April 26, 2026 – Fourth Sunday of Easter
Genesis 1.26-36
II Timothy 3.14-17
A Textbook Example
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Shortly before I left for vacation the New York Times published an article that caught my preacherly eye. The headline read, “Texas Considers Required Reading List for Schools Which Includes the Bible.” Hmmm. Texas Considers Required Reading List for Schools Which Includes the Bible. The article reports the Texas State Board of Education is planning to revamp its English and Social Studies curricula to include certain parts of the Bible, which will also include a comprehensive overhaul of the way the state teaches history. My first reaction was to wonder what parts of the Bible Texas would choose to include. I think the long list of begats in Matthew and Luke would make a fine history lesson, or perhaps the tongue-twisting genealogies in the book of Numbers would make for an interesting English class. Texas already posts the Ten Commandments in schools, so elementary school children can go home at the end of the day and ask their parents about murder and adultery and coveting each other’s spouses. Imagine, using the Bible as a textbook for public school education – I wonder what that might look like?
Good morning class and welcome back from Spring break. I trust you’re getting used to the new textbooks we handed out at the start of the semester, those heavy black editions on your desks where we have been discovering a brand new and entirely unexpected way of learning. I understand that the Texas State Board of Education’s choice of the King James Version of 1622 does present some challenges, but you have been very good at adapting, and hey, if it’s good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for us.
Our first subject this morning will be social studies, and we will return to the subject of capital punishment we began before the break. Please open your Bibles – er, I mean, your textbooks – to the book of Leviticus chapters 20 and 24. Earlier we discussed methods of capital punishment, which were principally stoning and burning at the stake. Today we’re going to examine the grounds for the death penalty, those offenses which are punishable by death. In chapter 20, for example, we find that worshiping the wrong God is punishable by execution. Yes, William, you have a question? If we can be executed for worshiping the wrong God, then who is the right God the Old Testament lists Yahweh, Jehovah, Elihu, El-Shaddai Adoni, El-Elyon, Ancient of Days or I Am? Well, they are all the right God, I mean, sometimes God is called by each of those different names, and yes, I know that different families of Israel fought over what is the right name to call God, which can be confusing, but I don’t think you can be stoned if you use the wrong name. I don’t think. Ellen? Which is the right God in the New Testament, God the Father, God the Son or God the Holy Spirit? Well again, they are not three different gods, and you probably won’t get in trouble for calling God one or the other, but I’ll have to get back to you on that. I’ll tell you what, let’s move on, I can see this is a bit distracting. Another capital offense is desecrating the sabbath, which is the day we worship. Michael? No, I don’t think there were lawnmowers in the Old Testament, so your Dad probably won’t be punished for cutting the lawn every Sunday morning instead of coming to church. Yes, I know you live next door to the church, and we can hear it every Sunday morning and it tends to drown the preacher out and it is very distracting, but… Yes, Angela? You have been reading ahead and discovered that Leviticus prescribes capital punishment for children who disrespect their parents? Now Angela, don’t cry, I don’t think that means talking back, I’m sure the police are not coming for you when you get home from school. Will you look at that, Social Studies time is up, so let’s move on to something safer, like vocabulary.
I’ve corrected the vocab quiz you took before the break, and it looks as though we still have a bit of work to do. Let’s go over the biblical words I asked you to memorize and define. We began with the word champaign. In the book of Deuteronomy, champaign is not a bubbly drink from France, it is plain, a long flat bit of countryside, but I can understand how you might have gotten confused. The word beeves is the plural for oxen, it is not a cartoon character from Beeves & Butthead. Neesings. Nobody remembered the meaning of the word neesings; let me give you a hint, when you are done with your neesings, you will hear the reply, ‘God bless you,’ or ‘Gesundheit.’ Yes, neesings are sneezes. And it is not that surprising that many of you said ouches are wounds, but in the Bible they are the setting for stones or gems. I can tell we are into the baseball season, but the word trow is not what you do with a ball, but it means to think, and mazzaroth was not the second baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates whose walk-off home run beat the New York Yankees in the 1960 World Series – that was Mazeroski; the mazzaroth are the signs of the zodiac. Some of you even had difficulty with such simple terms as wist and wen. Wist is a form of the verb “to know,” not a card game, and wen is not a question, it is a wound described in the book of Leviticus – like ouches, but not.
But perhaps seventeenth century vocabulary is not your strength, so let’s work on spelling instead. Next Friday will be our weekly spelling test, featuring the following biblical proper names, which you will recognize from last semester’s history class. Please know the spelling and punctuation of the following names: Tiglath-Pileser, Zaphnathpaaneah, Jonathanchiltemochim, Nebuchadnezzar, Ashurbanipal, Mahershalalhashbaz (which is the longest name in the Old Testament), and Ahasuerus. If that last name is too difficult, you may give me its Latin equivalent of Xerxes. Good luck!
Let’s turn now to a review of last week’s history lesson, appropriate for this Earth Day weekend, namely the Creation of the world. We spoke about the rightly neglected 16th century Bishop, James Ussher of Ireland, whose tireless work has permitted us to pinpoint not just the year in which God created everything in less that one week, but the exact date on which God began creating. By counting backward from New Testament times, stating with the firm date on which we know Jesus was born, December 25 in the year Zero, Bishop Ussher calculates the first day of creation to have been October 23, 4004 BC. His exacting calculations were later refined by Dr James Lightfoot of Cambridge University who located the exact moment of creation to be 9:00 am on the 23rd, presumably Greenwich Mean Time. Ussher came to this conclusion, in part, by counting in Matthew’s genealogy forty-two generations between Jesus and Abraham, and then guesstimating the years between Abraham and Adam. Yes? Amelia? Luke lists fifty-seven generations between Jesus and Abraham? Ah, but our esteemed Texas State Board of Education has anticipated your objection and has specifically said that if Charles Darwin can throw in a missing link or two to demonstrate the theory of evolution, there is no reason we cannot do the same and throw in a couple extra generations to make the Bible work the way we want it to work. Yes, Lance? Oh for goodness sake, don’t go on about the dinosaurs living a hundred million years ago again. Do you see any dinosaurs in the Bible? No, you don’t. Therefore there neither are nor were ever any dinosaurs.
Laura? You have a question about the order of creation? Go ahead… If God made the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day, then where did the light come from on the first day? And how do you even count days before the sun was made? Clever girl, but you are not the first to ask the question. The fact that Day Three follows Day one is as natural as Day Six – when the animals were created – follows Day Five when the birds are created, even though paleontologists have proven that the Day Five birds are naturally descended from Day Six’s reptiles. To which the Texas Board of Education says, Well La Ti Da, “naturally descended,” is little more than Darwin’s theory of evolution dressed up in top hat and tails. You’re just trying to make a monkey out of the great state of Texas, when it is perfectly capable of doing so all by itself.
On to the creation of humanity. After all the animals were created on the sixth day in Genesis One, God finally came to the pinnacle of creation, which is you and me and all of humanity, and at the end of the day Creation was complete. Yes, Anna? In Genesis Two God created the animals after the first man and woman and how does that jibe with chapter One’s creation story? Clearly you have been seduced by the twin temptations of reason and logic, neither of which has a place in the new curriculum. Biblical truth will not be compromised by science or history, and a good Lone Star state education will seldom be confused with factual analysis.
I can see the period is over; tomorrow we will study poetry and tonight’s homework will be an analysis of Shakespeare’s use of metaphor when he wrote the entire book of the Psalms.
Class dismissed.