A sermon for Bible Sunday, free written on a phone before getting out of bed, that you will probably not hear if you go to a church today. I will not be going to a church today. Resting today is wisdom. I will be getting out of bed though. Ten past seven. Time to get up. I hope you all will find something of joy and freedom today. I hope I will too.
Note - I didn't write the sermons I preached on a phone before getting up on a Sunday. A little more preparation went into them.
Today the Church of England celebrates "Bible Sunday". The new bishop of Newcastle has written that "Primarily Christianity has always been primarily a religion of the book."
Here's an idea: Perhaps it shouldn't be.
Perhaps it should primarily be a religion of reason and compassion and should seek to cherish and hunger for the fullness of these things as far as possible before ever opening any ancient text.
There are many wonderful things in the Bible just as there are in many religious texts. There are many horrible things too and much that's contrary to reason and history. You don't need me to list them.
We all know the dangers of placing an ancient text before either reason or compassion or of asserting the authority of that ancient text for all time. Or to claim to assert that. Even the most strident fundamentalist brings a whole range of their own values and beliefs into their claimed literal reading of a text.
Reason knows a book cannot confirm itself by claiming itself to be truth. Reason knows it's not "God breathed" and that it contains many errors and reports of events many of which may or may not contain mythic truth but which do not contain literal truth. Reason allies with scholarship not assumption. We bring reason and scholarship and honest enquiry to the book rather than an assumption of the book being the "Word of God".
Compassion recognises dignity and beauty. Compassion liberates, builds, embraces, encourages, empathises. We bring compassion to the opening of the ancient texts and reject whatever in those texts is incompatible with a growth in and towards love.
Reason and compassion, the mind and heart of honest and charitable humanity, protect against both foolishness and meanness when opening the Bible. They bring questions and healthy doubt rather than a diseased certainty.
Today I will read a Bible passage. I do each day even though I am not a Christian. I find it helps in recovering from religious trauma and in bringing a widening understanding to words previously controlled by religious beliefs and structures imposed upon them. Others may need to avoid the Bible completely because of similar religious trauma and that's okay too. When humanity is placed above ancient religious texts, as it should be, then judgement about reading or not reading falls away. There is no one right way and no threat of a hell so reading and not reading are both acceptable and to be affirmed.
I will seek to read with all that reason gives and with a hunger to grow into a greater compassion. I will ask "What is this?" rather than imposing belief on the words, a belief that told me it was wrong not just accepting the words as true, given by a deity. I may still get it wrong of course and may leave the text asking many more questions than when I began to read.
Today the Anglicans and Catholics will both read a passage contrasting pride and humility. The pride of the respectable religious man and the humility of the despised tax collector. Whether or not Jesus actually told the parable the contrast remains and the text of a myth may still teach.
The passage also contains a prayer that to an extent for me turned from humility to self-abuse in a way all too easy to find confirmed in hymnology and spiritual classic literature. When being "a sinner" turns from honestly admitting that you mess up by action and inaction and that you still have inner work to do and becomes a central part of your identity then all kinds of problems arise. Sinner can become a deeply harmful word to call ourselves yet accountability, to use a word that's caused some controversy this month, is a beautiful thing we could all do with embracing more. We all "sin" but that word has so much religious baggage that perhaps it needs replacing with a word that has not been used to cause so much harm.
The passage is also about inclusion, liberation, acceptability, and many other things that didn't tend to get into sermons. So the same passage, regardless of any literal historicity, can be used for life or death.
Christianity, like most religions in our world, has manuscripts and books that have been raised up by people as scripture, counted as more important than any other writings. May they always be approached with the twin sails of reason and compassion and so bring life rather than the shipwrecks of unkindness, foolishness and may all religious reading avoid bringing assumptions of perfection and reliability to any book.
May our reading lead to liberation and to the building of a loving future for all people and all ecology too. Otherwise the books become death and should mostly remain closed, dusty on the museum shelves. May life triumph today, in whatever we choose to read, watch or listen to.
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