Biblioidolatry

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Propers: The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 24), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks. That right there is a sermon in itself.

There is a very simple formula for atheism. We make the Bible say things that it doesn’t really say. We then come to find that the things we’ve made it say are not true, are in fact dead wrong. Thus people, quite understandably, lose faith in the God of the Bible. Because if you can’t trust Him to be true, then you can’t trust Him to be God.

We have this notion, especially prevalent in America, that the Bible is a top-down book, that it descended from Heaven engraved upon golden plates, whole and inviolate, unchanging for millennia, the perfect physical embodiment of the Word of God. Thus the Bible becomes for us our source for all truth. If it’s in the Bible, we believe it—or at least our interpretation of it. If it’s not in the Bible, we ignore it. And we often end up ignoring the Bible to boot.

Yet this is not a Christian understanding of the Bible, certainly not a traditional or historical or classical way of understanding it. If we were to go back in time to the earliest centuries of the Church, we would likely be shocked at the way our ancestors read the Bible. We might denounce them as heretics, or worse, liberals. But they were nothing of the sort.

The early Church understood the Bible in the way that Judaism understood the Bible: that it is not a top-down book descending from on high, but a bottom-up book, inspired by God, absolutely, yet mediated through human authors. It is not one book but many, combining mythology and history, poetry and proverbs, prophets and philosophers, lamentations, law codes, love letters, apocalypse and praise. It is the record of one people’s struggles with God for hundreds of years.

And that understanding, that relationship, develops over time. The God described in Leviticus is understood very differently from the God described in Job. In some ways the Bible is an argument, a debate, not only between different experiences of God but between Man and God Himself. It is no coincidence, after all, that Jewish religious instruction is predicated upon heated back-and-forth debates. The very name Israel means “one who wrestles with God.”

Not everybody got this. There was a fellow in the early Church named Marcion who took one look at the Hebrew Scriptures—what we call the Old Testament—and wanted the hurl the whole thing against the wall. He read the ancient stories of the warrior-poets and said, “God can’t be like this. There’s no way that the Christian God can be the same god who does all these seemingly horrible things. The Old Testament must be false.” So he threw it all out.

That’s because Marcion didn’t get it. He was making the Bible say things that it doesn’t really say. There is a lot of history in the Bible, yes, but when it seems like God is being petty or cruel or outright wicked—Jews didn’t take that literally. They read that as allegory. Of course God is not wicked; if He were, He wouldn’t be God. For them, the Old Testament was important not for what it said about the past but for what it says about the present. It was for moral instruction; it was to bring us closer to God.

And if the rabbis found anything in the Scriptures that repulsed us, that drew us away from God—well, clearly that couldn’t mean what we thought it meant. God is better than that. God is better even than our record of Him.

Even that word “literal” doesn’t mean what we think it means. We call something literal when we think that there’s only one clear way to read it, a simple, straightforward, plain meaning obvious to all—by which we mean obvious to us. But when the early Church talked about reading the Bible literally, they didn’t mean read it like an A-B-C book. They meant to take every letter seriously. Read deeply. Wrestle with the text. Pray with the text. Find God in that text, because that’s why He gave us the Scriptures: so that we could find Him, and He us, in our daily lives. There’s no sense reading those stories if we aren’t part of those stories.

For Christians, Scripture has one purpose and one purpose only. That is to draw us into Christ: draw us into His Spirit, draw us into His Body the Church. Jesus is the beginning, the middle, and the end of all the Scriptures, of the entire Bible. If you want a summation of basic Christian beliefs, don’t flip open the Bible to Genesis 1, verse 1, but look instead to the Creeds of the Church: Apostles’, Nicene, Athanasian. That’s what we all believe. That’s the mystery of our faith.

We are not Mormons, who received a golden book directly from the hands of an angel. We are not Muslims, who hold that their holy scriptures are a direct and perfect copy of the Mother of the Book eternal in the heavens. Our Word of God is Jesus Christ. We worship Immanuel, God-With-Us, God made flesh. We do not worship a book. To do so—to believe in Jesus only because a supposedly perfect book tells us it’s okay—is false worship, biblioidolatry.

We do not believe in Jesus because He’s in the Bible. We love the Bible because it brings us Jesus. It is the written Word of God that gives to us the living Word of God. People say the Bible is infallible, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t contain mistakes, or that there’s only one way to read it. Infallible literally means that the Bible does not fail, cannot fail, because it brings us Jesus. And Jesus saves!

Now, I don’t want people going home today thinking that Pastor Stout doesn’t believe the Bible, or doesn’t like the Bible, or doesn’t take the Bible seriously. I assure you, I take the Bible very seriously. I read it at least three times a day, in accordance with my ordination vows, so that I get through the whole thing, Genesis to Revelation, every other year. I love the Bible. And what’s more, I will often defend the historicity of the Bible. The parts of the Bible that are history are good history, certainly better than what other ancient peoples were writing 3,000 years ago.

But my faith is not in the Bible. Our faith, Christian faith, is in Jesus Christ our Lord. Without Him, this book is dead. With Him, this book becomes for us the Resurrection and the Life.

For us, the whole Bible has been leading up to Jesus. All the revelations of God throughout the Old Testament, they were partial, they were prelude. They gave us glimpses of God. Jesus is God in the flesh! Everything He is, is God. If you ever want to know what God is like, where God is when we suffer, even if God loves us at all, you look to that Cross. You look to the Man who poured out His life for the world, who healed the sick and fed the poor and raised the dead, who forgave us even as we were murdering Him in the worst way we knew how.

That’s your God. That’s how much He loves you. I can put it no better than Luther himself: “Apart from this Man I have no God!”

“Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks. A prophet? A teacher? An executed criminal?

You, Lord, are the Messiah. You are the Word of God. You are the fulfillment of every promise, the fruition of every hope, and the truth for which we have all longed.

You are the Savior of us all.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.