The True Story

The Reverend Seth Ethan Carey

July 22nd, 2007

Amos 8:1-12

Mark 10:13-16

First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois

www.firstconge.org

630-469-3096

They met me in the hotel lobby as I was checking out. I’d just spent the past week in Connecticut, as a delegate for the bi-annual meeting of our denomination’s much esteemed General Synod, and a couple of friends from back home had come to meet me for breakfast before I caught my flight back to Illinois.

As I greeted my old comrades, I was standing next to a giant banner that the management had hung at the front desk in honor of General Synod XXVI. In bright, bold letters it read: “Welcome, General Synod!”

“Who’s General Sy-Nod?” inquired one of them with a friendly note of sarcasm. “Sounds like something out of Star Wars.” That led to an inevitably brief discussion about the merits of nominating a cybernetic robot general as the next Minister and President of the United Church of Christ.

As childish as they may be, I rather enjoy such absurd conversations. I enjoy them for the same reason that I love going to the movies—because they bring a strange kind of magic to our lives, a sort of vicarious glamorization of our otherwise mundane circumstances. Like most products of the imagination, these speculations allow us to envision a bigger world, a world that we can’t normally see.

My big brother is a master of this sort of vicarious imagining. As a child, he used to make up all kinds of over-the-top stories. I suspected that he was a big liar, but I was naive enough to wonder if they might be true. In retrospect, I don’t know how I could have been so gullible; because you see, most of his stories were about me.

I remember one in particular very clearly, probably because he sat me down and explained it to me in such a serious manner. I’d been kidnapped, he informed me, by a nefarious gang of neighborhood kids. For three days I’d been tied to a chair in their secret hideout, an old abandoned greenhouse down the street, where I was guarded day and night by preteen gangsters armed with whiffle-ball bats and switchblade knives.

I was about to ask him how I could have forgotten such a traumatic adventure, but he anticipated my question. “They’ve been using you as a test subject for their experimental narcotics,” he told me sadly, “and they’ve erased your memory.”

He went on to explain to me how lucky I was to have a big brother like him, a big brother with enough bravery and cunning to sneak into their perimeter undetected, a 9-year old shadow in ninja black, and disable my captors with his ingeniously-devised digital wristwatch that could both tell time and fire laser beams.

He actually sat me down and told me this. It’s no wonder I turned out the way I did.

But even in the face of my suspicions, how could I not be grateful for such a brother? Never mind that he used that gratitude as leverage to suggest that I do his half of the dishes that night.

***

When my brother told me his crazy superhero-vigilante stories, I guess I didn’t really know what to think. To imagine that anything might have really happened that way was impossible; but still, for some reason I trusted him. I imagine some of us feel the same way when we crack open the Good Book. In our modern eyes it might look more like a comic book than the infallible Word of God. Its ancient pages are filled with colorful legends of angels in white and demonic possession, giant creatures and warrior-children, evil kings, noble prophets, armies of darkness, gateways to Heaven, heroes forged in battle, cities rising and falling like the breath of a slumbering demigod, and an exorcist messiah executed at high noon. The Bible works hard for its distinction as the greatest story ever told.

But is the story true? Is it even, as they say on television, “based on actual events?”

In 19^th century Germany, a lot of people began to wonder. They started asking questions about the validity of this influential text. Perhaps they were fueled by the intellectual skepticism of the Enlightenment, or the recent discovery of ancient Babylonian scriptures that shed new light on the Bible. Or perhaps they were driven by Darwin’s recently published theory of human evolution, a theory that gunned down the first three chapters of Genesis without mercy. No longer content to take scripture at face value, the biblical scholars of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries embarked on a noble and tireless quest to determine the social and historical context of the Bible. Equipped with an intricate arsenal of archaeological evidence and literary criticism, scholars carved the Bible into a million tiny pieces and examined each one of them with the cold objectivity of a mortician, labeling them as poetry, or as history, or as legends to be told around a midnight fire. Once they’d gotten a reasonably good idea of what was what, they glued it back together and handed it back to the churches with a caution to tread lightly.

If I sound critical of their work, it’s only because the books they wrote bored me to tears in Seminary. And yet I’m immensely grateful for their legacy, because it cautions us against fundamentalism. It encourages a nuanced reading of the Bible, instead of blindly assuming that every word of it is historically accurate and literally true—which a lot of people do. Now, if you want to read it that way, that’s OK by me; but when people use the Bible as a weapon, I get angry. It’s like Orson Welles War of the Worlds all over again, with people mistaking the story for the real thing and starting a riot. We remember that Jesus spoke in parables—stories—and when people took those too literally, he got frustrated, too.

But there’s another problem, the flipside of the same coin. Those of us who carry Bibles that have been thoroughly dissected and duct-taped back together—figuratively speaking—often fail to take it as seriously as we should. It’s not easy working up the same enthusiasm for it as those who take it word for word as God’s honest truth. And I suppose that’s only natural.

But it also happens to be a mistake.

No matter that we shouldn’t read the Bible like it was some ancient newspaper, or history book. Yes, it’s filled with outlandish tales and political agendas and poetry. But it’s still a vital record—not necessarily of history, but of the ways in which people have experienced God.

And that makes it holy.

***

Still, it can seem so alien to us. The prophet Amos warns us:

“The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.”

I believe that time is now. There is a profound spiritual hunger in this world. There is a thirst in our ears, for hearing the words of the Lord. In fact, there’s a progressive movement underway to start teaching the Bible in schools again. Not as scripture, but as a significant cultural document. And I’m all for it, because for all the references to the Bible that get thrown around in our culture, it is shocking to learn how few people actually know anything about it, even in evangelical circles. According to a recent article in Time magazine, over 2/3 of Americans believe that the Bible holds the answers to life’s biggest questions, but only half of the adults in the U.S. can name so much as a single Gospel.

Of course, some people still expect their pastor to have the whole Bible memorized. But that’s sort of missing the point, don’t you think?

Seriously, it isn’t about memorizing books and repeating them like some kind of robot. It’s about learning the story, and being able to understand what it really means. That is what’s important. And while it’s good to be familiar with the important parts of the story, like humankind’s expulsion from Eden, and Moses’ liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, and the passion of Christ, it’s even better if you can fill in the blanks with some of the more obscure legends, recalling them like fond childhood memories. Like the time that those neighborhood kids were calling the prophet Elisha “Baldhead, Baldhead!” And then at his command, a bear ate them. Good times. Or remember when that young man was sitting in a window, listening to the apostle Paul preaching? Remember how he got bored and fell asleep—and then fell out of the window? Of course Paul brought him back to life. Hey, remember when the apostle Luke found out that Darth Vader was his father?

Right, that wasn’t in the Bible. I was just testing you. But anyway, I think you get the idea. Our Bible is full of great stories, and poetry, and even some real honest-to-God history, too, even if it isn’t always 100% accurate. But then again, I’ve never read a history that was.

***

It’s important to understand that there is a difference between fact and truth. Facts rely on physical reality, but truth is much harder to define. A fact is a fact if it happened; but whether it happened or not, it still might be true, insofar as it embodies true ideas.

In that sense, the Bible is a true story. It’s the true story of a people struggling to know their god. But the Bible is also mythological. That doesn’t mean that “it didn’t happen,” or that “it isn’t real.” It means that scripture is an attempt to clothe a vital truth in tangible images and words. The stories themselves—whether or not they are factual, and I believe that some of them more or less are—the stories themselves are of the utmost importance because they speak the truth, even if that truth isn’t always obvious. The Garden of Eden reminds us that none of us is perfect. The exodus from Egypt reminds us that God works to liberate the oppressed. Elisha’s revenge against those kids reminds us to never abuse our power, and Paul’s long-winded sermon reminds us preachers of the ever-present danger of putting people to sleep on Sunday morning.

Even my brother’s absurd tales of kidnapping and midnight rescues were manifestations of a deeper truth—that he’s my big brother, and he’s going to look out for me no matter what. Even as a small child, a part of me recognized that. And that’s why I trusted him, no matter how ridiculous his stories were.

Stories imbue within us a sense of wonder that transcends logic. They operate on us in ways that can’t be explained. I could tell you that God loves you in a three-point sermon, but the visceral tale of Christ’s death on a cross works like an injection straight to the heart. You don’t just know it, you feel it. And that’s why these stories are sacred. That’s why we need to hear them. They lend a childlike sense of wonder to our faith, and I don’t think we can afford to let our cynical modernity destroy that. We need it. I for one don’t always want to look at the world with “the cold objectivity of a mortician.” As Jesus once said, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it."

God is invisible to jaded eyes, to all but children. But that’s good news, because we are God’s children. And the words of our scriptures hang a cloak on God, defining the divine shape. Just think of the Invisible Man. He always wore that trench coat, and the fedora, and the sunglasses.

Without the sunglasses, you couldn’t see his eyes.

With the words of the Bible draped on God’s shoulders, God is a little easier to see. But the scripture is a flowing robe, always shifting in our finite human eyes. As much as we may crave the inerrant word of God, a stone tablet with the answers engraved in large, friendly letters, it is not what we hold in our hands. As much as we may long to look God in the eye, all we can see in this life are God’s sunglasses.

My big brother had a pair of sunglasses, too. “They offer maximum UV protection,” he informed me, “and they also allow me to see into the future.” His dry sense of humor was evident, even as a child. And yet behind those sunglasses were his real eyes, always looking out for me.

Whatever you believe, I hope you believe this: Behind the poetry and prose, behind the legends & veils, God is real. And that’s a true story.

But even the veils are magnificent.