[+] The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible: A Personal View

by Dr. Lloyd Averill

[Thanks to Sky Jubilee (David Enroth) for forwarding this article on the Bible.]

Is it possible, in the end, to say in a few lines what this complex document called the Bible is about? Taken as a whole, Old Testament and New Testament, the Bible is the record of those experiences, inner and outer, individual and communal, in which men and women, in a variety of circumstances and over a period of a thousand years, believed that they had met the Ultimate One--the transcendent, God--more certainly than they had met each other and had been changed by that meeting in ways beyond mere human changing. Succeeding generations have preserved the record to prepare all who should come after, in whatever time and place, for their own encounter with Ultimacy, to prepare you and me for our own encounter with God.

The New Testament, taken by itself, is the recorded experience and resultant testimony of a community of women and men in the first century of our era, that the character of transcendent reality-- the inner heart and purpose of God--has been definitively revealed--acted out, given flesh and blood reality--in the life and teaching and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, who shows us not only what it is for God to be God but also what it is for women and men to be what they were created to be: creations of a loving God, themselves made by Love for love. The record of that experience has come down to us from successors of the first Christian community who, over two thousand years since, have also experienced in their own lives and times the life-altering influence of that same Jesus.

So the Bible is not in the first instance history or biography or cosmology, as it may appear to be--though it contains those kinds of writing. Neither is it a collection of propositional truths which we are meant to receive unquestioningly and uncritically, as the fundamentalist would have us believe. It is, rather, a large and complex story "that reaches from our feet to the infinities," written over hundreds of years, worked on by more authors and editors than we can ever begin to identify, and preserved with remarkable integrity in spite of enormous problems of translation and transmission.

Then we can characterize the predominant style of the biblical literature in this way: Do you want to know what God is like? Let me tell you a story. Do you want to know what the will of God is? Let me tell you a story. Do you want to know how God wants us to live as individuals and as a community? Let me tell you a story. Do you want to know how God relates to those who reject the idea of Ultimacy, or who believe in some other god? Let me tell you a story. Do you want to know what kind of a person Jesus was? Let me tell you a story.

The Bible prompts us to ask those questions, and instead of offering abstract, speculative, theological or philosophical answers, it offers us living and answering images, in which we can find not only the ancient actors in those stories but discover ourselves as actors in something very like those same stories in our own time.

So, in the end, the Bible is a story about God and us."

Valentine's Day Great Marriage Rebellion

by Jim Lowder

[See Jim's comments and congratulations below to longtime lesbian friends who were just married at San Francisco City Hall.]

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: Thanks Jim and Jerene. You have said it so well, and I have posted your comments on my Ecumenical News site, as I was sure that many others would want to see it. Jim is the former pastor of Dolores Street Baptist Church in San Francisco and is now Director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America.

This is making an important statement in a very positive way, I think (and portrays opponents as negative nay-sayers). Thanks for sharing your thoughts with all of us.

-- Rick


Jerene and Jim wrote:

For those who are not on the Baptist Peace Fellowship mailing list-serve, here is my St. Valentine's Day message that I posted earlier this evening. -- Jim Lowder

Jerene and I got an unexpected Valentine’s Day present this evening. We received a phone call from longtime friends Moya Watson and Leanne Waldal. Moya was on our staff at Dolores Street Community Services in San Francisco back in the late 80s. Among many of her talents, she was a computer guru who led our nonprofit (and church) into the computer age. We have remained good friends ever since.

When Moya and Leanne called, it was hard to hear them, partly because Moya was on a cell phone and partly because of a lot of crowd noise in the background. But we did hear the words, "Leanne and I are getting married!" They were standing in line at City Hall in San Francisco, along with hundreds of other gay and lesbian couples receiving marriage licenses in the United States for the first time. It is the third day of the Great Marriage Rebellion.

We were in tears as we talked. Moya said she had always wanted Jerene and me to be there to "officiate" at their wedding. But this moment was too important to pass up. Most expect the "window of opportunity" to close on Tuesday when judges of several courts hear appeals from opponents of gay and lesbian marriage. All we could do was cry, cheer, and yell, "Go for it!" Her calling enabled us to be a part of their marriage and a part of this historic moment.

This is truly an historic moment in the United States because it advances the cause of civil rights for gay men and lesbians in a significant way. No matter what happens on Tuesday or later this year. It is a legal and social advance.

A marriage license is, primarily, if not exclusively, a legal document. Somewhere along the way this document has taken on a spiritual and social significance. We have merged the legal status of marriage with the blessing of such unions by religious institutions.

When Jerene and I got married, we separated the legal aspects from the "holy union" and spiritual blessing of marriage. We got a license and had – I have to be honest here because there were witnesses – a rather frivolous " legal ceremony" on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. We did so out of solidarity with our gay brothers and lesbian sisters who at that time could not obtain either marriage licenses or declarations of domestic partnership. Later, we were married in a wonderful service of worship and holy union. Both the legal license and the spiritual blessing should be available to everyone.

What really concerns me is a statement made the other day by White House press secretary Scott McClellan. "The president believes very strongly that marriage is a sacred institution, and that we should do what is needed to protect and defend the sanctity of marriage."

I appreciate the sentiment coming from Mr. Bush as an individual and a person of faith. What I don’t understand is why our government thinks it has any business whatsoever making statements about what is sacred and what is not! My goodness! A government that deceives its own people and then goes to war in order to dominate the Middle East and control oil; that needlessly sacrifices the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans; that provides tax cuts for the richest one percent of our population while 46 million of our citizens have no health insurance – that government is concerned that its values are threatened by Moya and Leanne loving each other?! Lord, have mercy!

Joan Ryan, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, makes a very good point when she writes that if "the sanctity of marriage was truly the impetus behind Bush's campaign to prohibit gay marriage, he also would be pushing for a constitutional amendment against Elvis wedding chapels and drive-through ceremonies. He'd be calling for a ban on 20-year-olds marrying 85-year-old billionaires, and a ban on Hugh Hefner ever walking down the aisle again." Hollywood stars often marry and divorce in the same week. Yet no one is on a campaign to prevent these people from marrying and no one is decrying that they are a threat to the sanctity of marriage.

Our marriage is what Jerene and I make it. It is a sacred union because of the values that sustain it and the bond that holds us together. It will not be undermined by what anyone else does. What kind of value system does Mr. Bush have when his marriage to Laura Bush is threatened by Moya and Leanne getting married. It is fine for people to oppose gay and lesbian marriage out of values and beliefs and to refuse to "recognize" them. But the "legal" right to marriage is a right that should be enjoyed by everyone.

Jim Lowder

Stop the Radical Religious Right from Putting Intolerance in the U.S. Constitution

-- excerpted from an email alert sent by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU):

Spurred by the recent Massachusetts State Supreme Court decision against discrimination, the Bush Administration and some members of the radical religious right are aggressively campaigning to amend the U.S. Constitution to deny the right to marry to same-sex couples in committed relationships. Just today, the Bush Administration signaled that the President will endorse this mean-spirited measure.

The Massachusetts ruling recognized that gay and lesbian Americans serve in our military, keep our communities safe as firefighters and police officers, staff our hospitals, build our cities and pay taxes. The Massachusetts court ruled that the state cannot deny to gay couples the same marital legal rights in pensions, health insurance, hospital visitations and inheritance that other committed couples enjoy.

The radical religious right wants to write intolerance into the U.S. Constitution and forbid equality to these citizens. As a nation we have periodically struggled with the question of marriage -- the last law prohibiting people from different races from marrying was overturned only 35 years ago -- but we have never taken the step of amending the Constitution to define marriage. Revising the Constitution to incorporate discrimination is wrong and should be rejected.

Take Action! Urge your Members of Congress to reject efforts to write discrimination into the Constitution!

Click here for more information and to send free faxes to your Members of Congress:

http://www.aclu.org/LesbianGayRights/LesbianGayRights.cfm?ID=9977&c=101

[+] "We Are Partakers of the Divine Nature"

by Archbishop Desmond Tutu (in a sermon at Southwark Cathedral, London. [ACNS source: Southwark Cathedral]

The Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple
Sunday 1 February 2004 - 11.00am Choral Eucharist

Long, long ago, very clever people decided that the human body, flesh, all material things, that all of these were in and of themselves, evil, intrinsically, inherently and always. So there was no way that the good, the pure, the sublime and, by definition, the perfectly good spirit could be united with the material. For these people, the dualists, the incarnation, God, pure spirit, becoming a human being was totally and in principle, and always, out of the question. What people thought was God become flesh in Jesus Christ, well, that was all just playacting, a charade. Could you imagine God the all-powerful, God the eternal, dying? Oh come off it! Get real! When this one was crucified, it was not really Jesus - God - dying. You and I may pooh-pooh all this superiorly and say, "How odd, flying in the face of facts" but aren't so many of us really closet duallists or worse, have we not sometimes been embarrassed with our physicality, when we have found it attractive to engage in the familiar dichotomies as between the sacred and the secular, the profane and the holy? When we have thought that Original Sin, must somehow have had to do with the facts of life, we snigger a little bit, wink, wink, as if when God said to Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful and multiply", God meant that they would do so by perhaps looking into each others' eyes!

And have we not heard so many, many times: "Don't mix religion with politics", so very much the philosophical position of duallists. And just look at the tangle we have got into about human sexuality, about gays and lesbians, etc. Now what follows is really in parenthesis. I hope so very much that you have got over the anguish of last summer and may I salute Canon Jeffrey John who acted with so much dignity and selfless generosity.

The Jesus I worship is not likely to collaborate with those who vilify and persecute an already oppressed minority. I myself could not have opposed the injustice of penalizing people for something about which they could do nothing - their race - and then have kept quiet as women were being penalized for something they could do nothing about - their gender, and hence my support inter alia, for the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate.

And equally, I could not myself keep quiet whilst people were being penalized for something about which they could do nothing, their sexuality. For it is so improbable that any sane, normal person would deliberately choose a lifestyle exposing him or her to so much vilification, opprobrium and physical abuse, even death. To discriminate against our sisters and brothers who are lesbian or gay on grounds of their sexual orientation for me is as totally unacceptable and unjust as Apartheid ever was.

The God we worship has taken our physical material selves seriously because God declared about everything that God had created - matter and spirit, everything, not just that it was good, God said it was "very good". That is why we say in the Nicene Creed: 'maker of all there is, visible and invisible'. That matter is not recalcitrant, hostile and antagonistic to the spirit and so God could and did become a real human being, a real baby, belonging to a particular couple who have names, who lived in a real, a particular village, Nazareth, in an actual, real part of the world God created, belonging to an actual, real community with particular and specific laws, rules and customs.

So this baby's parents obeyed the law and brought the baby to be redeemed as the first-born male who belonged therefore to God. God took human history seriously and so fulfilled promises God had made earlier to a Simon and to a faithful widow, Anna. God became a real human being; God took on our humanity - why? Other clever people said God became a human being so that we could become God. The epistle of St Peter speaks daringly of us as partakers of the divine nature. In this Eucharist, we will mix water and wine in the chalice and the President prays a remarkable prayer: 'Oh God, who didst wonderfully create and wonderfully renew the dignity of man's nature, grant that by the mystery of this water and wine, we may be made partakers of His divinity, who shared our humanity.'

Here God uses everyday, mundane, material things to communicate the very life of God, making Christianity, as Archbishop William Temple used to say "the most materialistic of all the great religions." Yes, we are made partakers of the divine nature, God became a human being so that we could become as God. The Orthodox Church makes far more of our so-called 'deification' than we and you might recall how in the epistle to the Ephesians, the author speaks of us as being those who are going to be filled with the fullness of God - yes, we have been created in the image of God, that is our destiny, our destiny to be God-like, God-like so that we are perfect, even as our heavenly father is perfect.

So in the Old Testament, God exalts God's people to be holy, "even as I your God am holy" and though this injunction occurs in the book Leviticus, which spends a great deal of time over the minutiae of cultic, ritual things, it turns out that this holiness that God requires of God's people has nothing to do - or very little to do - with cultic purity. No, it is to reflect the divine compassion and concern for the weak and the hungry and so the assertion is when you are harvesting, don't take up everything, leave some, leave some for the poor, be kind to the alien, for you see you were aliens in Egypt. How apt as we contemplate ever more stringent requirements for asylum-seekers and refugees. When you worship this God, if it does not make you see and feel like God, then that worship is a cult and for God it is an abomination, however elaborate it might be.

God will not heed your worship, your beseeching, for your hands are full of blood, the blood of your sisters and brothers killed in wars that were avoidable. Demonstrate your repentance by how you treat the most vulnerable: the orphan, the widow, the alien. When you are king over this people, and this God gives you God's righteousness, it is so that prosperity will prevail, will prevail because as king, you judge rightly, you judge rightly especially the poor with equity, you give justice to the poor, you deliver the needy when they cry and the poor man who has no helper. You will pity the helpless and needy and save the lives of the poor. How many of our governments would pass this stringent test: "how did you deal with the poor?"

And when God's spirit anoints you, it is so that you may preach the Good News, especially again to the poor, to preach the release of the imprisoned ones and to announce the year of the Lord's favour, the year of jubilee, the year of release, the year of the cancellation of debt - of heavy, un-payable, draining international debt.

To be partakers of the divine nature means we become more and more God-like, treating all with an even-handedness, even those we regard as evil. For you know, even the most evil, the Shipmans, the Saddam Husseins, Bin Ladens - we may not like it - but they remain God's children. This God, who lets God's sun shine on good and bad alike; who makes God's rain fall on all, for all, and we, who want to be God-like, are asked to forgive, even as God has forgiven us in Christ, forgive even that which we consider to be unforgivable.

To be like this God, who gives up on no-one, who loves us, not because we are loveable but that we become loveable only because God loves us, God loves us with a love that will not let us go, a love that loved us before we were created, a love that loves us now, a love that will love us forever, world without end. A love that says of each single one of us: “I love you, you are precious and special to me, I love you as if you were the only human being on earth, I love you and there is nothing you can do to make me love you more because I already love you perfectly.”

How incredibly, wonderfully, it is that God says to you, to me: "There is nothing you can do to make me love you less. I take you, I take you very seriously, I take you - you - body and soul, you the visible and the invisible of you, I love you, I love you, I love you."

[From http://www.aco.org/acns/articles/37/50/acns3772.cfm. Pictures of Tutu at the Cathedral are posted at http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view.php?ArtID=810. Thanks to Kyle Miura for forwarding the article to EcumenicalNews.]

[+] "Clarity on a Cold Night" and Thoughts on the Homeless

by Nancy Bublitz Smith

Clarity on a Cold Night
The sky is crystal clear.
The nearly full moon shines brightly, lighting the night.
The stars twinkle in their places.
The air is so cold that my breath drifts by as a small white cloud
There is such wondrous beauty in the deep silence of the night.
Surely God delights in the beauty of the night.

Yet, as I walk to my house,
I wonder what will happen to those who have no home?
Where will they sleep?
How will they keep warm?
Will they survive the cold starkness of the night?
Can they possibly delight in the beauty of the night?

My heart longs to linger and gaze at the beauty of the starry skies.
Yet I am cold and soon choose the warmth of my heated home.
Shaking off the cold, I sit trying to get warm.
But They are out there somewhere:
the homeless, the forsaken, the lost, the weary.
So I shake it off, go to bed and pull the covers over my head.

Am I so very different from you?

11/14/00 Nancy Bublitz Smith

Ramblings…

We were supposed to be thinking liberation theology for our next sermon in the preaching class, and this poem came to me as I was putting out the trash. Part of me knows that I should be so willing as to be generous, and share my living space with those who have less. And the smarter part of me sees how, in the past, those I have tried to help have mistreated both the opportunity, and me. Yet, as a Christian, how can I sleep comfortably on a bone cold night knowing that women, children and men are sleeping under freeway bridges, or in doorways as temperatures reach freezing? Being a Christian has its liabilities. Especially if it only induces guilty consciences and no social actions, such as financial gifts, or warm sweaters turned over to the homeless shelters.

[Thanks, Nancy, for sharing your heart and your thoughts with us.]