Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 10/21/07
Biblical
2 Kings 22:8-13
2 Timothy 3:14-17
You can often tell an apprentice by the tools that he or she is carrying. We would expect a plumber’s apprentice, for example, to be carrying various pipe wrenches, a torch and some solder, and a couple of pipe cutters. A carpenter’s apprentice might be found with some different saws, a hammer or two, a tape measure and a carpenter’s square.
Back when I was in college you could always identify the engineering students by their hand-held calculators. In my dad’s time it was the slide rule. The pre-meds often moved through the campus with a harried look and carrying a massive book called “Organic Chemistry.” There were always less pre-meds by the end of that course.
Apprentices of Jesus can be identified by their tools, as well, and none are more important than this one; the Bible. Walk into an office and find a Bible on the desk and you can be pretty sure the person is a Christian. See it on their bureau or bed-side table and it is safe to assume that they are trying to pattern their lives after Jesus.
Why does this book have such an important place in our walk with Christ? Why does it have the authority that it does? How do we approach it and interpret it?
We find an answer to all these questions in a single phrase of our text, this morning, the phrase: “All scripture is inspired by God.” The word he uses here (theopneustos) literally means “God breathed.” It is that word, that idea, which gives Scripture its unique authority. It is that same word which helps us avoid two critical mistakes in our approach to scripture. The first is in believing that scripture is only of God – that there is, in other words, no human element in it. The second is in the conviction that it is only human, and that there is no element of God.
Consider the first mistake; this idea that scripture is only of God. If we truly believe that God is behind every word, every line, every jot and title, than we would have no choice but to take it exactly as it stands. We would bring, in other words, a literal approach to scripture, lifting it from the text and applying it directly to our lives.
Two years ago a man named A.J. Jacobs decided to do precisely that. It wasn’t that he was a strong believer – quite the opposite, he described himself as an agnostic at the time – but he had been impressed by the power of religion and wanted to explore his own religious background. And so over the course of a year he tried to live what he called a “biblical life.” His book describing the experience is: The Year of Living Biblically: One’s Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, (Simon and Schuster, 2007).
He started with an effort not to lie anymore. He was amazed by how many lies he told; not necessarily big ones but what we would call “white lies”. He changed the way he dressed. He became intentional about prayer. One area in which he struggled, and this will come as no great surprise, was with the whole idea of stoning people.
The Hebrew scriptures are very clear about putting to death not just murderers, but adulterers, Sabbath breakers, perjurers and blasphemers. As Jacobs points out, even a rebellious son could be sentenced to death. The most common form of execution was by stoning. But just how, exactly, do you stone people in New York City that you don’t even know?
Jacobs’ first step was in realizing that scripture never specified exactly what size stones are to be used. He stuffed his back pocket with a bunch of pebbles. His first victim was a Sabbath-breaker. He didn’t know the guy, but he knew the guy worked on both Saturday and Sunday – a Sabbath-breaker if there ever was one. Jacobs ended up stoning him by pretending to stumble as he passed and dropping a stone on the guy’s foot. They both apologized. This stoning thing was tough!
One day he was sitting in a park on the upper West Side of New York City. There was an elderly guy sitting next to him; tall and thin and wearing a cap. “You’re dressed queer,” the guy snarled. “Why you dressed so queer?”
Jacobs did, in fact, have tassels on the end of his clothes as prescribed by scripture. He was wearing sandals and carrying a maple walking stick. He told the man that he was trying to live by the rules of the Bible; you know, the Ten Commandments, stoning adulterers…
“You’re stoning adulterers?” the guy asked. Well yes, Jacobs replied. He was trying to stone them. And then the man said that he was adulterer. In fact, he said, he was committing adultery all the time; yesterday, today, tonight, tomorrow, two weeks from now. “Are you gonna stone me?” he asked.
“Yes,” Jacobs replied, “that’d be great.” At last, he had a real victim!
“I’ll punch you in the face. I’ll send you to the cemetery,” the guy says. Jacobs continues, “He is serious. This isn’t a cutesy grumpy old man. This is an angry old man. This is a man with seven decades of hostility behind him.”
Jacobs reaches into his pocket. He wants to show this guy that he isn’t going to use big stone, just all these little pebbles he had collected. Just as he opens his hand, the old guy lunges, grabs one out of his hand, and whips it at Jacobs’ face. It goes whizzing by his cheek.
Jacobs is stunned for a moment. He hadn’t expected the guy to make the first move. But now that he has, Jacobs can retaliate – “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is another biblical principle. He takes a stone and throws it at the man. It bounces off his chest. “I’ll punch you right in the kisser,” he says.
The two of them end up glaring at each other for several seconds. Then finally the man walks away, brushing into Jacobs as he leaves.
That is the issue with believing that scripture is only God made. As that one experience makes clear, as soon as we begin taking it literally it becomes very easy for us to get off track, to become involved in things that seem to have little or nothing to do with God.
But Paul doesn’t say “God made.” He says “God-breathed.” Breathed into what? Breathed into those humans who actually put ink to paper. Breathed into people like you and me: people who were less than perfect; people who were shaped (as one of our confessions puts it) “by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written.”
Look at Paul’s epistles. It is very clear that they were written in response to specific issues at a specific time. It is equally clear that the culture of that time influenced some of what he wrote – some of what he said, for example, to women, or to slaves. We don’t ask women today to cover their heads in worship even though Paul says they should do specifically that. And we don’t ask slaves to be obedient to their masters. In fact, contrary to Paul’s seemingly implicit acceptance of slavery, we know today that slavery is an abomination, absolutely contrary to God’s intent.
So yes, we say scripture is the inspired word of God – that is what gives it its unique authority – but at the same time we remember that it is people who were inspired, and that as a result these pages are going to reflect their involvement. We don’t take every line literally. We don’t go around today throwing stones at adulterers and Sabbath-breakers. We recognize that sometimes we have to dig beneath the surface of the text to encounter what God is saying. We recognize that we need to bring a literary and historical understanding to our interpretation.
But if one error is to see only God in these pages, there is another and opposite error that we can make, as well. It is this second error that actually poses a far greater threat to us here in this community. This second error is to see this book as only human.
The truth is that while almost all of us would acknowledge that scripture is inspired, a lot of us have stopped reading it. We’ve settled for an elementary school level of understanding. How many of us could find the Ten Commandments in Scripture? How many of us could name them? How many of us could repeat Jesus’ Great Commission and tell us where to find it? What about the Beatitudes, or the Sermon on the Mount?
These are some of the foundation-texts of our faith, but if you struggled to answer some of those questions you aren’t alone. Studies of incoming students at evangelical Wheaton College suggest that biblical literacy even among conservative students is in sharp decline.
One of the defining cries of the Reformation five hundred years ago was “Sola Scriptura,” (Scripture alone) but how many of us actually spend time being shaped by this word? People like Luther and Wickliffe risked their lives to get scripture into the hands of the laity. William Tyndale was strangled and burned for offering the first English version of the New Testament. But how many of us would actually risk our lives for the sake of this book? The truth is, in spite of what we profess, we are far more likely to treat scripture simply as literature, or historical artifact.
Why read the Bible? In one of his books , the wonderful scholar Eugene Peterson reframes an illustration first offered by Karl Barth. We begin by imagining a huge warehouse in which an entire generation had been born and grown up, virtually all their needs provided for. The warehouse is everything they know, everything that they have ever needed, but one day some children drags a stool over to a dust-caked window and scrapes away the grime. To their amazement they see people out there walking on some streets; people and streets they never knew existed. One of those people points up and several others gather around, talking excitedly. The children look up, as well, but all they can see is the roof of their warehouse. The people pointing up out beyond their window make no sense to them. The children grow weary and turn away.
What those people in the street can see that the children can’t is the sky and the heavens and everything that the heavens hold. They can see airplanes flying and clouds taking shape and flocks of geese moving south. Peterson continues:
What would happen, though, if one day one of those kids cut a door out of the warehouse, coaxed his friends out, and discovered the immense sky above them and the grand horizons beyond them? That is what happens, writes Barth, when we open the Bible – we enter the totally unfamiliar world of God, a world of creation and salvation stretching endlessly above and beyond us. Life in the warehouse never prepared us for anything like this.
This warehouse, this earth and the universe in which we live, can tell us a great deal about our Creator. Paul talks about it in the first chapter of Romans. John Calvin spends page after page discussing it in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. And the truth is, spending a day out on the golf course or fishing on a lake can, indeed, nurture our soul.
But there are things about God and about reality this world can’t reveal. It can’t tell you about Jesus. It can’t explain the cross. When you’ve just buried your spouse of forty or fifty years, the golf course has no answers. When you’ve just discovered your best friend has betrayed you, the lake – with all it beauty – has nothing to say.
In the world’s eyes the cross is nothing but folly and failure. But through these pages we know that it is something altogether different. We know that it is the tangible expression of God’s boundless love and grace. In the world’s eyes the idea of forgiving those who have hurt you or loving those who are your enemies is simply absurd. But through these pages we know it as the way of Christ and so the way to real and lasting peace.
The truth is, the ways of God are not our own. There are things about God and about what is most truly real that we aren’t going to find on our own – things that are counter-intuitive, things that on the surface make absolutely no sense to us.
The world would tell us that the purpose of an organization is to serve it members. But bring that perspective into this organization, this community, and we destroy the very heart of who we are. We are a different kind of community. We exist not to be served but to serve. Mission isn’t peripheral or even secondary to our existence. It lies at the very center. How do we know? Because that is what we see of Jesus in these pages. Because in these pages Jesus tells us to “go out” – go out and make disciples, go out and feed the hungry, go out and clothe the naked and minister to the sick and to the oppressed.
In most organization we give to support a budget. But not here. Here our gifts are about worship. They are about our relationship to God; a way in which we express our love and our commitment. It is true that our budget is derived from our gifts, but that’s not why we give. That kind of giving completely misses the point. Scripture calls us to make our offerings not to support an institution but as an act of worship. And amid the materialism of our culture, there may be no more powerful act of worship that you and I can offer; there may be no more effective gauge of who or what is truly Lord in our lives.
“All scripture is God-breathed” the apostle writes. Those words tell us why scripture holds the unique and authoritative place it does in our life together; revealing what senses and logic alone cannot discern, speaking to us of that Kingdom which envelopes us even now.
“All scripture is God-breathed.” And with those words we are reminded again that it was into people much like you and me in whom God breathed. And with those words we are reminded that the fruit of their labors – scripture, as we know it today – is far more than human effort alone.
You can often tell an apprentice by the tools they carry. For us the most important tool we carry (far above any other) is this book.
What role does Scripture play in our walk? To what degree will we allow this word to shape our lives as we seek to follow Jesus?
His book was excerpted in the October 16, 2007, issue of The Christian Century
Christianity Today, “The Greatest Story Never Read,” Gary M. Burge
Eugene Peterson, Eat this Book, (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2006)