St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, November 13, 2011

The Bible Revolution – Rev. David Mundy

Psalm 23 1 Corinthians 13:1-8 Luke 1:46-55

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If I asked you to come up with the name of a single document or book which has been a revolutionary world-changer which would you choose? Of course that’s not the sort of question many of us get asked, but if you had some time to ponder what would you choose?

Perhaps it would be the American Declaration of Independence which was the signature document for the fledging democratic nation which would eventually become the most powerful nation in human history.

Of course the Declaration of Independence is a document. So, in terms of a book, how about the Communist Manifesto? In 1848 two Germans living in London, Karl Marx and Joseph Engels, were commissioned to draft a sort of catechism for communism and it fuelled revolutionary movements in Tsarist Russia and many other countries.

In the twentieth century another communist document, Mao Tse Dong’s Little Red Book became the bible for Chinese revolutionaries. We might not agree with any of the premises of these books but they did stir movements which brought about massive social change.

What if we went back further in history to the actual bible, the scriptures of both Old and New Testaments which we include in every worship service. You might not think of the bible as a revolutionary book, but it has been argued that the bible translated from Latin, the language of the elite, into English, the language of the people, was the beginning of a revolution in Europe which led to the end of monarchies and opened the door to democracy.

The English version of the bible which was instrumental in this revolution was actually commissioned by a monarch, King James I of England, in 1604 and completed in 1611, four hundred years ago this year. In the century before the King James Bible there were a number of attempts to translate the bible into English but the efforts were suppressed by King Henry the Eighth and others who saw the dangers of putting the bible into the hands of the common people. As difficult as it might be to comprehend today, some of those renegade translators were brutally executed for their efforts. The most famous of those translators was William Tyndale who was hunted down “on the run” in Europe by Henry’s henchmen, impaled on a stake, strangled to death, then burned.

For the past few months I have been trying to figure out when and how we could celebrate this important anniversary and not long ago I realized that it would have to be “now or never.” We have so many dedicated worship services during the Fall and Winter that this was the only Sunday left when this could happen before we got to 2012.

I’m going to let you in on the fact that I tried to get my Bowmanville ministerial colleagues to participate in a joint service where we celebrated the 400^th anniversary and had individuals from each congregation read a passage from the King James Bible. Well, that idea was shot down in flames – no takers, not one! Everyone was kind because they are a nice bunch, but they felt that there just wouldn’t be any interest from their folk.

I had to smile because most of the pastors in our ministerial are from evangelical churches and when I began my ministry thirty-odd years ago the majority of my conservative colleagues were biblical literalists and they felt that the only English bible that really counted was the King James bible. All those other upstart translations and paraphrases were suspect and maybe even the work of the devil. Times and fashions change, even for the bible.

You may have noticed that the passages of scripture we read and heard this morning sounded, well, old fashioned, and were in language which was more like Shakespeare, at least to our ears, than anything we are accustomed to using today. That is because they are from the King James Bible and really one of the few passages we continue to us from this version is the Lord’s Prayer each week.

Just the same, as we made our way through the familiar twenty third psalm you may have felt that this was the only version, really, even though there were words such as maketh, and thou, and anointest and runneth – as in “my cup runneth over.”

The passage from Corinthians is far more jarring to our modern ears. The phrase we know as “love is patient,” which everyone seems to want in their wedding ceremonies is “charity suffereth long” in the King James. The latin word “caritas” means love, so that’s why it says charity but for us it is just confusing.

Why then would we bother with celebrating an old version of the bible with words we can barely pronounce, let alone understand? Perhaps my colleagues had it right – no one is interested in the King James bible anymore.

Well, for starters the bible is the bestselling book in history and the King James is the bestselling English translation – estimates are that more than a billion King James Bibles have been printed in the past four hundred years. Even today when there are so many versions and paraphrases, some which sound like more like a novel than scripture there are still more than a million KJV’s sold each year. We can celebrate its success and longevity, at the very least.

We can also be impressed by the truly poetic language of this bible. The King James Version has some unlikely fans, those who love the language and the history even if they have given up on the religion that goes with it. In May this year Vanity Fair magazine printed an article called When the King Saved God which praises the King James. The author was Christopher Hitchens, surely the world’s best-known and most eloquent atheist. Hitchens, who has famously said that “religion poisons everything” concedes that the King James Bible is a great gift to the English language and even if every copy in existence were burned it has still left an indelible mark on our literature and culture. It’s hard to argue with this, given that there are hundreds of expressions from the King James which are still well known and used regularly in our language. Just a few examples:

Eat, drink and be merry (Luke 12:19)

The apple of his eye (Deuteronomy 32:10)

An eye for an eye (Matthew 5:38)

Fell flat on his face (Numbers 22:31)

Am I my brother’s keeper? (Genesis 4:9)

But the crowning achievement (please excuse the pun) of the King James Bible may have been freeing God’s voice and the message of justice and salvation so that it could be heard by common folk. Did the publication lead to democracy? It was certainly one factor amongst many, even if that was far from the intention of the King of England. A century ago American president Theodore Roosevelt declared “The King James Bible is a Magna Carta for the poor and oppressed: the most democratic book in the world.”

In the gospel today we heard the voice of young, pregnant Mary offer her hopeful vision of what the birth of her child Jesus could mean for the world:

He hath shewed strength with his arm;

he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seats,

and exalted them of low degree.

He hath filled the hungry with good things;

and the rich he hath sent away.

Does this mean we should go back to reading the King James Version in worship? No, although maybe it would be worthwhile from time to time in include a passage in worship. This 400^th anniversary celebration is more about knowing our family history than it is about reverting to another era. And appreciating the freedom of reading the bible in a form we can understand and take to heart. That is the key – allowing our faith and actions to be revolutionized by scripture.

In one congregation I served there was an older man who had spent many years in the “theatah” and had a marvellous reading voice. When he was asked to read scripture on Sundays he insisted that he read from the King James Version because the language and the cadence of this glorious translation were unsurpassed. We humoured him, but not without irony. He was one of the grumpiest, most difficult people I have every been privileged to pastor, so whatever he was reading, no matter how grand, wasn’t making much of a difference in his life!

The story of the King James Bible can inspire all of us to actually read our bibles, whatever version we use. Since the Good News Bible was published forty five years ago as an easily readable version of the bible there have been about forty more translations and paraphrases, almost one a year on average. Bibles are inexpensive, available just about everywhere, including on the internet. One of our young people has several versions on his smartphone!

This really is good news, except that despite all this choice, studies show that we don’t read the bible any more today than 150 years ago when few people could afford a personal copy, or could read for that matter.

I have two copies of the King James bible, one of which I keep close at hand, both of them having belonged to one of my grandfathers, my mother’s dad. He was a Salvation Army officer so these bibles aren’t ornamental dust collectors. They were working bibles, well worn, and both of them have copious underlining and marginal notes.

Wouldn’t it be good if we all had copies of the bible which were worn out by our constant use and reference, not to support our preconceived notions but to call us to a deeper understanding and experience of God’s justice and salvation.

You might want to leave your old King James Bible on the shelf, but make sure you have a version of the scriptures which you can understand. As parents and grandparents, you can include bible stories as part of the rhythm of family life and talk about what your children are learning in Sunday School. Our new Sunday School curriculum is based on the same passages we listen to in worship so there is a common theme.