Treasures Old and New
Sermon October 15, 2017
My favorite cake growing up was the Lively Chocolate named after our neighbor, Mrs Lively. Over 40 years we have messed with the ingredients. Years ago, we remove the chopped pecans in the icing - too sweet. Connie adds darker chocolate and removes some sugar. We once used honey and it was a mess. We once forgot the shortning making a gooey delicious mess. However, we have never made the cake without some kind of flour. Not all ingredients are of equal value.
I grew up hearing preachers ascribe a quote to Billy Graham: “The Bible said it, I believe it, that settles it.” It summed up a theology of inerrancy and infallibility which treats every verses as equally inspired. Now, in practice, most people set Jesus’ teachings above the rest of Scripture but officially we considered every line as written by God’s hand. Some verses we just ignored.
Leviticus 11: 7 :”The pig... is unclean for you” was a verse my Bible-believing church ignored.
Deuteronomy 22:9-12Don’t plant two types of seed in the same field… Don’t plow with an ox and a donkey together. Don’t wear clothes that mix wool and linen together.
Leviticus 19:9 When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest.. leave them for the poor and the alien.
Leviticus 11:12 Anything in the water that does not have fins or scales is detestable to you. Maybe because Long John Silver’s was my childhood seafood construct, I did not mind a ban on shrimp. However, when my North Carolina native wife took me to the coast I embraced Peter’s vision in Acts 10:15 , “Never consider unclean what God has made pure.” We might notice that Peter was near the coast and hungry, when he left behind a kosher diet. We must realize, undoing the Levitical dietary laws by means of Peter’s vision or Mark’s inference in Mark 7:19 breaks with a literalism that treats all Scriptures with the same weight.
This is not simply an Old Covenant of Hebrew Scripture issue. Consider Paul’s words to the Corinthians about prayer and headscarves. “If a woman doesn’t cover her head, then she should have her hair cut off.” (1 Corinthians 11:6) I never heard a sermon about “Prayer and hair.”We never talked about it!
As a young biblical literalist, I understood gleaning and why God cared for the poor, but I struggled to figure out why God was against hybrid corn, blended slacks, and long hair. Indeed, in college, I experienced an unnecessary crisis of faith as I encountered Biblical criticism because in many ways I had confused Jesus and the Bible, merging them into one.
UB Confession of Faith: “Article IV—The Holy Bible” speaks to the power and place of the scripture: We believe the Holy Bible, Old and New Testaments, reveals the Word of God so far as it is necessary for our salvation. It is to be received through the Holy Spirit as the true rule and guide for faith and practice.
Do we hold verses on hair, blended garments, and hybrid corn on spiritual par with . . .
- Worship God alone
- Never confuse the Creator and the created
- Do not trivialize the sacred
- Stop working- your workers too! Set aside one day for worship and be renewed!
- Honor elders.
- Do not murder.
- Do not commit adultery.
- Do not steal.
- Do not testify falsely.
- Do not try to scheme to cheat your neighbor out of their stuff.
When we give every line equal weight the Bible becomes a kind of a magic book or infallible science-like reference book instead of a story of human sinfulness and our God, who never gives up on us. Faith is robbed of it personal relationship becoming instead a series of rules or steps. Literalism does not need prayer of the Holy Spirit’s guidance.
In “The Strength to Love,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote “Rarely do we find people who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think. Our minds are constantly beginning invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, propaganda, and false facts. Soft-mindedness often invades religion. This is why religion sometimes rejects new truth with a dogmatic passion. (For some) reason is looked upon as the exercise of a corrupt faculty . . . This has led to widespread belief that there is a conflict between science and religion. But this is not true . . . their respective worlds are different and their methods dissimilar. Science investigates and religion interprets. Science gives knowledge which is power; religion gives wisdom, which is control . . . Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of materialism and moral nihilism.”
If you have never carried the heavy burden of theological literalism, then go easy on those still shackled under its soul-stifling burden. Literalism kills. (2 Corinthians 3:6) Literalism locks out theological inquiry, needs no tradition, and an contemporary insights from the Holy Spirit. It effectively closes the Bible. Literalism finds all it needs inside the Bible, and so does little with Jesus’ promise in John 16:13 “that the Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth.”
Now, many reject Biblical literalism. Some of you may have. But do you have a replacement lens to guide your reading of the Bible? Many reject literalism but accept the literalists’ equal weighting of verses and abandon the scriptures replacing the sacred texts with little to nothing. Without a lens to view the scriptures, the spiritual life becomes disconnected and subjective.
The funny thing is that the Bible never teaches us to read its passages in the same light.
Listen to our passage, from Matthew 13:51-54 “Have you understood all these things?” Jesus asked. They said to him, “Yes.” Then he said to them, “Therefore, every legal expert who has been trained as a disciple for the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings old and new things out of their treasure chest.” I am not sure, but it sure seems like Jesus is telling us we need to do some thinking about our reading!
Did you notice the context of the Ten Commandments? Listen to the introduction and the first commandment: “Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You must have no other gods before me.” Who spoke these words? The very voice of God speaks in first person singular pronouns, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery… no other gods before me” Listen to the conclusion of the passage! After the very voice of God speaks these ten rules to all the people, Moses records, “When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the horn, and the mountain smoking, the people shook with fear and stood at a distance. They said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and we’ll listen. But don’t let God speak to us, or we’ll die.’’’ Moses will hear and record the other laws. There is a clear distinction! The Ten Commandments are set apart, spoken by the very voice of God and written down by the very finger of God. They are set above the laws on hybrid corn and blended slacks! The rest of the Law will come through Moses, but not heard by everyone! Just ponder that difference.
In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul is talking about marriage, divorce and such, but listen to Paul on how to read Paul. “Now, about what you wrote… I’m saying this to give you permission; it’s not a command. ...I’m passing on the Lord’s command to those who are married… I’m telling everyone else (the Lord didn’t say this specifically)... Nevertheless, each person should live the kind of life that the Lord assigned… I don’t have a command from the Lord about… but I’ll give you my opinion as someone you can trust because of the Lord’s mercy. So I think this advice is good because… This is what I’m saying, brothers and sisters… I want you to be free from concerns. … But in my opinion, she will be happier if she stays the way she is. And I think that I have God’s Spirit too in this.” Paul tells us that at times he is offering his opinion. Other times he has direct teaching from Jesus. Literalism ignores such nuances.
I wish as a teenager trying to make sense of the Bible someone would have shared Philippians 3:15 where Paul instructs the church “Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you.” orPaul’s confident instruction in 2 Timothy 2:7 “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in all things.” If Jesus has given the church the power to loose and bind then surely we have the power to interpret or weigh the verses and think about them. ( Matthew 16:19 and 18:18) Just think about that.
What theological tool might replace a wooden literalism or a personalized subjectivism? Let us weigh the scriptures. Let us give greater weight to the Ten Commandments than to laws about hybrid slacks. Perhaps, we might weigh everything in light of the teachings of Jesus? That is what the Apostle Paul did. I wonder if, up in heaven, the Apostle Paul grimaces every time someone uses one of his letters to set aside Jesus’ commands, such as setting aside Jesus’ Easter commissioning of women preachers for Paul’s insights on worship? .
Paul came to see the Scripture through the teachings of Jesus “I consider everything a loss in comparison with the superior value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I have lost everything for him… In Christ I have a righteousness that is not my own and that does not come from the Law but rather from the faithfulness of Christ. The righteousness that I have comes from knowing Christ, the power of his resurrection, and the participation in his sufferings. … I have already reached the goal or already been perfected, but I pursue it, so that I may grab hold of Christ, who has grabbed hold of me. This one thing I do: I forget about the things behind me and reach out for the things ahead of me. The goal I pursue is the prize of God’s upward call in Christ Jesus. So all of us who are spiritually mature should think this way, and if anyone thinks differently, God will reveal it to him or her. ” (Philippians 3:8-16)
My dear friends in Christ, let us read the Bible through the eyes of Jesus. This is not such a new practice; it is as traditional as Red Letter editions. Let us resolve to replace our literalisms and our subjectivism with a Jesus shaped lens, thinking, weighing scriptures, open to the Spirit, grounded in community, and listening to our traditions. May Jesus become our standard of interpretation.
Thomas Merton, from “Opening the Bible” said, “The basic claim made by the Bible for the word of God is not so much that it is to be blindly accepted because of God’s authority, but that is recognized by its transforming and liberating power. The word of God is recognized in actual experience because it does something to anyone who actually “hears” it; it transforms their existence . . . There is an implicit contrast between the dry academic and official learning about religion and the living power of the word. Paul too contrasts the deadening study of the letter with the living giving power of the Spirit by which God manifest himself in the text . . . The message of God to us is not a matter of ink and paper but of the new life that has sprung up with the believers.” May Jesus transform us as we come to see even the scriptures through His eyes. Amen.