“The Whatabouts: Responding to Questions with Faithfulness,” Week Ten
My parents did their level best to raise two children with serious sweet tooths with a healthy, balanced diet. I was the one kid class who never got to eat McDonald’s, we went without pop tarts and soda pop, and to this day I still do not know what buckeyes taste like—although that may simply be because I was raised by Michigan alumni.
But I would still get the occasional box of sugary cereal, and I did what probably every other kid has at one point tried to do with their Lucky Charms: with surgical precision, I fished out and ate all the marshmallows, while leaving behind all the…whatever the rest of Lucky Charms is made out of. Great is the mystery, I suppose.
I may have been (and still am) terrible at the game Operation, and I may navigate my smartphone’s keyboard with all the dexterity of the bull in the proverbial china shop, but you give me a bowl, a spoon, and some milk, and I will bet that it is just like riding a bike.
Of course, eating just the marshmallows deprives you of whatever (marginal) nutrition the rest of the bowl of cereal is supposed to provide, and while it may taste good going down, it is both unhealthy and a bad habit…which, I worry, contributes to the image we in the church have of how we read our Bibles, of cherry-picking and supersizing what we like, and ignoring the weightier matters that we might not.
This sermon series is my first as your new minister here at Valley, and I arrived at it after multiple conversations with the search committee about how and why evangelism came to be noted as so important a trait in the congregation’s search and call profile. And specifically what I heard was a need to be equipped to talk to people about faith in a way that could answer their questions—questions to which we may or may not have all the answers, or not feel comfortable answering.
The way I experienced doing evangelism on the West Coast would sometimes come in the form of fielding questions from folks skeptical of the nature of my faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and I came to think of those questions as “the whatabouts,” as in, “Well, what about…?” Being honest in those moments was vital for my own integrity and for my friendship with the person asking me. I crafted this sermon series to tackle many of these questions a way for me to share with you what evangelism has looked to me and in my ministry, by trying to answer those whatabout questions, and as a way to let you into my own theology and faith.
Today’s whatabout question is, “What about the cherry-picking?” And by this question what my peers really meant was, “What about taking individual Bible verses out of context and then super-sizing them?” Or, as it were, taking the marshmallows that may taste best to us while leaving behind the rest of the spiritual food that is meant to nourish us and sustain us for longer stretches of time.
I am not kidding when I say that how we read our Bibles can
create the spiritual equivalent of a starvation diet, but we may not even be
aware that we are fasting! We may think we are getting the food we need when we
reach for the religious version of saccharine, and it may make us feel good in
the moment, but there is a very real low that comes after that Christian
version of a sugar high. Our goal must be to move from those sugar highs
followed by lows to a healthier spiritual and Biblical diet, nourished by the
totality of God’s Word to us. 2020 has provided enough steep lows for any of us, we surely do not need to add more unnecessarily.
In order to arrive at that place of balance and steadiness, we may need to jettison a traditional understanding of this passage from 2 Timothy 3, which is frequently cited in defense of the doctrine of Scriptural inerrancy—the idea that there are no errors, of any sort or magnitude, within the canonized Bible.
And setting aside for a moment the merits or lack thereof for that belief, what this passage is more precisely used for, in my experience anyways, is a defense of that person’s particular, individual canon within the canon. We each have our own favorite verses, passages, chapters, and stories of Scripture—those parts of the Bible we gravitate to whether as a result of our own life experience, our overall worldview, the interpretations of Scripture we were raised with, any of it.
But we also each have books of the Bible we seldom ever go near, at least in any substantive way. If we do, it is often to grab one particular verse—the cherry-picking—out of that book. It is a little like the old joke about the devout Christian who was stranded on a deserted island, and the rescuers discover that the Christian has built two churches on the island, not just one. And when asked, “Why two churches?” the Christian responds, “One is the church I attend, and the other is the church I would never set foot in.” We have books of the Bible we lavish great attention on, and books of the Bible that we rarely set foot in.
Yet despite this tendency, we still insist on proclaiming
things like “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” Do we really,
though? Do we treat the totality of Scripture—all of which we hold to be the Word
of God—with uniform deference? If we are fully honest with ourselves, and with
God, I do not think that we do. We pick and choose according to our own
criteria—there is no universal criteria for saying which books of the Bible
matter more than others; it is an arbitrary choice by us.
What are we to do with this tendency of ours? At top, I think, is the necessity to be honest about it—honest with ourselves, honest with others, and honest with God. We, the world, and God deserve to know the truth of how and why we choose to interpret Scripture in the ways we do, and as Jesus famously teaches in John 8, we shall know the truth and the truth shall set us free.
So, where is the freedom in this honesty? Well, lets start
with the freedom of being able to discard indefensible interpretations of
Scripture, which church history is positively littered with. We are under no
obligation whatsoever to say that women do not merit a voice and full equality
in the church simply because of a verse in Titus or a parenthetical in 1
Corinthians, because the totality of Scripture, the preponderance of it, the
sheer weight of its narrative from “In the beginning” to “I saw a new heaven
and a new earth” is that women can, were, are, and should be religious leaders. We are under no obligation whatsoever to say that any people somehow merit being subjugated, oppressed, enslaved, just because of a verse taken out of context, not when the entirety of Scripture, from Moses and Aaron and Miriam to the prophets and righteous kings of Israel and Judah to God-made-flesh as Jesus of Nazareth tells us that God desires our liberation and our freedom.
Instead of taking a verse out of context with metaphorical tweezers, and then supersizing it entirely out of proportion, what if we chose to let the entirety of Scripture determine what we think about it?
That does not mean trying to digest the entirety of God’s Word each time we open it up—it means that when we do open up our Bibles, it is always with the question, “How does this fit in with the rest of the Bible?” on our minds and in our hearts.
Because the rest of the Bible is, in no small part, a conversation with itself. God may have led its composition, but God also reveals the Spirit in a multitude of ways. Every Scripture is useful, this passage in 2 Timothy says, including in how they speak to each other. Matthew and Luke are very clearly responses to Mark. Acts was always meant to be a sequel to Luke. James and Paul offer very different approaches to Christian ethics. And Revelation…well, we will get to Revelation next week.
But the totality of Scripture is such that God repeatedly, and at great length, reveals to us a profound concern for matters of justice, right relationship, and living in love. As wonderfully and sometimes confoundingly diverse as the voices in Scripture can be, we can find in it common threads woven around these topics throughout its entirety.
We, you and I, have chosen to embark together on this phase of our respective journeys as partners in understanding the fullness of God’s Word, of following those common threads wherever they may lead us together. That is what we affirm together in my installation today. We said ‘yes’ one another and to the God who called us together to deepen our understanding of that same God’s Word—not to simply reach for the marshmallows of it. A balanced diet of Scripture means not only expanding our comfort zones within it but balancing it with the totality of what it says to us. We are saying to one another today, “I trust you to take part in this search for balance with me,” because from that balance comes freedom and liberation: liberation from outmoded and harmful ways of reading the Bible, from feeling like you have to defend those outmoded and harmful ways of reading the Bible, and to choose to read the Bible, as it is written in this passage from 2 Timothy, so that the person who belongs to God can be equipped to do everything that is good.
So, what about the cherry-picking? It happens frequently, and often because we are not fully honest about how we read the Bible, and why we read it the ways we do. We do not have to do that, beloveds. We are set free to read the Bible in its totality, in its context, for what it is, for who wrote it, and for whom it was written. We can rise to meet the Bible where it is, just as it meets us where we are, in the hopes that, as we say when we read it here in worship every Sunday, that God would bless our reading so that we might open our lips and declare God’s praise.
We were made for such great things as that. And we are called to such great things as that.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
November 15, 2020