Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI
Video: vimeo.com/367598507
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
Like churches, corporations do not always notice the world changing before it is too late. Just ask Polaroid. Oh, you can’t…
Now, on a scale that includes Purdue Pharma, the opioid pushers, razor blade companies are fairly innocent small fry. But a couple of decades ago, the industry entered a sort of arms race. More blades, more gel strips, more skin guards, every feature the latest in technology guaranteeing the smoothest shave, each promise about as real as the ridiculous line of 3D toothpaste being peddled in the super market, as if brushing your teeth in only two dimensions were an option.
At each step, the price of razor blades went up.
Then two things happened to put a dent in that market. Hipsters started growing beards, which became cool. I don’t know whether it was irony, cost efficiency, laziness, or some combination of the above, but razor sales started dropping. In the meantime, folks like me started looking for alternatives. I chose an old fashioned safety razor. I’ve probably saved more than a thousand dollars in the last five years, even if it has cost me a little blood.
Entrepreneurs figured out that consumers were rebelling, and started cost efficient direct to consumer sales on a subscription model. One such company was Harry’s, founded in 2013. The next year they purchased their own razor factory in Germany so they could control the whole process from factory to consumer. In May, the company sold for $1.4 billion, ironically enough, to one of the traditional razor manufacturers.
Alas, I have not figured out how to escape the cost insanity of electric toothbrush heads. I know I could just get an old-school toothbrush, but they just aren’t as effective, and I like having teeth. So it was that I was out spending a ridiculous amount on a new head for my Sonicare toothbrush recently, when I decided to wander over to the book section. And there, filed under non-fiction, I discovered the Bible.
Now, in actual brick and mortar bookstores, the shelf would be labeled Bibles, or Inspiration, or something, anything, may God help me, besides non-fiction. But there it was, as I prepared to preach today’s text about scripture. It was enough to stop a thinking pastor in her tracks, and it did stop this pastor in his. At least I had enough sense not to find an hourly employ and suggest it be moved.
So if the Bible is not exactly non-fiction, what is it?
First, let’s turn to today’s reading.
2nd Timothy 3 is the go-to passage for every misogynist in America, every homophobe, every doomsday prepper. It is the excuse for more hatred and evil than you can ever imagine. It is read as if it it the Bible declaring the infallibility of the entire Bible. In fact, infallibility is exactly the word those in the Fundamentalist heresy use in discussing the Bible when they cite a passage in Leviticus or Deuteronomy, though they studiously avoid the passages in the same book that speak about immigrants, because in the end, theirs is a pick and choose literalism, one in which their God just happens to hate exactly the people they hate.
Here’s the thing: the selective literalism of the fundamentalist heresy based on 2nd Timothy starts with a lie so bold that centuries of Christians bought in.
Paul’s second letter to his follower Timothy was not written by Paul and was not written to Timothy.
Most reputable scholars accept Paul’s authentic letter to the church at Thessaloniki as the earlist christian text we still have, and date it to around the year 52 C.E. Giving text and tradition the benefit of the doubt, we can place Paul’s transfer to Rome around 58 C.E., two years after his arrest in Caesarea. This was about when there was a change of proconsuls, from Felix to Festus. Providing us with cntext. We know nothing about what comes after that, whether Paul actually made it to safely to Rome, whether he was tried and executed, as legend would have it. The late New Testament scholar the Rev. Dr. Helmut Koester describes accounts of Paul’s later trial and activity as “products of the apologetic and novelistic literary activities of Luke.”
At that point, based on the last authentic texts from Paul, he was still filled with urgency, his belief that the return of Jesus and the day of judgment was immanent.
Second Timothy is not urgent. Instead, it focuses on the maintenance of an ongoing church, with institutional preservation and with human structures of authority. It was probably written near the end of the first century, about the same time the gospels themselves were taking shape.
The grammar, terminology, and writing style are completely foreign to Paul.
But let us pretend, for a moment, that Paul really wrote this. What does the text mean when it says “scripture?” Certainly not itself, for how could someone writing a letter know that the letter would be included in a Biblical canon that wasn’t yet even an idea?
To the early Christians, scripture meant sacred Hebrew texts. And they read those texts in a Greek translation called the Septuagint. We know this, among other reasons, because mistranslations in the Septuagint text get carried over into the New Testament.
We aren’t sure when exactly the various gospels and letters written in the first century or so of Christianity came together as a collection. The earliest listing of the New Testament canon as we know it today is the Muratorian Fragment, a 7th century text found in an Italian abbey. We know that many gospels, letters, and prophecies circulated among early Christian communities, hand copied, often with errors, and that many were lost or deemed non-canonical, providing thousands of hours of programming for the History Channel and the like. The Gospel of Thomas was lost for almost two thousand years before being rediscovered in Egypt in 1945, and some of the texts in that amazing discovery were burned by the mother of the discoverers before the collection was rescued.
In other words, Timothy cannot be self-authorizing.
Now back to what the Bible is, where it should be located, and how it should be used.
The Bible does not belong on the non-fiction shelf. The Bible does not belong on the fiction shelf. Those are modern categories that would have made no sense to the ancients, even if the Bible were one single thing written by one person in one time. And it isn’t. It is a collection of many genres written and modified over a thousand years in a variety of contexts, from the Kingdom of David and Solomon to the Roman Occupation. It contains hymns, legal codes and self-help, histories and prophecies, even pious fictions like the Book of Job. Like a rich archeological site, it has layers that each tell a tale. The Book of Isaiah alone is written in the discrete historic periods. And, funny enough, along the way, human society evolved, belief evolved, technology evolved.
In the earliest layers of text, the Hebrews weren’t even monotheists, believing instead that YHWH was one of many gods, each to a nation and people, but YHWH was theirs, and he, modeled on the Canaanite god El, was the chief and most powerful of them all. People were enriched or destroyed in this life based on appeasing divine ego, with collective punishment. By the final layers of Hebrew scripture, God was singular and universal, and most of all, good, an image picked up by Jesus who would develop the idea of God as a loving parent.
The Bible is the story an ancient people told themselves about who they were, where they fit into the world, where they described their experience of holy mystery.
It is true like the story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree is true, not because something happened in exactly that way, but because there is something essential and true in the story. The fabrication by Parson Weems speaks to the real experience of people who knew Washington, that he struck them as a man of deep integrity. Even if we turn a critical eye on Washington, noting his ownership of slaves, documenting some shady real estate transactions, and they are there, it doesn’t mean that he was not a man who struck people in his time as an exemplar of good character. He may not have said “Father, I cannot tell a lie,” but there is truth in the tale.
I choose to believe that there is truth in the prophet’s insistence that God cares about justice, humility, kindness, sacrificial love, far more than God ever cared about gold and buildings and ego.
I choose to believe that God, all majesty and mystery, is contained in that book of an ancient people, and that it is worth studying. But like anything complex, you will only get out of it what you put into it. And in these hurried, overwhelming, and antagonistic times, it is hard to find the time and resources we can trust.
But they are there. And part of our role as a church is to live into this ancient story in a way that is relevant and real in today’s world. If you thought captivity in Babylon was so very different than the newly dedicated temple built by King Solomon, well, baby, you should see me now.
When John Robinson, our religious ancestor, blessed the Pilgrim departing from Leiden for the New World, he told them that there was yet more light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word. In the United Church of Christ, we continue that belief with one of our marks of faith, what we call our belief in continuing testament, and captured in the slogan that God is Still Speaking.
We need to re-build biblical literacy in our communities of faith, providing one another and our children the tools to find the treasure that is there. The author of the letter supposedly addressed to Timothy is right that scripture is useful in training to righteousness, that we should be proficient in it. And just as that text captures a thousand years of religious exploration and evolution, we must tell the story of the two thousand years since, the story of today, of saints like Dorothy Day and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of quantum entanglement and the great “I Am Becoming,” our unfinished God who is speaking us into existence.
May we never be a people who believe one ancient book in an early Seventeenth Century English translation can contain all that God has to say. May we never kill God and try to contain mystery between faux leather covers gathering dust on the shelf.
Neither fiction nor non-fiction, the Bible is and must be living, as holy and mysterious as we are, more question than answer. May it always be so.