Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 11, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I suspect by now many of you have seen this, the Monroe Pastors’ Fellowship Statement, titled "Why It Matters--Local Pastors Speak Out!" In it the pastors say they are going to address the matters of "the Authority of Scripture" and the "Sanctity of Marriage." It appeared in the June 23 issue of the Snohomish Tribune and in the July 7 issue of the Monroe Monitor. Although the statement never says so in so many words, it is intended as a statement against same-gender marriage and in support of keeping marriage the monopoly right of heterosexual couples. Now, I’m not going to preach on same-gender marriage this morning, at least not directly. I am, however, moved this morning to preach in opposition to this statement at a deeper level than the specific issue of same-gender marriage. This statement signed by twenty pastors in this town (in which there aren’t more than maybe 30 who are active) is, in my opinion, based upon and expresses such unsound theology and such bad history that I must speak out against what I believe to be its profound errors and in favor of a different, and I am convinced, better and more faithful vision of our religion and the Scripture upon which it rests.

As I was thinking about how to do that, one phrase in the statement kept leaping out at me. The statement includes this sentence: "[The Bible] is the revelation of the will of God and is not to be interpreted on the basis of personal experience." It was that phrase "is not to be interpreted on the basis of personal experience" that really got to me. It is this one small but pivotal part of the pastors’ statement that I wish to address this morning.

The assumption behind that assertion, and indeed one assumption behind the entire statement, is that Scripture is something absolute and unchanging, that it stands over against us as something external and objective against which we, our thoughts, and our actions are measured. I do not doubt that the pastors who signed this statement sincerely believe that that is what the Bible is. It is not their sincerity that I am questioning this morning, it is the theological soundness of their position and the ethics of that position’s consequences that I question, indeed that I dispute. And I want to get at what my problem with the claim that the Bible is not to be interpreted on the basis of personal experience through Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan that we just heard.

You all know the story. It is probably the best known of Jesus’ parables, although it may also be one of the most misunderstood, as I hope may be apparent by the time I’m done here in a few minutes. In it, a man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho. On the road he was attacked by robbers, who beat him, stripped him, took his belongings, and left him "half-dead." First a priest, then a Levite came by, saw the man, and passed by on the other side of the road. Later a Samaritan, a man most Jews would have despised as impure, as a heretic, came by. The Samaritan was moved by compassion, and he ministered to the beaten man at considerable cost to himself.

Now, that parable may not seem to have much to do with the Monroe Pastors’ Fellowships’ statement on Biblical authority and marriage, but let me suggest to you that it does. In particular, this parable speaks directly to the contention that we are not to interpret the Bible on the basis of our personal experience. To see how Jesus’ little story relates to our issue this morning, we need to understand some things about the story that would have been obvious to Jewish readers in the first century when the story was written but that probably aren’t apparent to us.

We start by asking: Who were the priest and the Levite and why didn’t they help the beaten man? Were they simply uncaring men not moved at all by the plight of the beaten man? We often think of them that way, but I think the answer to that question has to be "no," they were not simply uncaring men with no sense of pity for a fellow human being in distress. No, there’s something else going on here, and that something else has to do with who the priest and the Levite were and how they understood with faith, their God, and their Scripture-the Hebrew Scriptures of the Bible.

You see, the priest and the Levite were men of faith. They were, in our vernacular, church professionals, officials of the Temple in Jerusalem. The priest was just that, a priest, one who presided at religious ceremonies including in particular that animal sacrifices that were the mainstay of Temple life. The Levite was a kind of religious para-professional, a lay person who assisted the priests in their duties. They represent the leaders of first century Judaism, and as such they were men under the Law. They were bound to obey the Law. Beyond that, the believed that the Law came from God and was the Word and will of God. The Monroe Pastors’ Fellowship statement says at one point that the Bible is "the final authority on all cultural issues," and the priest and the Levite of Jesus’ parable would have agreed whole-heartedly. They believed in the Law as the Word and will of God in much the same way that the signatories of the pastors’ statement apparently do.

And the Law said they could not stop and help the beaten man. The reasons why they could not stop and help the beaten man all had to do with the notion of purity. The religious establishment of Jesus’ day taught that the faith was primarily about obeying the laws of purity set out most particularly in the book of Leviticus. Just as an aside, notice the similarity between the name of the book, Leviticus, and the Levite of the parable. The similarity is not a coincidence. Leviticus is the book of the Levites.

The purity code specifies certain things and certain people as ritually impure or unclean. If one came into contact with a substance of person that was unclean, one became himself (the purity is mostly about men, after all). The contaminated person then had to engage in certain cleansing rituals and often wait a specified number of days to become clean again. One who was unclean could not enter the Temple, where the priest and the Levite worked, so they had to avoid all uncleanliness.

The man beaten by robbers and left half-dead by the side of the road was unclean according to the purity code of Leviticus. He was unclean in at least two possible ways. First, he was certainly bleeding, or had been. His body had to have been covered to a greater or lesser extend in blood; and blood is unclean according to Leviticus. Anyone who touches blood becomes unclean. The priest and the Levite could not help the injured man because they were bound by the laws of purity, and those laws prohibit contact with blood.

Second, the man was almost certainly unconscious. He never speaks in the story, so I think we can assume that he could not speak because he was unconscious; and if he was unconscious it would not have been apparent to the priest or the Levite that he wasn’t dead. Under the purity code, a dead body makes the one touching it unclean. The priest and the Levite could not go see if the man were alive or dead because to tell if he were alive they probably would have had to touch him. If he were dead, they would become unclean. They would have violated the Law they had devoted their lives to obeying, serving, and teaching.

OK. So they were obeying the law. That still doesn’t tell us, however, what this parable has to do with interpreting or not interpreting Scripture on the basis of personal experience. Bear with me. Here’s the connection. I think we can assume that the priest and the Levite were not evil, cold-hearted, uncaring people. I think we can give them that they had a normal, perhaps, because of their work, even a heightened sense of caring for other people. They didn’t want to see anyone suffer. They didn’t want to see anyone die. In that world they would have seen and probably would themselves have experienced a lot of suffering; and they would have seen a lot of death, including almost certainly death within their own families. They were human. They certainly were moved by the suffering of others and mourned the deaths of others. If they would have held the plight of the beaten man up to the light of their own experience, they would have helped him. They would have been moved by compassion just as the Samaritan was.

The problem was: They could not interpret their Scripture, the Law, on the basis of their personal experience. For them, the Law was something external and objective, absolute and unchanging. And, to quote another line from the Monroe Pastor’s Fellowship statement, the Bible "means what it says." So, they ignored their experience and their natural human reactions. They obeyed the Law, and the beaten man continued to suffer as a result. He suffered until one come along who was willing to act out of compassion regardless of what the Law said.

And, of course, he is the one of whose actions Jesus approved. In this instance, the consequence of faith as obedience to external, objective, absolute, and unchanging Scripture was that a man suffered, and Jesus spoke God’s No! to that approach to faith. In this parable, as throughout his ministry, Jesus is teaching us that faith isn’t about an objective Scripture that stands over against us and against which we are measured. Faith does not require us to ignore our human experience, as the Monroe Pastors’ Fellowship statement says. Rather, faith calls us to live ever more deeply into human experience, all of human experience, and to find there the ways in which God’s ethic of love is calling us to act as the Samaritan of the parable acted-out of compassion, for the good of the other.

Friends, when we ignore our experiences of life, personal and collective, our Scripture dies. The Bible is alive today precisely because it speaks powerfully across the millennia, across cultures, across worlds. It has spoken powerfully to countless women and men, and it speaks powerfully to us, precisely when we bring to it our experience of being human, our hopes and our fears, our joy and our tears. it is in the interplay of the Bible with our lives, with our experience, that meaning is created. Without that interplay, Scripture is a dead letter, a book of interest to historians perhaps, but not to anyone else. In that interplay, the Bible is indeed the living word. Amen.