Whence “Scripture”?

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Sept. 14, 2008

The people of the Book speak:

Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad :   “Hear, O Israel! The LORD our God is One!” which is recited as a prayer morning and night by observant Jews the world over.

La illaha ill Allah, Muhammadur Rasul Allah (pbuh).  Or, “There is no God but the One God, and Muhammad is God’s Messenger (peace be upon him).”   That’s the daily prayer for Muslims known as the Shahada, from the word “to testify,” for many in Islam a pillar of their faith.

For Christians, you might say the pillar of their faith would be the Greatest Commandment, Jesus’ response to a Pharisee’s question in the 22^nd chapter of Matthew:  “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.   And You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets – all the rest is commentary.

These are from the written traditions of these major world religions, from the sacred texts known as “scripture” – the primary sources of the articulation of a faith.   For many Christians, the Christian Bible alone is scriptural, though there are many versions and translations, so that finding out which “Bible” one means is often quite a task.   For Jews, the Pentateuch, or first five books of the Hebrew Bible, is thought of as Torah or scripture, though ‘scripture’ for many Jews may include both oral and written traditions of the Talmud and the Midrashic texts as well.  

In Islam, the Quran is sacred scripture only in its original Arabic, though most Muslims hold Muhammad’s life (sira) and traditions (sunnah) in a position of scripture-like authority, too.

Other religions have their written sources.   For Buddhists, the Buddha-dharma, or Path of Awakening, might be found in the collected sayings of the Buddha, mainly the Sutras, or perhaps in the other commentaries on those sayings.   For the Hindu, the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Puranas form the basis of their faith narrative.   Other books comes from other times and places:   the I Ching from China and the Tibetan Book of the Dead are but a couple;   you may think of other examples of sacred texts of other religions.

In my everyday life, I hear the word ‘scripture’ from my Christian colleagues and friends, and when they say it I’m pretty sure that they’re talking about the words of the Christian Bible.   And I often wonder, if I used that word, what would I mean?   If I take my identity as a UU seriously, then I need to consider how to converse with these friends of mine.   If I were to tell them what I thought MY scripture said, what text or texts would I look to?   What kinds of words would I leave in, and what kinds of words would I leave out of a body of writings I would call primary, sacred, scriptural?

It’s a hard question and I’m not sure I have a good answer yet, but I’m wrestling with it so I want to share with you where I am.   Considering some of the sacred texts of the world, let’s see if we can define scripture, figure out what functions scripture fulfills in most settings, and then see if we can find some common traits that may give us some clue as to where to begin looking for our own.

For starters, scripture seems often to be:   1) the story of human witness to the divine,   2) it is often formative of the identity of a faith community, and   3) it is designed to draw us out of our own experience and into the experience of others.   If scripture can be defined as human witness to the divine, then there is little reason to limit it to biblical or any other particularly sacred texts, for many writings, both ancient and modern, sacred and secular, witness to the divine.   If scripture can be defined as formative of the identity of a faith community, then there is little reason to limit ‘scripture’ to things in a particular canon (or official body of works), as many writings outside traditional canons fall into that category.   If scripture can be defined as that which draws us out of our own experience and into the experience of others, again there is little reason to limit this to the Bible or the Vedas or the I Ching, because many texts – sacred and otherwise - do that for us, even novels and short stories and other narrative and expository forms.

An important question I’d ask about ‘scripture’ is whether a text is inspirationally expressive or inspirationally repressive.  To be considered worthy of our attention – and most sacred writings do this - scripture should serve the function of potentially inspiring the building up of the human project and its connection with the divine rather than chipping away at its foundations or inspiring its tearing down.

Yet another role scripture may serve is to act as proclamation, proclaiming the Beauty of Life or the Good News or the Truth, whether overtly religiously or not.   Depending on context, this proclamation may come in many forms, and thus scripture need not necessarily be recognized as being the Word of God or named as such.   In fact, the focus of scripture may not be on “God” at all, but rather on humanity’s struggle with issues of life and love and finitude.  So to sum up our working definition for the time being, scripture is:

“text or communication that 1) consists of human witness to the divine (in whatever language the divine is made manifest);   2) formative of the identity of a faith community;   3) draws us out of our own experience and into the experience of others;   4) is inspirationally expressive;   and 5) may serve as proclamation.”

One thing I notice about this intentionally broad definition is that it doesn’t limit us to material that others necessarily consider biblical or scriptural.   In our tradition, especially, sources far and wide can serve the purposes of midrash in particular contexts, regardless of their original or overall intent (midrash being the Jewish term for commentary on a text or the comparison of one source with another).   Midrash comes in many forms, and much commentary that is not explicitly meant to point us toward that which is larger than ourselves does so anyway, in one fashion or another.

I also notice that under this definition, there may be portions of many canonical texts that don’t pass muster – for example, those that Christian feminist theologian Phyllis Trible has rightly called Texts of Terror, like the killing of the infants of one’s enemies in Psalm 137;   surely a text that makes senseless victims of children cannot be said to be inspirationally expressive, and there are many examples of such within the biblical canon alone (a reason, many of you have told me, for rejecting the Bible as your own scripture).

Under our working definition, scripture should be able to be taken seriously if not literally, and should stand up to the rigors of examination by reason and experience, which does not preclude the idolatry of worshipping the text rather than the object of the text – redefinition alone will not rid humanity of its potential to ‘stray from the path’ (I think that’s a UU euphemism for sin).

 

Finally, let’s move from the general to the specific, and list a few examples of writings we may consider scriptural for our purposes.   Let’s begin with all those sacred texts we mentioned before:   the Christian Bible, the Hebrew Bible, the Quran, Vedas, and others.   Since we took our working definition from an examination of them, they ought to fulfill all the requirements:   they’re human witness to the divine, their formative of a faith community, they draw us out of our own experience and into the experience of others, they’re generally inspirationally expressive, and people certainly use them as proclamation.   All that’s true, with one caveat:   they’re formative of someone else’s faith community, not ours, or not one we recognize as wholly ours.   So they may be scripture, but they may not be our scripture.

For something closer to home, we had a couple of readings earlier this morning, one from William Ellery Channing and another from Ralph Waldo Emerson.   Channing, known as the Father of American Unitarianism because he claimed for us the epithet Unitarian in his 1819 sermon, Unitarian Christianity, is a good candidate because he preached and wrote pretty much in our own vernacular, though in the early 19^th century.   From the piece we read this morning, “I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstance; which discovers everywhere the radiant signatures of the Infinite Spirit, and in them finds help to its own spiritual enlargement.”   Certainly Channing was concerned with the freedom of the human spirit as well as with the formation of an American Unitarian faith community.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, another 19^th century Bostonian and founder of the Transcendentalist movement, wrote and lectured prolifically for decades and led many to begin to notice the natural world around them in new ways.   From the reading this morning, “it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.”   Some of his words stand the test of time very well, others of his writings perhaps not so much.   For example, his words, “ Nobody can bring you peace but yourself” resonate well today.   On the other hand, “ Men are what their mothers made them” sounds vaguely offensive, either to men or to mothers, I’m not sure which the worse.

Another of our own is James Luther Adams, the guiding light of Unitarian theologians in the 20^th century.   That was Adams in our responsive reading:  “I call that church free which enters into covenant with the ultimate source of existence, that sustaining and transforming power not made with human hands.”

But still I’m not sure.   There are so many of our fellow UU’s who think clearly and write well and deserve our attention.   Unitarian abolitionist Theodore Parker, pioneering feminist and Universalist minister Olympia Brown, Humanist leader and minister of this congregation Curtis Reese.   And yet, I’m not ready to limit us to people we think of as coming out of our own tradition.  

What about novelists and non-fiction and short story writers;   Flannery O’Connor and Alice Walker and Walker Percy and Annie Dillard certainly write of the human encounter with the divine;   they point us beyond ourselves, are inspirationally expressive, and formative of an individual spiritual depth if not a communal faith.   I love the earthy poetry of May Sarton, the sublime nature of Wendell Berry, so many others.   I can’t imagine gathering here at church without sometimes reading Mary Oliver to each other:   “You do not have to be good.   You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.   You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Maybe that’s what’s formative of our faith tradition: a willingness to search broadly, a willingness to be inclusive, a willingness to burst beyond the dusty old pages.   When I think of all the possibilities that cry out to be included in what we might call scripture, I am caught up in a reverie, stumped by sheer volume, wanting not to draw lines of exclusion but to gather it all and relish it and live within it.   Maybe that’s the best test of scripture – that we long for it, that we cry out for it, and it for us, and that it becomes for us the pointer to the ultimate source of existence.

 

A confession may be appropriate here.   In this quest of mine to define scripture for myself, I found, lying hidden in the darkness of my past, the biblical groundings of my childhood.   After all, I grew up as a white male kid in the American South of the 1950’s – virtually everybody I knew said they were Christian, whether they acted like it or not.   I am aware that the Golden Rule – “Do Unto Others as you would have them do unto you,” a mainstay in many religious traditions - is writ in bold and italics upon my psyche.   Along with it, near that deep place and in slightly smaller font is inscribed a question that Jesus is said to have parabolically posed, “Who is your neighbor?”   Doing unto others and discerning my neighbor are two theological activities that speak strongly to me as a person of faith.  

What is it that’s deepest in you?   What questions lurk beneath the layers that drive you daily on your quest?   I hope we find readings together that you can count as scriptural for yourself.  

In the end, it’s not the one book we claim that saves us.   Grace comes not through attaching ourselves to one book or to many;   grace comes through engaging with others and with the whole of life.

 

So may it be.