My wonderful, little friend Alice came to visit me today. She and her brother, Nigel, are unable to attend Harvest Sunday, but wanted to bring in the vegetables they had lovingly tended to all summer!
We ended up making words with the veggies. Alice was especially thrilled with a certain, two-ey!
I have been talking about what I call Script Out® passages for a few weeks now – passages from the Bible that we like to ignore or pretend like they aren’t there at all. It is something that we often do because a passage makes us feel uncomfortable. And I’ve been thinking this week, that there is a certain power in discomfort.
I mean, consider the really extraordinary things that have happened this month because of discomfort. At the beginning of September, the world had been in the throes of a full blown humanitarian disaster for quite some time. As a result of a revolt in the region of Syria and Iraq, driven by an organization called ISIS, and made worse by the anti-insurgency tactics of the Syrian government, there was this huge movement of people who were on the move trying to save their lives, their families and some sense of hope.
Many reports were filed on this disaster. All kinds of information was freely available. But most of the world barely even noticed until there was a picture. And you all know which picture I mean because I know that you’ve all seen it – a picture of three year old Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the water on the beach of a Turkish resort town.
I didn’t want to show you the picture. I hate to see the picture and I’m sure you do too. And I thought about not showing it but I think I have to because that picture did what no report could have done because it is one thing to talk about the statistics of a human tragedy like what’s happening in Syria. It is quite another thing to put a human face – and especially a child’s face – on that tragedy. And, yes, it makes us mad and it makes us upset, but at least it made us notice.
The human-caused tragedy unfolding in Syria is not a new thing. It has happened again and again throughout human history and it has usually, like this time, been driven by the hatred or fear of those who are different in one way or another. In particular, racial, tribal and religious differences have played a huge role in the atrocities that have been committed down through the ages. And if we’re going to be people of faith we can’t ignore that, as much as we might like to.
Now, to say that religion has played a role in such terrible stories is not the same thing as saying that religion is the cause of these things. I am not a person who would blame all of the terrible atrocities that happen in this world on religion. But it would be extremely foolish for us to ignore the role played by religion because, when we ignore it, we practically guarantee that it will just keep happening.
And, to be painfully clear, as much as we might like to think so, it is not just something that belongs to other religious traditions. It is an intimate part of our own. There are several passages in the Bible where atrocities such as genocide, cultural genocide and mass deportation are not just tolerated but actively endorsed. All of these passages are what I call Script Out® passages – passages that we like to pretend aren’t there. We don’t read them, don’t talk about them, they might as well not exist at all so why not just take a bottle of my trademarked liquid and literally remove them.
A perfect example of that kind of passage is the story about Saul, the first king of Israel and the Prophet Samuel. The land is threatened by foreign invaders – the Amalekites. But Samuel, speaking for God, doesn’t just tell Saul to fight in defense of the nation. He goes a lot further than that and “Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” He is specifically (and in the name of God) ordering Saul to commit what we would call genocide today. It is one thing to kill the combatants in a conflict, it is quite another to target those not fighting including, in that case, women, children, infants! and even the domesticated animals.
gives very specific instructions:
And not only does God order, through Samuel, this slaughter, but when Saul fails to follow the orders to the letter, he gets chewed out for it and essentially fired from his job as king. (And it is not even as if Saul hesitated to kill the children and infants, he was apparently fine with that. His sin, according to Samuel, is that he doesn’t quite slaughter all of the cattle.)
So we seem to have a whole-hearted endorsement of the practice of genocide right here in the Bible. And passages like this one have definitely been used to justify terrible acts down through Christian history. Although Nazism in Germany did eventually go far from Christianity in its pursuit of what it called pure Aryan Religion, it also appealed to the cultural genocide described in the biblical Book of Ezra as justification of its policy of racial purity. White South Africans used the Book of Joshua and its account of the genocidal conquest of the Promised Land as justification of its policy of Apartheid. If you had been on the ground during the Bosnian genocide, you would have heard both Orthodox and Catholic Christians (who were killing each other as well as Muslims) appealing to the Bible for what they did.
For these and many other reasons, I’m sure that many of you would agree that this is a definite Script Outâ passage – that we’d all feel much more comfortable if I just took out my bottle of Script Outâ and removed it completely from my Bible. But I’m not going to do that. And the reason why I’m not going to do that is the same reason why I don’t think we should shy away from the picture of Aylan Kurdi, because there is a real power in those things that make us feel very uncomfortable even about the Bible.
I’ll tell you what I think happened in that story of Samuel, Saul and the Amalekites. I don’t have any real trouble seeing that Samuel was speaking for God in much that he said. In fact, I think it went something like this:
Saul, the king, said to Samuel, “Samuel, our land is being overrun by these Amalekites. The people are in danger and are desperate for some help. What should I do, Samuel?”
And so Samuel went to God with this question: “God, what should the king do about this Amalekite problem?”
And so God said to Samuel, “The king must call up the tribes. The people must come together and fight. Sometimes, that’s just what you have to do.”
Samuel didn’t have any problem with those instructions so he just passed them on to Saul who organized his armies. But then, Saul noticed something about the enemy and he came back to the prophet for further instructions.
“Samuel, I have noticed that these Amalekites have a lot of non-combatants with them. They have women and children and even infants. They also have a lot of cattle and other animals. If God gives us the victory... I mean when God gives us victory, what do we do with the non-combatants?”
Samuel took the issue to God, and God’s answer must have been something along the lines of this: “Non-combatants? What, are you crazy? You can’t kill them. That would be wrong. Let them escape across the Nile River.”
And Samuel got that answer, but how clearly did he get it? There may have been something that interfered with his reception, some static on the line as it were. The thing that might have interfered was Samuel’s own prejudice against and hatred of these Amalekites. The message may have been, “Let them escape across the Nile,” but the message Samuel passed on to Saul was, “You should annihilate them!”
I believe that has often happened throughout history. God’s message of justice, his hatred of violence and oppression, his love of mercy has always been there. The message hasn’t changed but it has sometimes been corrupted by the people receiving and passing on that message – corrupted most often by the messengers’ own fears and prejudices and hatreds.
And that is reflected even in the pages of Scripture. Yes, we believe that the Scriptures are inspired by God. But that does not mean that they were dictatedby God. Inspiration works like this: people experienced God in various ways and the accounts of what they experienced and what they learned came to be written down in the Bible. But that truth about God was always limited by their own human knowledge and understanding.
That is why, though the Scriptures are absolutely essential to us as Christians, they are not and cannot be our ultimate authority. God knew that no matter how well-inspired the Bible was, it would always be limited by the humans who transmitted it. So, we believe, God chose to reveal himself in a way that could not be corrupted by human transmission. God revealed himself in a person: in Jesus the Christ. For Christians, the real reason why the Bible (both the Old and the New Testament) has authority is because it bears witness to the one who is our ultimate authority: our Lord Jesus.
So, while those passages that endorse things like genocide are still there in the Bible, we cannot and must not let them be our guide. If God most fully revealed Godself in the person of Jesus Christ, then the God that we know through Jesus would never approve of such things.
And yet, the passages are still there in our Bible. They have not disappeared from our Bibles and, as much as we might like to, I say we cannot use our bottles of Script Out®to remove them. So what possible purpose could they have in our Christian lives? I would say that they are there to make us feel uncomfortable. They are there, right in your Bibles, as a permanent reminder that it is always possible for our hatred and fear and suspicion of a people who are different from us to interfere with the clear message of love and mercy and acceptance that God has given to us in Jesus Christ. These passages remind us that we can do it too. And that might be hard for us to see – as hard as seeing a picture of a three year old boy lying in the surf – but I hope it may at least prompt us to action as that picture has.
I can think of one key application of this. This spring, Canada completed something truly exceptional: a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that looked at the entire Indian Residential School system and the terrible abuse that occurred in and around it. Beverley McLachlin, Chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada stated, on seeing the reports, that there was really no question that Canada had clearly set out to commit cultural genocide with the active support of various churches including our own.
Now that is kind of harsh. No one wants to be associated with such things, but the evidence was fully examined and quite clear. It is not an issue of personal guilt or blame, mind you. It was nothing that you or I did, and it is not as if we have to feel personally responsible, but we are part of a community (both as Canadians and as Christians) who carry that burden for what was done.
But it really does seem to me that most Canadians and most Christians haven’t come to terms with that. We just don’t see ourselves as belonging to a community that does such things. Perhaps we need something – maybe a picture or a passage of Scripture – that makes us feel uncomfortable enough to realize that even people like us are capable of doing terrible things if we let our fear or mistrust or hatred of people who are different from us interfere with the message of God that has been given to us in Christ Jesus.
For me, Bible passages like the story of King Saul and the Amalekite genocide can serve to make us that uncomfortable and that is why I am not going to use my bottle of Script Out®to disappear this passage either. I hope you keep it in your Bible too.
You might recall that I posted one of my favourite "oldie" photos a week or so ago and asked for help. There were no names on it. Well on Sunday a lady came to me to say one of the ladies was her mother! These ladies are all sisters. How cool is that?
left to right: Myrtle Kohli, Rosella Roos, Minnie Jardine and Hazel Howell.
n the mid-1800’s, Dr. Moses Stuart, a professor at Andover Seminary near Boston, Massachusetts, was universally recognized as the most important Biblical Scholar in the United States of America. He is still considered to be the father of American Biblical interpretation and was hugely influential in his time. He represented the standard of Biblical studies.
In his day, the Abolitionist movement – a movement that was dedicated to abolishing the practice of slavery in the United States – was very much on the rise in the Northern States. It was a movement that was strongly opposed in the Southern States – a difference of opinion would eventually (and inevitably) become a primary cause of the most destructive war ever fought on this continent: the American Civil War.
So, in 1850, Dr. Stuart chose to address the entire issue from a Biblical point of view by publishing a pamphlet called “Conscience and the Constitution.” Now, Moses Stuart didn’t like slavery at all. He particularly thought that slavery as practiced in the Southern States was cruel and
wrong. But he was, first of all, a Biblical scholar. And, according to his expert opinion, the Bible was absolutely clear that slavery was A-Okay. Therefore, he concluded, it would be wrong for the United States to move in the direction of abolition. The best thing that anyone could hope for was if the Southern slave owners chose, of their own free will, to release their slaves. But outlawing it would just be wrong.
It is rather shocking today to think that a mainline biblical scholar could have come to such a conclusion. But the fact of the matter is that many people felt, at the time, that the Bible was absolutely clear on the matter of slavery. People who believed and were committed to the biblical text could easily find many passages – like the one that we read this morning from Ephesians – that’s simply told people that slavery was an institution ordained by God and that those who found themselves in the position of being slaves had no choice but to merely obey and to be the best slaves possible. The Bible was clear.
And, since the Western world has, since the late 1800’s, come to the consensus that slavery is just plain wrong, those verses have become among the most notorious Script Outâ verses of the Bible. They are kind of embarrassing and so we’d really just rather pretend that they weren’t there at all. We don’t read them. We don’t dwell on them. They might as well have been removed from our Bibles using our favorite Bible study tool. But, as I hope you’ve been picking up, I don’t think that’s good enough. The whole of scripture, including these verses, have been given to us and we have to struggle with all of it whether we like the passages or not – just like Dr. Moses Stuart felt that he had to struggle with these passages too – but that doesn’t mean that we need to come to the same conclusions that he did.
It is true that for nearly 1800 years, Christians did regularly use the Bible to defend the institution of slavery. And it was not hard for them to do so. There were a number of passages, like Ephesians 6:5, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters,” that were pretty darn clear and not open to much interpretation.
What’s more, and even worse, they were passages that primarily addressed slaves and told them that they should take any abuse directed at them without complaint, that they should not do anything to change their status apart from being obedient and submissive. Yes, the Bible does also address slave owners and masters, encouraging them to be kind and not to be cruel towards their property, but it never, in these passages, gets around to suggesting that there is anything wrong with the fact that these slaves are considered property.
This kind of passage is what is often called a proof text – a simple, straightforward verse that, without any need for context, sets down a policy in a few words. So the proof texts in favour of slavery were clear and were numerous. That is why many Christian slaveholders felt perfectly justified to state that the Bible was clearly on their side and so God was also clearly on their side. And there were even many Christians, like Dr. Moses Stuart, who actually hated the institution of slavery and yet nevertheless felt that they had to agree with it.
So, yes, these slavery passages of the Bible are definitely what I consider to be Script Out® passages. We behave today as if these passages weren’t there at all. I’ve never heard them read in church. I have never heard anyone preach a sermon on them. No Christian that I know has them underlined or highlighted in their Bible. For all intents and purposes they might as well not be there at all in our Bibles.
But, as I have been saying, I don’t think that that is something that we should be doing as Christians because the Bible is not a smorgasbord for us where we can come and pick and choose what passages we want. We have to take all of it seriously and we particularly have to struggle with those parts that we disagree with.
So, the big question is how do we deal with these kinds of proslavery proof texts that are undeniably present in our Bibles? Well, the first thing I would note is another aspect of that whole mid-nineteenth century abolition debate. While it is true that those who fought in favour of slavery at that time regularly appealed to the Bible in defense of their position, it is also true that their opponents were doing exactly the same thing.
The vast majority of people who at that time were fighting for and arguing for the abolitionof slavery we’re doing it because of their Christian faith and because they felt very strongly that that was what the Bible was teaching them to do. They believed that, what’s more, while being fully aware of the proof texts that their opponents used. How is that possible? Well, they obviously weren’t appealing to the pro-slavery proof texts.
What they appealed to instead was something much broader and general. They spoke about the overall narrative of the Bible. They noted, for example, that, even though there were laws in the Books of Moses that regulated the practice of slavery (and so affirmed it), that when you looked at the story told in those same books, you saw a God who was so appalled at the way in which the Egyptians enslaved a people (the Hebrews) that he chose them as his own, defeated the Egyptians and led them out to freedom and life in a new Promised Land.
And the Exodus from Egypt is really just the most dramatic example. Again and again throughout the Bible, we see God intervening to free his people from tyranny and from literal slavery. The prophets proclaim it. The kings are called upon to implement it. Laws are established to keep people from falling into slavery and to get them out of it as soon as possible.
And then we get to the New Testament. In the Gospels and the Letters of the New Testament, yes, there is a basic understanding that slavery exists. Jesus’ parables are populated by slaves and servants. And, as we have seen, slaves are even encouraged to be peaceful and obedient because to do otherwise was to be seen as dangerous to society and to invite reprisal. But, alongside that, we also have another story being told. It is a story of the kingdom of God and this new thing called the church. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul made it clear that the church meant that, despite what happened in the world around them, the people of the church were to live in a different reality. He told them, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” He was saying that, though the church was made up of all sorts of people including slaves and women – both of whom were effectively considered to be somewhat less than human according to society – those differences simply didn’t matter inside the church.
People also pointed at a short letter that Paul had written to a man named Philemon. Philemon was a slave owner (and someone that Paul had converted to Christianity) whose slave named Onesimus ran away from his master. Onesimus ended up in prison with Paul and Paul led him to the Christian faith as a fellow prisoner. When he learned Onesimus’ story, Paul sent the slave back to his master but he sent him carrying the letter that is preserved and is now found in our New Testaments.
The abolitionists appealed to that letter because, although Paul does not directly question the institution of slavery in it, he makes it clear that slavery is really not compatible with the message of the gospel. Basically, while Paul stops short of actually obliging Philemon to give Onesimus his freedom, he pretty much explains to him that that is his only option if he wants to live according to the gospel.
So, basically, you had people on both sides of the argument appealing to Scripture to defend their positions. The pro-slavery people appealed to certain proof texts that were, admittedly, crystal clear in their meaning. The abolitionists were more inclined to appeal to the general overview of the Bible story – the themes of liberty and release, the development of big ideas like the church or the kingdom of God. They looked at the big story that was being told rather than the particular things that people said at certain points in that story.
So what do you do when you have that kind of situation – when you have a few proof texts that are very clear but that stand in contrast to what seems to be the big picture of the Bible story? It is actually a situation that has arisen in a number of situations and not just in the discussions around slavery. The easy solution is to go with the proof texts because they are clear and simple to understand. But that does not mean that that is the right answer. In fact, I think everyone today would agree that the abolitionists were right and were being faithful to scripture.
I remember when I was a teenager and I thought that I knew everything. Remember those wonderful days? It was so wonderful to be so sure. These days it sometimes seems that all I know is that I don’t know anything at all. But I remember thinking back in those days that having the complete and full truth about anything was easy. All you had to do was find a simple Bible passage that stated something clearly – a proof text – and you were done. You didn’t have to think any further.
Well, with age and wisdom, I have learned how dangerous proof texts and the absolute certainly that you have the truth can be. I don’t think that God ever intended for us to turn our minds off and just take our moral truths from proof texts. You must never take your eyes off of the overall narrative because our job is to see where God has been working in history and to try and perceive where God is working today.
It is a lesson that doesn’t just apply to discussion of slavery. All kinds of other disagreements have hinged on the same difference between a few clear proof texts and the broad sweep of the Biblical story: the place of women in the church and society, the differences between race, sexuality issues are just a few examples.
If a few proof texts about the benefits of slavery can remind me of the caution that we need in reading proof texts in general, I think that can help me a lot. So, personally, I feel that it is important that they are there in the Bible and it is important that we struggle with those verses. I’m putting my bottle of Script Outâ away. They are staying in my Bible.
Thank you to everyone who helped make the launch of
Place of New Hope a great success!
Thank you to everyone who brought food and worked to put on such a delicious lunch, to those who set up and cleaned up and to everyone who came.
Did you know that in Hespeler there are Youth Drop-In centres; cooking classes; breakfast clubs; Thursday Night suppers; clothing centres; food banks; ESL classes; A-A, Al-Anon, & Al-ateen groups and more?
Working together with several local organizations and agencies to provide the best care for those in our community.
Karen, and the models in the fashion show showcasing clothing from Hope Clothing.
Who knew this guy could model?!?!
A very pretty dress found at Hope Clothing.
We host Al-ateen, Al-Anon and A-A on Friday nights.
The Y Employment services at our Launch. They also visit most Food Bank Thursdays.
A pretty mauve dress for a little girl, available at Hope Clothing.
Another pretty dress for a young girl found at Hope Clothing.
