Texts: John 1:35-39; 1:43-46; 4:27-30; 11:32-36

Come and see.

About ten years ago I was able to attend a gathering in Barcelona, Spain called Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions.  As far as I could tell, all the major and minor religions of the world were well represented and the week was filled with seminars, panel discussions, and cultural activities.  For someone just beginning seminary studies, it was both exhilarating and overwhelming.  One of my dearest memories from that week is the lunch times.  A contingent from the Sikh religion had set up a large tent a short walk from the main buildings and every day prepared, served, and cleaned up a simple but abundant meal that was open for everyone, and free.  I went every day.  For the Sikhs it was a practice of what they call Langar, a sacred meal, meant to inspire humility in the Sikhs who serve, and those receiving, as we were asked to sit in rows on the ground together, and hold out our bowls when we wanted more.  They were always quickly filled.  Some of my best conversations during the week happened with whoever I ended up eating next to during Langar.  There were many words spoken throughout the week that gave insights into other religions, but the Sikhs taught something about themselves we couldn’t have learned any other way.  And all they said, basically, was “come and see,” or “come and eat.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about that phrase recently – come and see.  It’s come to mind especially in these last couple months when we as a congregation have taken a significant step in becoming more public about our wish to fully welcome and be blessed by all persons regardless of sexual or gender identity.  It comes at a time…

Text: Matthew 5:13-20

Today, November 2, is All Souls Day.  Yesterday was All Saints Day, the day before that was Halloween, and the day before that was trick or treating in the city of Columbus.  My relationship with this cluster of days has undergone significant shifts over the years.

During my growing up years, our family didn’t celebrate Halloween – meaning we didn’t dress up or go trick or treating, and we were taken out of school early on the day of the Halloween costume parade.  My parents weren’t comfortable with the way Halloween seemed to glorify death and fear.  I don’t remember feeling left out or upset that we didn’t get to do what everyone else was doing.  This was probably aided by the fact that we lived a few miles out of town so didn’t have to peer longingly out the window at all the action we were missing.  We just skipped it, not a big deal.

When Abbie and I had Eve and Lily and lived in a neighborhood in Cincinnati with lots of foot traffic, including for trick or treating, we joined the festivities.  Along with the fun they had, and our enjoyment of getting compliments about our cute costumed kids, there was another feature of the experience that stood out to me.  What other holiday or event do we have that brings a good portion of a community out of their homes and on their front porches to meet and interact with neighbors?  I’m not sure there is one quite like it.  As a person whose job description, in part, is to build community and foster intergenerational relationships, I was pleasantly surprised at how this evening enabled neighbors to meet each other, and how adults welcomed children and treated them with kindness.  Granted, the interactions were usually…

Text: 1 Samuel 15

Speaker: Jim Fredal

When I first decided on this text, and this theme, as a topic for a sermon on violence in the Bible, I asked some friends about it.  We read the passage and talked about it one evening for several hours and I have to say the conversation was heated, intense, and quite diverse. Some thought passages like this should be eliminated from the Bible, others found new ways to think about it, like the effect of trauma (the Amalekites harassing the Israelites immediately after their exodus) on victims and their inclination toward violence against perpetrators.  Others cited passages like this as good reason not to pay much attention to Christianity or Judaism.  I found all of their arguments compelling if not ultimately convincing, and have gone through a range of responses myself.
So how does one respond to a text like this?  We cannot in good conscience accept it and yet we hold it to be scripture, and as scripture it makes claims on us.  What do we do with a text that we don’t really understand and can’t agree with?  I have experienced and chosen a variety of responses in my life, some similar to those that came up in our conversation.
Option #1: I can simply affirm that, however difficult it might be me us to understand, God’s judgment is just.  God’s ways are not our ways, and the folly of God is wiser than human wisdom.  When God appoints the hour for the destruction of the wicked, who are we to question this judgment? If evil must be destroyed, mine is not to question or even comprehend the decision of God.  If God said, I believe it, and that settles it!
Option #2: I decide that I can’t accept what it actually says— God commanding…

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Text: Numbers 25:1-18

Today’s reading contains just about all the elements one could fit into a “difficult passage.”  There’s forbidden sex.  There’s idolatry and sacrifices to the wrong god.  There’s a treatment of foreigners, and specifically foreign women, as inherently dangerous.   There’s Divine wrath which demands public executions.  There’s a respected leader, Moses, ordering his people to kill their fellow Israelites.  There’s a plague that wipes out 24,000 people, many of them no doubt innocent.  There’s violent vigilante justice by a zealous individual, Phinehas, which apparently brings resolution to all the above problems.  Phinehas is rewarded by the Lord with “a covenant of peace,” for him and his descendants.  To top it all off, there is a final command from the Lord for Moses and the Israelites to keep harassing these foreign neighbors.  Forgive me if I’ve failed to name another feature of the story you find particularly troubling.

Welcome to worship.  Today’s lesson has been rated R.

This is indeed a difficult passage.

But, as we are committed to doing during this series, rather than cut this page out of the Bible or pretend like it’s not there, we’ll confront the story head on, wrestle around with it, and see what kind of blessing it has to offer.  That phrase I’ve highlighted as the sermon title “A covenant of peace,” comes from the words spoken by the Lord to Phinehas after he kills the Israelite man and Midianite woman, Zimri and Cozbi.  Posing it as a question is meant to highlight a topic of particular interest to us.  A question which hangs over this entire text:  In a violent world, what is it that makes for peace?

The passage is printed as an insert in the bulletins and I’d like to start by walking through the first half of the story as…

First, let me thank you for the fact that during these first two weeks of the “Difficult Passages” series you have allowed two white men to tell you all about the subordination of women.  As ironic as it is, we need to be reminded that this issue belongs to all of us and that men have their own work to do in making sure that gender equality and justice are available for all people.  So thank you for allowing me to do some of my own important work.

When Joel and I were first talking about this difficult passages series, he told me that there were a large number of scripture passages named by the congregation that were either directly about or have been used by some to subjugate women.  He said that he would be very narrowly focusing his sermon on Ephesians 5:22-24, the one passage that was named the most, so he said it might be nice for me to cast a wide net and preach about a number of the other difficult passages.  I think that in the world of ministry teams, this is what they refer to as hazing. 

As someone who has had to spend a lot of my spiritual journey wrestling with how to approach difficult passages, I feel like I ought to be able to articulate the perfect hermeneutical key for helping people understand what to do when the Bible makes us squirm, when the various texts seem so distant from anything resembling good news.  But there isn’t one magic way to interpret scripture as a whole.  The passages that make us squirm require us to think and respond in different ways, drawing from all of our available resources of moral discernment.  Sometimes they require us to hold together opposing viewpoints.  Sometimes they require us…