…  we might say that the church has invoked, formally or informally, the “binding and loosing” power granted to it in these matters; so why not with LGBTQI+ matters? In other words, why do people get stuck here?

Fr. Rohr says that it may relate to “shadow material”: that those who spend too much time and energy on any one thing  may be saying more about themselves than others.  (remember your Shakespeare? “Me thinketh thou protesteth too much”) I have no idea. Just wonder why this issue, unlike so many other relational, sexual, ethical issues, are such quicksand.

In St. Louis, the pastor of a large UM church in LA would not even talk to me about these matters. He quoted Acts 15 as the final word. I wanted to talk about the Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8:26-40) in light of Deuteronomy 23:1-3; Leviticus 21:18-20 and Isaiah 56:1-8.

There is more to the text than “acts of immorality” in Acts 15, and two of the three “prohibitions” we do not enforce; could call null in light of grace. So why the other?

That is the crisis of interpretation… not just what is written, for as Barbara Brown Taylor has long maintained, for every in scripture there is a not saying, an alternative reading or interpretation. The Spirit tells Philip to do what the Law did not allow: join a eunuch for spiritual conversation. AND BAPTIZE HIM—there was no reason to prevent the eunuch from being baptized, though there had been ample reason under the written words of the law to exclude him.

I could recall the story of Cornelius: Do not call unclean what God has called clean. I could mention Peter saying to the legalists in Jerusalem, “If therefore God gave them the same gift as he gave us when we believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could withstand God?” (Acts 11:16-17, NKJV).  I could expound any of the texts cited above.

But as Tom Long said, long years ago, “It is not enough to know the words of Scripture. What is crucial is knowing the heart of the One who inspired it.” And the way to know God’s heart is to know Jesus’s heart—who always drew circles and never lines; who always welcomed in the other (and even the judgmental others!); whose harshest judgments were always upon those who “tithed the mint and the cumin, but ignored the greater matters of justice and mercy.”

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