The Word of the Lord?

“Just rip out those pages from your Bible!”

That was the advice given by one of my faculty colleagues to a seminarian some years ago. The student was a gay man who had been tormented for years by the so-called “clobber passages” about sexuality in the Bible, those verses that seemed to label him an “abomination,” or “unnatural,” certainly “immoral,” and by extension even “spawn of Satan.”

Rather than dragging up all the historical-critical textual tools at our disposal as modern Christians to engage yet again with the insidiously deceptive practice of using sacred texts to justify cultural bias, my colleague (both exasperated by this student’s religious PTSD and also seeking to be kind) said, “oh, just rip those pages out and be done with it!”

As a gay man myself, and also a proud “liberal” (sometimes even an aspiring “progressive”), I empathized with that advice—and I was also appalled. Granted, the project of integrating religious faith and sexual orientation can feel terribly arduous, especially in a society with a well-established repugnance toward “non-straight” people. But integration at least implies some level of respect for both sides of the equation, in this both the human and the divine, and I can’t imagine physically shredding a sacred text.

On the other hand, preserving the “sanctity” of a text is often used as an excuse to maintain a cultural status quo rather than engaging with the much harder work of historical analysis, or communal confession, or the tasks of healing and reconciliation.

Consider, for example, the long and brutal history of Christian anti-Semitism. The Gospel according to John (among other texts) has been used frequently in Church history to both justify religious discrimination against Jews and, in some cases, to promote social and political violence. John refers to “the Jews” more than 60 times in his account of the Gospel (and no fewer than 19 times in John’s so-called “passion narrative” in which Jesus suffers and dies); these ancient texts continue to show up in contemporary contexts where “Christ-killers” still operates as a dangerous epithet for Jewish communities.

Some have suggested replacing “the Jews” with “religious leaders” in those particularly problematic passages. But this can easily obscure the underlying social dynamics of that powerful story in ways that drain the story itself of its human/divine drama. Equally troubling: in this harrowing time in U.S. society when our own government is erasing our own history—of transgender people, of Black people, of indigenous people, basically anyone who isn’t straight, white, and male—we must resist doing exactly the same thing with our sacred texts and our sacred history; erasing the problem won’t solve it and will likely make it worse.

Adding to these canonical conundrums, the progressive ire toward problematic texts is rarely applied evenly or consistently, and for some good reasons. The Bible has been used poorly and sometimes with horrific consequences concerning such a wide range of issues that no one person can keep track of them, whether with reference to race and ethnicity, or gender and sexuality, or economics and ecology. If “erasure” were generalized broadly—just remove, delete, ignore, or omit whatever troubles us, might cause harm, or doesn’t align with our preferred theological positions—we would not only have very few pages of the Bible left, we would surely eviscerate what it means to refer to a text as “sacred.”

But doing nothing about these religious vexations is not an option, either. I have spent too many years picking up the pieces of religiously ruined lives not to appreciate how damaging institutional religion can be, including these ancient texts that can sometimes be brutal, violent, and soul-killing.

So, what’s to be done and what can we do? I would propose taking three modest but nonetheless important steps.

The first step: stop calling the Bible “the word of the Lord” in public worship. That ritual declaration enjoys a long history and appears in most mainline Christian churches, and it’s time to retire it. Referring to texts from the Bible as God’s own “word” perpetuates the notion that even the vilest of biases originates with God and thus grants (religious) permission to act with (cultural) violence. “Don’t blame me,” misogynists like to say when treating women badly, “it’s in the Bible.”

No longer referring to a liturgical reading from the Bible as “the Word of the Lord” will sound to some people nearly as severe as my faculty colleague’s suggestion to rip pages from that book’s binding. But The Episcopal Church already approved that liturgical change back in 1997 (the “Enriching Our Worship” collection of supplemental liturgical texts). In the parish I’m privileged to serve here in Michigan we use those newer options more often than not: the lay reader usually concludes a reading by saying, “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.”

I love the ambiguity, or perhaps “Anglican breadth,” in that liturgical statement. After all, the Spirit might want to encourage us to heed a biblical exhortation, or the Spirit might urge us to resist a given biblical writer’s point of view—there’s no way to predict in advance what the Spirit will be “saying” to God’s people concerning a particular text for a specific occasion. Even so, that liturgical invitation still affirms the inherent value in the Bible itself, reminding us that biblical texts can always prompt insight or provoke engagement.

Inviting people to hear what the Spirit is saying right now with a biblical text  can also remind all of us that the Bible has been heard and read in many different ways in countless contexts over the course of many centuries; our job is not to figure out which one is “correct,” but to hear what the Spirit is saying—right now. (And this, by the way, is just one piece in the ongoing and urgent need to develop a robust “theology of Scripture,” which the late-biblical scholar Dale Martin passionately urged: if the Bible does not just contain “meaning” we’re supposed to “find,” what does it look like actively to make meaning today from those texts?)

And by the way, even the great Protestant Reformer Martin Luther insisted that the Bible is not the “Word of God.” But, Luther said, the Bible can become the Word of God when good news is preached with it. How we use the Bible matters, and the “good news” we might make from it will vary depending on the time and place in which we use it.

A second step, related to the first: clergy need to step up and shoulder their responsibilities not only as “pastors” but also “teachers” in their congregations (teaching should actually be considered part and parcel of providing pastoral care). If the lectionary assigns a particularly difficult or challenging text for a given occasion of public worship (and what counts as “difficult” will vary depending on the community and current events, among other factors) the ordained minister has a spiritual responsibility (and in some instances, an obligation) to name that problem explicitly. Even if the occasion does not afford sufficient time for a thorough treatment of the passage, it matters to have the challenge named.

Not long ago, I preached at a diaconal ordination on the Feast of St. Barnabas. The Gospel text appointed for that occasion came from Matthew (10:7-16) and included a reference to “Sodom and Gomorrah” and divine judgment. While I did not dwell on that portion of the text, I also did not ignore it.

“We just heard a reference to ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ in the passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel,” I said in that sermon. “And I can guarantee that every LGBT-identified person in this assembly today experienced stomach-churning anxiety, even if only for a moment, when they heard that reference.”

I then connected that anxiety to the ministry of a deacon, who is called to make the needs and concerns of the world known to the Church—and this includes, of course, the ongoing and shameful abuse of the Bible that traumatizes whole communities. Simply omitting that phrase from the proclamation of the Gospel in that liturgy would have been a form of religious denial and also a missed opportunity to illustrate how a religious text can shape the ministry of healing even when the wound itself came from that same religious text.

A third step, and perhaps the most important: remind ourselves regularly that the Bible was assembled by the institutional church for the sake of the church’s mission. The church does not exist to serve the Bible, in other words; the Bible exists for the sake of the Church. (As a priest in The Episcopal Church, I would say the same thing about the Prayer Book.)

Putting this point in a slightly different way: not everything in the Bible reflects something “true” about God; but every book of the Bible does reflect something vital about the person who wrote it or the community from which it emerged. And that matters—to me, it matters a lot. One of the many things I appreciate about the Bible is how it preserves stories of people and communities who struggled, sometimes mightily, in their efforts to know and love God, and to discern how they ought to live as God’s people in the world—exactly what I hope the church today is likewise trying to do.

Remembering in that way what the Bible is and the Bible’s proper role in the life of the Church does not in any way diminish its religious significance; it still counts as a “sacred text,” and I would say, even more so. After all, what could be more sacred than a tool to help God’s people participate in God’s own mission of healing, reconciling, and promoting a life of flourishing for all God’s creatures?

I can’t think of anything more “sacred” than that.