“Scripts for the Pageant”
Rev. Dr. Steven Jungkeit
Texts: Psalm 119: 97-105; Matthew 2: 1-12; John 1: 14
Where shall wisdom be found? That question from the Book of Job is one that reverberates on Epiphany Sunday, during which we retell the story of the Magi in search of the Christ child. It is also a fitting question for the first Sunday of a new year, which, in a mere four days, has delivered an attack and an apparent occupation of Venezuela, with implications that are still unclear. Where, indeed, shall wisdom be found?
I don’t yet have coherent thoughts on yesterday’s news, still less on what it will mean for the future. I do fear for the friends we made in Cuba this past spring, since that country is now in the crosshairs of the administration. For now, though, I wish to defer those thoughts, in order to focus on Job’s question from an angle both outside, and yet strangely inside, the events now shaping our world.
To get at Job’s question, I’d like to tell you about a person who once lived not far from Old Lyme. A short drive up I-95, in Stonington, after climbing a flight of stairs, you can enter the apartment of James Merrill, one of the most important poets of the United States during the past hundred years. The apartment is a modest but beguiling space, with a library hidden behind a trick bookcase, a rooftop view of the ocean, and a dining table that sits beneath an enormous copper plated dome. For years, Merrill and his friends would gather under this dome in the evenings, and they would use a ouija board to invite conversations with spirits from the past. Somehow, from these sessions, Merrill produced a three volume book of epic poetry called The Changing Light at Sandover. The third part of that poem, published separately in 1980, is where I have borrowed the title for my sermon today – Scripts for the Pageant.
(A couple years ago, a few of us from FCCOL visited Merrill’s apartment, and then drove down to the Beinecke Library at Yale, which has in its holdings Merrill’s actual ouija board, along with a cracked teacup he used during those divination sessions. A curator allowed us to examine the board and the cup in a private room – we even tried to get Merrill to speak to us using the ouija board, but, well, he refused to speak.)
For Merrill, the pageant of his title is life itself, in which human beings seek out roles within a vast cosmic drama. And the scripts are the possibilities granted to each of us, which are, as often as not, suggested by wisdom figures from the past that we then perform anew, as we fashion our own life stories. I am me, and you are you, but we encounter reflections of ourselves in other human lives, especially as we expose ourselves to history, literature, film, or theater. Such exemplars help us to steer the course of our days, providing a kind of script from which we ourselves can riff and improvise. I suspect that deep down, when we turn to the arts, we’re searching not so much for entertainment or distraction, but rather for scripts for the pageant of life, clues as to how we might enact meaningful and fulfilling lives in the time given to us. We are, in essence, pursuing Job’s question: where shall wisdom be found?
For generations of faithful people, the answer to that question has been found in the pages of Scripture. And indeed, scripts for the pageant is how I have begun to imagine what it is to read Scripture. It is to encounter a series of persons, some of whom are historical, others of whom are probably fictions, but all of whom provide some sort of insight into how we might fashion ourselves in the cosmic drama of life. Jesus and the Apostles are, of course, some of the most well known figures in the script, along with Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Saul, David, Job, the prophets, but then also Mary, Paul, Timothy and on and on. They’re each characters in the vast drama that unfolds in the pages of the Bible. They represent, at times, the very best of the human spirit, and sometimes the very worst. I think of them as roles we’re given to enact or emulate at different times throughout our lives. Sometimes, we’re offered these scripts so that we may choose a better path, learning from the mistakes of previous generations. Sometimes we’re given these scripts that we might discover hidden realms of goodness within ourselves. But it’s all given that we might find our own way in this complicated drama called life. The Bible is a script for the pageant of our days.
For a number of reasons, I’ve been drawn toward the Bible more deeply in recent years. That’s had to do with the searching conversations our Bible study group enjoys together, but it also has to do with some other reasons that I’ll share in just a moment. Sometime this past autumn, I began to imagine a year long read through of the entire Bible. And I began to imagine inviting all of you to join in that read through with me. It’s been in the bulletin and it’s now in our newsletter, but consider this your invitation.
Before saying more about why this feels like an important endeavor right now, it’s necessary to address some misgivings that some of you may hold, misgivings that, if I’m honest, I also share. Many of us have found FCCOL, and continue to make a home here, because we’ve been wounded by religion in the past. Often, FCCOL functions as a kind of halfway house for those of us who haven’t been able to give up on God, or on some sense of the transcendent, even as we’re wary of the way religion has been used for hurt or for harm. For many of us, that wariness extends to the Bible itself. It’s been weaponized against more than a few of us, and it’s been used to justify all manner of oppressions throughout history. It’s been used as a refuge for superstitions and for uncritical dogmas, and it has been used to undermine scientific discoveries at almost every turn. These days, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the Bible has been the plaything of lunatics and idiots, of despots and of bullies, of bigots and of fools. Why concern ourselves with such a book, especially today, when we might do well to learn from other sources?
To those questions, add this observation. Churches such as this one, formed by generations of liberal theologies, continue to grant the Bible pride of place in our iconography and in our self-understanding. The open Bible is one of the few visual symbols we have held onto as Congregationalists. But our tradition has rightly sensed that to rely on the Bible alone for insight is to do a kind of violence to the human spirit, and so we have opened ourselves to multiple sources of wisdom. Depending upon Scripture alone is to trap oneself in an intellectual and spiritual cul-de-sac, one from which many people never really emerge. And so the entire tradition of Protestant liberalism has treated the Bible with a sort of highly principled reserve. In many ways, that has characterized my own approach to the Bible – it’s one of several important touchstones that I use in preparing a sermon, but it’s not the sole one, and sometimes it’s not even the most important one. That’s born of the conviction that God finds us in many different forms, and the pages of Scripture are but one of them.
Even so, I have several reasons for inviting us to focus on the Bible this coming year. Allow me to lay out three of those reasons for you. The first I’ve spoken about often, and it has to do with declining literacy both in our country and around the world. A recent statistic published in The Guardian suggests that in the past 20 years, the number of people who read for pleasure in the United States has declined by 40%, time now spent scrolling or watching videos. (It’s interesting, by the way, to note that that decline mirrors almost exactly the decline in religious practice in our culture.) So too, there have been numerous articles published in the past year about high performing students who graduate from high school without having read a single book in full. Some other studies suggest that people are actually reading more now than they ever were. But it is the kind of reading that has changed, with brief articles and encapsulations that now predominate, rather than long form arguments. One way or another, the ability to focus in a sustained way on words, on arguments, to track detailed stories across the page, has eroded. Words are tools for thinking, and the absence of sustained attention to words renders human beings far more pliable, manipulable, and docile than they otherwise might be. Declining literacy is surely one of the reasons for the turn toward authoritarianism in recent years.
For centuries, our tradition has insisted upon the priority of the Word, and of words, for the shaping of faithful lives. That may mean we are relics of the past. It may mean that we are profoundly countercultural in this time. It may mean we have something important to offer. What better way to reclaim a piece of our own mental agency by spending just a little bit of time every day immersed in the words that have shaped the lives of millions of people across the ages – wrestling with them, learning from them, arguing with them, but immersing all the same?
My second reason for inviting you on this adventure returns us to some of the objections I cited earlier. Over the years, we liberal and progressive Christians have ceded the Bible to preachers, sects, and ultimately political leaders who have hijacked the text for their own very dubious purposes. But I’m sorry, this book is far more complex and far more interesting than what the fundamentalists and evangelicals and political hucksters have managed to do with it. While the Bible is now associated with far right politics, we must recall that the Bible has inspired some of the most impressive liberation movements in history. For all the ways the Bible was used as a tool of enslavement, it was the Bible that inspired the movement toward abolition, as enslaved people saw themselves in the story of Moses and the Hebrews coming out of Egypt. For all the ways the Bible has been used as a tool of white supremacy, it was the Bible that gave inspiration to the Civil Rights Movement, which shook the very foundations of that same white supremacy. For all of the ways the Bible has been used to prop up right wing dictatorships throughout the Americas and in Africa, it was reading the Bible that created liberation theologies throughout both hemispheres, creating a movement that took the needs of the poor and the disenfranchised seriously. The band U2 once said about the song ‘Helter Skelter,’ “This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles – we’re stealing it back.” This is a chance to steal the Bible back from the demagogues, from the charlatans, from the soul-killers. They can’t have it, and we’re stealing it back!
My third reason for inviting you along on this pilgrimage of the mind and the spirit is simpler. I want us to discover, or in some cases to rediscover, the beauty of this book – its marvels, its pleasures, its vistas. It’s true that not everything in it is pretty, and, candidly, there are some truly awful parts that we’ll come to. We’ll talk about those. But it’s also the record of a people coming to awareness, in fits and starts, of something, of Someone, who is transcendent to their lives, and who is calling them to what William James described as “The More” – the more than mere materialism, the more than the repetition of our days. It is a record of a people discovering mercy and compassion as a divine horizon, and who sometimes lose sight of that horizon. It is a record of people who, for all their distance in time and space, feel recognizably human in their striving and their failing, who thus provide us with models and guides for living. It is a record of a people learning to become ethically responsible – to themselves, to others, and most of all to God. And then too it is a record of a people who discover what they have been searching for in a humble carpenter made of flesh and bone, in whom they came to see the very face of God. It is a record of a people, not unlike you, not unlike me, who sense somehow that this is a story like no other, one worth being centered in, one worth building a life around, a script for the pageant that is the living of our days.
Let me address one final concern. Should you choose to accept this invitation – this mission – you will have moments that feel thrilling, when you feel positively rejuvenated by what you discover. But you will also probably have moments of doubt, that make you wonder if the book actually discloses goodness at all. You may wonder, in the midst of some of the carnage, or the judgment, or the laws, if the message is for you. How, you might wonder, could such a book come to be called “the Word of God” when so much of it runs counter to all that we now associate with God?
If those questions plague you, as they have me from time to time, I offer this helpful piece of counsel that I was once given: the Bible is not the Word of God. According to the preamble of the Gospel of John, it is a human being, Jesus the Christ, who is the Word of God, not words printed in a book. The Bible was written by human beings, who, we often have to say, were dead wrong about certain things. And so when reading the Bible, it’s important to remember that God didn’t say this stuff – Paul did, Luke did, Isaiah did, together with all the other people who compiled these stories, songs, laws, and letters. God possesses no hand, and so God did not dip a quill into an inkpot to produce these words. Human beings did.
If Jesus is the Word of God, and not the words of the book, that can help us as we read. It can help us discern where divine wisdom is to be found in Scripture, and where it is not. For example, when we come to passages in which the Lord God commands wholesale slaughter, we have license to say, “that may be how people of that time and place understood God to function, but it in no way accords with the image of God that we find in Jesus.” In such cases, the text does not disclose the Word made flesh, but rather a violent tribal deity that the people had to mature out of. Conversely, when we encounter people practicing mercy with one another, demonstrating love and care for one another, we discover early intuitions that, we believe, come to fruition in the life of Jesus. The Bible is, in other words, a continually unfolding record of divine disclosure, one that does not come to an end at the end of the book.
I hope that more than a few of you will choose to accept this invitation. It will stretch and challenge us all, I think, but it will also be a chance to grow in faith and understanding. If you do accept, let me or the office know so that we can stay in touch throughout the year. I’m hoping we can convene discussions at the end of each month to share what we’re learning.
And so where shall wisdom be found? In the pages of the Bible, sure. But I actually think the greater wisdom will be found elsewhere. I believe wisdom shall be found in our collective, shared experience of wrestling with this book together, as we encounter the living Spirit that animates our reading and our discussion with one another.
If the first few days of 2026 are any indication, we shall have no shortage of challenges in this new year. Let us fortify ourselves with wisdom. Let us take up this script for the pageant of our days.