Alright my friends, we are now in the second week of a brand new liturgical season, the Season of Origins. How many of you made it up to St. Johns last week? Good for you. Thank you.

For those of you just tuning in, we are making history right now. We are joining with a handful of other churches across the country as we develop a whole new liturgical season - much like Advent or Lent- from the ground up.

The Season of Origins will begin each year on Indigenous People’s Sunday and run for 4 weeks. And, if all goes well, it will be adopted by the wider church in the coming years.

On week one, which we celebrated for the first time ever last week, we will INVITE the church into the work of reconsidering various Biblical narratives that have shaped us - for better and for worse - throughout the ages.

On week 2, which is today, we will NAME and lament the harm that has been done at the behest of scripture and in the name of God.

On week 3 we will engage in the work of REPAIR(ing) past harms through justice seeking action.

And in week 4 we will IMAGINE how the church can be more just and generous in the future.

I’m sure you all think that sounds wonderful and yet most of you are probably still wondering where all this is coming from. So, in the words of the great theologian Inigo Montoya:

“Let me explain...

no, there is too much.

Let me sum up!”

Last Fall, a number of us read Dr. Kate Common’s book, “Undoing Conquest,” and gathered up at St. John’s to learn more about her work. In a nutshell, we now know that the story the Hebrew people tell about themselves in the Bible - their origin story, if you will - from their exodus across the red sea as they fled slavery in Egypt to their violent conquering and settling of the promised land, is not borne out by current archeological evidence.

What the evidence reveals instead, is a gradual exodus from the Egyptian empire as people fled increasingly harsh conditions brought on by climate change, oppression, and income inequality, to start new lives up in the uninhabited highlands of that region.

This loose collection of people were called the “Haibrus/Habirus” - literally, “the dusty” or “departed ones,” by the Egyptians and their neighbors. They were regarded as fugitives, rebels, and ruffians. But they were also ingenious! From what we can tell, the Haibrus developed new technologies for farming and water catching that enabled them to live far from the Nile.

They formed non-violent, egalitarian communities up in the hills that gradually coalesced into a people with a shared story that scholars believe grew into the narratives we now know of as the Hebrew Bible.

And this is good news. At least it’s good new for anyone who has ever actually read the Bible and then slammed it shut thinking, yikes! This is some horrible, violent, and awful stuff! I want no part of this!

Anyone? Me too!

For those of you who have remained blissfully ignorant, you need to know that this book might be holy, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of dangerous things in here. And perhaps the most dangerous part of all centers on the sections in Joshua and Judges that we refer to as the conquest narratives.

You may remember that according to the Bible, God led his people up out of Egypt into the wilderness with the promise that he would eventually bring them to a land full of milk and honey where they could settle down once and for all.

The only problem with this plan was that the land God had promised them was already occupied by other peoples. Under the leadership of men from Joshua to King David, the Hebrew people conquered the inhabitants of the land, slaughtering or enslaving every man, woman, and child who stood in their way, as they claimed more and more of the territory for themselves.

I wish I could say that this violent spirit of conquest was confined to that one time in history but, as you all know, these stories have been used by Christians ever since to justify everything from the crusades and the slave trade, to the colonization and genocide of indigenous peoples.

Even now, Israel’s current occupation and genocide in Gaza is defended by both Christians like our own U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Hukabee and Jewish leaders like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Biblical grounds. Netanyahu has pointed to 1 Samuel 15 - verses wherein the Lord commands Saul to utterly destroy every man, woman, and child amongst the Amalekites, as well as their livestock and their homes - as justification for the scorched earth campaign he has waged in Gaza since October 7.

Which is to say and name, (see what I did there?) on this the second Sunday of the Season of Origins in the year of our Lord 2025, that this Bible in the hands of the wrong people, or at least the Bible in the hands of people determined to do what is wrong, is a dangerous book. And it is why the work this season calls us to is as important and relevant as ever.

Thankfully, Dr. Kate Common’s scholarship in “Undoing Conquest,” undoes and undermines efforts to use the Bible as a license for violence, genocide, colonization, and oppression.

If the archaeologists are right and these stories of conquest never happened the way they are described, then it is high time that we re-evaluated them and learned to understand them in their original historical context.

Rather than read these narratives of conquest as historical accounts, we can now understand them as collections of oral histories that grew up around the home fire into tales of daring escapes and mighty victories. They were stories that made a small tribe of traumatized and marginalized people feel bigger in the midst of the giant empires that threatened to swallow them up.

These stories, passed down over hundreds of years, helped a diverse group of refugees craft a new identity as a people blessed by God to survive and thrive against all odds in a strange new land.

And, for our purposes today, knowing more about the origins of these stories gives us every reason to question any attempt to utilize them as permission to expand our own empires at the expense of other small tribes.

Or at least it should, right?

Yeah. And I’m sure we can all agree this is a good thing. But one thing I noticed as our two churches gathered last Fall to study Dr. Common’s book and consider the evidence, is how hard it is and how uncomfortable many of us were with the idea that -even knowing what we know now - we could reconsider or even re-write the Biblical story.

After all, for all its issues and the resulting abuses, the Bible is still our holy text. Many of us were taught that this is the inviolable word of God and we just need to accept it as is. We grew up in churches that hammered home 2 Timothy 3:16 almost as hard as John 3:16. That verse you heard today about how:

All scripture (emphasis on the all there) is inspired by God

and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness…

If it’s all inspired, if it’s all God breathed, who are we to question it? And if we dare to question any of it, then what’s to stop us from questioning all of it? I mean, it’s one thing to look at the earliest stories in Genesis like, say, the Garden of Eden or Noah’s ark and read them as myth, or accept that the holiness code in Leviticus was a law for ancient people we no longer need to follow.

But if Moses didn’t actually cross the red sea and Joshua never made the walls of Jericho come a’tumbling down, we are faced with a vexing question: at what point can we start to trust this narrative? When and where in the text does myth begin to settle into actual history? How can we know what is factual in these pages and how is that different from knowing what is true?

And not for nothing, but given all the damage this book has inspired combined with all the inconsistencies, contradictions, and misinformation that this book contains, should we abide by it at all? Perhaps it is time to throw this proverbial baby out with the bath water and just be done with it.

But there are at least 2 reasons I hope you won’t do that. Actually there are a ton of reasons, but I’m going to focus in on two today.

1. You don’t need to believe this book is the inerrant word of God and read it literally in order to believe that the Bible is holy and true.

2. If all the educated, compassionate, well intentioned people who understand that walk away from the Bible, then we’re leaving one of the most powerful and influential books in history solely in the hands of people who do not understand it and will continue to use it to do harm.

So today, in the time remaining, I want to say a few words about what the Bible is and isn’t and give you a sense of how we can read it both reverently and responsibly. OK? Great.

First things first, contrary to how it is packaged and sold, the Bible is not one book. It is actually a library that includes multiple genres: myth, history, law, prophecy, poetry, parable, polemic, memoir, propaganda, letters, and apocalyptic literature full of symbols and ciphers, which simply makes it impossible to read the whole thing literally.

You don’t read a parable the same way you read the news. You don’t read a poem the same way you’d read a law code. If someone tells you they take the whole Bible literally word for word, just ask them if they think God has wings? It says so repeatedly in the Psalms (17, 57, 36, 63, 91). I don’t know anyone who takes those verses about God hiding us in the shadow of his wings literally. We all read it metaphorically because the psalms are poetry.

Just as I don’t personally know anyone who reads Jesus’ imperative that you must give away all you own to be his disciple literally, which is weird because in that case I’m pretty sure he meant exactly what he said (Luke 14:33). Which is to say that nobody, not even the most diehard literal fundamentalist, reads it straight up literal word for literal word. Everybody, brings some level of interpretation, some level of picking and choosing, to their reading of the Bible.

Alright, moving on, you also need to remember that the Bible was written over thousands of years by dozens of different men reacting to circumstances incredibly far removed from each other and our own. Much of the Bible was transmitted and preserved orally for generations before it was finally transcribed, in all-capital letters with no spaces or punctuation or even - in the case of Hebrew - vowels.

This saved papyrus, but meant you needed an expert like a Rabbi, relying on previous knowledge and context, to parse the meaning. Just think about that for a moment. All the letters smooshed together in one solid block of text with no spaces or commas or anything.

Someone recently said that “200 years from now no one will know the difference between a butt dial and a booty call and this explains why the Bible is so hard to understand.”

They’re not wrong.

Modern punctuation, along with vowels and spaces were added beginning in the 6th century by scribes as they copied and translated the original texts into various other languages, an effort that, as you might imagine, involved a lot of interpretive choices too.

Speaking of which, the Biblical canon itself, is the result of hundreds of years of discussion and discernment. These 66 books that made the final cut - were not finalized until 1546 and Martin Luther was still arguing for the removal of Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation in the 16th Century.

To say then, that these words were inspired by God or even that this Bible is the word of God is not the same thing as saying they are the very words of God, straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak. No, that horse left the barn thousands of years ago. This book is, in the words of John Fuselage, “the world’s longest game of telephone”

[W]hen we read the Bible we’re reading translations ….of rewrites of copies…written by Greek-speaking believers, (translating Jesus’s Aramaic or stories from Ancient Hebrew) that had originally been passed down by word of mouth, through the centuries (into their vernacular and  their context which is completely different from ours) (“Separation of Church and Hate" p 70).

Contrary to what many Christians have been told to believe and many are trying, against their better judgment to keep believing, the Bible we have now is simply not a divinely dictated, scientifically sound, historically accurate, legally binding document that is internally and infallibly consistent full of straightforward answers to our deepest and most pressing political agendas and personal questions - though it can still surprise you that way.

What it really is, if we’re honest, is the record of a conversation people have been engaging in with God and about God for millennia. It is a conversation wherein people are trying to figure out through story telling and rule making and prophetically calling one another out, how to get this whole “love God and love your neighbor” thing right while, more often than not, getting it wrong and living to tell the tale.

And yet I still believe it is a holy book because I believe this is a holy conversation. One, to quote Brian McLaren, “into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed.”

Which is why Christians like us believe that this conversation is continuing even now. We believe that God is still speaking, that revelation is ongoing, and that our faith is evolving, which means that the work this new Season of Origins is calling us into is really just another step in this ongoing process of revelation.

So what I want you to know today is that it is okay to question scripture, to wrestle with scripture, to wonder aloud whether we are meant to take a story literally or figuratively. It is ok to debate whether a story is an invitation to engage in similar behavior or a warning away from that behavior. In fact, it’s not just okay, it’s vital to look at a story in both its biblical and historical context and see how even the Bible calls itself into question at times.

For instance, thinking back to the fall of Jericho, the Bible recounts that Joshua and his army committed genocide and, as I said before, many Christians have used that text as a license to do the same.

But we also read in that story that Joshua showed mercy and spared …anyone?… Rahab, and her family, yes. Rahab was a sex worker who hid the Jewish spies that Joshua had sent ahead of his army. As a reward for her help, she and her family were spared when Israel destroyed the city and everyone else in it.

Rahab then married Salmon and they had a son named Boaz who married Ruth - a widow he really should have steered clear of since she was a poor immigrant from an enemy tribe. But if you know that story then you know that everyone had a little too much to drink at the harvest festival that year and as a result Ruth and Boaz became the parents of Obed, who was the father of Jesse, who was the father of none other than King David, who was the great, great, great, great X 40, grandfather of …. Anyone?…. Jesus.

Joshua spared Rahab and that one act of mercy led to the birth of Jesus.

Which just opens up so many opportunities to read and understand this story in new ways, doesn’t it? And this story… this story is just the beginning. The more you dig into the troubling passages in the Bible, the more you find opportunities to understand them in new and liberating ways.

Jesus did it all the time. He faithfully recalled what the scriptures said and then preached a new word that called his people to lives of deeper mercy, grace, and compassion. We see it in the Sermon on the Mount where he says:

 “You have heard it said, ‘do not murder,’ but I say to you, watch your anger…” “You have heard it said, ‘‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth… Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you … (Matthew 5).

Jesus was constantly quoting scripture and then revising and rethinking it as a means to call us to an even higher way of love.

And friends, that gives us permission to read scripture in this way too.

As faithful Christian coming to these hallowed stories, we always have interpretive choices. We can read the story of Jericho as a license for violence like so many of our forebears have or we can read it as a call for clemency and loving people outside of our tribe. We can choose to focus on the harm or we can choose to focus on the one small act of mercy which occurred in the midst of a great horror, an act of mercy that generations later allowed Jesus to be born.

We can read the fall of Jericho as a straightforward historical account of a conquering nation that had God’s blessing to wipe indigenous people off the map, or we can read it in light of the archaeological evidence as a story of braggadocio written by a small tribe that was trying, with God’s help, to find a foothold in the midst of a dangerous world.

In Hebrews (4:12) we read that "the word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword.” Now is the season to consider how we will wield it. Will we give into our worst fears and violent tendencies and continue to wield these words as a weapon, justifying our basest instincts?

Or will we use them with skill and care, perhaps more like a scalpel is used for surgery, to peel back the layers of our history and our motivations, and expose to the light that which needs to be healed in us and around us? (Thanks to Brian McLaren for this analogy, “Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road” p 207)

Often what we see in this book says more about what is in us then it does about what is in the Bible. So may this new Season of Origins be a time to reverently and responsibly reconsider not just this book, but who this book is still calling us to be. Amen.