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“Being Biblically Literate”
Mark
A Sermon preached by The Rev. Douglas M. Donley
Today is the day we begin our Lenten Journey. We have fewer colors in our space. We will contemplate what is missing in our lives, in our world, in our relationships with each other and with God. We’ll look at scriptures from the last week of Jesus’ life as we conclude our traverse through Mark’s Gospel. Each Sunday for the next seven weeks, we will have someone present a contemporary text to complement our ancient texts from scripture. Think about what you might want different in your life. This is the season to look at it and act on it.
Of course,
this Lent brings with it the continuing preparations for war and the passionate
justifications for going or not going.
We’ll have an opportunity to look more intensely at all of this on
Friday and Saturday of this week. Along
with House of Mercy, First Baptist St. Paul and Judson Baptist, we are
sponsoring a conference entitled, “Peace, Justice and the American Way.” George Williamson, pastor of First Baptist
Church of Granville, Ohio will speak at the conference as will Paul Dekar from Memphis Theological Seminary and Jane Esdale from the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North
America. It’s important to have this
conference because the time is ripe for a new movement in our world. It is not a movement with new ideas. It’s ideas are as
old as our
Clyde Cicarelli asked me a few weeks ago to talk about Stalin, Hitler and Bonhoeffer. I think what he was trying to get at was the question of what you do in the face of a brutal dictator. Certainly Sadaam Hussein has proved himself to be a brutal dictator. There are others in the world who think that George Bush is a brutal dictator. What’s the best way to address all of this? Deitrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian made the choice to conspire to have Hitler assassinated. Although a pacifist, he came to the conclusion that his participating in the death of Hitler would save untold lives of people throughout the world. When the Peace and Pizza group watched a film about Boenhoffer a few months ago, I remember reflecting that we can’t possibly know what he must have been going through. From our nice lounge and relative peace, it’s easy to criticize his theology and his decision to try to kill anyone. But if we were pushed to that life and death situation, where would we be? I have to confess that I truly don’t know.
What is clear is that Bonhoeffer made his best decision based upon all the facts available: the political climate, the social, the military and the Biblical evidence before him. He said that this struggle and even death was the cost of discipleship. Our Lenten task may well be to become literate in all of these aspects of life and theology. We might make not only sense of our world, but also sense of our place in it.
About 20
years ago, I was evangelized by an American Baptist Minister in a bar. That sounds like the beginning of a bad joke,
but it’s the truth. We were talking
about activism, particularly as it related to the situation in
One of the
reasons we are treading so methodically through the Jesus story as retold by
Mark is that we are a largely Biblically illiterate people. Sure we know bits and pieces of scripture
which we piece together and create our own theology. We know what people write and say about
scripture. But we don’t really know it
all that well. The task of writing,
revising and performing The Gospel According to Kermit
made people look again at Biblical stories, some for the first time. This is exciting work. It’s transforming work. It shows us how we can look at scripture in a
new way. Hear what Ched
Myers wrote in his book, Who Will Roll
Away the Stone?:
p.71“A central criticism of Mark’s Jesus was the biblical illiteracy of his
listeners. He understood that literacy
in the texts of scripture can facilitate literacy in the texts of our
world. He took “revered” visions of
Moses and the prophets off the dusty shelves and threw them like a Molotov
cocktail into the middle of the power struggles of his time. The stories of how Jeremiah or Ezekiel
unmasked oppression, “decontextualized” by the
scribes, were “recontextualized” by Jesus,
kick-starting the narrative of biblical radicalism back to life in the minds
and hearts of his listeners. By undomesticating these texts, he wrested them from the grip
of the powerful and put them into the hands of the poor; they became the
fundamental interpretive code used to delegitimize
discourses of domination (
Now that
Jesus is in
The most memorable portion of this scripture reading is the story of the widow’s mite. Ah, yes we know this one because it is preached to us at each and every stewardship campaign. When it’s time to raise the money, we remember the faith of the widow. Don’t worry, we don’t start our Commitment and Stewardship campaign until next week, so you can breathe a sigh of relief. If we are biblically literate, we will know that this text is juxtaposed to another one about the scribes. Beginning in verse 35, Jesus denounces the scribes and tells us to beware of them. On the other hand we have the faith of the widow. Scribes bad, widow good. The first shall be last and the last shall be first.
But just as
we are to be biblically literate, meaning we need to read scriptures in their
context, we need to be economically literate as well. Here’s how the scribes and the widows are
related economically: Widows were deemed
unfit to run the financial affairs of the household because they were the wrong
gender. Scribes were often trustees of
the estates of their deceased husbands. The
trustee received a percentage of the estate.
Embezzlement and abuse were not uncommon. Kinda like the tax
collectors and the moneychangers. Jesus
has harsh words for all of them. But the
difference is that the scribes had the piety of their religious office to hide
their robbery. Hear what Jesus says
about the scribes: “Beware of the scribes who like to walk around in long robes
and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces… they devour widows’ houses
and for the sake of appearance say long prayers” (
In this scene, Jesus sits opposite the treasury and notices how much people put in the till. He sees the rich put in vast sums to polite applause by the aristocracy. But the widow puts in her tithe, all that she has to live on. She doesn’t have any leftovers. She is made to pay what she has in order to fulfill her obligation. It doesn’t matter that she will go hungry. She still has to foot the bill. This is what we call a regressive tax, where a poor person spends a larger proportion of their income in taxes than a rich person. Being economically literate is another part of being Biblically literate.
If we look closely enough, we’ll notice that Jesus talks of the economics of widows twice in this chapter. In the discussion with the Sadducees, they ask whose property a woman would be in the resurrection of the dead. It’s a silly question. It shows how the Sadducees viewed women. In Leverite marriage it was important to preserve patriarchy by having children on behalf of the deceased husband. Luckily Jesus didn’t view women as property and quoted scripture to prove it. Jesus said in the reign of the God he knows, there is no patriarchy. No one is property. No one is terrorized physically, militarily, economically, spiritually. Instead we are to love God and love our neighbor. If we could just embrace that, we could move a lot closer to solving many of the problems in our world.
We need to be literate about many things in our world. We need to base our decisions on all of the information available. We need to use the Biblical information, the social information, the economic information, the political information, the military information even the religious information. All of these need to be factors when we make our decisions of faith and life.
Maybe this can be the Lenten challenge. Be Biblically literate. I plan to look ever closer for the Jesus missing from popular culture. I want to reclaim that radical message of Jesus. I want to be Biblically literate.
This is not the same thing as taking the Bible literally. It means taking the Bible seriously. It means know the stories. Gain inspiration from some, argue with others, but in the process find the Jesus who calls us to do good and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
When we encounter that Jesus, we might then find how we are to act in today’s world.
And in the process, we might even set some prisoners free;
Grant recovery of sight to the blind;
Bind up the brokenhearted;
Bring good news to the poor and outcast;
And proclaim the acceptable season of God’s favor. Amen.