Sermon for January 24, 2010
Gospel: Luke 4

One of the themes of the liturgy this morning is the Holy Scriptures.
• They are mentioned in the prayer of the day: “Lord God, you have caused the Holy Scriptures to be written for the nourishment of your people; grant that we may learn and inwardly digest them.”
• They are mentioned in Nehemiah: the people of Israel listened to the book of the law of Moses, which was probably our book of Deuteronomy, from early in the morning until the middle of the day… I don’t want to hear any more complaints about fifteen minute sermons.
• And finally, they are mentioned in Luke: Jesus, like a good rabbi, stands up in the synagogue and reads a passage of scripture for the congregation.

Since the liturgy is pushing us in this direction, today is probably as good a day as any to spend some time thinking about the meaning of the Bible in our lives.

Before getting into this, though, I should tell you that there are times when I wonder whether the Bible is really worth it. Don’t get me wrong: I love the Bible. Some of my most transformative experiences have been inspired by it.
• But every time some tells me that Barak Obama is the antichrist, I wonder if the good that the Bible does really outweighs the bad.
• Or every time I read a statistic like the one that says 45% of the American population believes the world was created about 10,000 years ago, just like it says in Genesis, I wonder if the good of the Bible outweighs the bad.
• Or every time someone tells me that gay people can’t be ordained, because the Bible clearly proscribes homosexuality. It makes me wonder if the Bible is really worth it.

The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that the problem isn’t the Bible; the problem is the people reading the Bible… or better yet, not reading the Bible but thinking they know what the Bible says.
• For instance, the antichrist that so many Christians seem obsessed about: it’s never mentioned in the Book of Revelation. And any 11th grade English student who reads the Book of Revelation should be able to figure out that the Beast refers to the Roman Empire, not some scary figure who is going to arise at the end of days and persecute all the Christians.
• Or the creations story in the book of Genesis: it’s not even written like history, so why are people reading it that way?
• Or the question about who can be ordained: I find it interesting that the Lutheran church has been ordaining divorced men and women for over a generation, even though the Bible speaks more stridently and more clearly against divorce than homosexuality. No one ever threatened to leave the ELCA over that. It makes you wonder if there is something more going on than how we read and interpret the Bible.

After years of doing Bible study with people, I’ve come to see that an awful lot of Christians approach the Bible in one of two ways:
• Some people use the Bible to show others that they are real Christians. The Bible becomes a kind of symbol for how devout a person is. They call themselves Bible-believing Christians, and they go to Bible churches, and they study at Bible colleges. They believe that the Bible should be read in public schools and plastered on the walls of public courthouses. Kind of like the American flag, the Bible becomes a political statement, a call to arms, something we have to fight to defend.
• The other approach to the Bible I find among Christians is a kind of embarrassment. They look at the Bible like they might look at an eccentric relative… someone they’re not quite sure how to deal with. They just hope no one draws any conclusions from the fact that they are related to this odd character. They would never want anyone to think they actually believe what’s in the Bible; they are far too sophisticated for that.

What I find interesting about the people in each of these groups is that few of them actually read the Bible… even the people who approach it as a symbol of orthodoxy. They may read a verse or two every week in church, but few of them have actually read the Bible from cover to cover. This is interesting, but not very surprising when you think about it, because the Bible can be pretty difficult to understand. It’s full of names and places that we haven’t heard of; sometimes it will say something in one place and then say something contradictory in another place; sometimes it says things about God that are quite troubling, describing God in ways that make Hitler look civil by comparison. No wonder so many people don’t bother to open it.

So how do we reconcile these two approaches to the Bible with the fact that every congregation of the Lutheran Church in America has in its constitution a statement that the Bible is the inspired Word of God? Do we really believe that? Do we want to believe that? Or what about the people in Nehemiah who wept when they heard the words of the Bible read? What accounts for that kind of response?

Well, here are a couple of things to keep in mind with regard to the Bible. First, the Bible takes interpretation. In Nehemiah, when Ezra read from the book of the law of Moses, the Levites were there to help interpret the Bible with the people. And after Jesus reads from the book of Isaiah, he sits down to offer some interpretation of what he just read. Whenever you read from a book as old as the Bible, you need to be able to interpret it in order to make sense of it in a modern context. The people who translate the Bible from the original languages, Hebrew and Greek, into English already make that first step of interpretation. Translation is interpretation. But then we have to take the interpretation further: what did a passage of scripture mean to the very first people who heard it; and what does it mean to us? What does a story about a shepherd that was originally told in a rural, nomadic, Ancient Near Eastern society, mean to post-industrial, urban Americans? It takes interpretation to figure this out.

But does that mean that anything goes when it comes to interpreting the Bible? Read into it whatever you want? No! The Bible itself gives us clues for how we should interpret it. For instance, Jesus tells the religious leaders of his day that the whole Bible rests on to two commandments: love the Lord with all your being; and love your neighbor as yourself. Those two commandments are a key for interpreting the Bible. So if a passage of scripture would lead you to think badly about God or your neighbor, you’re probably not interpreting it right.

An even more profound clue for interpreting the Bible comes to us in this morning’s Gospel reading. After Jesus read from the book of Isaiah, he sat down to interpret, and what did he say? “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” What Jesus was saying is that he himself is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy. That’s a very Lutheran way of reading the Bible. Jesus would have made a good Lutheran. Lutherans believe that the whole point of the Bible is to introduce us to Jesus. The Bible is the Word of God, not because God sent it to us in God’s own handwriting, not because it was written by Moses or Peter or Paul. The Bible is the Word of God because it reveals Jesus, and Jesus is the living Word of God. Jesus is the Word of God with hands and feet and a brain to think and a heart to love.

Mark Allan Powell, a professor at Wartburg Seminary, puts it this way. Love the Bible. But the Bible will never love you back. Jesus WILL love you back. Jesus is the Good News that God speaks to the poor. Jesus is the word of freedom that God gives to the oppressed. Jesus is the word of vision that God gives to the blind. All the promises of salvation that we read in scripture are fulfilled in Jesus. And Jesus is the means by which these promises are fulfilled in us. Notice how he words that: today, these promises are being fulfilled in your hearing. In your hearing of the Good News, Jesus is present among you. Jesus comes into our lives to give us the freedom, the vision, and the encouragement that God intends for us.

Once you train your eyes to see Jesus in the Bible, the whole thing comes alive. You’re no longer bogged down in questions about historical accuracy or who wrote what. Instead of the Bible being a political statement or the source of embarrassment, it becomes, as Martin Luther put it, the manger that holds Christ. The Bible is the manger and we, like the shepherds, bend over it in sheer amazement and gratitude at what God has done for us.