Nehemiah 81-6, Luke 4:14-21 and Psalm 19
January 27, 2013
We are in
the middle of a sermon series about the symbols of faith. When we reflected on altars on January 6 I explained
that the altar symbolizes sacrifice, and Christians believe that Jesus Christ
became the ultimate sacrificial lamb, and so the symbol of an empty altar came
into common use as Christianity began to spread across Europe. The bread and chalice of Holy Communion,
which reminds us of Christ’s sacrifice, and perhaps the candles which have come
to symbolize the light of Christ are appropriate items to put on the
altar. But our congregation, like so
many, had lost an understanding of what the altar meant. Symbols need to be brought to consciousness,
and explained from time to time or they lose their meaning. Many Christians who don’t know the
connection between the animal sacrifices on the altars of the Old Testament,
and Christ the lamb of God sacrificed to take away our sins, have come to
simply think of the altars in their churches as holy spaces. So they started
putting other items on the altar as well, such as offerings of money, and
sometimes that altar looked a little plain, so they began to perk it up a bit
with some nice flowers. When we don’t
understand the symbols of our faith, we are in danger of using them wrongly,
which in turn masks, or distorts the original meaning of the symbols in
question. Placing items on a Christian
altar makes us look at the things we put there, rather than remembering that no
more sacrifices are required of us and we are forgiven simply through the Grace
of Jesus Christ. When we focus on the things on the altar we start to think of
the altar as a place where we present our gifts to God – our tithes, canned
goods around Thanksgiving etc. If then we put a Bible on such an altar it looks
as if we are offering the Bible to God.
And it’s even worse if that Bible on the altar is one that no one ever
opens and reads.
Of all the
things that don’t belong on an altar, the Bible is at the top of the list. For one thing Christians believe that the
Bible contains God’s word for us. It is not something we offer to God – it is a
precious gift God has given to us. And
not only that, offerings of sacrifice on the altar are typically dead, yet
Christians believe that God’s holy word is very much alive. We believe that God can and does speak to us
through this book in a way different from any writing. After all the term Bible simply means
“Book.” It is the book of books – God’s
holy living word.
When bibles
end up on church altars I believe it is a sign that the congregation is
struggling with these two precepts – that the Bible is a precious gift of God
for us, and that the Bible is God’s living word. So today I begin a two part sermon to explore what these mean.
Gift
Did you
notice how Psalm 19 waxed poetic about the gift of God’s word to us. In the time the Psalm was written the focal
point of God’s word was the Torah – which means law. Torah is the first five books of the Bible, and though it
contains the commandments it is far more than a list of rules. The Bible Study folks are reading Genesis
right now and can testify that it reads more like an adventure story than like
a list of thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots. In Psalm 19 the verses use several
different words for Torah – law, testimony, precepts, commandments, fear of the
Lord, ordinances – this is one of the Bible’s ways of making a poem.
7 The
law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul;
the
decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple;
8the
precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart;
the
commandment of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eyes;
9the
fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever;
the
ordinances of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
10More
to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey,
and drippings of the honeycomb.
Psalm 19 is
shouting from the roof tops – God’s word is a wonderful, precious, delicious
gift!
Nehemiah
also shows us an example of the people of God receiving God’s word as a
wonderful gift. The books of Ezra and
Nehemiah are the end of the History of Israel in the Old Testament. They are written after the Kingdom was united
by David, and the Temple was built in Jerusalem by Solomon, and after the
Kingdom was invaded by the Syrians and the Babylonians and many of the Jews
were taken into captivity and forced to move away from their homeland. Finally the Persian Empire took over and
under the policy of their Emperor Cyrus, the Jews were allowed to return from
exile. Ezra and Nehemiah were given
official permission to help the Jews rebuild the temple and begin to worship
rightly again. The scene we are focused
on today is when the people are gathered outside the gate to the temple. Ezra the priest knew that before they could
worship the Lord rightly they had to be introduced to the Torah which had been
forgotten during the exile. So early
one morning Ezra, Nehemiah and thirteen elders gathered the people, men and
women and children who could hear with understanding, by a gate to the Temple
called the Water Gate. And Ezra started
to read from Genesis straight through the Torah, and the elders helped the
people to understand, explaining the difficult and confusing parts. We can tell that the people received this
word of God as a gift because they stood from early in the morning until midday
and were attentive and they answered Amen, Amen and lifted up their hands and
then bowed their heads and worshipped the Lord with their faces to the ground.
What about
us, today? Do we view the Bible as a
true gift. Do we feel about the Bible
like we feel about receiving just the right Christmas present, something we use
all the time that reminds us of the giver and makes us smile? I suspect this is not so for many of us.
I’ve been
teaching Local Pastors’ School for about 6 years now and I also served on the
staff of the Intro to Preaching course at BU for 4 years. One of the main questions
we ask every new preacher is, “Where is the Good News?” It is extremely common
for the sermons of new preachers to be overly moralistic. Sermons are full of words like should, ought
and must. Listeners often come away
feeling shamed, scolded, or discouraged.
And we have come to suspect that new preachers preach this way because
that is the type of sermon they have been used to hearing. This is where the term “preachy” comes from.
If the people standing at the Water Gate for a whole morning were presented
with such an interpretation they would have wondered away dejected and no one
would be left to shout “Amen, Amen.”
For people
to start hearing the Word of God as a gift they need to always see the good
news in the Bible. I suspect the teachers
were helping the people notice that God created them and
said they are good; that God told Abraham and Sarah that they would be the
parents of a great nation and that each of the people listening at the Water
Gate was part of that nation. The
teachers insisted that now that they knew who they really were, they could keep
God’s commandments and live more like God’s people.
To
find the good news you need to focus on God; God’s gifts, God’s grace, God’s
healing, God’s vision of how the world is mean to be. Jesus first public
teaching recorded in
Luke was to teach about such good news.
He opened the scroll to Isaiah 61 and read: 18“The Spirit of
the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the
blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19to proclaim the year of the
Lord’s favor.” This is a vision of what
God is doing in the world. The poor
whose lives are filled with bad news are given good news. Those who are in prison, held captive, stuck
in life are released. Those who can’t
see the beauty that is a sign of God’s hand at work are given sight. Those who are burdened, battered, bullied
and bruised are set free. It is the
“year of the Lord” the year of Jubilee when the Bible instructs all debts to be
wiped clean – everyone has everything they need to live well, and no one is
financially beholden to anyone else.
Jesus is announcing God’s work in the world, and it is good news.
Knowing
you are a beloved child of God, that through Christ you are forgiven whenever
you mess up, and through the power of the Holy Spirit you can live a life of
shalom with God and your neighbors is Good News. When we read the Bible
rightly, focusing on the Good News, then it becomes more precious than gold,
sweeter than honey, a true gift of God for the people of God.
Living
Word
Perhaps the
best part about this gift of God’s word for us is that it is a living word.
I have a
collection of letters stored away and among them are letters from my
grandmother. I treasure these letters
because I had a close relationship with grandma, and these letters can help
remind me of where I came from and that I was deeply loved. Reading them over again would do me good,
especially if I’m in a place where I feel bad about myself. But my grandmother died in 1996, and I can’t
turn to her any more in the current trials and questions of my life. I can’t get the same comfort and guidance
from the old letters that my living grandmother was able to give to me.
But when we
say that the Bible is God’s Living Word we are saying that they are
substantially different from old letters.
What we are saying is that any one of us can pick up the Bible and read
it in a way that God speaks to us – speaks to our lives here and now. When we embrace the Bible as the living Word
of God we will find that it addresses our current situation, time after time,
giving us guidance, comfort, hope. It
is God’s primary way of talking with us.
There was a
time when Christians read their Bibles every day, searching the scriptures as a
way of listening to God, and finding answers to their prayers. But today, not so much. Again this is a topic of discussion in the
seminaries and amongst clergy, and professional religious folks have reached
some general agreement that modern Biblical scholarship is much to blame for
taking the Bible out of the hands and hearts of the people. Modern Biblical scholarship has made us
think we need certain particular tools to read the scriptures. You have to have some sense of geography,
where is Judea, where is Ephesis? Where
is Eden? You have to have a working
knowledge of ancient civilizations – their cultural practices, their
religions. You have to know how to read
Hebrew and Greek – dead languages that don’t even use the same alphabet we use.
You have to have to understand a bunch of technical words like covenant,
ephphatha, agape and paraclete.
Sometimes the church tries to lower the bar a little. The lectionary cut out the names of the 13
Levites who were helping Ezra
Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Maaseiah on his right
hand; and Pedaiah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashum, Hash-baddanah, Zechariah, and
Meshullam on his left hand. But all in
all, over the past 70 years folks in the pews have gotten the sense that the
Bible is only something experts can read and understand, and they have given up
trying.
The good news for us today is that
the Bible is the living word of God and you do not have to be a Bible expert,
or wait for one to preach to you, to begin experiencing God speak through it to
you on a regular basis. This is all you
need to do.
1.
Read
it regularly. Just like having a friend
you never talk to or listen to isn’t much help, so you can’t experience the
Bible as God’s word unless you read it.
a.
Get
familiar with the books and how the chapters and verses work – table of
contents
2.
Read
it selectively. Don’t just pick it up
and decided to read from Genesis through to Revelation and expect God to speak
to you all the time. Through all of
history I don’t believe many people received revelation through the begats, or
even through lengthy descriptions of wars.
a.
Start
with the lectionary – portions that our parents in the faith have found to be
tried and true.
b.
Or
use the Upper Room – or another devotional
3.
Read
with this uppermost question in your mind – What is God saying to me through
this passage today.
a.
Don’t
get side tracked wondering too much about the geography, technical terms,
ancient history.
b.
Trust
that God can use the same portion of scripture to speak to you today, that God
used three years ago – but that the meaning or significance can change.
4.
Study
of the scriptures – learning more about the technical stuff – can help you –
but just remember that reading devotionally – as a way of hearing from God – is
not the same as reading it for knowledge.
We need to do both.
The Bible is
more than a symbol of our faith. It is
not just an object to be placed in the front of the church for decoration. It is to be proclaimed every Sunday. We use
it to drive everything we do in a worship service, our hymns are based on it,
our prayers come out of it, or liturgy quotes it and the sermons are meant to
explain it and present it as good news for God’s people. Just as the Bible directs our worship it is
God’s plan that this living word will be the primary source of a two way
conversation between God and us, guiding and shaping our lives.
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