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New Testament Reading—Matthew 1: 18-23
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of God appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by God through the prophet: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”
Imagine for a moment two classrooms of students. In one classroom, the goal of the teacher and all the students is to pass an exam that will come at the end of the course. You have heard about schools that focus their teaching on getting children to pass standardized tests. This school is like an extreme version of that. Neither the teacher nor the students care at all about whether they are learning anything that will help them in life besides simply passing the test. In this classroom, the students do as they are told and they generally lack a self-motivated love of learning. In the second classroom, the goal is precisely the opposite. The teacher and all the students are completely focused on learning all that they can to have a richer, fuller, more exciting, and meaningful life. In this classroom, the children are guided by their own curiosity, passion, and interest. Arguably, the end result of the school year reflects the goals of each classroom. The kids who studied to pass the exam excel in knowing how to pass the exam. The kids who studied so that they might have a richer, fuller, more exciting, and more meaningful life have acquired tools that will enable them to lead future lives that are more likely to be full of joy and enrichment.
This morning I am actually not at all concerned with pontificating on standardized tests or whether Danalyn is going to go to a Montessori school. Instead, what I want to suggest is that the way people read the Bible can be similar to these two classrooms. For the sake of making distinctions, I will be somewhat stereotypical here. When it comes to the Bible, we might say that some people read it with the primary purpose of passing an exam. At the end of their life, they want to get to heaven. Often for this school of thought, the Bible not only contains the answers to the test but the Bible is also a significant part of the test itself. If you believe that everything in the Bible is literally the Word of God, then you are that much closer to heaven.
Now, there is another school of thought that says our purpose in reading the Bible is to read it so that our lives become richer, fuller, and more meaningful. In fact, those who belong to this school of thought have experienced this to be true. They don’t read the Bible because someone told them to and because they are good obedient students. They read the Bible because they have found it to be integral to plumbing the depths of what’s ultimately important and purposeful in their lives. Another thing that is different about this school of thought is that they read the Bible with curiosity and questions. Again, they don’t do this because they are told to. They do this because of an innate desire to learn, to discover the truth, and to search for meaning.
In this second school of thought, I think critical thinking naturally becomes a disposition of the mind. The word “critical” can sometimes have connotations that imply a negative, unfavorable assessment, but I don’t think that has to be the case. When I googled “everyday examples of critical thinking,” the examples were largely positive ones. They involved everything from how to buy the right car to how to decide between several job offers. In everyday life, it helps to be reflective, to gather information, to analyze and interpret what you see, and to challenge one’s own assumptions and conclusions. Likewise, the scholar Marcus Borg demonstrates how critical thinking can have a positive effect on how one engages the Bible and draws meaning from it. Borg says we can think of our spiritual journeys as passing through three stages in how we understand the Bible. The first stage he calls “pre-critical naivete.” This is when we believe what we are told. We don’t question things. Santa exists. The second stage is the critical thinking stage. During this stage, we examine our previous understandings. We allow them to be challenged, and if an understanding doesn’t hold true, we seek another understanding that does. In other words, you finally realize who eats all those cookies on Christmas Eve. Now, there is a third stage that Borg calls “post-critical naivete.” I would actually call this advanced critical thinking. In this stage, you are able to not only distinguish between true and false but you are able to distinguish between different types of truth. We realize something may not be true in a factual or historical sense, but we nevertheless realize that it is true in a metaphorical or spiritual sense. I may know who eats the Christmas cookies, but I still put out the stockings anyway, because I realize more than one kind of truth can come down the chimney.
How might we apply this thinking to the Bible? Whenever I read this morning’s scripture, I think, “Poor Mary! The only woman to have her virginity debated for all eternity.” With this story, we could accept it as the literal, historical truth, or we could say, “Hmmm…this might not be true in that sense. I’ve heard of in vitro fertilization, but this is…” Now, if someone wants to believe the immaculate conception is the miraculous work of God, I will let him or her believe that, but what about those of us who just can’t get ourselves to literally believe in the immaculate conception? I think we can take a reflective approach that ultimately leads to what for many of us is a spiritual truth. We can begin by observing that Matthew wasn’t written to be a history book in the modern sense of the word. As Ed Martin pointed out in our adult ed class, it wasn’t until much later that history as a factual “record of past events” even became a concept for humans. Back when the gospels were written, you didn’t have historians running around fact checking in library archives. What you had were generations of master storytellers who excelled at using metaphorical language and literary devices to convey the meaning and significance of Jesus’ life. This is not to say that we cannot learn history from the gospels. We now have scholars who have rigorous methods for determining what historical events and persons arguably lie behind stories that were composed with a non-historical purpose in mind.
While we can focus on academic questions about the who or what of the historical Jesus, we can also focus on other kinds of truth found in the gospels. For the advanced critical thinker, this entails a shift in how we appreciate and understand scripture. As one Catholic priest quips, “The Bible is true and some of it happened.” In a similar manner, an American Indian storyteller begins to tell the creation story of his tribe by saying, “Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” Thus, Borg declares the metaphorical, spiritual truth of the so-called virgin birth by saying, “The story of Jesus being conceived by the Spirit of God affirms that what happened in Jesus was of God.” For Christians, that’s a truth that captures what we think is ultimately significant about Jesus in relation to the divine.
Borg applies this same kind of thinking to the rest of the Christmas story. As critical thinkers, we might not believe there was a radiant star and a sky full of angels, but as advanced critical thinkers we can be enthralled by the poetry used to convey how big an event the life of Jesus was. As critical thinkers, we can learn that “Herod the Great never ordered the slaying of all male babies in Bethlehem under age two,” but as advanced critical thinkers we can nevertheless realize that Matthew is drawing upon the story of Moses when Pharaoh issued a similar order. Borg observes, “The author of Matthew is saying the story of Jesus is about the story of the true king coming into the world whom the evil kings seek to swallow up. This is story of Exodus all over again. This is the story of the conflict between the Lordship of God known in Christ and the Lordship of Pharaoh and the rulers of this world. And the rulers of this world always try to swallow up the one who is of God.” Advanced critical thinking allows us to “to hear that as a true story.”
For many of us, advanced critical thinking is what gives birth to our faith. No longer do we feel like reading the Bible forces us to close down our intellect because we are told we must believe this, this, and this, or else we will flunk the test. Instead, we feel like reading the Bible encourages us to turn on our intellect so that we might better discern truths about the sacred and the divine. From this perspective, the story of what’s called the virgin birth isn’t about Mary’s sex life. It’s about a spiritual truth passed from Isaiah to Matthew. It’s a truth captured in the name Emmanuel. It’s a truth that says “God is with us.” How is God with us? That’s what the story of Jesus promises to help us understand. Matthew is telling us what is in store for us in the rest of the gospel. The question for us is how are we going to make the most of this story? I think this is when a church can say, “We will make the most of it by using our ability to think critically.” For such a church, critical thinking makes our lives richer, fuller, more exciting, and, ultimately, more meaningful. Amen.