One Sabbath day Jesus was walking with his disciples through the grainfields. The disciples began to break off some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to Jesus, "Look! It is against the Law to do this on the Sabbath. Why are your disciples doing it?" He answered, "Haven't you ever read about what David did? He and his men were hungry. They needed food. It was when Abiathar was high priest. David entered the house of God and ate the holy bread. (NOTE: This is either a mistake by the author of Mark, or a mistake by Jesus, since Abiathar was not high priest during David’s time) Only priests were allowed to eat it. David also gave some to his men." Then Jesus said to them, "The Sabbath day was made for man. Man was not made for the Sabbath day."

It is one thing to say that the originals were inspired, but the reality is that we don’t have the originals – so saying they were inspired doesn’t help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals. Moreover, the vast majority of Christians for the entire history of the church have not had access to the originals, making their inspiration something of a moot point. Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later – much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places… [These] copies differ from one another in so many places that we don’t even know how many differences there are. Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant. A good portion of them simply show us that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most people can today (and they didn’t even have dictionaries, let alone spell check). Even so, what is one to make of all these differences? If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture? In some places, we will see, we simply cannot be sure that we have reconstructed the original text accurately. It’s a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don’t even know what the words are!

All Souls Community Church, the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Grand Rapids, does not regularly meet here at the Forest Hills Fine Arts Center, but we will for four straight Sundays. We are meeting here because it is the Islamic holiday of Ramadan! No, actually because it is the Jewish high holy days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippure, the Jewish New Year and the Days of Atonement. But the two do coincide, Ramadan having started yesterday and Rosh Hashanah on sundown the day before.

Ramadan is a month-long period of fasting and prayer celebrating the Qu’ran having been delivered from Allah to the Prophet Mohammed, "sent down from heaven, a guidance unto men, a declaration of direction, and a means of Salvation.” Fasting occurs during the daytime, broken each evening when it is customary to end the fast with a prayer and a meal, called an iftar, and the visiting of family and friends; whereupon the cycle is begun again the next day. It becomes a way Muslims concentrate on their personal faith and intensify their gratitude for life.

The Jewish high holy days, beginning with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur, are the most sacred days of all to a Jew. It is the end of the Jewish year and the beginning of the next, so it is a time to take stock of one’s character the past year. These are days of judgment, remembrance, and repentance, the days of awe, and those who have acknowledged their wrongs and repented of them are forgiven. Their name is inscribed in the Book of Life.

Understanding the faith of others is an historical concern for us as Unitarian Universalists. It is derived centuries ago from our liberal theological origins in the recognition of the varieties of human religious experience and, therefore, the variety religions and faith traditions that result. In 1872 Rev. Charles Carroll Everett, Unitarian minister and Harvard Professor and Dean, taught the first college course in the United States on comparative religions, “East Asiatic Religions.” A generation and a half before him the Unitarian Transcendentalists had established a deep spiritual kinship with the Brahmo Samaj of India that endures to this day. Locally, All Souls is a regular sponsor to the annual Interfaith Thanksgiving Service, and six years ago I had the honor to help clergy of other faith traditions launch this service, as similarly I did with my Unitarian congregation in Milwaukee in the 1980’s.

We are not Muslims or Jews, but the spiritual life of each of us can be enriched not by adopting the faith of others but by religious understanding and spiritual appreciation. You can understand and appreciate the disciplines of another’s faith without stealing rites and rituals and beliefs that form the character of the faith of another. Your spiritual life can be enriched by fasting as a means to a greater gratitude for the wonderful gift of human life and a deeper devotion to protecting and sustaining it. Your spiritual life will be enriched by taking stock of your character, admitting the wounds and harms you have caused, and seeking forgiveness. Doing these can be done without becoming a Muslim or Jew. Our faith tradition has long acknowledged and respected the varieties of human religious experience because it is not a contradiction to us to say there are many paths, wide and varying; and that there are part of various paths that overlap. And it is part of our spiritual practice to learn others ways of worship and faith as the means to ennoble human connection by recognizing and respecting differences while seeing where paths cover common ground.

It comes from our anthropology; that is, our view of human being. We think fallible human beings do not possess a God’s eye view of things. Every human being who has walked this earth, from you and me to Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed, “sees through a glass darkly,” as the ancients said it. None has God’s all-encompassing view of goodness, beauty, and truth. Therefore, holding “the right belief” and “the complete truth” is impossible for human beings because as fallible mortals we could not grasp it even if it were given to us; we could not see it if it stood before us; we could not hear it if it was clear and complete in its sound. We human beings possess the capacity to choose right and wrong, good and evil, but never fully, completely, and absolutely so. The more we learn, the closer we may come by our choices. Ignorance is not only not an excuse but it is a recipe for disaster; and the same of naiveté. But it is a fantasy to hold that we could or do or have “Truth.” It is the human condition “to see through a glass darkly.”

Bart Ehrman chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a popular lecturer and author with a specialty in the formation of the New Testament, the early Christian Church, and the life of Jesus. He grew up in the Episcopal Church and had a “born again” experience as a teenager. The “born again” experience he had is a common one. The loneliness and “strangeness” and fear of self that all teenagers experience, because it is the beginning of adulthood, attend him also. “The leader of the [high school Campus Life Youth for Christ club had] a powerful message, that the void we felt inside was from not having Christ in our hearts. We were teenagers. All of us felt a void!” That void is the mark of adulthood. It brings about profound changes to the teen as he or she first begins to experience it and thinks it can be excised. It did with him. He became driven to pursue the “pure life of a Christian” in seeking absolute Truth and to experience God completely. He sought out the pure Scripture, the original and inspired document of God’s revelation, that would seal his faith as the True one and his belief as the Right one. But what he learned shook him to his core. Humanity doesn’t possess that “original” book!

The three historic Western faiths - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - have a peculiar place in our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition. Historically we come out of Christianity, as the Puritans and Pilgrims are our spiritual forbears, though no current creedal Christian church would claim us as kin. Theologically, unitarianism means “belief in one God” as opposed to creedal Christianity’s “Trinity,” which to us makes a god out of Jesus. That means that theologically we are like the Jews in not holding to the divinity of Jesus. Our ancestors in Europe of the 1500’s, and then again on this continent in the 1700’s and 1800’s, were often called Mohammadans because Muslims, like us, acknowledge an historical lineage through Moses and Jesus, but do not consider Jesus as the Son of God. And not only do we have this peculiar historical connection to the three historical Western faiths, but they are all called “People of the Book” because a Book holds a central place in faith. To the Jews it is the Torah, the Christians the Bible, and the Muslims the Qur’an, and to us as Unitarian Universalists books are precious and sacred and holy.

The most frequently cited commonality amongst new people to All Souls is a love of books. Our faith tradition represents that reading is so crucial to the development of the human personality that in the New England of our Puritan and Pilgrim ancestors of the 17^{th century, there was a 98% literacy rate! The first Public Library established in the United States was the Boston Public Library in 1848, and the first monetary contribution to this place where all citizens could come to read books, was Library Board member Josiah Quincy, politician and educator and longtime member of the Unitarian Church on Arlington Street where William Ellery Channing preached.}

Historically, our forbears knew one could not come to one’s own interpretation of the Scripture without the ability to read it for oneself. Today, we defend the political rights of Free Speech, and vigorously oppose any and all attempts to ban books, because it is through the freedom to engage ideas that the individual grows intellectually and emotionally, morally and spiritually. Our forbears bequeathed this revelation to us. To the extent that one cannot read, or that one’s access to books and ideas are denied, that person cannot be free; that person cannot grow in character, cannot grow a soul towards the freedom that is life’s gift. Reading is more than fundamental. It is critical, for the life of the mind and the life of the spirit cannot be separated. And freedom is the key to the growth of both.

It is an irony that anyone in the tradition of the “People of the Book” would want to ban them, especially when historically, the Bible has been banned more than any other book! Banned by the Christian Church itself, I might add. The fear of books that would lead some to ban them, is the fear that the life of the mind will grow beyond the past. It is the fear that the life of the spirit will be lost to the power of new ideas. It is the fear that in being educated the self will break free of the beliefs of the Church or the religious community. The fear is that education will liberate, and in liberation the self will be lost.

And in a very real way it is true. When you learn something you do lose yourself. You lose your old ways of thinking and believing. To learn something new you have to shed something old. You have to change. You have to step into the yearning and longing that is adulthood and is the spiritual way. You have to step into a void in your current self to be transformed into a greater and larger self. You have to step into a New Being. You have to lose your life to save it.

Bart Ehrman’s story is the story of humankind’s spiritual growth. It is a story about a journey along a path of discovery. It is fueled by human curiosity, yearning to have “the Truth,” and a longing to be free from error and from insignificance. After his “born again” experience he graduated from his Lawrence, Kansas, high school, and headed off to Moody Bible Institute “to become a ‘serious’ Christian and devote myself completely to the Christian faith.” But he found there only more questions. So he finished and went to Wheaton College. The same there, and he found himself in graduate school at Princeton. And there he stumbled across the reading from Mark that served as our first reading this morning. That Gospel writer of Mark made a mistake in identifying the time frame of the King David story incorrectly. Ehrman found other contradictions. “There are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.” And worse. He learned there are no originals! And for a moment he pondered, if only someone had shielded him from this terrible knowledge! If only someone had protected him from this void by a Truth that has no void. If only he could be saved forever from having to change again and again, risk being transformed again and again, seek becoming a New Being that is ever becoming New.

His story is our story is all humankind’s story. Though his faith tradition is different than ours, his story is understandable because it is the compelling story of humankind. To seek knowledge is a spiritual endeavor because it involves risk. To learn is religious because it involves losing the self. But it is the response of the self to the void inside that is adulthood. It is a longing, a yearning for something more. Every bit of knowledge one secures can broaden understanding of existence and deepen appreciation of human being. But at a price. You will never be the same again. Every learning can become an occasion to grow in gratitude for this gift of life and in affection for the human family. But it is costly, for you will not be able to turn back. Every learning can help grow a soul. But learning destroys naiveté and innocence as it destroys ignorance.

That is human nature. We possess the capacity to choose right or wrong, good or evil. We can choose to remain ignorant by feigning innocence. We can choose to use our intellectual capacities to shrink freedom or enlarge it. We can choose to use our spiritual sensibilities to capture the minds and souls of others or liberate them. Or we can beckon to all to feast upon the bread of knowledge that life may be nourished and sustained. The bread is not for priests alone but for all souls.

The more ideas a person is exposed to, the more educated that individual becomes. The more widespread is a person’s education, the more he and she will be able to discern right from wrong and make appropriate choices. It is a religious responsibility to educate persons as broadly and deeply as possible so that they might choose wisely. It will not satiate the void, but knowing more will beckon the individual to discover more about existence. By this people change and grow, and may even grow into the soul that they are created to become. And the broadness of their affection may become the mark of their character, and they may fast from ignorance and hatred of others. Truth may finally become the servant of Love.

Religion is not about truth and spirituality is not about being right. Religion is about seeing the world and all of existence as a pattern of relationships, and spirituality is about establishing relationships and valuing mutuality as a sacred and holy thing. Human beings are different. There are a variety of human religious experiences, as various as there are individuals who live, have lived, and will live. That is not something to fear, but something to learn about. Human experience and thought and belief do not and cannot exhaust the entirety of God. To broaden one’s understanding of human being is to expand one’s image of God. And this can only be done when the mind is free to engage thoughts and beliefs and books and ideas that it had not before engaged. And the heart is liberated to love.

AMEN.