Hilton Head Island, SC – September 16, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 2:16-23; II Timothy 3:1017
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – All scripture is inspired by God and (is) profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. – II Timothy 3:16 (RSV)
The Bible is treated differently in different religious traditions. Jews, for example, focus most heavily on what is called “the Torah,” which consists of the first five books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy. These are supposedly the five books written by Moses, although almost no Jewish scholars believe that Moses actually wrote them. Nevertheless, Jews always read something from the Torah in their services, whether or not they read anything else from the Hebrew scriptures. Curiously, Christians are far more likely than Jews to include passages from the historical or prophetic Old Testament writings in our worship.
Fundamentalists and evangelical Christians are more apt to take everything in the Bible literally than are Catholics or mainline Protestants. Liturgical Protestants (Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist) are more likely to use more scripture passages in worship than non-liturgical churches (Baptist, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, etc.)
Every tradition takes the Bible very seriously, but in the 21st century, few even try to adhere to every word the Bible says, because there are so many contradictions in what it does say.
It is absurd to imagine that the Bible is all of one seamless piece, and that it says essentially the same thing in every book and on every page.
For example, what is the key to salvation to eternal life? In general the Old Testament suggests that it happens when we follow God’s laws, and in general the New Testament says it happens solely because of God’s grace, although elsewhere it declares that salvation occurs because of our faith in God. But the letter of James says, “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (2:17). So which is it, doing or believing, or believing and doing? And then there is Paul’s First Letter to Timothy, in which he said that God “desires all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (2:4). If that truly is what God wants, then surely it will be what He gets - - - won’t it? That is a verse much loved by all those of us who subscribe to the notion of universal salvation. But among all these choices, how should we understand the essential mechanism of salvation?
Our responsive reading from Psalm 19 declares that the laws of God are perfect, sure, right, pure, and clean, and that if we keep them, we have great reward. One of the Levitical laws says that any man who has sex with an animal should be executed, along with the animal (Lev. 20:15). We don’t encounter that infraction a lot these days, as far as I know, but if we did, would we or should we actually execute such a person? Any why must the innocent and no doubt also befuddled animal also be killed? The law is gruesomely clear, and thus easily understood, but would we do what it says if someone violated that peculiar and odious law? Some states, especially in the South, still have laws to prosecute this bizarre practice, presumably in keeping with biblical demands. But how should society act toward such strange offenders?
Some people believe scripture passages have an almost magical quality within them. There is the oft-used preacher’s illustration of someone who decided to open the Bible, close his eyes, and point to the first two verses upon which his outstretched finger fell. Whatever they said to do, he would do. So he tried it the first time, and the verse was Matthew 27:5, “And Judas went and hanged himself.” That was a sobering verse, to say the least, but the gullible biblicist closed his eyes again, and pointed again, and this time his finger fell on Luke 10:37, “Go and do likewise.” You can’t use the Bible like that. To do so inevitably leads to misunderstandings. The Bible is not a divinely inspired how-to book which tells us everything we need to know for every conceivable situation.
When someone recites a particular Bible verse to affirm something he believes, the verse is often called a “proof text.” It “proves” what the person who uses it chooses to believe. The writer of the Gospel of Matthew is the most obvious proof-texter of all the writers of all biblical books. He stubbornly drags verses out of the Old Testament to verify all kinds of things he wants us to believe. An example is seen in our New Testament reading this morning. Only Matthew says that Joseph and Mary went to Egypt with the infant Jesus to escape the wrath of King Herod, who wanted to kill the child he was told by the wise men was the Messiah. Why go to Egypt, when they could have gone east of the Jordan River into the Jordanian desert or north into Syria or south into Arabia? When Herod had died, God told Mary and Joseph it was safe to go back into Israel. And why? It was, said Matthew, to validate a verse from the prophet Hosea (11:1), “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” The holy Family went to Egypt to validate a verse written seven and a half centuries earlier, Matthew insists. What kind of circuitous thinking is that?
In the late 1940s, when my friends and I would go to the Saturday matinees at the movie theater, before the feature film started, they always showed what were called “Previews of Coming Attractions.” Matthew saw many Old Testament verses as being quintessentially previews of coming attractions. That was how he understood scripture. So when the mothers of Bethlehem wept because Herod had ordered their babies to be killed, it – quote - “was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more’” (2:17-18). Then, when Joseph and Mary took Jesus to their hometown of Nazareth, Matthew ended the birth narrative by stating emphatically that it was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophets, ”He shall be called a Nazarene.” The only problem is that no prophet ever said that, because the village of Nazareth did not even exist in Old Testament times. There is a verse, but not in the prophets, which says, more or less, “He shall be a Nazarite.” However, Nazarites were male children dedicated to God from birth. They certainly weren’t boys who came from Nazareth. There is no connection between the two words. That, however, didn’t stop Matthew from his ever-egregious proof-texting.
Human beings seem to have a considerable variety of brains, and by that I mean literal brains, the great gangs of ganglia encased inside our craniums. We don’t all think alike. If you want verification, consider how differently Republicans and Democrats view the same purported “facts” regarding our upcoming election. Each side is apt to shout at the other, “Are we living on the same planet? How can you understand things the way you do? Look at the facts!” And yet both sides heavily dispute the meaning of the facts.
In trying to understand the Bible, do we have such conflicting views because we have such different kinds of brains, or is the Bible so conflicted that naturally we also conflict over how to interpret it? The answer is a resounding Yes. Yes, we have different kinds of brains, conditioned by differing experiences, environments, and so on, and therefore we read the same words with enormous differences in understanding. And Yes, the Bible does not speak with one united voice. But should that surprise anyone? The Bible was written over a period of at least sixteen hundred years. How could we imagine there would be a single undifferentiated thread of meaning running through 66 books by an unknown number of authors, but surely at least a few dozen? Do words from sixteen hundred years ago and dozens of authors mean now what they meant then? Do any words from then mean what they mean now, and are there any words from then which even exist now? How can we expect the Bible to be easily understood when it was written over a period of sixteen centuries and under those befuddling linguistic conditions?
Most Bible scholars do not think that the First and Second Letters to Timothy were written by the apostle Paul, even though each letter clearly makes that claim at the beginning. Whoever was the author, he wanted to make a point about how the letters’ recipient, presumably the man named Timothy in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, should view all of scripture. Likely that meant what Christians call the Old Testament, not what we call the New Testament. Whenever I and II Timothy were written, as yet there was no authorized collection of New Testament writings. In any event, the unknown author said to Timothy, “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. All scripture is inspired by God and (is) profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that every man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (II Tim. 3:14-17).
Let us try to read between the lines in those verses. What seems to be implied is that all scripture is good, but it is not all of the same quality, nor can we rely on all of it equally. Genesis is better than Numbers, Isaiah is more easily grasped than Ezekiel or Daniel, Mark or Luke or Romans are preferable to Philemon or James or Revelation. Or at least so say some of us.
But the whole Bible, with all its faults and fallacies and contradictions and conundrums, is a better foundation for Judaism and Christianity than anything any Jews or Christians have written since then. The Bible is the bedrock of our faith. Without it, we would be theological and doctrinal paupers.
However, never suppose that the Bible is simple to comprehend. It isn’t. In the main, it declares a unified message, but in places, it is very difficult to understand. The Book of Job, for instance, is so old that its actual text contains many words about whose meanings no one can any longer be certain. Still, it has passages which are familiar even to those with the most skeptical of outlooks, and some of its verses are remembered in language and literature all over the world.
Listen carefully: There was no concept of “The Bible” up through the end of biblical times. Jews did not agree on the particular 39 books of the Hebrew Bible until about the year 200 CE. Christians didn’t agree on the 27 books of the Greek Bible until the end of the fifth century, or about 400 CE.
Nonetheless, even toward the end of the New Testament period, isolated verses in the New Testament suggest that early Christians were starting to approve a “canon” –c-a-n-o-n- of New Testament writings. The word canon simply refers to an “ecclesiastically approved list.” Again, scholars do not think the apostle Peter wrote either I or II Peter, because the Greek is too good for a poorly educated Galilean fisherman ever to master. Whoever wrote it, in the last verses of the last chapter of the second letter, he said this: “So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do to the other scriptures” (II Peter 3:15-16).
This is a very interesting passage. It suggests that already, presumably toward the end of the first Christian century, the early Church had put its stamp of approval on the letters of Paul, although there is no mention here of any of the four Gospels, or any of the other New Testament books. Secondly, the author admits that some things in the Bible are “hard to understand.” He certainly said a mouthful there! Thirdly, the author hints that some cockamamie notions of Christianity were already circulating, and that people needed to be careful about what they believed. The Church has always carried on a battle against what it considered false doctrine or false teachings. There are, for instance, a dozen or more other Gospels which the Church rejected that other writers had proposed to be included in the Christian canon. You or I might question why certain books were allowed into holy writ, but there is no question they are much more acceptable than many of the other alternatives which failed to make the cut.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is quoted as saying, “You must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:48). In Luke, Jesus says, “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (and the word “Father” is capitalized) (6:36). Jesus almost certainly said what Luke says, and almost certainly he never said what Matthew says. Matthew was a Gospel written for Jewish Christians who believed it was imperative to affirm and to uphold all the laws of the Torah. In doing that Matthew and his followers presumably believed they could become perfect. Luke was written for Gentile Christians, few of whom even knew what the Torah was. Mercy we can attain; perfection, never. Anyone who understands that Jesus commanded us to be perfect mistakes everything else he said about our nature, for human nature prevents perfection in any of us. The Bible is not easy to understand. It requires us to think deeply about its meanings.
Nevertheless, the Bible is the primary written foundation for Judaism and Christianity. It is two thousand years old. It is almost the only historical record for the period of history it covers. A few writings from other nations briefly mention things that happen in the Bible, but if those outside writings were all we had, there would be no Judeo-Christian tradition. The Bible is best source of our religious foundations. It is not infallible, but it is indispensable.
So what should you do regarding the Bible? Read it! Read it! Read it! Study it, ponder it, think about its affirmations and its contradictions, it soaring poetry and its glowing prose.
The world was very poor until the nineteenth century, by which time almost every home in Christendom acquired a Bible. But because that was the only book in many homes, Judaism and Christianity were much richer for the widespread reading of the Bible in which nearly everyone who could read was engaged. Now too few people, especially liberal Christians and Jews, are familiar with the Bible and its storehouse of splendid stories and its potpourri of powerful poetry. We read everything else we can get our hands on, but not holy writ.
Every Sunday we have three Bible readings as part of our worship. There is a reason for that. The more biblical material you hear, the more biblical understanding you have. And usually I try to refer to each of those passages in the sermon. Rarely if ever are my sermons Bible studies per se, but I always attempt to base whatever is the sermon theme on one or more of those scripture passages. In my old age I have become much more of a teacher than a preacher, a rabbi than a pastor. And, as the unknown writer of II Timothy said, “All scripture is inspired by God and (is) profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” So read the Bible, and think about it. You - - - and the world - - - will be better off for your having done so.