Terrible Texts

Living Water

As many of you know, when news of the Rev. Terry Jones' plans to burn Qurans on Sept. 11 hit the news, I decided that MassBible would respond by donating two Qurans for every one that Jones burned.  I decided that's the form that being God With Skin On would take in this situation.  As you might imagine, as the story hit both the national and international press, we got responses.

One was a sincere and respectfully asked question from someone considering making a donation.  His basic question was:

"I am just curious if you have read the Qur'an and if the distribution of said texts will be accompanied by any interpretive explanations to their prospective recipients which might mitigate and hopefully prevent a harmful interpretation of some of the harsher, more intolerant, and violent passages of the Qur'an."

This is a well-meaning, heartfelt response and I post it to get at an issue also represented in some of the hate mail we received.  The issue?  Plenty of people could write us with the same legitimate question about our distribution of the Bible.
 

Many, many people haven't got a clue what's in the Bible.  Even regular church attenders are often no more familiar with the Bible's darker texts than they are with the Quran's peaceful texts.  The lectionary leaves out stories like the Rape of Dinah in Genesis 34, and the Sunday School story of Noah cuts off before we find Noah drunk and naked and cursing his sons at the end of Genesis 9.  And that's just the tip of the iceberg in only one of 66 books.
 

To be fair, one person remembered that Elijah was none too tolerant of the prophets of Baal, as Elijah ended their contest on Mt. Carmel by slaughtering them in 1 Kings 18:40.  However, the person reminding me of this was using Elijah's slaughter to justify the condemnation of Islam, assuming, "You wouldn't condemn Elijah now would you?"  Well, actually, whenever I preach on that story I do come down pretty hard on Elijah for that action and, when I visited the site in Israel commemorating that event, I was troubled to see that it was a statue of Elijah engaged in the slaughter that marked the spot.  Because a biblical character does it, doesn't make it good.
 

The point is that I actually spend a lot of my time dealing with misuse and misinterpretation of violent and disturbing passages in the Bible.  But despite the fact that I have seen and experienced the Bible used in hateful, oppressive and violent ways (some in the e-mail we received), we do not put warnings in the Bibles we give to those in need.  That would simply insult the motives and intelligence of those who receive them.  We trust the message of Scripture that although hate may thrive in the short-term, it is the Kingdom of God that will prevail in the end.  We leave the Spirit free to do its work.  We offer guidance and interpretation for those who want it, but it is not given unasked.
 

While donating Qurans (to Muslims, I might add) seems to some like "an act of sheer apostasy from the Christian faith," our detractors will be even more horrified to learn that we are not willing to forbid God to work through other faith traditions.  We think that God is clever enough to sort out all our differences and compassionate enough to speak using whatever frequency we happen to be tuned into.  As God says to Moses in Exodus 33:19, "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion." I doubt that God will be consulting any of us to see who should be damned.  "Oh, that's right, Mr. Phelps, I almost forgot that I hate gay people."  NOT.
 

I am a Christian and lead an organization that has distributed Bibles to those in need for 201 years because, despite all the crazy, violent, and often confusing parts of the text, the Bible speaks to me and has had no small part in leading me to the God I know and love.  I have experience with its power for both good and evil and feel called to help those who struggle with the Bible to see that the horrors represented in Christian extremism need not be the only interpretation of the text.
 

One way I lived into that calling this month was to show that not all Christians are out to slaughter the prophets of Baal, even though we may think, worship, and believe differently.  When engaged in theological debate with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, Jesus did not throw the woman down into the well because there was a statue of Zeus in the Samaritan temple.  They had an intellectual debate on the merits, and then Jesus summed it up by dismissing their differences and saying, "Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."

When Jesus said "I am the way" (John 14:6),  I believe he meant that WAY to be the experience of God in the flesh...God with skin on...that people meet the God of love only by experiencing that love first in the flesh.  We tried to be that for the Muslim community during a week that is painful for all of us in various ways.  Whether we did that rightly or wrongly is for God alone to judge...and I'm perfectly okay with that.