Community Church Sermons
May 7, 2006
A
certain member of our church was at a social gathering a few months back. She
and three friends were having a conversation that went something like this:
One friend had just finished reading Dan Brown’s The
DaVinci Code. She thought it was the best thing since sliced bread! “I
always thought there must have been something between Jesus and that Mary
Magdalene, and now it’s a proven fact!”
Friend number two, a very devout Christian woman who
believes every word that’s found in the Bible is literally true, just about
choked on her glass of Cabernet Sauvignon when she heard that comment. “That’s
heresy!” she said. “And blasphemy, too! And anything else you want to
call it because the Bible debunks all that nonsense. And the Bible IS the Word
of God, you know!”
This brought friend number three into the fray
saying, “Well, not everything in the Bible is true, you know. There’s a lot
of contradictions, and historic mistakes, and nobody believes stuff like a
six-day creation anymore. I’m not sure I agree with Dan Brown, but I think the
Bible is every bit as much a work of fiction as The DaVinci Code.”
Now I found it interesting, as this conversation was
being described to me, that it pretty much represents where a lot of people are
today when they think about the Bible, The DaVinci Code, and other
religious things. Some people love conspiracy theories. Others cling
tenaciously to simple faith. Still others just don’t have any use for any of
it.
But the most intriguing comment of all, in my
opinion, was the one made by my friend, our church member. And what she said
represents the view of an increasingly large number of people in our world.
Maybe she’s representative of you.
“Marty,” she said, “I just don’t know WHAT to believe
anymore!”
Something is different about the world today than it
was fifty or a hundred or a thousand years ago. I think the internet has
something to do with it. How well I remember a conversation I had almost twenty
years ago with a young electrical engineer who was working on a project that
had something to do with this mysterious thing he called the World Wide Web.
“The worldwide WHAT?” I asked. He said, “You’re not going to believe
how this is going to revolutionize the way people think and live.” And then
he explained some things about how we were standing at the brink of what he
called “The Information Age.”
Now, twenty years later, I know what he was talking
about. Virtually all of us here today have by now driven up the ramp and merged
onto the high-speed lane of what it is called the Information Superhighway. And
it’s changed our world!
Something is different about the world today than it
used to be. People are no longer “taught” things by authority figures so much
as they “learn” things from the community around us. People are no longer
limited to a single point of view on any given subject. All you have to do is
“Google” a topic and you can come up with a million different web pages that
describe it, discuss it, and dissect it in a hundred different ways. Even
before I started writing this sermon, series, several thoughtful members of our
church delivered to me copies of web articles they’d found about The DaVinci
Code, The Gospel of Judas, Opus Dei, Mary Magdalene and – of course –
articles on how people are responding to all that. I want to thank all you
contributors for participating in the creation of this sermon series.
We live in a world with more knowledge and more
information at our fingertips than at any other time in human history. For
some, that’s exciting. For others, it’s very scary.
But for many of us in the Christian community, I
suspect, it’s largely confusing.
“Marty, I don’t know WHAT to believe anymore!” is how my friend so
eloquently said it.
This sermon series is about the Bible. Since the
Bible is more or less at the center of a lot of the controversy sparked by Dan
Brown’s book, and National Geographic’s recent presentation of the Judas
Gospel, I thought it would be important for us to talk openly and honestly
about these things as they relate to our faith. We’ll take up DaVinci and Judas
in coming weeks. Today’s topic is “Back To The Bible.”
For
me, the Bible is a rich treasure. It is as relevant to life in today’s world as
it was to the world of long ago. It is an indispensable tool in the life of
faith, and we need to go back to the Bible.
Having said that, however, I must also say that the
Bible is not the object of my faith. My faith centers on Jesus Christ. The
Bible helps me to know Jesus, and to learn about what it means to have faith.
But the Bible itself is not something to have faith in or to not have faith in.
And that is what presents the first problem most of us will encounter in
getting back to the Bible.
Someone I do business with in the local area told me
he had to leave his church because of the new minister. I thought that was
rather odd since he had been on the Committee that just called the new
minister! So I asked him why he left. Well, he told me, everything was okay
until the new preacher started up a Bible study class. One of the class members
who’d never studied the Bible before asked him what version of the Bible she
should get. The new preacher said to find one that she felt comfortable with,
some translation that she could understand. And that’s the straw that broke the
camel’s back!.
My friend, who was brought up with “the authorized
version of the Bible” and clings to the idea that “if the King James version
was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me”, explained why he left this
way: “Once you start letting people bring
in their own versions of the Bible, how long is it going to be before someone
brings in… a Playboy magazine?”
And that’s pretty much a direct quote!
Well, the logic escapes me, but I do understand how
hard it is to let go of the Bible as an object of our faith. Giving up our
sacred cows, no matter how afflicted they may be with the religious equivalent
of mad cow disease, is always a scary thing.
I remember how scared I was sitting in my first
Seminary class when the professor told us to feel free to write notes in the
margins of our Bibles. “Write in the BIBLE?” I wasn’t so sure that was a
good idea. Writing on the Bible would be like writing on Jesus himself, I
thought!
But, of course, I’ve since learned that’s not so.
It’s just that many of us grew up in a world where we were taught that the
Bible itself is sacred, and that we were to have “faith in” the Bible. And for
some of us, the Bible became larger than life – too holy to ever do anything
with than to just accept and believe it. To question the Bible, or to put it to
scientific inquiry was to be a faithless heretic!.
I love the story of how Joseph Smith, the founder of
the Mormons, discovered the golden tablets that became the Book of Mormon. It
was 1823 and the angel Moroni led Smith to the metal sheets which were hidden
on a hill in Palmyra, New York. When Smith brought the tablets back home four
years later, he carried them in a sack. But when people wanted proof of the
tablets, he wouldn’t let them look inside. Instead, he let them hold the sack!
And sure enough, there was something in it!
Well, sometimes we Christians treat the Bible this
way – as a sacred object too holy for ordinary people to take hold of, and
explore, and think about, and learn from. Our faith IN what other people have
told us about the Bible keeps us from ever daring to peek inside the sack.
And that’s why, when people like Dan Brown come
along with the suggestion that we haven’t been told the whole truth about the
Bible, many people are attracted to the idea, and many people are frightened by
it. And many, many others – like my friend, our church member – just don’t know
what to believe anymore.
That’s why I believe it’s so important for you and
me to get back to the Bible.
But I want to be sure you understand that going BACK
does not mean retreating into the fictional world of my business acquaintance.
It’s not back to the old King James that we need to go.
And it’s not to go back to a hundred years or so ago
when the Modernists with their new scientifically rational way of thinking
tried to de-supernaturalize the Bible and strip it of all mystery. Or to the
other movement that grew in response to the Modernists – the Fundamentalists –
who reacted by saying that the Bible is the inspired Word of God containing no
errors whatever, and if you don’t believe that, you’re not really a Christian
and you can go straight to hell.
Many of the things you and I believe about the Bible
today come out of this big fight that took place a bit more than a hundred
years ago between the Modernists and the Fundamentalists. It’s time to get over
it. But to go BACK to the Bible is to go further back than that.
Back past the time of John Wesley…and Jacob
Arminius…and John Calvin…and Martin Luther.
Back past even the Reformation of the Middle Ages.
Back past the split of Christianity into east and west. Back past the Roman
Church. Back past Constantine and his conversion.
To truly go BACK to the Bible, we would ultimately
come to a wonderful moment:
The time when there WAS no Bible!
Many Christians today are surprised when they learn
that most of the great heroes and heroines of our faith had no Bible! It’s hard
for us to believe you can have faith WITHOUT a Bible, but you can. Most of our
Judeo-Christian ancestors had no Bible.
But they had a faith.
Abraham and Sarah didn’t have a Bible. But they had
a faith!
Isaac – and Rebekkah - and Jacob – and Rachel – and
Leah – and Joseph – and Moses – and Miriam- and Joshua – and Deborah – and
Jonathan – and David – and Mary – and Joseph – and Jesus…
…did not have a Bible. But they sure had a FAITH.
Yes, they had some stories passed down and told one
generation to the next. And they had some songs they sang around campfires. And
they even had an occasional written scroll of the days long ago. But even these
written scrolls would not be assembled together into a canon that looked
anything like our Bible until long after these people of FAITH were gone.
Peter – Mary Magdalene - John – Mary and Martha -
James – Paul…
None of them had a Bible. But they all had a FAITH.
And here’s what you need to know about our Bible.
Our Bible is the voice of those ordinary human beings who walked this earth
before us. Our Bible tells their story. Our Bible preserves the memory of those
who – without a Bible as a reference guide - had to figure out how to live as
the people of God, and to be good neighbors, and to build healthy communities
in which to raise children, and to make the world a better place that might
someday be so beautiful it could actually be called “the kingdom of heaven.”
To go BACK to the Bible is not to go back to some
belief ABOUT the Bible. It is to go back to the people the Bible was
written about!
And there, BACK in the Bible we would discover some
wonderful things!
First, we would discover what faith really looks
like!
To many people today, faith means accepting a set of
beliefs or doctrines. Oh, how far we have drifted from faith of the people of
the Bible! To them, faith was not a way of BELIEVING, but a way of LIVING!
One of my favorite stories of living faith is the
story of Jonathan and his armor bearer told in First Samuel 14. The Philistines
were sending out raiding parties against the villages of Israel. They were
killing people, destroying homes, and stealing possessions. Someone had to do
something about this! Someone had to save and protect the people!
Well, Saul was the King over Israel. He was also
Commander-In-Chief of the Israelite army. So Saul took all his generals and 600
of his elite soldiers, and went looking for the Philistines. They went up on
top of a high hill, and lo and behold, what do you think they saw in the valley
below? The Philistines! They were ripe for the picking!
But Saul was like a lot of Christians I know. He
wasn’t about to do anything until he knew for sure it was God’s will – meaning
he wanted to make pretty certain he would succeed. So Saul called on a
representative of the priesthood who was entrusted with the ephod. Now the
ephod was a breastplate of sorts, and it contained the urim and the thummin!
These were used to divine God’s will. It was sort of like my mother who used to
use “the lucky dip” into the Bible to find the answer to her question. And, of
course, on the 9th or 10th lucky dip, the answer my
mother wanted in the first place would usually miraculously appear!
Well, the urim and thummin worked something like
that. We aren’t exactly sure of the details, but some scholars believe the urim
and thummin were three white stones and three black stones contained in a
sacred box. The priest would take the box and shake it, and then pull out three
stones. If all three stones were white, God’s answer was, “Yes!” If the three
stones were black, the answer was, “No!” And if the three stones were mixed,
the answer was a definite, “Maybe!”
So there’s Saul, with the generals, and the 600
soldiers up on the hill trying to get an answer to the question, “God will
you give us success over the Philistines?” And they keep coming up with
black and white combinations!
Meanwhile, Jonathan – Saul’s son – and his
armor-bearer – climb up another hill. Jonathan looks out and says, “My gosh!
There’s the Philistines! Let’s go get ‘em!”
Well, the armor-bearer is more like Saul than
Jonathan. He knows the odds aren’t very good – the two of them against the
whole Philistine army. So he asks, “But how can we know for sure this is
God’s will?”
And Jonathan scratches his head and answers, “Well,
if we get killed, we’ll know it wasn’t God’s will! But if we win, we’ll know it was! So…CHARGE!!!!!”
And off they go – down the hill – screaming like a
bunch of Lady Vol basketball fans after a Candace Parker dunk. And the
Philistines are so surprised by the commotion that they think Jews are popping
out of holes in the ground everywhere, and they’re surrounded! They go into a
panic, and run away! Jonathan saves the people of Israel…through faith.
You
see, faith is not about believing things. Faith is not about knowing ahead of
time how it’s all going to turn out. Faith is not learning the spiritual
principles that will assure you of answered prayer, financial success, or
building healthy kids. Life is not controllable like that!
True
faith is an adventurous spirit of living that dares to take risks to accomplish
good for your neighbors, your community, and the world. Faith is taking stock
in the goodness God has already planted in your life when you were created in
God’s image, and then trusting God completely as you live out that good even in
the face of evil. Faith is risky business!
I
know a lot of Christian people who don’t want to risk anything, especially the
possibility of being wrong. They want to turn the Bible into something like the
urim and the thummin – something that will give them the results before
anything is risked. They want definite answers, and step-by-step instructions.
They flock to hear sermons on the 3 Biblical steps for attaining wealth, or the
12 Biblical keys to raising good kids, or how to pray and get answers every
time. They try to turn the Bible into something that looks a lot more like Saul
and the ummin and the thummin than like Jonathan and his willingness to risk
his life for the good of the community. And that’s why we have so many people
today who have a faith in the Bible, but they don’t have a clue about how to
cope with the new challenges of life in the 21st-century.
If
we could get BACK to the Bible, we would learn again what faith is!
And
we would learn what faith isn’t. Because spread across the pages of the Bible
are also stories about peoples’ mistakes and failures. Some of those people do
terrible things in the name of God. Every generation, you see, has people in it
who perpetrate evil on others and say it was God who told them do it. More than
once in the Bible even innocent children are put to death…in the name of God.
Going BACK to the Bible exposes us not only to human faith, but to human
ugliness, too. To go BACK to the Bible is to look into a mirror and see
ourselves. And when that happens, we can learn and grow.
And
all this faith – and faithlessness – is lived out in the Bible against the
backdrop of a God who, for some strange reason, thinks we human beings are
worth loving, and worth patiently working with to build good lives, good
families, good communities and a better world. And that love is ultimately
revealed in the life of the most beautiful person who ever lived.
When
you go BACK to the Bible, you get something far more wonderful than the Bible
itself.
You
get Jesus.
The
other day, I was with Pat Provart and her daughter Michelle and son Mark as
they waited in the CCU Waiting Room while Bob was undergoing by-pass surgery.
We were having a very lively theological discussion about all these things –
the Bible, the DaVinci Code, the Gospel of Judas. At one point in
the conversation, Mark said something that was very deep and wise about how all
these controversial things affected his life. He said, “These things may
challenge my theology, but they’ve never shaken my faith!”
That’s
why it’s okay to read DaVinci (and that, by the way is your assignment for next
week), and study Judas, and dare to take the Bible out of the sack and open it
up to your questions, your struggles, and your concerns about life, faith,
yourself, and God.
Like
the people of the Bible, your theology will be shaken! And it may need to
change.
But
your faith will grow.
Marty,
I don’t know WHAT to believe anymore,” my friend, our church member said.
Then
go back, dear friend. Go BACK to the Bible!