The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Palisades	UUCP P.O. Box 709 Englewood, NJ 07631 Phone: 201-568-5540

READINGS 1) From the essay “Beyond Idolatry” by Forrest Church collected in the book: “A Chosen Faith”, by Forrest Church and John Buehrens “Breakthroughs in science directly advance our religious understanding, offering new metaphors to help explain the nature of our being. Take the holograph. This is a metaphor drawn from modern technology itself. Biology has shown that each individual shares organically in a complex living system, even as every cell in our body, however distinct in function, carries the genetic coding of the whole being. In a hologram a three-dimensional image is created by the interplay of two lasers, an object, and a photo plate of thousands of tiny “cells.” Incredibly, even if the photo plate is dashed to bits, one can direct the laser beam through any single shard of lens remaining, and the three dimensional image, however faint, will still appear. Again, the whole is contained in each of the parts. The idea that the earth itself is an organism (sometimes called the Gaia hypothesis) draws on an idea as old as the ancient Stoic humanists, whose emphasis on relatedness can be found in religious thinking from Pauline teaching about ‘the body of Christ’ to an Emersonian emphasis on the individual soul and the Oversoul. These new metaphors also correspond to the insights of feminist theology, challenging us to move toward a relational ethic based on a principle of cooperation rather than competition. They challenge our traditional individualism, at least in the atomistic sense. We are all individuals, or course, but sovereignty lies in the corporate body, not the individual member. To be loyal to ‘the highest’ in us, we must act with reverence toward all life. By defining virtue in a cooperative rather than a competitive fashion, we seek the common good, which moves us wherever possible from ‘either/or’ confrontation to ‘both/and’ reconciliation.” Reading #2 from an article in the Guardian, by Karen Armstrong entitled: “Unholy Strictures” found at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1546558,00.html “Before the modern period, Jews, Christians and Muslims all relished highly allegorical interpretations of scripture. The word of God was infinite and could not be tied down to a single interpretation. Preoccupation with literal truth is a product of the scientific revolution, when reason achieved such spectacular results that mythology was no longer regarded as a valid path to knowledge. We tend now to read our scriptures for accurate information, so that the Bible, for example, becomes a holy encyclopedia, in which the faithful look up facts about God. Many assume that if the scriptures are not historically and scientifically correct, they cannot be true at all. But this was not how scripture was originally conceived. All the verses of the Qur'an, for example, are called "parables" (ayat); its images of paradise, hell and the last judgment are also ayat, pointers to transcendent realities that we can only glimpse through signs and symbols. We distort our scriptures if we read them in an exclusively literal sense. There has recently been much discussion about the way Muslim terrorists interpret the Qur'an. Does the Qur'an really instruct Muslims to slay unbelievers wherever they find them? Does it promise the suicide bomber instant paradise and 70 virgins? If so, Islam is clearly chronically prone to terrorism. These debates have often been confused by an inadequate understanding of the way scripture works. People do not robotically obey every single edict of their sacred texts. If they did, the world would be full of Christians who love their enemies and turn the other cheek when attacked. There are political reasons why a tiny minority of Muslims are turning to terrorism, which have nothing to do with Islam. But because of the way people read their scriptures these days, once a terrorist has decided to blow up a London bus, he can probably find scriptural texts that seem to endorse his action. Part of the problem is that we are now reading our scriptures instead of listening to them. When, for example, Christian fundamentalists argue about the Bible, they hurl texts back and forth competitively, citing chapter and verse in a kind of spiritual tennis match. But this detailed familiarity with the Bible was impossible before the modern invention of printing made it feasible for everybody to own a copy and before widespread literacy - an essentially modern phenomenon - enabled them to read it for themselves. Hitherto the scriptures had always been transmitted orally, in a ritual context that, like a great theatrical production, put them in a special frame of mind. Christians heard extracts of the Bible chanted during the mass; they could not pick and choose their favorite texts. In India, young Hindu men studied the Veda for years with their guru, adopting a self-effacing and non-violent lifestyle that was meant to influence their understanding of the texts. In Judaism, the process of studying Torah and Talmud with a rabbi was itself a transformative experience that was just as important as the content. …The last thing anyone should attempt is to read the Qur'an straight through from cover to cover, because it was designed to be recited aloud. Indeed, the word qur'an means "recitation". Much of the meaning is derived from sound patterns that link one passage with another, so that Muslims who hear extracts chanted aloud thousands of times in the course of a lifetime acquire a tacit understanding that one teaching is always qualified and supplemented by other texts, and cannot be seen in isolation. The words that they hear again and again are not "holy war", but "kindness", "courtesy", "peace", "justice", and "compassion". Historians have noted that the shift from oral to written scripture often results in strident, misplaced certainty. Reading gives people the impression that they have an immediate grasp of their scripture; they are not compelled by a teacher to appreciate its complexity. Without the aesthetic and ethical disciplines of ritual, they can approach a text in a purely cerebral fashion, missing the emotive and therapeutic aspects of its stories and instructions. Solitary reading also enables people to read their scriptures too selectively, focusing on isolated texts that they read out of context, and ignoring others that do not chime with their own predilections. Religious militants who read their scriptures in this way often distort the tradition they are trying to defend. Christian fundamentalists concentrate on the aggressive Book of Revelation and pay no attention to the Sermon on the Mount, while Muslim extremists rely on the more belligerent passages of the Qur'an and overlook its oft-repeated instructions to leave vengeance to God and make peace with the enemy. We cannot turn the clock back. Most of us are accustomed to acquiring information instantly at the click of a mouse, and have neither the talent nor the patience for the disciplines that characterized pre-modern interpretation. But we can counter the dangerous tendency to selective reading of sacred texts. The Qur'an insists that its teaching must be understood "in full" (20:114), an important principle that religious teachers must impart to the disaffected young. …We must all - the religious and the skeptics alike - become aware that there is more to scripture than meets the cursory eye.” · Karen Armstrong is the author of The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism SERMON The full title of this sermon is actually: “The Bible was Never Meant to be Taken Literally: Reflections on the Bible as a collective social, psychological and spiritual Journey toward Wholeness.” For those of you visiting or new to UUism we have a program in our denomination called The Journey Toward Wholeness; and we are dedicated in this congregation to exploring this JTW from different angles. The program itself is primarily about freeing ourselves and society from racism, homophobia, sexism, classism, able-ism, ageism, all those ‘isms we are variously affected by. But as the name Journey Toward Wholeness might suggest we put those challenges into a spiritual context. We are a varied group so you will hear many ways of talking about spirituality and Wholeness. But for today I’ll choose one way of talking about it and that is our 7th principle. We UU’s see ourselves as part of an interconnected web of existence of which we are all a part. The fact that we are on a journey TOWARD wholeness however means we recognize that while we are spiritually, and metaphysically, connected in a web, the human community does not always treat each other as if we were all parts of a whole, much less as if the whole is within each of the parts. In Unitarian Universalism we recognize that the human community has also been torn apart by religion. So it may seem very odd that I’m going to try to make a case today for the Bible as an embodiment of the Journey Toward Wholeness. I have my work cut out for me; because it is clear that at this point in history and at other times in history, the Bible, and other religious scriptures, have been used to control and divide people. It has always been difficult in UU circles to know how to teach and preach from the Bible. As a matter of fact Lauren who is with the kids this morning wrote me an email about this very problem. We like to coordinate topics with the kids so I told her my topic and she wrote back. Those of us who know and love Lauren will see that the exclamation marks are a replacement for her hands which, in person, would be used to emphasize her point. (I use with her permission) Hi - I'm sorry to say - I don't know any bible stories!!!! How awful is that??? Do you know any stories that are about why we are all different shades and colors - Oh I know - I will do a creation story - A Lenape Native American story and make references to Noah's Ark - Where is that in the bible??? Pretty pathetic ain't it??? Lauren Nope, not pathetic, just typical of us. Unitarian Universalists are woefully undereducated about a book which for better or worse has been the center of major controversies for thousands of years. So that’s one reason to know more about it, just to be educated. That has been the most popular excuse for learning the Bible in the years I have been part of UUism. But I submit there are other even better reasons. I wrote some suggestions back to Lauren, along with directions to the location of the Ark, and I’ll tell you what I said a little later. Let me first tell you that I am coming to this topic from a very different perspective than most, if not all of you. Studying religion, including the Bible, is how I have spent the majority of my waking hours for the past almost 20 years. While normal people were learning law, or medical administration, or drafting, or computer programming, nursing or accounting; I have had the good fortune as a minister to study the Bible and its relationship to history and three different religions, at least. I’ve spent thousands of hours on this and other religious and theological topics, including “what color should we paint the sanctuary”, since the year 1988 when I entered Divinity School. I’ve had the privilege of studying the Bible from a myriad of perspectives. [at this point in the sermon I began to pile up dozens of books I had brought with me to demonstrate the breadth and prolific nature of Biblical scholars] I took classes with feminist theologians who looked at the Bible from the perspective of: What or who is missing here? What’s wrong with this picture? We examined it with what Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza a professor of mine called the “hermeneutic (method) of suspicion”. Hermeneutic basically means method. And I studied the Bible from the perspective of African American men like James Cone, the father of Black liberation theology who argues that “Yahweh and Jesus Christ are events or happenings of liberation in the lives of oppressed peoples and that black experience is the contemporary equivalent of biblical experience”. I have studied with people like Katie Cannon an African American Womanist theologian and read other women of color who also looked at the story from the lens of oppression both as people of color and as women of color. We also studied with Jewish scholars who could add to the actual text their knowledge of Midrash and Talmud and, the other vast volumes of commentary on the text. I’ve studied with Christians and read exegeses of the text in the Anchor Bible commentary, the Interpreter’s Bible, and in dozens of individual analyses and texts from numerous authors. And we were taught and used numerous methods for approaching the biblical texts themselves: structural exegesis, literary, historical, linguistic, anthropological exegesis. Exegesis means “to draw forth meaning”. We learned that the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament) was not one seamless text from beginning to end but in fact intentionally constructed as a compilation of sometimes ambiguous and contradictory stories, set side by side. And that the New Testament does likewise. That ought to be the first wake up call that the Bible was never meant to be taken literally. Does an editor who wants you to apply only one meaning to a book or a story within it, place it next to one which contradicts it? Or is that in itself a message that we are to approach it from many angles? We also studied oral traditions from the ancient societies from which some of the Biblical stories derived, and we compared those stories. For instance the story of Gilgamesh which sets a context for the later story of Noah’s Ark. And in our Hebrew language class we took (for instance) the story of Jonah apart line by line, word by word, in Hebrew, and then put it back together again, in Hebrew, asking what it meant to us, and might have meant to others, on all those levels: historically, literarily, symbolically, spiritually. What I began to understand was that Biblical and religious studies are indeed art and theater, among other things. The Bible is a massive interplay of voices and ideas, and passions and attitudes, and arguments and drama; and so also a continuation of the original oral tradition out of which the Bible arose and of the oral tradition in which it was for many centuries received, as Karen Armstrong reminds us. The difference between then and now is perhaps somewhat like the difference between a story heard on the radio and one seen on television. The oral tradition engages the imagination in a way that the written does not. When visual images are not created for us the mind creates its own pictures, which means the mind engages with the body and creates linkages of memory therein. The way one learns about the Bible in a liberal divinity school is rich, it is wonderful it is life giving. It’s the way it should be learned. I have to say though; all was not necessarily peaceable in the kingdom of academia. The M.O. there as it is elsewhere in our modern culture seemed to be one of thesis/ anti-thesis, and sometimes either/or. Which is not to say that the professors whose work I read and studied with were not influenced and enlarged by each other’s work; they clearly were. But it seemed to me that the more deeply academics burrowed into their sovereign niches the less sunlight entered in to the burrow and sometimes there didn’t seem to be any connecting tunnels between them. I preferred the role of student where I could sit back, and take it all in and appreciate the complex bio diversity of world views. When you don’t have anything to prove, or anyone to convince, it is all a feast. Perhaps a holographic feast. Then later the study of the Bible was even more deeply enriched for me when I took a class at a nearby Episcopal seminary which (in this particular class) approached the Biblical stories from a non- competitive perspective. There I found the people who had what Armstrong calls “the talent and the patience for the disciplines that characterized pre-modern interpretation”. The way I learned to approach the Bible there was through a spiritual discipline which was a wonderful combination of individual and collective listening. Something called lectio divina, which is a way of encountering the text both individually and collectively. Asking: What is it saying to me? What is it saying to us? We’ve done that a time or two in services here. I have to say, and I mean this with no false humility: the more I know about the Bible, the less I know. This book is not just black marks on a white page. This is not just a book, it is a battle and it is a resting place, it is a debate and it is a dialogue. It is the struggle for humans to understand themselves and the Power of the Universe, and it is the struggle for humans to control each other and that Power in the Universe. It is the struggle for humans to be right and make everyone else wrong, but it is also the struggle for humans to engage with their history and with their own power and with each other mindfully. At its worst it is a symbol of the either/or mentality we all live by at times, and at its best, it can be a rich soil in which to learn a way of living that is both/and. In other words it is a Journey toward Wholeness. Some of the “documents” are missing, to be sure. But those documents are now in conversation with the documents in the “canon”; making it even richer and more interesting. The journey requires good guides and good guide posts otherwise it can be a scary one. Because the people who have the patience for discipline and the desire to contemplate truths at a deep level, tend not to be the ones who make it onto your nightly news. Our lens on the Bible is colored by the fact that it is very often the negative, the blustering, the extremist and the fearful personalities which are associated with religion and the Bible. And all of this…(the stack of books which represent so many creative and culturally different points of view) all of these stories, and all of the oral tradition, attached to this one book remain largely unknown to the vast majority of people. And this is unfortunate. It means that even liberals who want to be just and fair and generous, and I think we genuinely do, well, we see the damage that’s done, and that is what we engage with in our minds and hearts. Not with the long tradition of exegesis and commentary. And you know what that means? It means we are engaging with the problem on the level of the problem. As Audre Lorde a Black Feminist writer once wrote before she died: “you cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. If we UU’s throw this book out, and never bother to engage with the commentary on its mythological and theological levels, we will remain woefully uneducated about thousands of years of human conversation about the meaning of our existence, and we will allow the either/or mentality to rule the day. The mentality of: Either accept the Bible and a wrathful God, or throw it out entirely. Karen Armstrong wrote in another essay in The Guardian called “Believers in the Lost Ark”: “Today in popular parlance, a myth is something that did not happen, so to claim that a biblical story is mythical is to deny its truth. But before the advent of our scientific modernity, myth recounted an event that had – in some sense- happened once, but which also happened all the time. It was never possible to interpret a myth in terms of objective reason. There were two ways of arriving at truth, which Plato called Mythos and Logos (reason). They complemented each other and were of equal stature; both were essential. Unlike myth, logos had to relate accurately to the external world: from the very earliest days, we used it to create effective weapons and to run our societies efficiently. But humans are also meaning-seeking creatures, who fall very easily into despair. When faced with tragedy reason is silent and has nothing to say. It was mythology and its accompanying rituals that showed people how to acquire the strength to go on. As a result of our scientific revolution however, logos achieved such spectacular results in the west that myth was discredited. By the 19th century, believers and skeptics alike began to read the biblical myths as though they were logoi.” In other words even rational people, skeptics, forgot that these were myths and began to test the stories as if they were evidence in a scientific trial! Needless to say they didn’t hold up very well to the test. Armstrong goes on: “But the biblical writers would have been astonished to hear about a scientific expedition to find the “real” flood. In the pre-modern perspective, mythos and logos each had its own sphere of competence. If you confused them, you had bad science – like that of the creationists. You also had bad religion. Until we recover a sense of the mythical, our scriptures will remain opaque, and our faith – as well as our unbelief – will be misplaced.” When I engage with the mythical stories in the Bible, I try to use all of the competencies one can bring to the study of myth which in addition to the imagination can certainly include the study of language, history, culture, the new metaphors science gives us, and last but not least one’s own engagement with one’s life experience. I ask: what questions does it call out in me? What questions do I hear echoing down the centuries from this one story? So I wrote back to Lauren. I realized in the process of writing to her that the story of the Ark has a holographic quality as do most of the earliest archetypal myths. Though it is one small part of the whole Bible somehow it seems to contain the whole because the questions that it opens up splinter out from it like refracting light and are infinite. They concern the nature of “the Universe”, God, and the nature of humanity. I believe that contained within it is what is called (in theology) “the problem of theodicy” which is: If there is a God and God is Good then why is the world such a mess, how could he or she, let it go on like this? And contained within the story then is also the problem of free will, which is religion’s answer to the problem of theodicy. This is kind of like Where’s Waldo, see if you can figure out how those questions are buried in this story or might arise from it. I hope one day we can unpack those questions together. For now there is only time to open the story up a little bit and air it out. So here’s my email back to Lauren. Hi Lauren! (Exclamation mark) Noah's ark is in Genesis Chapter 6. Want me to bring you a copy of a midrash (re-telling) I wrote once of Noah's ark? It has illustrations too that a congregant did for me. It's kind of a fun story. Actually it was more for adults in some ways than kids - but it works for all ages I think. I wrote it for a Sunday we returned to our sanctuary in my Virginia church following a flood which had swamped our grounds. We’d done some major repair work and people were tired. Kids paraded down the aisles and out of the church with live pets and/or stuffed animals...it was fun. How about I bring it and you can use it if you want to? That combined with the Lenni Lenape story would be great. That way you can explain in a very UU way that different cultures have different ways of approaching the same questions like: How did people get here? ...Of course the ark story is about starting over again, and not a creation story. More like a re-creation story. In case you can't get your hands on a Bible.. a brief synopsis: God gets mad at people for being so mean to each other. He's so fed up with them, and so disappointed in his creation which he had made good after all (remember the words in Genesis: "and it was good") that he decides to start all over again with a few good humans and a couple of each of the animals. Most people think this is yet another depiction of a vengeful God (I mean heck one who would destroy the world). I disagree. Who doesn't ball up their piece of paper sometimes in frustration and start the sermon all over again? It’s important to remember what happens in the end. After the flood the God character promises he'll never destroy the earth again. And he gives the people the rainbow which is the sign of his covenant, meaning a promise, that he will never again destroy what he has created, even if people are oppressive and mean to each other. Then Noah and his family disembark and Noah goes and sits under a tree and gets drunk. And the rest is history. For much of the rest of the Old Testament, as I see it anyway, the God character struggles to contain his anger at humans for continuing to oppress each other. He doesn’t always do a very good job at containing his wrath. And for their part, the humans spend the rest of the book trying to bargain with him to get what they want. What I love about the story is that it could be a way of saying that it's up to people to work together to make the world a better place. Because the power in the universe is on our side and is not conspiring against us. Maybe it is saying that the power in the universe is one of Unconditional Love. Though this power also calls us to accountability according to later stories. So the story might also be a reflection of a shift/rise in consciousness in the people who wrote it. Because the personality of God in the beginning of the story is impatient and narcissistic, and by the end is...well what I said, loving and forgiving. Of course this is a little much for kids. But you are good. You can find ways to talk about that - the subject of unconditional love perhaps? Of taking care of the earth and each other? That would fit in with the Native American story. Just a few thoughts to help out. Didn't mean to send you into a panic over the Bible theme! Faithfully, Maj-Britt

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