August 21st: "I'm Not So Sure About...The Bible"

 

Watch the sermon here

First United Presbyterian Church

“I’m Not So Sure About…The Bible”

Rev. Amy Morgan

August 21, 2022

John 1:1-14

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

 2 He was in the beginning with God.

 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being

 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

 6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.

 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.

 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

 10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.

 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.

 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God,

 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

 14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.When you type “the Bible is…” into the Google search bar, the autofill responses include:

• The word of God
• Not the word of God
• The inspired word of God
• The inerrant word of God
• Fiction
• And…a Catholic book.

So if you’re not entirely sure what the Bible is, clearly you are not alone. 

Over the next several weeks, we’re going to be exploring some things we might not be so sure about. Many of these topics have grown controversial in our society, and within the Christian church, mainly because folks have become entrenched in opposing viewpoints, clinging to certainty about their perspectives in a world of rapidly shifting cultural dynamics. But beneath that façade of certainty are deep uncertainties, challenging questions, fear and longing and even grief. So we’re going to handle these topics tenderly, and with great care and compassion. 

We’re also going to continue the conversation around these topics after worship. Those who want to share, ask questions, and explore will be invited to gather here in the sanctuary, and we’ll keep the livestream running over YouTube, and folks can go deeper and learn together. 

But the most important thing about exploring these uncertainties is that we are going to ground our understanding of them in the Bible. But in order to do that, we first have to clear up some of the uncertainty about what the Bible actually is. Is it a history or science textbook? Is it Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, or some kind of rule book for living a good life? Is it inerrant, inspired, authoritative? And if it is, what do we mean by any of those terms?

That is our focus today. 

The first thing we need to understand is that the Bible did not drop out of the sky one day in it’s full and complete form. This is a book that developed over thousands of years, in different contexts, in the lives of particular people and societies. The Bible itself has a life and a story that we need to hear before we can hear what it has to say to us today. 

What we know as the Old Testament, or what Jews would call the Bible, was composed over the course of several centuries. The first five books of the Bible, known as the Pentateuch or Torah, had four distinct authors or editors that scholars can identify. They each contributed their take on the origin of creation, God’s relationship with it, and the covenant relationship between God and the Hebrew people at different points in the history of Israel. This multi-vocal composition is clear from the first two chapters of Genesis, where we get two very different creation narratives. We get very different pictures of who God is and what God wants throughout these books. God is sometimes very human-like, walking in the garden with the humans, speaking directly to them, and even being persuaded to change God’s mind. Other stories depict God as almighty and distinct from the creation, sending angels and messengers and speaking in dreams instead of making direct contact with humans. Leviticus focuses on personal and communal righteousness in daily life, while Deuteronomy extolls the rituals of the temple in Jerusalem. Sometimes God is referred to by the unpronounceable and sacred four-letter name revealed to Moses at the burning bush. Other times God is called Elohim, which is also the word for gods, generally, in Hebrew. In other places, God is primarily known as Adonai, the word for “lord” in Hebrew. 

After the Torah, the remaining 34 books of the Old Testament represent a variety of different kinds of literature, written over the course of several more centuries. There are books of poetry and wisdom; books of prophesy; ancient folk tales; genealogies and historical narratives; and even a little apocalyptic writing.

The New Testament, or what one seminary professor referred to as “the pamphlet at the end of the Old Testament,” begins with four different accounts of the life of Jesus Christ, known as “gospels.” Gospel, meaning “good news” in Greek, was a genre of writing that was not unique to those who followed Jesus of Nazareth. These are also not the earliest writings about Jesus in the Bible. The New Testament really begins with the letters of Paul, who wrote to particular communities he had visited or founded about particular concerns that arose within those communities. Later missionaries, some of whom wrote under Paul’s name, which was a traditional and acceptable practice in the first century, composed letters and sermons that were intended for the wider church, to begin unifying the beliefs and practices of the fledgling Christian community. The gospel writers drew from common sources, including each other, to construct their narratives, but they each did so in ways that supported a particular understanding of what Jesus meant in their unique context. 

So this is like Bible 101 reduced to about 5 minutes. We can unpack this some more later on. The main takeaway here is that the Bible has a history and context that we must honor and respect in order to read and understand it in a way that is authentic and authoritative.

Now, let’s briefly unpack those two words: authentic and authoritative. Authentic means that we are really listening to the text, to the people who wrote it, the communities it was written for, to what was happening in their lives and in their world. To read the Bible authentically, we can’t go looking for what we want it to say and find a snippet of scripture that supports what we already think. We have to allow it to challenge us. We have to be genuinely curious, open-hearted, and open-minded. We have to be willing to be surprised, and sometimes disappointed. Authoritative, however, means that what the Bible ultimately says lays a claim on our lives. Understanding that the Bible has history and context does not mean it is irrelevant to our current lives and context. If we are reading authentically, only then can we experience the Bible as authoritative, as really having something meaningful to say and real guidance to give us. We may challenge the Bible’s authority at times, and even question it. But if we keep reading authentically, it will continue to offer us life-giving truth. 

In our two readings from scripture today – from the good news according to Mark and John – we see, even in the first century, two different ways scripture is being read and used. 

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus gets in trouble with some of the religious authorities because some of his disciples are eating with defiled hands. In first-century Judaism, there were several groups with different understandings of scripture, tradition, and theology. The Pharisees who are featured in this story were known for trying to get people to follow the practices of the temple in their homes and everyday lives. They had developed rituals and traditions that went far above and beyond temple worship and rites, things Jesus at one point describes as burdensome. Here, Jesus criticizes them for using scripture to get out of having to support their parents. 

What the Pharisees have done is created their own beliefs about how to live, what makes them special and unique, what makes them faithful and righteous. They’ve taken some very specific, very contextual purity laws from centuries ago and plucked them out of their historical and literary context. And they’ve then applied them in a way that fits into the framework they’ve developed for what makes a person right before God. 

And Jesus calls them on it. He also bases his argument in scripture. But he reaches for one of the laws of God that shows up again and again – in the Torah and in the prophets, that gets applied in stories and wisdom throughout the Hebrew scriptures. “Honor your father and mother,” is not plucked out of context in a remote corner of Leviticus. It comes as part of the ten commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy. Exodus also commands that anyone who curses or strikes a mother or father will be put to death. Leviticus also commands reverence for mother and father. Proverbs has numerous passages advocating for reverence of parents, and the prophets, as Jesus quotes, also echo this commandment. 

Jesus draws from the whole tradition, in its fullness and with respect to the larger story, to condemn the Pharisee’s false certainty of their righteousness as nothing more than a way to shirk their responsibility for caring for their parents. Jesus listens authentically to the scriptures, hears what is repeated over and over and over. He listens for why this is so important, honoring parents, in the lives of his ancestors. What God desires is not ritual purity but a purity of heart, which leads to the flourishing of the relationships between God, creation, and humanity. That is what he hears when he reads scripture authentically and regards it as authoritative. It overrules the human traditions the Pharisees have constructed and clears space for those ancient scriptures to speak into the lives of his hearers in the first century. 

This story from Mark’s gospel helps us see how Jesus read scripture authentically and authoritatively. But I want us to look at the beginning of John’s gospel so we can shift the lens on this one more time. 

We’ve talked just a little bit about the words of the Bible, how they came to be written and interpreted and misinterpreted. But the Gospel of John lifts the conversation off the page. It describes the Word of God, logos in Greek, not as words on a page, stories and laws and prophesies, but as this being. The Word was in the beginning with God, the Word is God, the Word is the force that brought all creation into being. The Word generates life and light. And the Word became flesh and lived among us. 

This casting of Jesus as the living, active, creative, life-giving Word of God re-frames the whole conversation. Jesus becomes a living, breathing Bible. Like the written Bible, he can be misunderstood, misused, and misinterpreted. Or he can be read authentically and authoritatively. 

But what this really tells us is that the Word of God is not simply words on a page written by long-dead men. The Word of God is a force at work in the world. It is present and tangible and transformational. It is light and life. 

That is the lens through which we read and interpret scripture. Light and life. That is God’s Word, and we can see that from the very first chapter of Genesis when God says, “Let there be light,” and creates all life to the very last chapter of Revelation, where it says, “there will be no more night…for God will be their light,” and the river of life flows through the new Jerusalem. 

Light and life. That is what preachers would call our hermeneutic, our lens, our way of reading and interpreting scripture. Each story, each passage, each book of the Bible we read, we are looking for how it is bringing life and light. This can be a very difficult task at times. When we are reading about God commanding the slaughter of entire populations or the submission of women or people dropping dead because they withheld their possessions from the Christian community, light and life might not be the first thing we think of. And we don’t just get to throw out those parts of the Bible and say they don’t count because we don’t like them. We have to keep thinking, praying, studying, listening, approaching the text authentically, until the life and light come through. 

Whether we are looking to the Bible to teach us how to live our everyday lives or how to be in relationship with other people, whether we are seeking guidance on cultural or social concerns, whether we are discerning matters of the church, or whether we just want the Bible to bring us into a closer relationship with God, the way that we faithfully, authentically, read and understand the Bible, and make it authoritative in our lives, is to see how it is light and life for the whole world. 

To God be the glory forever and ever. Amen.