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Good morning!

The Bible is not just history – what happened sometime else to someone else – but memory, what happened to our ancestors and therefore, insofar as we carry on their story, to us. The Bible speaks not of moral truths in the abstract but of commands, which is to say, truths addressed to us, calling for our response.

Its meaning is found not in theological system but in stories; not in nature but in narrative – the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, where we came from, what is our place in the universe, and what, therefore, we are called on to do. That is why the Bible is written in the form of narrative. Unlike philosophy, narrative celebrates the concrete, not the abstract.

Narratives, as Jonathan Sacks points out, contain multiple points of view. They are open – essentially, not accidentally – to more than one interpretation, more than one level of interpretation.

What is true of texts is true of relationships because they are multi-faceted in a way physical facts are not. I either am or am not black-haired, short-sighted, and bespectacled. But I am, simultaneously, a child of my parents, the father of my children, the husband of my wife. The truth of one does not entail the falsity of others.

An acknowledgement of the multiplicity of narratives and relationships, interpretations and covenants, is fundamentally opposed to a narrative of displacement. One of the lessons of the biblical narratives is that despite our differences, the validity of one story does not exclude another.

Lord, help us read the Bible – and view the world -

Amen