1 John 3:11, 14b-18
For this is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.....Whoever does not love abides in death. All who hate a brother or sister are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them. We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
When you get right down to it, the main point of that reading is Jesus’ love for us, the sheep, so I have just chosen to speak on love – Love and Not-Love. Last week, if you recall, I wore my “don’t-hate-the-sin-and-love-the-sinner, just Love” tee-shirt, and pointed out how often people use that phony not-real scripture as justification to go ahead and hate the sinner anyway. This week I decided to skim the internet looking for other non-scriptures that get quoted as if they came straight from God’s mouth but I got side-tracked, as I often do, into the realm of things that actually are in the Bible – but that we choose to ignore.
I’ve been your pastor here for quite awhile now and if there is anything you have heard me say over and over ... and over ... it is that ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ are not necessarily the same things. Similar, yes, but synonymous, no. Those of us who seek the ‘truth’ in scripture have an easier time, I’m sure, than those who look for facticity. We can, without damaging ourselves, accept that certain unwieldy sayings are merely cultural artifacts of the time and place in which they were written, and not necessarily the eternal word of God, even though they are in the Bible. If you are here today, you clearly don’t place any huge importance on Paul’s command that women should sit-down and shut-up in church and none of us (I hope) are in the habit of dashing out the brains of babies when we invade a new territory.
Those who believe in the Bible as literal fact have a more difficult time with this kind of scripture and often end up tying themselves in knots trying to explain them away. Many of these verses come out of Leviticus. Some are deadly serious but others are just plain silly to our way of thinking today. Like, you can’t wear clothing made of mixed fibers. It’s an abomination. Anyone here today wearing pure linen all the way down? I didn’t think so.
Anyone here ever read a fortune cookie or looked at your horoscope in the newspaper? The penalty for that is permanent exile from the tribe.
How about you men - you look clean-shaven ..... abominable.
Without meaning to pry, are any of you here descended from an illegitimate person? If so, you’ll have to leave - you can’t be here. Scripture says.
OK - have you ever eaten shrimp? Lobster? Clam chowder? Too bad - abominations, every one of them. (I am in trouble, because I’m not giving up clam chowder.)
Now these as I said are basically silly in our context and while we recognize them as maybe important to their time and culture we are perfectly happy to ignore them today. There are a lot more – a lot more -- but I want to move into a few that are not so humorous.
How about a man who has been unfortunate enough to have testicular cancer? Thrown off the boat. Those 'things' are really important in the religious life, you know. And a woman, who seeing her husband attacked, had better not rush in to help defend him, because if her hand touches the genitals of the attacker, her hand has to be cut off – no exceptions. Says so, right there in Leviticus.
Absolutely no tattoos allowed. Tell that one to today’s world. That shuts a whole lot of people out of the worshiping community.
And then, of course, there is divorce. This is one of the few of these prohibitions that shows up in the New Testament, too. Scripture is really quite clear and blunt. Don’t do it. Human decency might point out that forcing anyone to remain in a failed and miserable marriage is hardly a sign of loving each other, but some churches do remain hard-nosed about this. It is interesting, though, to see the numbers of biblical literalists who manage to slide right past this one, rather than shut the doors to people who put money in the collection plate.
And then, of course, there is the main “clobber verse” used to excuse all manner of hateful behavior against gays. In the middle of all these ridiculous prohibitions – right there with don’t wear polyester and don’t eat clam chowder and if a lizard falls into a clay pot you have to break the pot, the writers of Leviticus tells us “do not lie with a man as a woman,” and from that one small sentence – lost in the midst of page after page of other “do not’s” – that we mostly happily ignore – our sad country has lost it’s mind in an orgy of hate-spewing – all in the name of obeying a loving God.
Oh, and there are also some dandy verses in there about not withholding food from the homeless but we don’t hear much about them today either.
My point in all this is not to make fun of others but to point out how deadly serious it can be when we set out to blindly enforce every word in scripture as if they were all of equal importance and without ever pausing to consider if it really sounds like the word of our living, loving God. So much of what passes for Christian faith today is powered by sheer, blind ignorance. Like the guy I saw who proudly had the words from Leviticus 18:22 tattooed on his arm in big letters. That’s the “do not lie with a man as with a woman” one. He was apparently blissfully ignorant that as far as Leviticus was concerned his tattoo was every bit as much of an abomination as the supposed “sin” he was advertising against.
We cherry-pick what we choose to believe. We all do it, but if we are going to do it, then let us do it deliberately rather than from ignorance. The Bible is too important to treat it so casually. We need to learn about it and read it prayerfully – listening for truth as much as we may look for facts. How about if more people actually chose to obey Jesus’ teaching that we not judge each other or that we love each other as he loves us? I wish the Christian world was as dedicated to those verses as that one short one back in Leviticus. And why are "Christians" ignoring Jesus in favor of Leviticus, anyway?
Listen to part of today’s reading again: We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods – [or God’s love or God’s compassion] -- and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help? ..... Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
Let us love.