Bibles have always sold well in this country. You might think everyone in the US has long since had one by now. Yet sales have not only continued at a brisk clip with 9.7 million Bibles sold in the US in 2019, but sales climbed to 14.2 million in 2023. Then in the first 10 months of 2024, sales were up another 22% over the first 10 months of the year before. But buying Bibles doesn’t mean people know their Bible very well. Time magazine observed in a 2007 cover story that only half of U.S. adults could name one of the four Gospels. Fewer than half could identify Genesis as the Bible's first book. I like to think Unitarian Universalists could do better than that – but I don’t have data on that.
A Gallup and Castelli survey concluded: “Americans revere the Bible but by and large they don’t read it.” Christianity Today wagged: “Americans love their Bibles. So much so that they keep them in pristine, unopened condition."
For many, apparently, the Bible is a sort of talisman: an object to possess as a symbol of tribal loyalty, not a text to study, know, and wrestle with.
Or: and this may be part of what’s going on with the recent boom in sales, as more and more people are growing up unchurched, what they’ve heard of the Bible makes it seems like this mysterious source of truth, and in these deeply uncertain times, they get curious to take a look.
But without a community and tradition to provide a context of meaning, without background on how the texts came to be written, and how those particular texts and not others came to be canonized, they aren’t likely to get much from their attempts to read it.
But if we do engage the text, and also the context – engaging the various interpretive possibilities in open discussion, the stories and the poetry offer us touchstones and wisdom as we seek to make sense of our lives and our world. Two weeks ago, I talked about the Book of Ruth as offering us a helpful inspiration to cross borders and make connections. I’ve spoken of the Loaves and Fishes story from the Christian Testament. At Christmas, we look at the two different Christmas stories, and last Easter we looked at the four different Easter stories.
There’s a lot more to glean from this rich and influential anthology. In fact, I’ll be offering a class, starting next Saturday March 1 at 2:00. We’ll have four Saturday sessions: Mar 1st and 8th, and then April 5th and 12th. We’ll be reading and discussing the book “Understanding the Bible: An Introduction for Skeptics, Seekers, and Religious Liberals,” by John Buehrens. Buehrens is a Unitarian Universalist minister, and was president of the UUA from 1993 to 2001. Let’s plunge in and expand our appreciation and understanding of how to use these resource for understanding our world. Get the book and join me for the class. First, though, where does the notion of God come from? There are lots of theories. Here’s mine.
Our brains do their best to cope with this world in which we find ourselves. They rely heavily on predicting what’s going to happen. Psychology researchers have been learning more and more clearly that the brain is not best understood as a stimulus-response mechanism – waiting for some stimulus, then responding. That would be way too inefficient – and often there wouldn’t be time to figure out much of a response. Rather, our brains anticipate events, and plan in advance. They are prediction machines. And as the infant grows into the toddler, it begins to form concepts of belief and desire. People believe things and people want things. This turns out to be tremendously useful in predicting how people – the most important features of our world -- will behave – which allows us to coordinate our behavior with theirs.
Apparently, conceiving of other people’s beliefs and desires comes first, and only later do we apply the process to ourselves and form a conception that we ourselves believe certain things, and desire certain things.
Beliefs and desires are a fiction. We might someday be able to make a complete map of someone’s brain – its 100 billion neurons firing across 100 trillion synapses, and know just what neurotransmitters are passing across which of those synapses, and at what rate. But nowhere in all of that will we find such a thing as a belief or a desire. Yet these are indispensable fictions for giving us a rough and ready way to predict and get along with other people and ourselves. There is no other practical way to understand each other.
We are made to relate to others as believing and wanting. We can’t avoid it. We can, with training, avoid relating to the universe as a whole as having beliefs and desires. Though we can’t get along without imagining that people have beliefs and desires, we can get along passably without imagining that the universe has beliefs and desires. We can do it, but I don’t recommend it.
If you’re a physicist at work, or if you’re reading an explanation of what physicists have concluded, you need to set aside any conception of the universe believing or desiring, but even the physicist gets off work at some point, and the exercise of imagining that the universe itself knows things and wants things is a helpful exercise for feeling at home in this universe.
We feel at home with people by relating to them as believing and desiring. Likewise, it helps us feel at home in this universe by relating to it as if it believed and desired. We explore our place in the order of things by asking ourselves what the universe seems to believe about us, what it seems to want from us. Imagining the universe as a person – an entity that knows things and wants things, that has feelings, like love and anger – is a construct that can be helpful for pulling in our whole humanity, not just the logical left-brain. By engaging with that construct, playing with it, wrestling with it, it can put us into a relationship with our world, with nature – or at least can help us cope with it.
And so we come to the God of the Hebrew Bible, the God of the Hebrew people. As probably every people have done, the Hebrews imagined the universe as having beliefs and desires – and the agents of these beliefs and desires are the gods, or, as Hebrews came to conceive, the one God. The Hebrew God has some powerful positives. In the Exodus story – a.k.a. “Yahweh and Moses’ Excellent Adventure” – Yahweh is liberation. He is sustenance; strength to rebel against oppression. Yahweh is covenant, the power of people to come together to be in community, to walk in a shared way of life aimed at transformation and healing and the realization of human potential to have and live in beloved community.
But the Hebrew God is rather bipolar. Life itself is rather bipolar. The God of the Hebrew Bible swings between dishing out unearned grace and unearned wrath – and life does include a lot of pleasantness and unpleasantness that we didn’t earn or deserve. The Bible is A LOT – and there are so many fascinating stories in it and about how it came to be, and what it might mean. I’m not going to try today to articulate overall the message of Buehrens’ Understanding the Bible – we’ll do that in the class starting Saturday. Nor will I make a general point about UU uses of the Bible. Instead I’m going to take just one example of the way God is characterized – God at God’s very worst – the abusive God who appears most harshly in some of the books of the prophets. We’ll see if even the parts of the Bible that are most likely to turn you off of the Bible entirely – if even those parts might have some use for us today. It will be difficult. And if, in the end, you decide that’s a bridge too far for you to find any use for, I won’t blame you. But let’s give it a try and see. The God of the Hebrew Bible is sometimes angry and punitive toward his people. Sometimes in life it does feel like the world is punishing you. The God of the Hebrew Bible is sometimes abusive. It’s the prophets that express this abuse – Hosea, Ezekiel, Jeremiah. These imaginative street preachers described for their listeners a universe that fits the profile of what we know about how abusers behave, casting Yahweh as the abusive boyfriend or husband, with Israel as the girlfriend or wife. This description so resonated with the people of Israel that they made these descriptions scripture.
My first semester of divinity school, every week, on Thursday, I was in Old Testament class for three hours in the morning, then had Pastoral Care class for three hours in the afternoon. In the pastoral care class we got to a unit on battering and abuse: how to recognize the signs of an abuse relationship, how that abusive dynamic works. In the Old Testament class we kept talking about this Yahweh character who fit the profile of an abuser that I was learning about in Pastoral Care.
Here are some of the aspects of the profile we learned:
Smashing things. (like maybe Sodom and Gomorrah).
Destroying her property.
Harming pets (like demanding animal sacrifices, or perhaps the Flood).
Acting invincible (Yeah).
Putting her down.
Calling her names.
Humiliating her.
Making her feel guilty. (Yahweh does all those things to Israel.)
Unreasonable demands or expectations. (Hmm. “Thou shalt not covet” seems a rather unreasonable demand.)
Limiting her outside involvement (like when Yahweh commands “have no relations with the other people in the land”).
Embarrassing her in front of others.
Using the children to relay messages.
Threatening to take the children away (as in Ezekiel, “Your survivors shall fall by the sword”).
Here’s one: Using religion to control her.
Degrading her about her relationships.
Abusing the children.
Treating her like a servant (that fits, doesn’t it?)
Making all of the rules. (like pretty much the entire book of Leviticus)
This Yahweh has serious power and control issues. Our pastoral care text said, "extreme jealously and accusations of infidelity characterize most men who batter." Yahweh is famously jealous, proclaiming in Exodus, "I the Lord your God am a jealous God.”
And in such books as Hosea, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, Yahweh repeatedly levels accusations of infidelity at Israel. Israel’s unfaithfulness is described as sexual unfaithfulness and promiscuity. The accusations, the threats of public shaming in Hosea, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah are in the Bible, and those parts of the Bible are more graphic than I feel comfortable sharing with you out loud in a worship service.
The abuse cycle, as counselors now recognize, includes episodes of tender seduction – “honeymooning her” -- periodically recurring between episodes of violence. Both phases – manipulating tenderness and dominating humiliation – are designed to assert and reinforce the abuser's power and control. Here, too, Yahweh fits the profile. Hosea describes how Yahweh will humiliate Israel, and then Hosea continues, in passage I will share:
"Therefore, I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. From there I will give her her vineyards, and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she shall respond as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt." (Hosea 2:14-15, NRSV)“Honeymooning,” it’s called, and it’s a tactic of abusers. For a long time the official Christian line on all of this was that God’s acts were fair punishment for Israel’s sins. As our understanding of the nature of abusive relationships grows, and we use that understanding to help us interpret the Bible, more and more people – including more and more Christians – are now saying: there’s not enough sin in the world to justify that much punishment.
Jewish scholar David Blumenthal, in a book titled, Facing the Abusing God, writes:
Abusive behavior is abusive; it is inexcusable, in all circumstances. What is true of abusive behavior by humans is true of abusive behavior by God. When God acts abusively, we are the victims, we are innocent. When God acts abusively, we are the hurt party and we are not responsible for God’s abuse. Our sins – and we are always sinful – are in no proportion whatsoever to the punishment meted out to us. Furthermore, the reasons for God’s actions are irrelevant. God’s motives are not the issue. Abuse is unjustified, in God as well as human beings."So what is the point of these awful stories? Yeah, this world, which we viscerally respond to as person-like, it does abuse us sometimes. And it abuses some of us more than others. How do we, today, make use of those stories? The answer, I suggest, is that we are called to Social justice.
Last week, we talked about the work for social justice that we do. We do direct service. We attend and sometimes may lead classes to educate ourselves and others about the issues. We organize, we advocate, we witness. Last week those in attendance were asked to write on sticky notes what they have been doing, or want to do in the coming year, in any of these five areas of justice work: service, education, organizing, advocacy, and witness. We put those sticky notes on the map that’s at the back there. If you weren’t here last week, I want to invite you to peruse that display and add your own sticky note – or two or three. And if you were here, but you’ve thought of an additional area you have or would like to contribute in, then please add another sticky note to our map.
One way that we can relate to those old stories of an abusive God is to move ourselves out of the role of the abused partner, and into a role of ministering to the abuser. The call to social justice is the call to minister to God. In that Pastoral Care class I mentioned, we talked about some ways to minister to victims of abuse. And we also talked about appropriate responses for a minister when the abuser himself comes to see you, or you see him.
How do you minister to an abuser? Our Pastoral Care textbook stressed accountability: holding the abuser accountable. In our social justice work, we seek to hold accountable the sources or injustice.
“The appropriate frame," our textbook said, "is that the abuser has committed a criminal act, and he should not be allowed to evade the consequences of his behavior."
He may be asking for forgiveness, but forgiveness is not appropriate if it allows him to elude accountability for his violence and his mania for power and control. Abusive men can be truly anguished – but the reality of the anguish is not always accompanied by readiness to engage with counselors or clergy to change their behavior and assumptions. "The minister's task," said our text, “is 'to become an ally of that part of the man that gravitates toward change.'"
An ally of the part that gravitates toward change. They won't change overnight – though they might swear they have. But they can gravitate toward change if enough sources are making clear that they cannot get away with their old ways. That’s the take-home phrase I offer to you today: be ye “allies of the part that gravitates toward change.”
There is a place for us in the framework of the picture that Hosea, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah put before us. We can take on the role of ministering to the victims, yes, and of ministering to the abuser, too. What would it be like to imagine ourselves as God’s pastor – to imagine ministering to the world that batters its poor with starvation, disease, violence, denial of education, economic hopelessness? How do we carry out such a ministry?
We minister to an abusive God as we would minister to an abusive human. We hold accountable. We avoid easy forgiveness that allows the abuse to continue. We are allies of the part that gravitates toward change. We find the thread of value there and work to weave with it a new cloth. We befriend the aspect that can transform.
Ministry for justice and security means alliance with that part of reality-as-a-whole that gravitates toward change, toward justice, toward a true and healthy love, toward freedom and the relinquishing of dominating power and control. This means standing up to Yahweh, staring him in the eye and naming his abuse – naming and confronting the hurt – facing directly the sources of power, whether they be governments or corporations or natural disasters. It won’t get better if we don’t hold it accountable.
As a minister would say to an abusive husband – “I am judging your behavior, not your humanity” – so we, as befrienders of a world our souls want to treat as a person, can say, in effect, “I am judging your behavior, not your divinity. I am not going to desert you, but I am not going to excuse you either. This is not betrayal. Speaking the truth is the best way I can help you.”
Here, then, is a new psalm – a poem, prayer, and promise.
You are my shepherd.
You provide for me in so many ways.
In you, I have the still waters of peace.
From you, security and love, beauty and abundance.
My cup truly overfloweth.
You also hurt so many humans and other animals and ecosystems.
There is such cruelty in you.
As you are my shepherd, so I will be yours.
I will stand with you, and I will not enable your harming.
I will hold you accountable.
I will stand with you as an ally of that in you which gravitates toward change.
This change will not be easy.
The change is too fundamental to be possible without anguish.
Universal peace and justice will take a long time.
They will not be attained in my lifetime -- they will in yours.
I will be with you, as you have been with me; I commit my life to that.
Together, we will take the next step.
I insist.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment