42,000 Slow Learners with a Speech Impediment

Psalm 89:1-18 • Psalm 89:19-52
Judges 12:1-7 • Acts 5:12-26 • John 3:1-21

In Judges we learn that Jephthah of the Gileadites unexpectedly defeated the Ammonites without the promised help of the Ephraimites. The Ephraimites used as an excuse “You Gileadites are really only renegades from Ephraim and Manasseh.” Taking this as an insult, a large fight broke out, with the Gileadites gaining an early advantage. They seized the shallow parts of the River Jordan that were the only obvious line of retreat for the Ephraimites to get back to their own territory.

The Gileadites asked each fleeing Ephraimaite if he were an Ephraimite. The Ephraimites seeking to avoid instant execution, denied that they were. At which point the Gileadites asked them to pronounce the password “shibboleth.” And when they mispronounced this as “sibboleth,” they were immediately cut down anyway. Apparently 42,000 clueless Ephraimites standing in a line waiting to cross the river neither took the time to practiced their pronunciation of shibboleth enough, nor figured our another way to get home. What deep lesson does this have for Episcopalians today?

We ought to adopt what Erasmus, a Dutch Renaissance theologian and biblical scholar said was the most important lessons he learned from his Jewish teacher of Biblical Hebrew: Not all the stories in the Hebrew Bible (aka the Old Testament) necessarily foreshadow the events or essential teachings of the New Testament. Sometimes they had meaning for a particular audience in a specific time and place and may not be meant for us in the here and now.

We as humble Episcopalians admit that there are some things that we don’t understand now, and maybe never had understood, and perhaps never will. The only thing worse than claiming omniscience or infallibility is, even when you are “a very stable genius,” is just making things up and expecting everyone to be gullible enough to believe them.

Written by Tony Stankus

Tony Stankus, now 69, was the first librarian at the U of A ever promoted to the rank of Distinguished Professor. He became an Episcopalian at age 66 because he could no longer resist the joy of St. Paul’s liturgies nor the warmth of its priests and people.