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…

Text: Ephesians 5:21 – 28

This is the first of four sermons in our Difficult Passages series.

In the Twelve Scriptures series this summer we highlighted the passages in the Bible that we see as guiding lights.  We received a lot of appreciative feedback, although several of you came to me and said something to the effect, “This is a good series, but what I’m really looking forward to is that other one about the bad Scriptures.”  That day has arrived, and for the month of October we are switching from the goodies to the baddies, pondering parts of the Bible that we find especially troubling and difficult, even antithetical to our values.

Unlike the Twelve Scriptures Project, our survey in the spring showed no clear top vote getters for the difficult passages, except for one: today’s passage from Ephesians that contains the lines “wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.”  “For the husband is the head of the wife.”  A little later in the passage, beyond what was read, it says, “slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ.”  “Fear and trembling” is a pretty good description of how I as the speaker of the day approach the task.

What I’d like to do, rather than preach one standard sermon, is to take up three different perspectives and offer three mini-sermons, each one representing a different approach we might take to a difficult passage of scripture.  I will attempt to highlight the good of what each perspective has to offer and will preach each mini-sermon with the full conviction of one coming from that perspective.  You listen for what resonates and rings true, and what sounds off base.

In order to not privilege one over the other, I will present…