Standing Under the Text
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
October 16, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Nehemiah 7:73b-8:4a;5-12
Acts 8:26-39

"So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and asked, 'Do you understand what you are reading?'"

I intend this morning to wade into deep waters-no surprise after the weather of the week just past! I venture in because, as one Midrash reads in so many words, "The Lord God did not see fit to part the Red Sea until one Israelite chose to put his foot in the water." At the morning's end, my foot may be wet only by virtue of it being inserted in my mouth! I am confident you all will be the judge of that.

The troubled waters into which I wade are the waters stirred by peoples who are attempting to stand under a common text. As I listen to the struggle of the Sunni, the Shi'a and the Kurds writing and perhaps assenting to the common text of a new constitution….as I struggle myself in a nation turned again toward its courts wondering who will read and interpret the common text of a now well-worn constitution, I find myself reflecting anew on the struggle of Christ's church to understand what we are reading when together we open the Scriptures and attempt together to stand under the text by grace through faith, a faith that seeks understanding.

So to the first: to those deciding whether or not to stand under a constitution cobbled together by three disparate peoples. One wonders how such a document might read had the modern history of Iraq been something other than the history of a nation created and now recreated by others. For though each of these three peoples has a text and an understanding all its own, together they have been made textless and storyless by the power politics of the last century. The framers of the Iraqi constitution necessarily leapt over a few thousand years of history in order to find a common narrative: We the sons of Mesopotamia, the constitution begins,
    land of the prophets, resting place of the holy imams, the leaders of civilization and the creators of the alphabet, the cradle of arithmetic: on our land the first law put in place by mankind was written; in our nation the most noble era of justice in the politics of nations was laid down; on our soil, the followers of the prophet and the saint prayed, the philosophers and the scientists theorized and the writers and poets created.

The phrases reach back and back and back for a narrative within the memory of all and for a story with the power to unite three tribes that today, if left to their own devices, would want nothing to do with each other at best…and at worst would prefer to do one another in! Such narratives do not "always reflect the way things are," notes Duke Professor Richard Lischer, "but mercifully-or arrogantly-impose a pattern on the disorder and anarchy of life as it is."

Now and again throughout human history and by God's grace alone, a people has been recreated by a story that tells the truth, that sings, that answers the question "What ought we to be?" with a promise compelling enough to override the reality of what we are (or in this case, are not). But of course this is only the beginning of standing under a text. Time will tell if the question addressed by the rest of the constitution-"What ought we to do?"-will be answered in the context of a history no longer invented by strangers or despots, but created by those who will and must inhabit its articles. Suffice it to say, in the first place this morning, that standing under a text presumes a text [created? invented? revealed?] with the power to tell a disparate people-a people that otherwise would be storyless and at each other's throats--who they are.

Speaking of a people not so much storyless as at each other's throats, we come in the second place before waters troubled by a people attempting to stand under a common text: the struggle of this nation to read and interpret the common text of a now well-worn constitution. "We the people of the United States," begins our text. Having stood under this text for the last two hundred years, the question that pursues us still, to the right and to the left, is simply: what sort of text is this?

We are troubled, these days, by contradictory answers. On the one hand, the right hand, Antonin Scalia tells a crowd at the University of Chicago Divinity School that "the Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead-or as I prefer to put it, enduring. It means today not what current society (much less the Court) thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted." Strict constructionism some call this way of standing under the text, though Judge Scalia prefers to be known as an Originalist who asks after the original intent of a text or more exactly asks what the text was understood to mean by reasonable persons at the time of its ratification. "A…strict constructionist," wrote Justice Rehnquist before he became Chief, "will generally not be favorably inclined towards claims of either criminal defendants or civil rights plaintiffs." This is because such were not what the text was understood to include by reasonable persons at the time of its ratification.

On the other hand, the left hand, Stephen Breyer, in lectures given at Harvard and recently published under the title Active Liberty, stands under the same text which he believes to be alive. "When I refer to active liberty," he writes, "I mean to suggest connections…between people and their government…that involve responsibility, participation and capacity." "We the people" writes Justice Breyer, does not read "we the people of 1787" but must be read as "a phrase that finally includes those whom the Constitution originally and intentionally ignored." A broad constructionist stands under the text asking after its purpose and present consequences, especially for those denied full participation in the democracy the text founded.

Says George Will to Justice Breyer's act of standing under the Constitution as a "living text": he "demonstrates how a posture of judicial modesty can empower a judge to wield immodest power in cutting down constitutional impediments to a--his--political agenda." Says Cathy Young from the Boston Globe of Scalia's speech to divinity students concerning the "dead text" he interprets and applies: "His moral views have a habit of grafting themselves onto his constitutional philosophy."

So what sort of text is this and how are we to stand under it? Whether dead or alive, the divide that slices a nation down the middle is what theologians and philosophers would call a hermeneutical divide: a question of the interpretive screen one brings to what one reads and listens for in a text, to what one sees and seeks out in a context, to what one thereby questions or condones in the ordering of the common life. We are better at seeing the interpretive screens in another's eye than we are at noticing the mote in our own!

All of which brings us to the text under which we stand, to Scripture and to our final question of the morning, the question of Philip to the Ethiopian eunuch: "Do you understand what you are reading?" The Ethiopian eunuch was reading the 53rd chapter of Second Isaiah: he was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces, we held him of no account. The text was not his. He was, you could say, in a storyless place (Gaza, a wilderness road, Luke reminds us) between the temple in Jerusalem where he was an outcast ("No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord," says the text of Deuteronomy 23 literally) and his home in Northern Africa (where he had chosen, among the three choices left to a eunuch, to be not a domestic servant or a military officer--castration being the precursor to "don't ask, don't tell", but a government official). He who could not father children, who had no heirs, you see, at least could be trusted with the treasury.

But more than a storyless place, he was a man without a story. "Who does not have a story?" asks Lischer. The marginalized, he answers, those "whose lives are structured not by the syntax of [the dominant] story but by bewilderment at the unrelatedness of things." Yet on his lap is the Book of Isaiah and on the road to him is running God's chosen exegete: Philip.

Now had Philip been a strict constructionist for whom Scripture was a dead text, the eunuch would have gone on his way as storyless as when he had set out: Deuteronomy 23! A.A. Hodge, an Old School theologian of the 19th century, held that the text we are given in the Bible is given as the communication of factual knowledge, of sedimented truth. From whence sprang the doctrine of verbal inerrancy and today's literal reading of the text, a text whose meaning was fixed on the day that it was dictated by the Holy Spirit from on high. To stand under such a text is to stand still theologically, socially, politically and so against the marginalized, the outcast, the characters originally not intended to be in the story of God's saving grace. It is to find the verse that declares crushed testicles out of bounds, among other things, and to stick to it.

Philip, it turns out, had been persuaded by the God who raised Jesus from the dead that not only was his Lord alive, but so was the text under which he and the early church stood. That same God, we are told, sent him down the wilderness road to the side of the Ethiopian eunuch. "About whom, may I ask, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?" he asks. Because Philip's interpretive screen for Scripture has become his living Lord: starting with this scripture he proclaims to him the good news about Jesus. And because the one writing this text, namely Luke, had revealed his theological hand in his gospel, declaring "all flesh" shall see the salvation of God, "all nations" shall know the forgiveness of sins and the "ends of the earth" would hear the gospel, then this man despised and rejected, marginalized and from the ends of the known earth, this child of God no less than you are or I am, was invited to stand under the text, was by grace given the story that would become his life.

"Faith happens," concludes Lischer, "when [with our reason intact we] review the complicated mesh" of Scripture and there encounter the person of Jesus Christ, which is to say God's "faithfulness, mercy, justice and love" in the flesh, and resolve to live by it! "What is to prevent me from being baptized?" we ask. The waters of Jordon, deep and wide, run before us: these are the deep waters of baptism wherein, before the foundations of the world, all were named and finally will be known. "My God, I look at the creek," writes Annie Dillard. "It never stops….It is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end…however lightly sprinkled, [these waters] leave indelible stains." Thanks be to God. Amen.

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