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Sunday, September 19, 2010
Making God’s Word Our Home
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Scripture: John 8:31 The New Jerusalem Bible
31If you make my word your home you will truly be my disciples.
This morning in worship we are giving away, to our third graders, almost 70 Bibles! This gift to our children is one of the many benefits of the giving that our members and friends do so generously.
We often talk about the place of the Bible in our faith. Some of you may have heard the story of the young couple who got married about ten years ago, and the grandmother of the bride, a grandmother who had a very close relationship with her 25 year old granddaughter, gave the bride and groom an unusual wedding gift. The wedding gift was a brand new, leather bound Bible in the New Revised Standard Translation.
The bride and groom were a little puzzled by the gift because most people don’t give or receive Bibles as wedding gifts. The note from the grandmother said that she hoped and prayed that this new couple would continue to discover for themselves the riches of life that come, as we do what Jesus encourages in today’s scripture reading, and that is to find a home in God’s book, in God’s word.
They put the brand new Bible in the closet on the top shelf and did not use it for several years. Then they felt a new and deeper spiritual need as the husband was laid off in this recession two years ago and they were struggling to avoid bankruptcy. They signed up for the Financial Peace University class in their church, in a different city, and the wife remembered the comfort and strength that her grandmother had found in reading her Bible. She pulled her brand new Bible off the top shelf of the closet, took it out of the box, and began to look for the book of Psalms which she knew would offer peace and comfort in difficult times.
She remembered that she could find the Psalms by opening the Bible in about the middle, and when she did and found Psalm 1, something fell out of the Bible. It was a brand new hundred dollar bill that her grandmother had placed there as part of her wedding gift!
Not only was there a hundred dollar bill placed at the beginning of the book of Psalms, she found another crisp hundred dollar bill in the first chapter of the book of the Bible right after the Psalms, the book of Proverbs. And when she went on looking to the next book after Psalms and Proverbs, the book of Ecclesiastes, she found-yes, another crisp hundred dollar bill!
She got the point. As she started at the beginning of her Bible with the book of Genesis and worked through each of the books of the Old and New Testaments, she found a C Note at the start of each of the books.
So here is the Bible trivia question for today. How much money did she have after she opened each of the books of the Bible, not counting the apocrypha (inter-testamental writings)?
She had---$6,600 because our Bibles have 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament, or in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament!
I don’t know what the woman did after she discovered her grandmother’s hidden treasures in the book that obviously contains many other of God’s treasures that are even more lasting and important than monetary treasures. I hope she went on in the book of Psalms and other books to learn again of God’s power and peace in all sorts of difficult times. Perhaps she discovered some of the comforting verses and stories there that you and I have held so close. Or perhaps it was the 8th chapter of Romans; nothing can separate us from the peace and love of Christ, not even economic hardship or war, or the image that tells us that in all things God can work for good with those who love God.
Perhaps she discovered some of the passages that our staff have chosen as their favorite verses, an exercise you might do today with others over lunch!
You understand the point of the story, a modern parable, that when we take some time to open and read through our Bibles, we find treasures we did not realize were present.
I imagine that all of us have probably more than one Bible at home, and some of those Bibles may have been given to us as a gift. Judy and I were, just a few days ago, looking at a Bible on my bookshelf that my mother gave me on graduation from High School many years ago, and because it came from her, it has very special meaning. It is not a current translation but is a King James translation that was done in 1611. The language is lovely because it is Shakespearean English, but it is not the Bible I use as a study Bible because the language is outdated. We don’t talk today in Whithers and Thithers and Thees and Thous, and neither did the people in Jesus’ time. Neither does God, but the people in 17th century England did when that translation was done.
If all you have is a King James Bible, you are getting a distorted image of religion and you will benefit from having a translation, not a paraphrase, that has been done in the past few years and that takes advantage of the recent discoveries of more accurate Biblical texts than were available even fifty years ago! More later about the strength and weaknesses of different translations.
Let’s look at some misunderstandings, some outdated ideas about the Bible, ideas that might keep us from finding a home in God’s book.
One misunderstanding is that God wrote the Bible, or God is responsible for how every word and story shows up in the Bible. People wrote the Bible out of their experiences with God. I believe that God was at work in inspiring those people who wrote and the Bible has been given to us by people of faith who wrote over a period of about one thousand years. More to the point, the Bible is not just one book, it is a collection of sixty six books written by lots of different authors who were writing to different audiences, and who their audience was, made a difference in how they might have shaped a story.
We can see that “shaping” or those nuanced differences easily in the four gospels. The Gospel of Matthew was written for an audience that was mostly Jewish so the author of Matthew is constantly saying that something happened in order to fulfill this particular expectation in the Hebrew Bible. We can see that early in the Christmas story in Matthew when he tells his audience that Jesus was born in Bethlehem so that the expectation from the Prophet Micah could be fulfilled.
The Bible contains differences and a variety of points of view. For some people, those differences can get in the way of being able to trust the Bible or to see it as authoritative, and for others of us, the differences do not undermine the reliability of the Bible.
Here are some examples of those differences. In Genesis, chapters one and two, we find two different stories of creation, and they have a different sequence of events of the order of creation. In Genesis one, the last thing God creates are human beings, male and female together. In Genesis two, the first thing God creates is a man, then a garden, then some animals, and the last thing God creates is woman.
Those stories were written in different time periods, about three hundred years apart, and the earlier story has a very human-like image of God with God taking a walk in the Garden of Eden in the evening when things have cooled off.
If you need the Bible to be perfect and totally consistent, that difference will bother you, but if you are willing to trust the stories as an inspired witness to the experiences of many people as they encountered a seeking and gracious God, knowing that their experiences reflect different times and different life situations, the Bible will be reliable and authoritative and life giving!
Let’s look at some different words that people use about the Bible that can be misleading. Some church leaders often say that the Bible is “inerrant and infallible.” Those terms are not in the Bible, and they are only recently used to try and say that we can rely on this book to tell us about God and about LIFE. If we try to apply them, we will have some challenges because most of us don’t believe what the writer of Ecclesiastes says about the afterlife, that there is no afterlife! And most of us don’t believe what the author of First and Second Timothy says about keeping women submissive and subservient. That was just a reflection of the first century patriarchal mind set, a mindset that even Jesus and Paul rejected. Jesus and Paul had women leaders in their respective groups.
One other misunderstanding about the Bible says that there has to be a conflict between science and religion, or that we cannot believe the Bible stories about creation and also believe that God took a long time to create the universe through a process called evolution. Methodist Christians see no conflict between science and religion. The Bible is not written as a science book. It gives us theological truths and not geological truths. It reflects the scientific world view of 2500 years ago, and we make a mistake when we try to turn it into a science book.
Another misunderstanding has to do with how we see some of the people we named in our call to worship, some of the prophets like Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Hosea and Samuel. The role of the prophet in the Bible is not to predict the future, not to be a fortune teller. There are times when the Prophets tell God’s people that if they keep on ignoring God and failing to live up to their agreement/covenant with God that bad things will happen. It is not much different from saying that if a person smokes three packs a day that they will have some serious health problems.
The role of the prophet is to speak for God, to call God’s people back to their covenant relationship with God, and one more role—to remind God’s people that they are to care for the most vulnerable persons among them: the widow, the orphan, and the stranger or sojourner. The emphasis on caring for those three groups shows up 43 times in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. This is the second most frequent verse in the Bible. The most frequent verse in the Bible is, don’t be afraid; don’t let fear control your life because God is right here with us.
There are two other misunderstandings as we begin to open and read our Bibles. Some people think that the only purpose Jesus has for us is to get us into heaven. Actually when we really read the Gospels, Jesus talks very little about heaven. He does tell us that he has come so we can have the best LIFE possible and he uses a term that we have gotten confused about. He uses it mostly in John’s gospel, but the meaning of that term Eternal Life is not something that occurs later on after we die, it is a quality of life that starts right now.
A misreading of the book of Revelations has contributed to that mistake. Revelations was written in perhaps the most persecuted time in the early history of the Jesus movement, and the purpose the writer had in mind was to encourage his fellow Christians to keep their faith and not abandon Christ even when they were scared. He used a type of literature that was more familiar to them than to us, but the message was, stay faithful, Rome’s power is only temporary, and God will cause even this evil Roman empire to fail, and he was right.
One more misunderstanding we need to do away with is that the people in the Bible, the heroes in the Bible, were not super heroes, they were not flawless and good, goody saints. They had the same mixture of strength and weakness that we do, and still God chose them. We mentioned some of those folks at the start of worship:
- Moses was a murderer and a stutterer
- David, a man after God’s own heart, was a murderer and an adulterer
- Peter was hot headed and boastful and impetuous
- Thomas was controlled by doubt
- The Samaritan woman who became a Christian missionary in her village had been married five times
- Paul stood by as Stephen was killed and then went on a crusade to kill other followers of the way before he saw the light of Christ.
We can go on, but the point is that the “heroes” of our faith were flawed heroes just like us. In the latest Robert Duvall movie, “Get Low,” a minister in that film introduces the Duvall character by saying that if we just think in black and white, just think that people are either good people or bad people, that we will be fooled because every one of us is a mix of both, and so were the people in the Bible that we think of as role models.
Here are two other resources for us as we move forward in our journey to find God’s word for our lives in the Bible. It is there for each of us. Not all of what is there is God’s word, some of it is temporary and some of it is wrong, such as the encouragement to kill the children of our enemies in Psalm 137.
It is important to know what the order and the chronology of some of the major events is. There is a chart in your bulletin to help keep those events in mind. At the end of the chronology is Christ and Paul and the gospels, and when we need to discern what parts of the Bible are eternal and which parts are more time/culture limited, we measure everything against the teachings and example of Jesus Christ.
The translation of the Bible we are using is very important. There is a difference between a paraphrase and a translation, and a translation by a team of scholars is most reliable. We have on our bookshelves today copies of the Common English Bible which I am really pleased with and, at the beginning, it even contains a ninety day plan for reading through the whole New Testament in ninety days. I commend this to each of you!
I also encourage you to find a couple of other important verses from the Bible to commit to memory. My late friend Dr. Dick Murray was a veteran of the Korean War. He used to tell me that the only Bible any of us really own is the one that we carry in our hearts and minds, not the one in our hand but the one in our hearts, the verses we have committed to memory. Dick Murray said that because, he felt it to be personally true, when he was in combat and in his foxhole in Korea. He was able to recall some verses and to recall a couple of Psalms that gave him enormous comfort and peace in the midst of battle.
How many of us have memorized a few important Bible verses or a Psalm or two? As I fall asleep at night, one of my practices is to remember in my mind the twenty third Psalm. You may have similar practices and rituals in your devotional life.
What is the next step for you in finding a home in God’s book? Over 200 of you have signed up for Bible study classes that have just begun. In February we will be offering another Disciple Bible class, but before that, in January, I will be doing something really new, teaching a seven week class on Tuesday nights called THE BIBLE FOR BEGINNERS. It is designed for people who are just starting to read and to learn about the Bible. It will coincide with a Sunday morning sermon series with the same title and same purpose, to introduce even the rankest beginner to an overview of the Bible. I invite you to join us in January.
This book is full of hidden and unexpected treasures, even more important than the book the grandmother gave to her newly, wed favorite granddaughter. And if we only had two of the 38 parables Jesus left with us we would know all that we need to know about God, and all that we need to know about ABUNDANT LIFE.
If we only had the parable of the prodigal son, we would know all we need to know about finding a gracious and seeking God who never gives up on us and who welcomes us back when we come to our senses and who, also, finds a new place for us to serve.
And if we only had that short parable about a GOOD Samaritan who is willing to risk himself in stopping to care for his enemy and bind up his wounds, we could see all that we need to see about caring for others who are in need, even when they are perceived to be so different from us!
We find those great, powerful and life changing stories in this marvelous, life changing book. More importantly, we meet this subversive prophet named Jesus who gave us not only those stories but who gives us himself! At the heart of the Bible is Christ who lets us measure everything else that is in the book against his example of grace and faithfulness and forgiveness and peace.
I was watching a PBS special one night last week about Michelangelo, one of my heroes of the Renaissance. In the mid 1500’s, a few years before he died, he obtained his own copy of a Bible that had been translated into Italian. Remember how radical it was in the time of the early Protestant reformation to be able to hold and read a copy of one’s own Bible? The point of that story was that by being able to read the Bible for himself, Michelangelo’s relationship with God and with the church and with his own art began to change and grow for the better.
May that happen to us as well!