LITERALLY

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I have been to the Himalayas. I have actually explored those mythic peaks. I have visited dark, secret caves on desolate mountaintops, and shopped for rice in impossibly remote villages and trade bazars. I ate yak, and drank butter tea that was so thick and pungent I still gag just thinking about it. And when I returned to my real life after living in that world for half a year, it was hard to describe the experience to people, hard to tell the stories - the enormity of the mountains, the sounds of those crazy markets, the deep holy feeling of isolated monasteries, and cave shrines. These stories, with their foreign smells, tastes and sounds could only be told big, larger than life, with outrageous colors and enlarged characters. But at 18 years old, I was not a very experienced storyteller, and as I initially tried to relate my experience to people as a series of facts, it was obvious I had failed to communicate any of the truth I had found on that journey. I had never had such outsized stories to tell and quite frankly, my story-telling abilities needed to catch up with my stories if anyone was going to really understand what I had been through.

Slowly I learned how to stop talking about the dates of travel, the number of shrines visited, the actual height of the mountains or miles that we hiked, and rather to just tell one really good story from the trip. I developed a few of them, each of which did a better job of representing the larger truth of my journey than any string of literal facts could have: that I had seen incredible things and been changed by them.

I think my journey to become a better story teller represents a larger truth: that facts and literal accounts of events can do a fantastic job of recording the outline of things, but often miss the deeper truths at their core. I would submit that the evolution of the meaning of the word 'literally' does as good a job of illustrating this as anything could.

You may or may not be aware that in August of 2013, Miriam Webster followed the Cambridge, Macmillan and Google dictionaries and officially updated the definition of "Literally" to mean both "actually" and "figuratively." As you can imagine, it came close to breaking the internet due to the fury of grammar geeks around the English-speaking world. I am hardly anal when it comes to language usage, in fact, as the person who lovingly edits my sermon texts before putting them on our website, Pat Rodgers could probably tell you in painstaking detail just how little concern I show for proper English grammar. But this one surprised even me.

How, you may ask, can "literally" suddenly mean both "actually" and "figuratively" at the same time? As the editors of the Miriam Webster dictionary said in their press release at the time, "Since some people take sense 2 to be the opposition of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a misuse. Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis..."

We all know what they are getting at. I am sure no one in this room is completely innocent of this little grammar abuse, sarcastically using the word "literally" to actually mean "figuratively." The truth is, "literally" is hardly ever used anymore to mean its literal definition, but is almost always used in this semi-sarcastic meaning that all these dictionaries are attempting to capture.

"I literally died when she said that," or "My jaw literally hit the ground when I came to the end of the story." The hearer of these statements knows that the person did not really die, and that their jaw is still connected to the rest of their face. But rather than speak factually they were attempting to speak emotionally.

The fact that this abuse is so common it is now canon gets right to the heart of our topic for this morning, which is: what is lost when the Bible is read literally?

First, a little history, because a very common misperception is that we have always been plagued with this divide between Biblical literalists and those who read the Bible in a more symbolic manner. In reality, however, biblical literalism is quite a modern issue. To begin with, for the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity, most of the people who were educated enough to read the Bible themselves were also smart enough to understand the genre of literature and knew it was not to be taken literally in that first dictionary definition sense of the word. In fact, the concern of the early Christians was quite the opposite of today, as stated by St. Augustine himself, in his book entitled The Literal Meaning of Genesis, published well over 1600 years ago:

"Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances, and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience.
It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do what we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, lest the unbeliever see only ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn."

Even in the fifth century they knew enough about the heavens to know that the Genesis account was not hard science. Sixteen hundred years ago, the only Christian concern about taking the Bible literally was how embarrassing it was when it happened. Even then they understood that stories are often told for reasons others than recording hard facts.

But things began to change in 1517, about a thousand years after Augustine had his say, when Luther came along with his 99 theses and kicked off what we now call the Protestant Reformation. Up until this point the Institutional Church was Christianity, and hardly anyone besides the priestly class even knew what the Bible said. But since the central aspect of the Reformation was the wholesale rejection of the authority of the Institutional Church, something new had to be vested with the authority it once held. The Bible was the obvious choice, catapulting the details of what it said to a completely new level of importance.

But still there was a great difference between reading the Bible for yourself and thinking it held important truths, and believing that every word in it was literally true. The truth is, that last step from important truth to literalism is largely our fault. And by "our" I mean our Unitarian ancestors, who were, as I have spoken about before, among the first people to begin attempting modern literary text criticism on the manuscripts of the First and Second Testaments, otherwise known as the Christian Bible.

When people like Unitarian Joseph Priestly, whose life I discussed about six weeks ago, began using these modern scientific methods in the 18th century on the Bible, they discovered clear evidence of multiple voices, redaction, corruption and mistranslation of older texts and many other issues that made a literal understanding of the Bible impossible. To many faithful Christians who had been presented an understanding of the Bible as being the word of God, this felt extremely threatening. So, as many of us do when threatened, they circled the wagons and hardened their positions. Not only were these modern scientists wrong about the Bible not being the direct word of God, they asserted, but also every word in it was literally true. Thus, biblical literalism as we understand it in the modern age, was born.

So, exactly what Augustine feared in the fifth century is actually playing out today. If one misses the fact that the Bible was never meant to be taken literally, they focus on the facts and miss the most important truths. On the other side of things, if the Bible is so associated with fact-averse people, those who fashion themselves to be otherwise skip the book altogether and miss the important underlying truths. So we have a time when many of those who read the Bible miss the point, and the people who could get the point don't read the Bible.

It's a real shame. And it is hard for me to understand how it persists. One of the first things anyone will realize when they read the Bible is that they are immediately presented with some glaring contradictions in the narrative. The most obvious is that in Genesis 1, animals are created first and then man and women simultaneously shortly after. Then, in Genesis 2, God feels bad that man is all alone, so he makes animals and then a female companion for him. Even without modern text criticism, it is pretty obvious that two or more stories were combined without worrying about the details. Again and again, in fact, the Bible reminds us that the details are unimportant.

A very recent archeological discovery further reinforces this point. We have known for a long time that there are lots of flood stories from different cultures that predate the one that stars Noah in the First Testament Genesis account. A newly discovered tablet in Iraq is older than any we had known of previously. Like so many of the others it talks about a man who marches all the animals of the world two-by-two into a boat to save them from a flood. But this one differs from all others in an important way. In all previous accounts, when the boat is described it is done in great detail and sounds like a modern boat in that it is longer than it is wide, but this one talks in great detail about a perfectly round boat, as we know some ancient cultures used.

Now, this may sound small, but to archeologists and biblical scholars it is huge. It is hard evidence that not only was this story told for a long time before the First Testament version, but also that the details were shifting. That is to say, whoever was telling this story was clearly not reporting on a factual event with set historical details, but rather was telling a metaphorical story, a symbolic recasting of a deeper truth than the sum of its details could add up to.

Just as I learned when I returned from the Himalayas, if you want to pass along truth and not fact, you have to leave the details behind and speak to the particular worldview of the people you are trying to communicate to, with a good story. We don't hold this against most of the stories we enjoy these days, but are more than willing to suspend our disbelief to get swept up in a good story because we understand the value. I submit that it should be the same way with the Bible.

We know now for absolute certainty that the earth is not flat, that there is not a solid dome, set on giant pillars, above us, holding the water from flooding down, which is literally what Genesis 1 talks about. But once we are freed from a literal reading, the truth of the book of Genesis becomes apparent, and it has nothing to do with precisely what order things were created in, but rather the beautiful thought that creation is a gift; that all of this, every animal, every rock, every bit of light is a miracle. Definitely a truth we are out of touch with and could use a regular reminder of.

I personally have had to make this same journey with the Bible. For a long time I was the person Augustine worried about, that is, since I knew the Bible represented out-dated facts, I rejected everything else it contained and so failed to bring its timeless truths into my life. But when I was able to get over the idea that this document was ever intended to be read literally as a historical telling of the human story, I found incredible wisdom in it.

What I have come to believe is that just like the Protestant Reformation got us beyond the authority of the Institutional Church, it is now time to finish the work that Luther started. It is time to vest the authority of revelation and truth not in the Bible, not in the nitty gritty details of the stories of the First and Second Testament, but rather within each of us. If we invest our lives with authority and purpose, and bring those fears and hopes and dreams along as we read these stories, we will discover essential and timeless wisdom for our lives right now, and that could literally make all the difference.

May it be so.