05/04/2021
Do You Understand?
Sunday, May 2, 2021 | Acts 8:26-40
Little Liam and Amelia are in first grade. Although some kids their age went to actual classrooms, Liam and Amelia attended school online. When they first started in the fall of 2020, they could read a little. But in first grade, they learned to read a lot. Now they’re excellent readers for their age and reading at a third-grade level.
One of the stories they might have read in the early days of first grade went like this:
Charlotte wants to build a fort.
She gets a big cardboard box.
She gets some strong tape.
Her dad helps, too.
He gets some scissors.
He cuts the cardboard.
He makes windows and doors.
They set up the fort in the backyard.
Her brother wants to play.
Her sister wants to play.
Her friends want to play.
Charlotte and her dad look at each other.
They need a bigger fort!
Readability scientists would give this story a very high readability score. The story is much more readable than a version like this: “Charlotte desires to construct a military fortress, but is lacking suitable material. However, she is soon able to acquire a cardboard box, and with the help of industrial grade packing tape, shears and staples, the child manages to erect a citadel of such impressive proportions that her siblings and the neighborhood children are all eager to participate. Soon, Charlotte and her father, who assisted in the project, come to the startling realization that a larger edifice is indicated.”
One online source defines readability as “the ease with which text can be read and understood.” Factors contributing to a readability score are the number of words in a sentence, the length of words and how many syllables they contain, fonts, spacing, etc. Two common assessment tools are the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) formulas originally developed for the Navy and the Department of Defense. Now, Microsoft Word has a built-in function that provides FRE and FKGL scores, and the popular editing tool, Grammarly, also uses FRE and FKGL formulas to assess readability.
An old journalism adage insists that when writing for a general audience, authors should try to imagine the audience as a group of eighth-graders.
In the Acts reading for today, we encounter a person who’s experiencing readability discomfort. Does it surprise you that he’s reading the Bible — what we call the Old Testament?
And would it surprise you to know that he’s not reading the story of David and Goliath? Nor is he confused by the riveting account of the baby Moses floating on the Nile in a basket made of bulrush reeds.
No, he’s plodding through Isaiah 53.
Have you ever had the feeling that some parts of the Bible are virtually unreadable? Have you ever thought to yourself: “What is the apostle Paul trying to say?” And forget all those prophets in the back of the Old Testament!
If we were to read Isaiah 53 ourselves, we might be just as uncomfortable as was the prince of Ethiopia. Like him, we might think that these texts read like “obscure speech and difficult language,” to cite Ezekiel (3:5).
Christians, along with Jews and Muslims, are called “People of the Book.” This story in Acts of the interaction between Philip the Evangelist and the Ethiopian gives us an opportunity to discuss interpretation and comprehension of the biblical text. Let’s look at it from three perspectives: text, teacher and comprehension.
Text
It is very unusual that this Ethiopian was reading at all, let alone reading something from the prophets. The literacy rate in the land of Cush — often the name associated with ancient Ethiopia — probably wasn’t any higher than it was in first-century Palestine, where the literacy rate was barely 1 percent.
In most villages, only one person — usually the leader of the synagogue — could stand up on the Sabbath in the synagogue and read the Torah. The gospels give us an example: Following his conversation with the devil in the wilderness, Jesus goes back to his hometown and attends the synagogue “on the sabbath day as was his custom. He stood up to read …” After reading, “he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down” (Luke 4:16, 20). A rule might have been in place that if no one else stood to read, the same person could repeat the ritual of standing, reading, and sitting seven times. By then, the congregation had heard a reading from the Torah, the Writings, the Prophets and more.
These readers were of vital importance. Without them, the people would have no way of knowing, let alone understanding, the word of God. But, on the other hand, it wasn’t really that important.
Why? Because the ancient Palestine people lived in an agrarian economy and sending one’s son to school was considered a waste of time and money. Boys were expected to be in the fields. And, moreover, theirs was a culture of oral tradition. The long and short of it was that a person could be illiterate and still fulfill all the requirements of the law, thank you very much.
But Jesus had learned to read. As a precocious lad of 12, he had schooled the scribes and Pharisees in the finer points of the Law. Jesus was evidently a second reader on this particular day when he stood to read. What’s interesting is the text Jesus chose to read. What do you suppose it was? Isaiah, the same prophetic source that the Ethiopian was reading! A portion of the Torah had probably already been read (see Acts 15:21), so Jesus stands up, reads a passage from Isaiah, including, but not limited to, 61:1-2. And then he sits down.
Here’s the thing: The literacy rate in the United States is 99 percent. No doubt almost everyone who shows up at your Zoom online church service, or in person at your brick-and-mortar building, can read. But honestly, your congregation probably has more in common with the audience to whom Jesus read 2,000 years ago than we’d care to admit.
A recent report by the American Bible Society shows that “only 9 percent of respondents read their Bible on a daily basis, the lowest figure in the decade.” Why? It’s hard to say. A number of factors may account for the decline. But one thing is certain: It’s not a readability issue as it used to be when the King James Version had its mystical imprimatur as the divine and inerrant word of God. For many people, reading the KJV was like trying to read the Bible in Latin.
What this means is that churchgoers generally are not like the Ethiopian of today’s story. They’re more like Jesus’ neighbors, who went to synagogue and couldn’t read the Scriptures to save their lives. What saved them was that someone else could read. And today, if people read and hear the Scriptures, it’s likely to be in church, and if not, it’s likely the Scriptures are not read or heard at all.
The implication is that the public reading of Scripture is as essential as it always has been.
Teacher
The literacy issues mentioned above continued well into the medieval period and into the Renaissance and beyond. Until the Reformation, no earnest and devout Christian worried about reading the Bible, or even understanding the Bible. The priest would read the text (although some priests were illiterate themselves), and the church would tell you what to believe about the text. Easy!
Then Johannes Gutenberg came along with his little printing press, and suddenly the Bible was being printed in the vernacular — how vulgar! — and people were coming up with the strangest ideas about biblical texts. In short, the Catholic Church, and even multitudinous Protestant churches, could no longer limit or control how people interpreted the Bible. Protestants with their printing presses had introduced into the general population a hermeneutical virus of pandemic proportions!
But this was not the problem for the Ethiopian court official in Queen Candace’s kingdom in today’s reading. This was an educated man. He was evidently trustworthy because he was in control of the keys to the treasury. He was somebody!
But when Philip hitches a ride with him and sits beside him in his new Chariot XL, he sees that the man is troubled. The conversation begins with a question: “Do you understand?” No, he doesn’t. “What don’t you understand?” And the Ethiopian explains. And then Philip explains.
We need teachers. If we can read, we had parents and teachers who were instrumental in teaching us to read. As our learning increases, and if we consider ourselves lifelong learners, we know that we must do the research and we must find the voices of the past to gain wisdom about the present.
We cannot, as so many seem to do these days, trust our own judgment, or think we can make pronouncements without considering a vast body of opinion when forming our own.
This is especially true on matters of theology, ethics and biblical texts. Before we begin to spout hair-brained ideas about the meaning of the book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ, for example, we might consult scholars and theologians of the present day, as well as those of centuries gone by. Establish how the text has been interpreted in the past. Then, we might offer our own view, but not without being able to explain why.
We need those who can help us unpack the Scriptures. These people have always been important.
Go back to Jesus’ day. In those days, the people who knew the Scriptures were priests, scribes, elders, Pharisees and Sadducees. Although the gospels usually present them in a negative light, they had a vital function in the religious life of the community. And remember that when the exiles returned from their Babylonian captivity, it was the scribe and priest Ezra who incited a religious revival: “The scribe Ezra stood on a wooden platform that had been made for the purpose; … And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people; and when he opened it, all the people stood up. Then Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, ‘Amen, Amen,’ lifting up their hands. Then they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Also … the Levites helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places. So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading” (Nehemiah 8:5-8, emphasis added).
The Ethiopian was eager to learn from a teacher. He would have agreed with the biblical proverb: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. … Do not be wise in your own eyes” (Proverbs 3:5,7).
This is why the church has pastors, teachers and evangelists who are eager to step into Philip’s role as a teacher, mentor and guide. In fact, the Bible explicitly states that some people have been gifted for this very task, and we should not hesitate to make use of their skills: “Some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:11-13).
Comprehension
Philip asked the Ethiopian dignitary in the chariot — in so many words — “Just what don’t you understand?” And the Ethiopian was like, “Everything!”
You’ve got to love what Luke, the writer of Acts, notes about this encounter: “Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus” (v. 35).
He started with the Bible! He didn’t start with a joke, a personal anecdote, a comment or discussion of the culture or questions about the man’s religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The man was reading from Isaiah, so Philip started with Isaiah, and then led him on a journey through what was Philip’s Bible of the time, the Hebrew Scriptures.
It’s a good principle that when sharing one’s faith we ought to start with the Book. Start with the Bible, then talk about our experience with the Scriptures as a source of faithful guidance for our lives. Rather than launching into philosophies of this world, fads and movements, we can just keep it simple and do what Philip did. Start with the Bible.
And then what did Philip do?
He told him the “good news about Jesus”! Isaiah 53, he said, is about Jesus. Philip no doubt explained how Jesus was good news. This is what people need to hear, isn’t it? Not only in the age of Covid, but anytime and anywhere. People are thirsty for good news. Philip told him about Jesus.
Sharing our faith is hard for many of us. But perhaps we over-complicate this. We might ask someone, “What don’t you understand — about life, your life, your faith, your journey, your mission, your purpose?” After their response, you say, “Let me tell you about Jesus.” Not hard at all.
Final observation: This text also reminds us that there’s no need for misunderstanding. The word of God, the psalmist wrote (He was not referring to the New Testament!), is a “lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (119:105).
What don’t you understand? If your answer is “everything,” just remember that it is no longer a readability issue. That excuse won’t fly. Instead:
• Take a good look at the text.
• Find a teacher and explore the history of the text’s interpretation.
• Ask yourself what it says about Jesus.
The journey toward understanding is enlightening and rewarding.
Amen. (Homiletics)
Enjoy!
