A STACK OF BIBLES: I have a sketchy memory of being on the playground of Bush Elementary School with my chums. When a guy might make a questionable claim about something – like he had ridden his bicycle to Bessemer or his dad knew Roy Rogers – one of us would retort: “Will you promise on a stack of Bibles that’s true?”

In reaching distance of my study desk, there is a stack of Bibles. Various go-to English translations, a Greek New Testament, a New Testament Greek-English Lexicon, and my beloved People’s Commentary of the New Testament.

They are nestled under a print of Rembrandt’s depiction of sleepy Jesus and his scared disciples in a boat on the stormy Sea of Galilee. You may recall the artist painted himself as the 13th disciple, edgily looking over into the waves.

We United Methodists are in a stormy sea over sexuality. We are about to split. Not the first time: we split over the stormy sea of slavery 175 or so years ago. Did not come back together until 1939, 94 years later. Now, a mere 83 years since then, a new group of unionists and confederates are dividing.

With slavery (in its day) and sexuality (now), like numerous other life issues across time, there is a seeming simple question: ‘what does the Bible say?’ That, friends, is the tip of the iceberg of authentic understanding Biblical authority…

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY: I am among those who bristle with the one-liner: “Well, this is not about sexuality but about whether you believe the Bible or not.”

I imagine the pro-slavery folks – armed with a host of Biblical verses that seem okay with slavery – used such a one-liner on those who championed abolition of slavery. Those verses are quite numerous compared to the handful of verses that can be clipped out of context to reject committed same gender love.

In truth, the authority of scripture is not being questioned. This people affirming versus people rejecting issue has to do with how the Bible is interpreted. A literalistic shallow reading misses the depth and width of the breath taking/giving life-transforming power of scripture.

With 2 Timothy 3.6, we affirm the ‘God breathed-ness of scripture’. Across the years, we have heard and called the Bible the Word of God. To fully clarify that phrase, we go to John 1.1-14. THE Word of God – Logos – the mind, heart, and love of the mystery we call God is proclaimed as becoming focused and enfleshed in the life and fate of Jesus.

Thus, more precisely, THE Word of God in our way of faith and life is Jesus. Jesus – that embodiment of God’s love, grace, and justice – is the lens, the interpretative key, for discerning God’s Word for treatment of people and the planet in the 783,137 words…31,102 verses of the Bible.

Like so many occasions since toddlerhood, I recently did time looking through my ophthalmologist’s phoropter, the gizmo that flips lens in the effort to help us see more clearly what is otherwise blurry. “This better or not so good? Better…not so good?” (My new specs are a bit better on my “mature” eyes.)

I’ve shared before how this reminds me of the account of Jesus restoring a blind man’s sight in Mark 8.22-25. First touch, the man can see, but people look blurry. With Jesus’ second touch, things become clear and focused.

My case is that Jesus, the phoropter-sight aligner of God, continually gives us that second touch across our life span.

He did that with such earlier Biblical teaching about getting eye plucking revenge (Exodus 21.23) and hating enemies in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. “You’ve heard before… but now I say to you…turn the other cheek…love/pray for your enemies.” (Matthew 5.38-45)

In the name of God’s love, Jesus continually invited questionable characters to his table that the super-dooper religious verse quoters of his day rejected.

Honoring the authentic authority of scripture entails an adventure in looking at the context of a passage, it’s situation in its time. There is the matter of carefully discerning, sifting for the gold of the timeless in the timebound for faithful application to our lives now.

What once seemed so clear about portions of scripture – slavery, segregation, second class treatment of women, rejection of same-gender love – now becomes blurry, needing the second (maybe the x-teenth) touch of Jesus.

The spirit of Jesus blows through scripture and our lives helping us to see others and ourselves with new eyes, broadened minds, warmed hearts, and outstretched hands.

BEING READ & POKED BY THE BIBLE: In an interview, Bono, lead singer of the famous Irish group U2 said:

“A book that is never off my nightstand is ‘The Message’, a translation of the Bible by the late American scholar and minister Eugene Peterson. I go back to it again and again, beguiled by the musicality of the language and the clarity of the translation. Some days I read it; other days it reads me.”

(NYT Book Review, Nov. 6, p. 6)

I’ve shared before the words of noted minister, teacher, writer Barbara Brown Taylor:

“My relationship with the Bible is not a romance but a marriage. One that I am willing to work on by living with the text day in and out, by listening and talking back, making sure I know what is behind the words…

Every time I poked it, it poked me back… In short, the Bible turned out not to be a fossil under glass, but a thousand things – a mirror, a scythe, a lantern, binoculars…a bridge… all of them to be touched…and used.” (The Preaching Life, pp. 56; 57-58)

The audacious adventure of honoring the authentic authority of scripture is not for the faint. It is an ongoing discovery of how the love of God stretches not shrinks us to embrace and be embraced by the cornucopia of people with whom we share this scary, sacred planet.

An audacious adventure that far exceeds riding your bicycle to Bessemer…