The Living Word
Psalm 28: 1-9
Matthew 28: 16-20
During our holy season of Lent, we are exploring some of the core tenets of our Christian life together. Last week, we began with prayer and we surveyed some of the obstacles to praying that many of us experience. This week, we turn to our Holy Bible. It is a piece of the Christian faith about which there is no consensus and often the cause of intense disagreement and debate. Yet, it is core to our Christian life together. Both the United Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ affirm that our holy Bible is central to our Christian life. The United Methodist Book of Discipline asserts, “The biblical authors, illumined by the Holy Spirit, bear witness that in Christ the world is reconciled to God. The Bible bears authentic testimony to God’s self-disclosure in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as well as in God’s work of creation, in the pilgrimage of Israel, and in the Holy Spirit’s ongoing activity in human history.” And John Thomas, the General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ, writes, “In the line of the familiar hymn, break now the bread of life, we sing, beyond the sacred page, I seek you Lord. Not apart from, but beyond or through the sacred page we seek the Lord and sometimes see God’s face. Taking the Bible seriously means recognizing its transparency, expecting to see beyond mere text to the mysterious presence. It is to see the Bible not as the ultimate object of faith…nor as mere literature expressing pious religious themes or fixed moral values be they liberal or conservative, but as the penultimate instrument of mediation through which the ultimate living Word encounters us full of challenge, comfort, judgment, grace and truth.” So, what does it really mean for us, as the body of Christ to claim the Bible as authoritative for who we are right now as people of God?
One of my favorite professors at Pacific School of Religion, Dr. Delwin Brown, grew up in a conservative religious community and later discovered that it no longer nourished his faith. He found himself being nurtured in a mainline Protestant church such as ours. His particular journey of faith gave him an especially open perspective on theological categories traditionally labeled as either liberal or conservative. He refused to accept the “theological caricatures by which each group demeaned, disdained, and despised the other…” He contends that both the conservative and liberal views of the Bible are inadequate. He writes, “Conservative theology ignores the diversity of scripture; liberal theology ignores its centrality to Christian existence. Thus both misunderstand its role in Christian life.”
In conversations with many of you, our perspectives on the matter of biblical authority vary widely. And that is one of my favorite things about you. We have a glorious variety of perspectives. At our committee appreciation dinner a couple of weeks ago, we talked about how this year marks 85 years of federation for us. It was February of 1923 that the Congregationalists and Methodists came together to form the Cotuit Federated Church. We all laughed at the joyful truth of our history and wondered how marvelous it might be and how radical given our current political climate to wear t-shirts that read, “85 years of agreeing to disagree!” I see this as one of our spiritual gifts as a congregation. We covenant to agree to disagree. Yet knowing we aim to discern where God is calling us and yet knowing that our shared Holy Bible is central to our life together what might it look like for us to claim the Bible as authoritative given our variety of perspectives? What claims might ground us, as we grow in our shared Christian life together? Based on conversations with many of you, I would like to offer some common convictions we share about our Holy Bible even in our wonderful diversity.
The first shared claim that we can make together is that we need to read the Bible. Perhaps this is obvious, but it is important enough to say. Most of us do not know our Holy Bible well enough to say much about it at all. I know before I went to seminary, I would get bogged down in the “son of, son of, son of,” lineage parts in the Hebrew Scriptures and end up giving up altogether. It is a wonderful and complicated library of sixty-six books, according to Protestants, and written over a one thousand year period. It includes history and prophecy, songs and poems, laws and sermons, letters and proverbs. Although it contains so many genres, it “tells one story, the epic story of God’s interaction with God’s people, with Israel, and with the early Church.” We know the names of some of the authors and others will remain unknown. It is a book of the community, written both to share their experiences of God and to inspire new ones. The books are not included chronologically or in an especially helpful order. Start by opening it and exploring the different genres. As Christians you might begin with the Gospels, as they are likely to be more familiar and work your way to the Letters. Starting your day with a Psalm or a Proverb is easy too. The Lenten devotionals have just pieces of scripture, but this might be a helpful way to get your toes in the water. I have also made copies of the daily lectionary for the next few months to get you started. In the fall, I will begin a comprehensive Bible study for the new and seasoned faithful alike. In the mean time, open it up!
The second shared claim we can make is that the Bible is the Word of God. It is of God, yet conveyed to us through human words. It is both full of words and full of God. Speaking to the phrase, “Word of God,” renowned Catholic theologian and priest Raymond Brown, speaks to both the word part and the God part. He says that indeed the Bible is the Word of God, claiming this body of work comes from God and is related to God in a unique way. He wrote, “God supplies guidance in many ways, for example, through the church, through official teaching, through families. And of course…in the Bible God has given this unique guidance in preserved written form, which constitutes a record of His dealings with Israel and the Early Church. The Bible is the library of Israel and the library of the Early Church that preserves the basic experience that can serve as a guide to the subsequent people of God.” Then he goes on, “If we turn to the word part of the description, we are allowing that there is a human element in the Bible…A human being thought of the biblical words and they reflect meaning and experience in the human author’s lifetime.” Brown speaks to fact that we are an incarnational faith and therefore God always seems to come through the human body in human history. God makes God’s self known through human beings. It would make sense then that even our Holy Bible is incarnational, as God has conveyed God’s guidance in and through human words. We proclaim together that our Holy Bible is human words, yet these are words through which God’s inspired truth is communicated to us.
The third shared claim we can make together, based on the first, is that the Bible is both holy and human. Some of us might disagree about how much is holy and how much is human but because God chose to share God’s inspired truth through human words, there are extremely human parts to our sacred scripture. It contains violence and rape, slavery and death, tragedy and suffering and God is depicted in both holy and human ways, seeking vengeance and acting out of rage, and offering grace and salvation too. Karl Barth, the prominent German theologian argues that our human language is unfit to convey truth about God. He writes, “The pictures in which we view God, the thoughts in which we think Him, the words with which we can define Him, are in themselves unfitted to this object and thus inappropriate to express and affirm the knowledge of Him.” Because human beings were involved in its creation, it can never be purely just God. Martin Copenhaver writes, “Taking the Bible seriously means receiving it as being inspired by God and as containing God’s word to the community of faith. But taking the Bible seriously also means taking into account the human influences it reflects.” The miracle and joy is that in this glorious and wonderful compilation of holy and human, God gives us eternal truths about God’s victory over suffering and death even in spite of our sin and failures. Fred Trost writes, “To take the Bible seriously is to believe this; to accept the astonishing, bewildering, miraculous, absurd, liberating truth.... Despite everything, God is in love with us all!”
The fourth shared claim is that the Bible itself is diverse. It is diverse in its class and perspective, diverse in its aims and theological lens, diverse in voice and hopes. We even see diversity within the same biblical voices. Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” And yet he also said, “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” We can’t easily make one sweeping pronouncement about Jesus in this respect. We can’t say that Jesus is violent, nor can we easily say that he is a peace activist. There is diversity within this holy and wonderful book of books. Del Brown writes that “In and through the diversity of Scripture we are led forward to think for ourselves in communities of diverse views, in situations of diverse options, in the face of problems with different resolutions. The Bible refuses our efforts to reduce it to one voice. If we edge toward rigidity, the biblical voices of freedom challenge us…If we lapse into quiescence, we are called to action. If we exhaust ourselves in worldly doing, mystical resolutions beyond human effort lure us. If we claim God for ourselves, we are told that our knowledge is foolishness. If we hide behind our fallibility, we are challenged to speak boldly.” The Bible is diverse, just as we are and in its diversity it offers us a beautiful mix of the ways God has spoken through diverse peoples and times throughout human history. It cannot be summed up with sweeping generalizations; we must read it to have our stories join those of the faithful who have gone before us.
Finally, in the Gospel of Matthew today we read that Jesus told his disciples to teach and obey what he had commanded them. As Christians, we aim to follow Jesus and following him means knowing him, knowing what he said and did, knowing the culture and faith in which he lived, knowing who he was in the face of all that was before him. “Taking the Bible seriously,” writes Fred Trost, “is not a program of some kind. It is not a curriculum. It is not a directive from some source far away. It is not a strategy to solve our problems. It is not a suggestion easily made. It has consequences. It is the simple act of faithful people, done for generations, sometimes at a risk, enabling the Church to make its way through time and events with a song on its lips, often in the face of the laughter and derision of the world.” Our Holy Bible is a living word, full of human life and the life of the God we know in Jesus our Christ. As we continue to grow in faith together, how might this living word grow in each of us? Amen.
Taking the Bible seriously: John Thomas, delivered at the Dunkirk Colloquy on October 10, 2000.
Authored by the Book: A Plain Account of Biblical Authority by Delwin Brown
To Begin at the Beginning: An Introduction to the Christian Faith by Martin Copenhaver Pilgrim Press, 2002 p. 103.
101 Questions and Answers on The Bible. Raymond E. Brown, Paulist Press 1990, 33-34.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. II: The Doctrine of God, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance; trans. T. H. L. Parker, W. B. Johnston, H. Knight, and J. L. M. Haire (New York: Scribner, 1957), Pt. 1, p. 188
To Begin at the Beginning: An Introduction to the Christian Faith by Martin Copenhaver Pilgrim Press, 2002 p. 116.
Taking the Bible seriously: Fred Trost, delivered at the Dunkirk Colloquy in 2000.
Authored by the Book: A Plain Account of Biblical Authority by Delwin Brown.
Taking the Bible seriously: Fred Trost, delivered at the Dunkirk Colloquy in 2000.