When we arrived we were ushered to the church yard where the entire congregation, including choir, priests, lay-ministers, servers etc. (it's an Episcopal church) were gathered around a small fire log, and we were handed a candle. Just before 6 our priest explained the beginning of the service, and at 6 he lit the Paschal candle, from which we all proceeded to light our candles, passing the flame from person to person. We then took part in the procession into the church which was lit only by the light of our candles, being led by the choir in a hymn. A sense of calm reflection descended on me.
We worked our way through the set readings, and then came the sermon. It started like few other sermons, and it quickly diverged from those other similar-starting sermons. It started with the story of a student congregant who discovered for the first time that not everything in the Bible is historical. And the rest of the sermon and story had nothing to do with how God proved the historical accuracy of the Bible in the student's life, or the student decided to live by faith and not by sight, or how the student decided to reject science and reason. Instead, the priest gave us glimpses into the path that he walked with this student in coming to terms with the a-historicity of the Bible.
What? Did I just hear correctly? You're doing an Easter service and saying the Bible is not the inerrant 100% historical account of God working with His people? That's brave. And that's exactly what I'm looking for. I read Theology at University, and loved. The one thing that never bother me too much, mostly because I had a dad who thought and reasoned, and I must have picked some of that up from him, was that everything in the Bible was not 100% true. This was a shock to many of my fellow theology students who were still starry eyed with wonder at the 6-day creation of a 6000 year old world. Many of them would continue to achieve brilliant grades - better than mine even - in fields like church history, philosophy, old testament studies, new testament studies etc. given by often very liberal professors that they thought were spiritually suspect because these professors were too academic, and gave too much credence to science, textual criticism, and actual history. I think back and wonder how all that time they were exposed to such good thinking, and were able to achieve such good grades, yet so compartmentalized their academic life
and their spiritual life (studying what was required, yet never translating that into their faith), that the one never met the other. It wasn't that their faith had reasoned arguments for why the world was 6000 years old, it was just, faith. Pure blind faith.
Which is why I found the sermon on this particular Easter so meaningful. It didn't claim to have all the answers, or deliver a turn or burn fiery speech, from the pulpit. No. It was about being less concerned about trying to establish with 100% certainty what parts of the Bible we can take as historical and which parts are more inspired. In short, sometimes people are so concerned about how (or whether) God has worked in the past, that they completely miss the possibility and presence of him in the present. And if anything, the Bible is not about the God of the past, it is about the living God, the God of the present.
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