Sunday, May 22, 2016 | 4:00 p.m.

A Complex Bible and a Complex God

Nanette Sawyer
Minister for Congregational Life, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Romans 5:1–5
John 16:12–15

A person once said to me that the Bible can’t be trusted and that we can’t know what the Bible really says because we don’t speak the original languages and the translations are all different.

Others think that the Bible can’t be trusted because there are different copies of the Bible—those that were copied by hand back in the days before we had printing presses—and the different copies have different words in them. Sometimes the scribes would add words or take out words or change words, either by accident or on purpose.

Scholars study all those different copies of the Bible, and they’ll create theories on “why is this word missing here”; “why is this phrase added here?” They’ll argue about which words were original, which copies are the best copies, which translation is the best translation.

In my opinion, that makes the Bible very interesting. It leaves a lot of room for developing our own understanding and for growing in our faith. This complexity of the Bible makes us work harder to understand why we accept and believe certain things and why we don’t accept and believe certain other things.

Through a large swath of history and this large swath of humanity—all these people—the faith community has evolved through its study of the Bible, and we have grown through our engagement with the Bible and through our struggles with it.

So on this Trinity Sunday I’m talking about the Bible because it is one place, one way, that the Spirit continues to teach us—to guide us into all truth, as Jesus says. And that very Spirit teaching us is God. It is the Spirit of God trying to help us grow. That very Spirit is Christ, trying to tell us things that we couldn’t bear to hear yesterday or 2,000 years ago.

That person who said to me that the different translations of the Bible make it untrustworthy was thinking of the Bible as a kind of rule book. They were thinking that the Bible could only be trustworthy if its meaning was simple and clear and if we could read it and know precisely what it means.

But the Bible isn’t that kind of a book. It isn’t a rule book. It’s a doorway through which we can hope to encounter the Spirit of God. There are always things that we won’t understand, and that’s OK. We’re growing in our wisdom. But God keeps trying to reach us and teach us, sometimes through the language that’s in the Bible. Unfortunately, language isn’t always completely straightforward.

One word can mean different things in different contexts. Or even in one context, a word can mean different things to different people. For example, once I was talking with a dear friend about a painful period that she was having in her relationship with her daughter. Both my friend and her daughter were suffering a lot in their relationship. They both felt betrayed and disrespected. They had both hurt each other, and they both felt some self-righteous anger about it.

In the face of my friend’s suffering, I tried to talk with her about compassion. I wanted her to have compassion and forgiveness for herself but also compassion and forgiveness for her daughter.

I used this word, compassion, in a way that I thought might liberate her. But she didn’t hear it in that way. She heard it as blame. She thought that I was saying that she didn’t care about her daughter, because she thought I was saying she didn’t have enough compassion.

That this is how language works. It means something to the person speaking it, and it means something to the person hearing it. Have you ever had this experience in a conversation where you felt that you just were not being heard? People were hearing your words, but they weren’t “getting” you? That’s language. Sometimes it’s hard. It’s complicated.

We both did the best we could at that time—the best we could and no better. This is how relationships work, and this is how communication works. Our context and our experience and our expectations make it hard for us to understand sometimes. We can hear some things, take them in. Other things we can’t even hear.

I think that’s what Jesus was talking about when he said, “I still have many things to say to you, [many things], but you cannot bear them now.” Jesus answered questions in the context of his time, but he didn’t and he couldn’t answer questions that weren’t even being asked yet.

Jesus walked with the disciples along the shore of the Sea of Galilee and taught them. But now we walk along the shore of Lake Michigan, and Jesus is not walking with us, not in that way. But the Holy Spirit is.

This is the promise that Jesus made to the disciples. The Holy Spirit will come and continue to guide you in all things: that’s how Jesus is with us today. That’s how God is with us—in the Holy Spirit.

But where do we encounter that Spirit? How can we learn in our own context, now, and remain rooted in God’s love, no matter what trials and tribulations we experience?

Yesterday I was doing some premarital counseling and marriage preparation with a young couple who live out of state but who will come back and be married here at Fourth Church. At one point the groom said, “This is off topic, but what do you think about the future of the church?” A rather big question! He said, “The church doesn’t seem to be appealing to the millennial population. The Bible is clear on some points that don’t seem to line up with what people believe now.”

So we talked a little about the role of the Bible and how we know what we know. We may think that the Bible is clear and simple, or we may wish that it was when we need a little help, but we read it from our own context and with our own expectations. When our context changes, our understanding changes too.

So we need a way to test our understanding, and Jesus gave us a test. He gave us a standard against which we could measure our understanding. Jesus said that the most important commandment of all the commandments is to love God, with all our heart, soul, and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. This is the most important thing, he said. So we call that the rule of love, that most important thing. And we try to use the rule of love like a lens through which we read the Bible.

To test our understanding, we can ask ourselves the question, does our application of the Bible reflect a love of God and a love of neighbor, even as we love ourselves? Sometimes our interpretations have not passed this test.

I was shocked when I found out that people used to think that the Bible was clear about slavery and white people said that God wanted them to own other human beings as their property. But as a society we came to believe that was an unethical use of the Bible. Slavery was certainly not God’s will. As Christians read the Bible through the rule of love, they had to see it differently. Society changed, our context changed, and our understanding changed with it.

We also know that people used to think that the Bible was clear that women are never called by God to preach the gospel. Some people still believe this. But we began to realize in a new context that women are called by God to teach and preach. The Spirit worked with us and helped us to see the Bible differently and to understand God’s will differently.

You can study old Presbyterian documents throughout the ages and watch the evolution of our theology, the words we use to talk about God and talk about the role of women in the church. We began ordaining women as pastors in 1956. Not so long ago.

The groom who spoke with me yesterday specifically mentioned the biblical understanding of homosexuality. On that too, we have come to understand that love is love; that love makes a family. Our context has changed, and we’ve learned to know people in a deeper and truer way, and that context has changed how we understand the Bible.

We realize mistakes we have made. We read the Bible through the rule of love as a lens, and we see it differently. We see God and Christ and the Spirit differently. Not that they change, but we change, and how we see them changes, and how we seek to live out our faith in the world changes.

Jesus encourages this kind of adaptation and change when he tells his disciples that they will keep learning from the ongoing guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit moves through the Bible—through the words it contains, through the stories that it tells, the stories that can change us. Also the Spirit moves through us, as we study it, as we begin to understand more and different things.

Some rabbis have described the Bible as a mansion of meaning, so big, so much meaning, and each word is a doorway into a whole room of meaning. You can walk through the doorway of any word to find a whole room full of meaning. I love the expansiveness of that image—of how much space there is inside that idea of the Bible for us to meet God, to be changed.

A pastor friend of mine has said that when he does a Bible study with his congregants, he imagines the Bible sitting in one of the chairs in the circle as a conversation partner. It’s a living, breathing document that came out of relationships—the relationships of all the people who told the stories first in the oral tradition and finally wrote it down and then copied it and copied it. Out of that, all those relationships, it grew, and it’s still in relationship with us.

What makes the Bible trustworthy is our process of reading it in community and in our context, all the while listening for what the Spirit may be saying to the church. We read through the lens of the rule of love. In this way we include the love of God, and we stay in touch with the wisdom of Christ, and we open ourselves to the transformative power of the Holy Spirit.

The Trinity is a way to talk about the complexity of God. God is not simple, and understanding God is not a simple thing. We have a living and Spirit-filled relationship with God, and our relationship with the Bible can help us with that if we continue to read it in community and if we stay open to its richness and don’t try to flatten it into something simple and merely literal.

I pray that we can let the Bible breathe God’s spirit into us. And let the Spirit continue to guide us into all wisdom, into all truth, as Jesus said. Amen.