A bishop once told me that the best definition of our Episcopal experience was "the Catholic Church where you don't check your brain at the door." There is no area in which that is more true than the interpretation of Scripture. I grew up in a tradition which taught that God sent the biblical authors into a trance and dictated the contents of the bible word-for-word in Hebrew and Greek. Seriously. And Scripture had to be interpreted factually and literally, even though it contains contradictions, factual and scientific errors, and terrible theology in places. That kind of hermeneutic simply cannot stand up to intelligent inquiry and has led to the proliferation of thirty thousand individual protestant denominations. More seriously it has led to droves of intelligent young people bailing out on the Faith. Thank God, they can find, as I found, the Episcopal Church and its rational engagement of Scripture.
We understand the holy books to be inspired by God yet the work of a cadre of fallible human beings trying to express their communities' experiences in search of God. Thus we read with every possible analytical tool available and with focus on the context/story of each author. Several readings today would lend themselves to serious analysis. For example, our reading from Jewish Scripture (II Sam. 7) might leave us wondering how the God who, Saint Paul says, does not dwell in human temples is today demanding a house to live in after dwelling in a tent. We could look at our New Testament selection (Mark 6: 30-34, 53-56) and query how Jesus' cloak could have curative powers. Instead, I want to take about our Ephesians reading (2: 11-22).
We know that the literary conventions of the Graeco-Roman world included a pass for plagiarism. Signing an author's name to a work was considered honorific, even if the content would not have passed muster with that writer. In that regard, we now know that Saint Paul did not write six of the books attributed to him. They are identifiable by unfamiliar vocabulary, theological strangeness, as well as reference to things that happened after Paul died. One of those six is Ephesians which is generally a beautifully-written inspiring book but we see today a major flaw literalists would miss. The writer says Jesus annulled the Jewish Law. Utter nonsense! God does not lie or go back on his promises. In today's psalm (89) God says to the Jewish People, "I will not take away my love or let my faithfulness prove false. I will not break my covenant." Saint Paul assured us that the Christian Movement was grafted onto the vine of Israel; it did not uproot it. Saint Peter, in the book of Acts, states that in every nation the person who loves God and does what is right is acceptable. So, no, God has not abandoned his first love. Therefore, our Communion and the Roman Communion, Methodists, United Church of Christ, Unitarians and others do not attempt to convert Jews. That does not mean that a Jew is denied entry to the Christian Covenant, which is open to all people. But this preacher is convinced that if God had really replaced the Jewish religion with Christianity (i.e. supersession) for faithlessness to God's will, then surely by now God would have replaced us with a third covenant.
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