Myth Busting

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

September 19, 2010

Myth Busting

Revelation 9:1-12

Well, what in the world do we do with our text?

Is what I read really “the Word of the Lord”?

If it is, how are we to interpret it?

What are we to learn from it?

Locusts dressed up like horses equipped for battle?

Crowns of gold resting on their little locust heads?

Their faces with human features,

long locks of hair flowing from crown to chin,

lion’s fangs for teeth.

This may be more than we can handle on a Sunday morning.

Is it any wonder that the Lectionary detours around Revelation?

Is it any surprise that when John Calvin

wrote commentaries on all the books of the Bible

almost 500 years ago,

he pointedly omitted Revelation,

believing that it should never have been included

in the canon in the first place?

If this were a different church,

with a different approach to the Bible,

interpreting this text would be easy.

You would hear me say in no uncertain terms that

this passage paints a vivid picture of what lies ahead,

what will happen, soon, very soon.

It will be awful,

the end times,

bringing pain and suffering beyond imagination,

but only for those who are not among the elect,

those who don’t have God’s seal on their foreheads.

And then I would tell you what you need to do

to assure that you are part of the elect,

part of the 144,000 an earlier chapter in Revelation

tells us will be the saved.

(Revelation 7)

We’d all breathe a sigh of relief,

and then turn our attention to more important matters:

working to assure the salvation of those around us,

those we know are not part of the elect,

those we know are not part of the elect

because we can tell,

because we just know.

The Revelation to John –

and that is the book’s correct title,

not “Revelations” with an “s” –

is the most widely and wildly

misinterpreted and misunderstood book in the Bible.

Luke Timothy Johnson, an eminent New Testament scholar,

once said of the book, “Few writings in all literature

have been so obsessively read

with such generally disastrous results.”

It is this book, and passages like our text

that remind us why education and life-long learning

are so important to us as Presbyterians;

why we put so much time, energy and effort

into our Christian Education programs

here at MPC.

We want to understand God’s word to us

as we read the Bible.

But Revelation isn’t the only book in the Bible

that can be confusing, confounding,

elusive more than illuminating.

We need help, we need guidance.

Otherwise we risk misunderstanding and misinterpreting.

We risk getting caught up in myths,

the things we think we know

about the characters and stories in the Bible.

It is through our commitment to Christian Education

that we work at being myth busters,

cutting through the misunderstandings,

so we can find our way to God’s word,

so we can truly learn.

It would be so much easier for us

if we read the Bible as the literal word of God,

as some denominations do.

We could read each sentence,

each paragraph, each book,

and say, “that’s that.”

                 

But that’s not what we do,

not here in the Presbyterian Church.

We read the Bible as the “inspired” word of God,

and that means we have to work at understanding.

We have to read the words and then ask ourselves

what is it that God wants us to learn

from the book, the paragraph,

the sentence;

what is it that God wants us to take from the story

and weave into our own lives

so we become part of the story.

The Bible is filled with difficult passages

that we need to read,

and then read again,

and then read yet again to find a sense of understanding.

We need to read them in worship services on Sunday mornings,

but even more so, we need to read them in classrooms,

living rooms, retreat centers,

any place where we can gather with one another,

and someone who can teach us,

guide us,

lead us,

help us to find understanding.

It isn’t just Revelation that gives us trouble.

Even the Gospels are filled with confusing verses and texts.

What are we to do, for example, with Jesus’ adamant teaching:

“If your right eye causes you to sin,

tear it out and throw it away…

and if your right hand causes you to sin,

cut it off and throw it away.”

(Matthew 5:29ff)

Pair this teaching with what we read in the first letter of John,

“if we say we have no sin

we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us”

(1 John 1:8),

and we ought to conclude

that the seats in our Sanctuary should be filled with

one-eyed, one-handed disciples.

As we dig, as we read with deeper eyes,

with open minds,

learning that Jesus often used hyperbole to make his point.

He doesn’t expect us to take him literally;

he does, however, expect us to take him seriously,

and to work at understanding what he’s saying to us

and what he wants us to do with his teaching.

The Bible is filled with word paintings,

lessons taught through illustrations,

through metaphor, analogy, allegory

Jesus often spoke in parables,

many of which confound us and confuse us

“Tell us what to do” we say to Jesus,

and his response is maddening:

“Let me tell you a story,”

and then he relates to us a vignette

something about how we are all like dirt,

different kinds of dirt,

leaving it to us to figure out

just what kind of dirt we are.

And oh how quick we are to conclude

that we’re the good dirt,

the good soil Jesus talks about,

while everyone else around us is rocky and thorn-ridden.

(Mark 4)

But Jesus doesn’t give us time to grow smug

before he tells us another story about

how we have planks,

veritable logs, in our eyes.

How absurd it sounds to us to hear Jesus tell us

that the meek will inherit the earth.

living as we do in a society that prizes achievement,

wealth, and power.

The news this past week that the number of Americans

living in poverty has never been greater,

forty-four million men, women, and children

one in seven Americans,

was greeted with a yawn.

How can they inherit the earth?

It is the strong we focus on,

and the bigger story this past week

was how and why we should cut taxes for the wealthy.

                 

We gather in classrooms

and open our Bibles and our minds

as we lift up our prayers:

“Teach us, O Lord.

Help us to understand your Word.

Help us to find ourselves in the pages of the Bible,

in the stories,

for we know the Bible is neither

history nor science,

but a love story,

a drama about you and your children,

a story that is unfolding still,

a story in which we all have a lead role.”

The powerful play “Inherit the Wind”

was based on the famous Scopes trial of 1925,

the trial that pitted the teaching of evolution

against the creationist dogma of fundamentalist Christians.

In the play the lawyer Henry Drummond,

in his defense of the teacher Bertram Cates,

asks in exasperation the lawyer for the prosecution,

the great Matthew Harrison Brady,

“Why did God plague us with the power to think?

Why do you deny the one faculty

which lifts us above all other creatures on this earth?”

We do have the power to think,

to reason,

to unpack, parse, compare, contrast.

We’ve been given these gifts by God

and God expects us to use them fully;

we cannot hope to grow in faith otherwise.

Is there imagery more powerful

than what we find in the Old Testament book of Ezekiel,

where the prophet finds himself

in a valley littered with bones, human bones,

bleached in the harsh desert sun,

the only remnants of what had once been vibrant human life.

It is a hopeless scene,

more Halloween than hallowed.

But then into that scene comes God,

telling Ezekiel that the bones will rise up in new life.

And before Ezekiel’s very eyes they do just that,

the bones clattering and rattling together,

the ankle bone connected to the leg bone,

the leg bone connected to the knee  bone,

the knee bone connected to the thigh bone

as they hear the word of the Lord.

We are not meant to read this scene literally, of course.

But we are called to study this scene

and draw lessons from it.

And we are to take the same approach

to everything we read in the Bible,

including the wildest passages from Revelation.

We have so many learning opportunities here within our church:

the Sunday School classes for our children;

Adult Education opportunities;

Women’s Circles;

the two Bible Study classes I lead each week.

Now that Melissa has joined our staff,

we are hoping to expand learning opportunities.

Find your place to learn,

find your place where you can read with deeper eyes.

Frederick Buechner calls the preacher

 a “fabulist extraordinaire”

because so much of what we preach on makes no sense,

sounds so wild:

a talking snake;

a woman almost 100 years old having a baby;

a giant 9 feet tall taken down with a rock

slung by a skinny teenager;

a king known throughout the world for his wisdom

who also manages to find time for 700 wives.

And wildest of all is the story of a child born out of wedlock,

who, as a man, leaves his livelihood behind

to strike out as in itinerant preacher

in a world filled with people claiming to be prophets,

whose efforts result in his arrest

and then execution as common criminal,

a man who we say without a moment of hesitation,

has risen from the dead and is with us even now,

our Lord and King.

These are the stories that fill the book

we call the Word of the Lord.

Find your way into the story.

For you are there within those pages,

within those stories.

That’s no myth,

but the revelation that matters most:

the revelation of God’s love for you, me,

for all the world, not just 144,000,

the Word of love revealed in

that itinerant preacher,

our Lord, our King, Jesus Christ.

AMEN