I’m moved to preach to you this morning about something that we often take for granted; Interpretation.
Interpretation is one of the most important things that any of us do.
It is a foundational element of being a creature of God.
It’s so important, in fact, that every creature on the earth; human, animal, plant, algae, bacteria, virus…
Every living being has been endowed by the creator with the ability to interpret.
Plants have internal mechanisms that do their interpreting.
Bulbs that we plant in the ground need a frost in early Spring to tell them that it is safe to start growing.
Other flowering plants that lay dormant, have their own signs for when it is time to put out flowers.
Have you ever stopped to notice the yearly cycles?
They all produce in their seasons, because they each interpret the signs that they were designed to respond to.
Trees interpret as well.
Of course, we know that they all seem to know at what time of year to let their old leaves turn their various colors and drop to the ground.
This gives trees the chance to go to sleep and save energy during the winter, and it allows them to renew themselves for new growth in the Spring.
Did you know that many trees also know how to interpret the signs that they are dying?
Scientist Suzanne Simard from the University of British Columbia has shown that when dying Douglas Fir trees get mortally injured, they send their carbon and warning signs into the soil for other trees to help preserve those that come after them. (Suzanne Simard Interview with Yale e360)
The other trees have to interpret how and why that other tree died, so that they can survive.
Was it climate related and they have to conserve their water? Was it disease and they have to ramp up their immuno responses?
Creatures that seem innert to us are actually very sophisticated organisms that communicate and interpret their world.
We know that animals interpret as well.
Where is a safe place to lay eggs, where is the best place to hunt, when is the right time to migrate, is that creature in front of me dangerous, is that little shimmy and a shake because he’s interested in mating, or because he has to pee really bad?
I could go on… but I’ll spare you.
The point is that almost every living thing that surrounds us is an interpreter.
As far as what we call these lower order of creatures, you could object and say, “oh Father Chris, those are just instincts, or natural mechanisms, they’re not really interpretations.”
I would say any response to a stimulus, where there are one or more options for response whether mechanical or instinctual requires interpretation.
We as humans have different kinds of interpretations as well.
We have mechanical or instinctual responses, which are certainly interpretive of our surroundings.
Has anyone ever had their body do something that they didn’t want it to do?
Have you ever been driving down the road and you see something that looks like an animal and your body just jolts a little bit, but as soon as you pass it you realize it was just a rock or someone’s trash on the curb waiting for pick up?
Your body interpreted a possible danger before your mind could catch up.
Another way our body interprets is through pain.
Did you know that pain is an interpretive process?
Pain is a function of your brain interpreting signals from your body and then keeping you from moving like this or like that so your body doesn’t break.
Pain is not something that you actively process intellectually, it is your body’s response to its interpretation of how you’re doing.
Finally, we get to the things that we usually think of as interpretive; when we use our brains, our minds, to receive information and to act on that information.
I would wager that 100% of us know what it is like to feel understood and to feel misunderstood.
Another way to say that is, we know when we feel like someone has interpreted our words or actions how we meant them, and when we feel like someone has misinterpreted us.
Jesus, in our Gospel lesson shows us that he is interpreter.
What we see in the conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees in Mark’s Gospel is Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, doing what rabbis did and continue to do.
Looking at the Bible and its laws and talking about the best way to interpret them.
Specifically there was a debate about what was allowed on the Sabbath.
(anecdotally, I had to translate part of a Mishnah passage on the Sabbath for my comprehensive exams in February dealing with how one can legally pass things from inside of the house to outside of the house on the Sabbath to give charity to an impoverished person. Do they reach inside, do you reach outside, do you put the charity in their hand, or do they take it from yours?)
The legal reasoning is very detailed and sometimes very strange to modern audiences, but it was seriously life and death important to the rabbis.
And actually, it’s still serious today.
Did you know that riding along the power lines that surround Amberly Village here in Cincinnati is a rabbinically sanctioned chord that goes around the whole area so that all of Amberly is considered legally “inside” for the orthodox Jewish population?
We get a glimpse here of the types of conversations that eventually got enshrined in the Jewish legal compendia known as the Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmud traditions.
These three different, but overlapping volumes of material, are collections of biblical legal opinions that probably go back to the time of Jesus and maybe before,
And they continued to be added to until about the 3rd century of the Common Era.
As a comparison, the Gospel of Mark, thought to be the earliest Gospel by scholars, was completed probably around the year 66-74 of the Common Era (150-200 years before Mishnah was completed).
Jesus, when he’s talking about the Sabbath laws and about David is interpreting the Bible and engaging in the major discussions of his day about what is legal to do on the Sabbath.
The Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmud all hold detailed decisions about preserving or taking life on the Sabbath and enshrine the differing legal opinions of several generations of sages, usually divided into two competing schools of thought.
The Gospel of Mark shows us that these discussions were already taking place in Jesus’ time and that far from being a nice conversation disputed with kiddie gloves,
The disagreements about interpretation were often fierce, factional, and could lead to destruction of reputation or in Jesus’ case capital punishment for blasphemy.
Jesus knew how important the human capacity for interpretation is.
At the kind of lowest threshold of interpretation, the only thing at stake may be whether we have a good time talking to someone at a cocktail party, hurt feelings between friends, or a short conversation between partners that turns into a long conversation.
On the highest threshold, I don’t think it is hyperbole to say that interpretation can have life of death consequences.
In this case in Florida we’ve been witnessing, where airman Roger Fortson, like too many young black men, was murdered by a police officer.
That officer so badly misinterpreted the situation that he didn’t even wait half a second before discharging his weapon.
It happens on the streets too. We’ve had kids in our neighborhood killed because they wrote something on social media that was taken the wrong way.
Javier Randolph, a kid from our neighborhood was chased and gunned down, because of bad interpretation. The killers thought he was someone he wasn’t.
Almost everything that we do in life is interpretive.
Every decision we make is based on our perception of what is going on around us and what the best course of action will be.
Even our gut-feelings are a conditioned interpretation of the world to help us navigate the best way to get where we need to go, to keep us safe, to achieve our goals.
This is why I began this morning by saying that interpretation is the most important thing that we do as creatures of God.
Now, having looked at some of the more scientific, psychological and physiological elements of interpretation (and we’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg on how complicated all of this is)
if interpreting our lives is so important and often so difficult, I wonder why so many people think that the Bible (the enshrined wisdom of God and plan of salvation) is so easy to interpret and that the consequences of bad interpretation only affect me personally; whether I go to heaven or hell.
In fact, we know that bad interpretation is dangerous on a communal level.
We’ve seen over the past few months that Benjamin Netanyahu has no problem using the Books of Esther and Joshua to justify 36,000 Palestinian deaths.
He has made the explicit connection between Hamas and the character Haman in Esther, or the Amalekites from Joshua. (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/live-blog/israel-hamas-war-gaza-attacks-hamas-idf-netanyahu-long-fight-rcna122651#rcrd23808)
This interpretive move has meant that all-out war is acceptable against those who have attacked you; collateral damage included.
By the same token, Hamas and pro-Palestinian protesters have begun to attach their movement to the term Intifada, which was an uprising that began in 1987 and which became synonymous with bombings of cafes and other civilian targets in the 90’s.
Many insist that the term is harmless, or that it refers to non-violent uprising as reported by NPR this week (https://www.npr.org/2024/06/01/nx-s1-4958278/intifada-chants-pro-palestinian-protests-israel),
But that is to ignore the fact that this term, like the term jihad, has two major streams of interpretation behind it, both supported by the Quran;
One is the non-violent form used to justify human dignity and the right to stand up for your humanity,
The other a violent call to dehumanize your enemy and win at any cost.
Need I mention the vast number of Christian interpreters over the centuries whose interpretations have caused undue amounts of harm and destruction of life.
Or a former now felonious president, who in some interpretations of this week’s proceedings is almost certainly being compared to an unjustly condemned Messiah, who “never said a mumbling word,”
But that’s just because he doesn’t mumble, he tweets, or X’es or whatever the new verb for displaying all of your erroneous thoughts on social media is now called.
Our reading from Samuel also shows us the import of interpretation.
We have the rather innocuous misidentity interpretation, where young Samuel continually thinks that God’s voice is the voice of his mentor Eli.
The consequences of this are sort of comical.
But, then we have the more serious interpretations.
Eli’s sons have misinterpreted what is appropriate and not appropriate.
As a priest, when I hear this and I think about that oft-chuckled at idea of the “priest-kid” who is a crazy person, it makes me more diligent about my own kids.
When Arlo comes around for a second bite o’ Jesus at Communion, and I remember that he was the kid who when asked how much he needed always used to respond, “too much,”
(it’s cute, right? Until you think about what it means for a little white boy to grow up to be a man who expects that the world should always give him and that he deserves to have “too much.”)
I look at this story of Eli as a warning.
Are my kids properly respecting the thing that probably seems pretty normal to them, because it’s what their parents do for a living?
For the House of Eli, the improper interpretation led to the complete destruction of his family and legacy.
The only thing he had left was that he was the one who raised up a great prophet for early Israel.
But this isn’t just about priest kids.
We have to take interpretation seriously for all of our kids.
Mel and I started watching this show about the Tik-Tok Dance Cult 7m.
Have you heard of it?
A Christian pastor and his family befriended and recruited semi-famous dancers on Tik-Tok and started to manage the business side of the social media for them.
These were young people who were struggling to make it,
They have incredible talents, but are faced with a world where everyone is crowding the online market place trying to be seen.
The pastor used all of the normal tricks to get buy-in and to get these young people to abandon their families in search of blessings, fame, and money.
He used the Bible to tell them to completely break ties with their families so that he could control them.
Hearing from the dancers who escaped the cult, one thing became very clear to me.
They all had a small connection to their faith, they knew it was important, but none had been taught how to interpret for themselves.
So they took it for granted that this “Man of God” was right, because he connected the interpretive dots for them.
Interpretation is so important, because it is the natural way that we interact with the world.
Biblical interpretation is even more important, because it connects our divine hopes and expectations, our sense of purpose, our sense of right and wrong, our sense of justification for violence and non-violence as individuals and as groups of people.
Jesus was killed, because of how he was interpreted.
When people are killed today it is that same harmful type of interpretation that sets the wheels of violence in motion.
The only way that I know of to fight bad interpretation is proper formation that gets people thinking about how we go about interpreting and how it can lead to good or bad consequences.
We need our kids to be in churches and schools that teach them to be discerning and thoughtful.
Heck, we need to continually put ourselves in places that do the same.
The thing that I leave you with today is this; be a seeker, seek after wisdom, but not just the “Bible is simple, are you going to heaven or hell?” Type of connecting the dots.
That’s not wisdom, that’s creative connecting of data.
Seek to be an interpreter, someone who thinks about the principles at stake and about their consequences.
God has given you the tools to tend the garden, but you have to be the one to sharpen them for the good harvest.
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