The Bible: What it Says & What it Teaches

It is part of our human nature that we tend to see what we are trained to see and want to see.  Just as our eyes tend not to see things that don't move, so our minds tend to overlook what is not obvious to our training and inclinations.  Thus, the Bible is filled with passages that support the role of good works in faith, but Protestant eyes have long been trained to read past them and, instead, notce those passages that support the idea of grace alone.  The works-righteousness passages lie hidden in the weeds while the grace alone ones stand out like lone trees on the prairie.

Failing to see the implications of a passage or a verse in the Bible because it is obscured by the reader's values, attitudes, training, and beliefs is nothing new.  Titus 2 provides an example.  Reading from N. T. Wright's translation of the New Testament, The Kingdom New Testament, Titus 2:5 instructs young wives to be submissive to their husbands, and 2:9 enjoins slaves to be submissive to their masters.  Since ancient times down to the near-present Christians lived in hierarchical and patriarchal societies, and they took note of the obvious message found in these two verses.  They undergirded hierarchical and patriarchal values and attitudes. In antebellum America, slave owners used this and other biblical passages to justify chattel slavery and all of the actions they took to suppress resistance to it.  Even today, some Christian groups intentionally treat women as second-class members because of what "the Bible says."

Meanwhile hidden away in the weeds is Titus 2:11, which Wright translates as stating, "God's saving grace, you see, appeared for all people."  For women as well as men.  For slaves as well as masters.  God's saving grace was already egalitarian in the age of the early church, and it has remained so in the face of the values, attitudes, and behaviors of societies that reject the very idea of social equality.  The Bible "says" women should submit to men and (black) slaves to their (white) masters, but it also says that Christ's sacrifice and God's love is equally for women and slaves.  The disturbing questions raised by verse 11 lays there in the weeds waiting patiently to be noticed—namely, if God in Christ sees no essential difference between slaves and masters, women and men, then how can we as humans claim that one is greater than the other?  How can we in all good conscience place them in marital or economic bondage?  If we then look to the example of Jesus of Nazareth, the one who persistently defied social conventions for the sake of the folks at the margins of society—if we look to his example, we find ourselves rejecting the "commonsense" attitudes, values, and behaviors of societies that turns people into second-class categories—woman, slave, colored, gay, not us.

Suddenly, we notice that there is more to the prairie than that lone tree that seems so obvious.  In the grass, there is another kind of life.  We discover, amazingly, that the Bible "says" women and slaves are second-class types of people, but it teaches that they are not—not in the eyes of God.

The Shadow of Slavery

Yesterday, January 21, 2013, President Obama delivered his second inaugural address to a crowd estimated at roughly one million souls.  Only time will tell whether or not it will become one of the better remembered inaugural addresses, but whether it stands the test of time or not it is a well-thought out testimony to enduring themes in our nation's life.  It is an articulate meditation on liberal values and a deft summary of the President's vision for the country and of his agenda for his second term.  It is worthy of our reflection and response—worthy of some quiet time reading and meditating.

Different ears will hear different things in the speech.  For me three words leapt from the text: equality, dignity, and change.  I could not but feel that the institution of chattel slavery cast its long, sad shadow across the speech and the day.  We are not shut of slavery nor of the racism that sustained it for more than two hundred brutal, bloody years.  The struggle for civil rights and economic justice suffuse nearly every paragraph of the President's speech, and undergirding them are three things that freedom-starved slaves longed for: equality, dignity, and change.  Racists of every generation including our own resist these same values, or rather reserve them for "their kind" and "their people."  The loathing that Mr. Obama has had to suffer through is a measure of the lingering voice of the slave holders who still, still, still cannot abide the freedom granted their former slaves by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.  The echoes of Dr. King in his address is the lingering voice of the descendants of slaves who themselves were still not free.  In the last fifty years, we have come a long way, but the President is correct.  No achievement is final, no victory is forever, and our journey is not complete so long as people of color, women, and gays have not achieved full equality and dignity.  Until that day, we must continue to seek change.

Most of us have been intensely disappointed by the politics practiced on Capitol Hill and in many of our state capitals since the election of President Obama in 2008.  It is painful to watch one of our two major parties, a pillar of our democracy, taken hostage by absolutist ideologues.  It has been sad to witness the President's honest attempts to enter into dialogue and cooperation slapped away in a manner that dripped with disdain and disrespect.  Birtherism is a stain on our national conscience, a reminder that equality and dignity are still being contested in our time.  We really do need to change.

That being said, it is also remarkable that we re-elected a "person of color" to a second term of office in spite of the obstacles thrown in his way by those who calculated that they could bring him down by practicing the "politics of 'no'."  It is remarkable that a descendant of slaves stood before us yesterday and called on us to continue the journey.  Slavery still casts its long shadow across our nation, but it is a shadow.  And, as I think about it, perhaps in our generation we are more blessed than harmed by that shadow because it has forced us to see that equality is something that we must grant not just to light-skinned straight men.  Mr. Obama began his address by recalling the Declaration of Independence's bold proclamation that, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."  They are also the unalienable rights of women, gays, Muslim Americans, and immigrants from Latin America.  They are also the rights of children who suffer abuse and families that struggle to make ends meet.  Equality.  Dignity.  Change.

Perhaps, just perhaps, lurking within the shadow of slavery is the Spirit working, working, working for the Kingdom.  Our faith encourages us to believe it is so.  Amen.