Story Ark: A Year in Bible Stories
Rev. Lilli Nye
September 18, 2011
I'd like to take a couple of minutes
to share with the congregation a picture for the arc of this year.
Next door in the Parish Hall, the
children and their teachers this morning are beginning their adventure in a
year of exploring many of the colorful and strange stories of the Bible.
For a long time at Theodore Parker
Church, the Religious Exploration program has worked through a three-year
rotation of themes—one year focusing on Unitarian-Universalist principles
and lore and history; one year encountering the religions of the world; and one
year exploring our Judeo-Christian and Biblical heritage. That's a rotation
that has been continuing for quite some time.
This year, they're undertaking this
last one: in particular, a journey into the stories of the Bible. It's an
exploration of what these mythic stories have to do with us today; how they
connect to our UU principles (or don't); what they might reveal about being
human, about being in relationship with each another, being in relationship
with other living things and with the world and with nature.
One very key element is going to be
the exploration of what do these stories say about being in relationship with
the Great Power that the Bible represents and personifies as the character of
God.
What is that power?
It's a creative power; it's a destructive power. It's a moral power; it's an
amoral power. Sometimes it guides, in dreams and hunches and the small voice
within. Sometimes it roars and thunders and wreaks havoc.
So what is this spiritual and cosmic
power that the Biblical writers personify in the character of God? And how do
we experience it in ourselves and in the world?
Inevitably, this is going to be a
dicey undertaking for us. Our congregation is made up of folks who have made a
distinct choice to not be part of a Biblically based
religious community. We've chosen <i>not</i> to embrace the
Judeo-Christian Bible as the primary authoritative text for our journey, opting
for a wider search for meaning that might include the Bible but certainly does
not limit us to it.
Many of us have distanced ourselves
from our Christian and Jewish origins. Some of us have ambivalence about those
origins, or we carry wounds from that earlier time, or anger associated with
those influences. And we may remain uncomfortable with the Bible.
Some of us have little or no religious
background, and the Bible is a big unknown. It seems so peculiar and so archaic
that it's puzzling how anyone could embrace it as a guiding text.
And yet, there are many reasons why
pretending that the Bible does not exist, pretending that it is not relevant to
our lives, is not really a good way to deal with our
ambivalence. There are many reasons why this is not a satisfactory answer to
the Biblical conundrum.
We're going to explore what some of
those reasons are in a minute, but for the moment, suffice it to say that as a
community we have agreed that it's a worthy undertaking to introduce our
children to the Bible, to help them to become Biblically literate. We can offer
them different lenses of interpretation than they might get elsewhere.
One of the reasons for doing this,
incidentally, is that if you don't interpret the Bible for yourself, someone
else will do it for you. We want give our kids tools to think about these
stories, to think about the teachings; we want to do that exploration in community,
so that they—and we—won't be so adrift when encountering these
stories elsewhere.
Also, as a congregation, we have this
emerging intention of trying to build stronger connections between what we call
"big church" and "little church" (that is, the children's
Religious Exploration program and what happens here in the Sanctuary, adult
worship). We're learning to recognize ourselves as one intergenerational
community, and we are engaging in a common adventure of learning and growing
together.
Here in the Sanctuary, we're going to
stay connected throughout the year by looking at some of the same stories that
the kids are also investigating.
Several times over the year, we're
going to hear a story together; we'll be introduced to it together; we may play
it out here in the Sanctuary. The kids will then depart and explore it in
various ways, and we'll take a look at it through the service, through the
sermon, and possibly through some other forms of creative discovery.
Here are a few things to keep in mind
as we go forward, a few of the reasons why we ought to be doing this. These
considerations are not presented in order of importance, they're just lenses to
look through.
First, my personal confession is that
I just think these stories are cool. You know how much I love mythology and
symbol and archetypes. Like the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, or
like the Greek or Norse myths, or like the Hindu epic the Ramayana, these
stories are colorful, magical, and bizarre. They're full of arresting imagery
and tragic and comic drama.
I hope that you might simply enjoy
them, even just at face value, even as entertaining tales. But I also hope to
impart the fascination that I feel about investigating their meaning. So,
I hope you'll just have fun with it.
Second, it's about being informed.
These are myths that have fundamentally shaped and informed our culture's
evolution and the development western literature and art. Many of the stories
from the Bible are shared not only by Judaism and Christianity but also by
Islam. They're foundational for a large portion of the world's
population.
Third, we want to engage the stories
as mythic situations that present big questions about human existence and
spiritual dilemmas. As odd and ancient as they are, they can invite us
into spiritual exploration; they can point to profound truths.
If you remember, last week we heard a
quote by Mircea Eliade, and he talks about how symbols are true because they
can hold simultaneously a whole spectrum of meanings, even paradoxical
meanings, even things that don't seem to make sense with each other, and yet
the symbol or the myth is a container that can hold that entire spectrum. In a
similar way, these stories sometimes contain impossible paradoxes, and yet
there they are. So we grasp them intuitively. The story opens us to a mystery.
Fourth, we want to engage our critical
thinking, our discernment, and sometimes our protest. By interacting with
a story, in fact, by being willing to take it seriously, we are challenged to
sort out and express our own moral and theological values, perhaps in contrast
to what the story presents.
We don't have to assume also that because
the Biblical author told us something or presented something to us, that author
thought it was a good thing or agreed with it. We can engage our critical
thought.
We began the service this morning with
a little prayer from Michael Leunig, the Australian cartoonist and poet. His
prayer gives thanks for the wonderful invention of the handle, and for all the
handles that allow us to take hold of things that would otherwise be very hard
to grasp. In the next breath, he reminds us to gracefully and playfully
recognize how much of our experience we'll never get a handle on, all those
things that are ungraspable, confounding, elusive, and mysterious.
This seems like a good dual reminder
as we begin this venture that we need handles, we need ways of interpreting.
We're all going to bring our own handles, and we need to be aware of them.
As Bill Moyers pointed out, each of us
has a handle on the Bible that's created out of a complex set of experiences
and biases. We each bring what we were taught by our elders, our personal
experiences, our convictions, our morality, our spirituality, our politics, our
tastes and habits. All of those things create our approach.
But we also are invited to try out
various new handles, new ways of interpreting that will open new insights for
us.
As Leunig points out, we need to
recognize that many of the Bible's stories have outlasted as much as 800 years
of interpretive wrestling, going back long before the midrashic arguments of
the ancient rabbis.
That doesn't mean that these stories
are just crazy and absurd—although sometimes it first appears that way.
But it means that their meanings are multiple and paradoxical. They're
disturbing; they leave us with a sense of puzzlement or wonderment. That's good
and that's OK. It's good to be puzzled, to be wondering, to be
disturbed, to be compelled to wrestle with something.
John Buehrens is a former president of
the UUA. After he completed his term he wrote a book called
Understanding the Bible: An introduction for Skeptics, Seekers, and
Religious Liberals. And he writes:
The Bible, I submit, is full of peculiar treasures for us because it is our culture's most basic religious and spiritual classic. And the very definition of a classic is a work that is not exhausted by a single reading or interpretation, much less by the simple and crude understandings we may have had of it as children. Nor even by those that we came to in the process of our first critical thinking, since those are often tinged with caricature, anger and ridicule.
So, of course, he's saying that a
classic text of this magnitude calls for repeated engagements, repeated
reinterpretations, and newly emerging understandings.
And so I invite you, beginning on October
16 when we meet Noah, to venture onto this ark, this vessel of stories, and let
it carry us over unfathomable waters to new and unknown places.