Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 2/17/08
The Voice of Scripture
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Matthew 22:34-40
One of the classes that we are offering on Wednesday nights during this season of Lent is “The Way of Transforming Discipleship.” There was a wonderful passage in our reading for this week. It was drawn from the late Henri Nouwen’s book, Life of the Beloved. Nouwen had left his post at Harvard to become a part of L’Arche – a faith community in Trosly, France, built around the needs of the developmentally disabled that has since become a world-wide movement. Ultimately, he chose to become a part of a L’Arche community in Canada.
One day he was approached by a handicapped member of the community named Janet. She asked him for a blessing. Nouwen responded in a kind of automatic way by tracing the sign of the cross upon her forehead with the edge of his thumb, but Janet protested. “No, that doesn’t work, I want a real blessing.” Nouwen promised that he would give her a real blessing when they gathered for their prayer service. Nouwen continues:
After the service when about thirty people were sitting in a circle on the floor, I said, “Janet has asked me for a special blessing. She feels that she needs that now.” As I was saying this, I didn’t know what Janet really wanted. But Janet didn’t leave me in doubt for very long. As soon as I said, “Janet has asked me for a special blessing,” she stood up and walked toward me. I was wearing a long white robe with ample sleeves covering my hands as well as my arms. Spontaneously, Janet put her arms around me and put her head against my chest. Without thinking, I covered her with my sleeves so that she almost vanished in the folds of my robe. As we held each other, I said, “Janet, I want you to know that you are God’s Beloved Daughter. You are precious in God’s eyes. Your beautiful smile, your kindness to the people in your house and all the good things you do show us what a beautiful human being you are. I know you feel a little low these days and there is some sadness in your heart, but I want you to remember who you are: a very special person, deeply loved by God and all the people who are here with you. ”
It is a beautiful blessing, and I love the image of Nouwen’s robe enveloping that woman. There is something almost sacramental about it; a kind of outward sign of the way God’s love is folded around each one of us. But the experience raises an important question: how do we know that Nouwen was right? How do we know that Janet was precious in God’s sight and deeply loved by her Creator?
I’m not asking whether Janet was loved by God. My question, rather, is how we know that she was loved. Maybe there was a really good reason why she was feeling sad. Maybe she had just said something really mean to someone else in the community, or just stolen their most cherished possession, or trashed their reputation behind their back. Would God still love her just as much? Would she still be so precious in God’s sight then?
The first thing we need to establish as we wrestle with this question is that our feelings and even our thoughts are not necessarily a reliable guide in our knowledge of God or of God’s will. Precisely because they are our feelings and our thoughts they are going to be limited; shaped by our own biases and life experiences.
A week or two ago, for example, I was reading some background about a very well-known Christian. I was surprised to discover that he had always struggled with the image of God as our father. It turned out that his father had been very abusive, and so it was hard for him to separate his feelings about his earthly father from his feelings about our heavenly father. Like all of us, he tended to project some of what he had experienced at his parent’s hands onto God.
What if Janet had messed up in some way? If she had, we can understand why she might have felt that God was angry with her, or that God had turned away. That’s where our feelings can take us. The issue is that those feelings aren’t necessarily an accurate representation of God.
The same can hold true of our thoughts, or the patterns of our logic. How often, for example, should we forgive someone who has hurt or betrayed us? Our logic might tell us that forgiving that person three or four times is pretty generous. But then here is Jesus telling us to forgive seventy seven times or seventy times seven (Mt. 18:22).
My point is that the living God constantly surprises us, constantly challenges us, constantly stretches and calls us beyond our limits. God is so much bigger than us; so much bigger than our thoughts or feelings alone. If we are going to know this God, then, we need some reference point that lies outside of ourselves; an objective standard beyond our thoughts or feelings that can serve as a benchmark for what is truly of God. We need Scripture.
Where did Jesus turn when he was asked which commandment is greatest? He turned to Scripture. He turned to two passages: the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4-5, and Leviticus 19:18.
When Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, where did he turn? Three times he responded, “It is written…” Deut. 8:3, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Deut. 6:16, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” And Deut. 6:13, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”
Scripture was Jesus’ guide. The great bulk of his teaching can be traced back, again and again, to passages in the Old Testament. As he said, he didn’t come to abolish the law or the prophets, he came to fulfill them (Mt. 5:17) – “not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished” (Mt. 5:18).
If the Scriptures of the Old Testament were Jesus’ reference point, then surely the Scriptures of both Old and New should serve as ours, as well.
Let’s go back to Henri Nouwen and Janet. How did Nouwen know that God loved Janet? I have no doubt that he felt great compassion for her as she wrapped her arms around him. But what if he had been the one that she treated cruelly? What if he had been the one from whom she had stolen? Would his feelings have been an accurate guide in that case? He undoubtedly felt great compassion in that moment, but the truth is that his feelings were grounded in the witness of Scripture itself.
Does God love us only when we are lovable, or only when we are obedient? Scripture tells us, Romans 5:8 and 10, “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinner Christ died for us… for if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.”
It is not about being good enough. It never is. It is about this love that reaches out to us and embraces us even when we are at our worst.
This may surprise you, but it is precisely here that so many of us misunderstand or misinterpret God’s nature and will. In a survey of mainline protestants – that is, people exactly like us – researcher George Barna found that only about one in four of us believe that works can’t earn our way into heaven. To put it differently, three out of four of us believe that getting into heaven is about being good enough; it is about our works.
This is huge. Three out of four of us believe something that is directly contrary to one of the central pillars of the Reformed faith. “Justification by faith alone” is one of our signature convictions. It is part of what makes us who we are. But apparently, a lot of us still don’t understand it. A lot of us, it would seem, are relying more on what “feels” right than on the witness of Scripture itself.
Let’s take this one step further and make it even more personal. What if you have been stealing from your company, or cheating on your spouse, or nursing some secret addiction… What do you think God’s attitude towards you would be?
Because we tend to get fed up with someone who turns away from us or rejects us our inclination would be to think that God would reach that point when God finally turns away. If we have been stealing, or cheating, or involved in some addiction, most of us would tend to think that God must actually hate us.
But that is not the God that we encounter in these pages. No, this God is there reaching out to us even when we are furthest away. This God is like the father of the prodigal son, anxiously scanning the horizon, waiting for that moment when we will finally turn back. This God, in other words, isn’t like us – his love is so much bigger.
Because God isn’t like us but is, in fact, so much bigger we need to spend time in Scripture if we are going to understand him, or understand his will. It is Scripture that is our benchmark; not our thoughts, not our feelings, but the testimony of Scripture itself.
One of the great Christian authors of the last century was a man named G.K. Chesterton. There is a story that one evening he and a group of other literary figures were asked what book they would choose to have with them if they were stranded on a desert island. One writer said without hesitation, “The complete works of Shakespeare.” Another responded, “I’d choose the Bible.” They turned to Chesterton, “how about you?” Without batting an eye he replied, “I would choose Thomas’s guide to practical ship building.”
There are some things that Scripture can’t do for us. These pages aren’t going to tell us how to build a boat, or whom to marry, or what career path to follow. But if you truly want to know God, and are truly searching for guidance on what the Kingdom-kind-of life looks like, there is no other source in all creation that carries the same insight or the same authority as what you will find right here. Scripture is one of God’s greatest gifts to us, but if we want to actually receive the gift and know its blessing, then just owning a Bible isn’t enough. To receive this gift and know its blessing, we’ve got to pick it up, open it, and begin to read.
Trevor Hudson and Stephen Bryant, The Way of Transforming Discipleship, part of the “Companions in Christ” series, (Upper Room Books, Nashville, 2005), pp. 25-26