Ever notice how things can get twisted and changed as people share stories over time? We used to play a game where one person would whisper a secret message to the person next to them who would then repeat it to the person beside them until it went all around the circle. No matter how carefully we listened, the message that was received at the end had very little to do with the message that was started. For some reason human communication can get bent and twisted out of the original intent. So we shouldn’t be too surprised that scripture gets twisted into hurtful interpretations that are unrecognizable to the original authors. How do we deal with scripture like this that have been used to distort and damage what Christianity is about?
Jesse Zink, in his book Faithful, Creative, Hopeful shares
the story of a congregation that is preparing a Good Friday joint service that
would rather go to a big sale than attend their special worship. Zink says it’s not that the minister is a
failure, but that the Christian faith has been defeated by today’s
culture. Bill McKibben wrote an article
in last week’s Guardian, describing how progressive protestant Christian has
been distorted by mainstream culture to the point that US politicians use
scripture abusively to support their oppressive laws, and I quote:
“relatively obscure passage in
a relatively obscure Old Testament story is a good example of what is known as
prooftexting – the citing of some verse somewhere to support your predetermined
beliefs…[which] is like a restaurant critic who has visited a steakhouse, noted
that it has creamed spinach on the menu, and declared confidently that it is a
vegetarian eatery.”
Scripture gets twisted like this and Christianity gets
twisted like this into an excuse to
bully people who care for others, who are compassionate for outsiders, for the
vulnerable and for the powerless. How
many times have we heard people say, “I can’t stand organized religion” because
they have experienced twisted uses of scriptures to justify toxic abuses of
power. Power over how people lead their
lives, power over legislation that appears on the surface of it to be harmless
but isn’t. All supposedly justified in
the name of Christianity but without the compassion and empathy that Jesus
taught his disciples to show towards folks less fortunate than themselves.
A case of scripture that often gets twisted beyond
recognition is this passage in Matthew.
It refers back to the Noah Story.
You know, the one that has generated all kinds of songs and art like the
Irish Rovers singing about ‘green alligators and long-necked geese’ and
completely ignoring the tragedy and destruction the Flood story implies. This is not a cutesy story about animals on
an overcrowded floating barn with the chaos of keeping the lions fed and the
rabbits from taking over. This is about
heartbreaking tragedy where people are swept up off in a tidal wave of
destruction. Once we see a painting of
the people left off the ark, it’s hard to think of Noah as cute. And here’s the thing. The Matthew passage doesn’t sound like the
persons taken up are raptured into Heaven, it sounds ambiguous. The ones that are taken, are they taken by
the flood waters, sparing the ones left behind? It’s hard to tell. Yet there has spawned a multimillion-dollar
industry of books and movies taking this single passage out of context into a
bizarre faith that has people sure they are entitled to special treatment from
God. They proudly put bumper stickers on
their car saying, “In case of the Rapture, this vehicle will be driverless”
because they know how the end times are going to work in their favor. It’s nasty and cynical and snobbish. The opposite of what Jesus taught.
Our Song of Faith, a document in the form of poetry that
tries to put into words our best understanding of the United Church’s ideas
says that “Scripture is our song for the journey, the living word passed on
from generation to generation to guide and inspire, that we might wrestle a
holy revelation for our time and place from the human experiences and cultural
assumptions of another era. God calls us to be doers of the word and not
hearers only... The Spirit judges us critically when we abuse scripture by interpreting
it narrow-mindedly, using it as a tool of oppression, exclusion, or hatred.”
All too often it may feel like we have been defeated by
toxic Christian teachings that drown out our understandings of following the
teachings of Jesus. All too often it
seems like the only Christians we hear about get into the news because they own
palaces or private jets or are condemning immigrants or abortion or inflicting
the Lord’s Prayer on every school-aged child regardless of what faith they may have. But when we look at the scriptures as a
whole, it seems certain that we are being called not to twist them to allow us
to judge our neighbors! It does not give
us permission to oppress others with laws that lock people up. Scripture instead invites us to live decent
lives, sober lives, empathetic and dare I say woke lives. Lives that recognize God at work in our
neighbors, God at work in us to see and call out hatred while inviting God to
heal our hearts and minds so we can focus on what is truly important.
Not when or where the end times will come but why and how
we love ourselves and love our neighbors and love God. That way, whenever God shows up in our lives,
to take us or to leave us behind, we will be ready. Now is the hour for us to
wake up and live honorable lives. That
way, whenever the end times come, we will be ready for God who comes in love. May
it be so for us all.
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