February 24, 2002
Psalm 121,122
    RSV KJV NIV CEV
Timothy 3:2-4;12-17
    RSV KJV NIV CEV

“COMMENTS I HAVE HEARD:
Frankly, I Am Bored by the Bible!”

This is a sermon about the Bible, which is, I believe, the most- misunderstood book of which I am aware.  The Bible is the very core of our Christian faith. It is the book upon which fundamentalists, evangelicals and liberals all lean for validation of their point-of-view; yet it is also the book that divides people of faith into uncompromising positions.

Often, people have a very unrealistic view about the Bible. I constantly run into people who feel guilty because they find some portions of the Bible difficult to grasp, as written.  They would have no problem being critical –– that means researching the truth –– of any other book, but somehow they have had it ingrained in them, that to question the Bible is wrong, or as I hear some say, “the genealogies, laws and codes are boring.”  And … they are.

I grew up in a fundamentalist home.  I was taught that if it was in the Bible, it was true.  I remember, as if it was yesterday, that I came home from high school and said to my Dad that I believed that evolution was right.  He didn’t say much, but I could tell by the look on his face, and the clenching of his fists, that if he ever lost control, I would have been seriously hurt.

Dad talked to a man about “my problem” and through that person, Dad purchased a book by Harry Rimmer, which was a refutation of evolution.  I read it thoroughly, and Dad’s plan backfired.  In Rimmer’s attempt to prove a 7-day creation story, I became a true believer-in-evolution from that day to this.  That convinced me: I could never be a Biblical literalist.

In 1997, our National Association of Congregational Christian Churches met in Atlanta.  The Bible lecturer that year was Fred Craddock, who, in my opinion, is America’s greatest preacher and teacher of preaching.  In the question period, after the lecture, someone stood, and, in a stained-glass-voice, asked, “Dr. Craddock, do you accept the Bible as the infallible and literal word of God?”  Craddock replied, “Oh, no, my good man.  I take it much more seriously than that.”  I wish that had been my answer.

My aim today is not to explain what the Bible is, or how it came to us, as important as those items are.  I want to address the issue of why the Bible is boring to many people and to try to suggest ways in which it might become more interesting, because until it is interesting, it will not be read as much as it should be.  Let us begin by stating “as Christians we are people of the Bible.”  As William Willimon, says, “That does not mean that we worship the Bible or that we claim to have, somehow, captured God between the pages of the Bible.  It means that in our life with the Bible, we claim to have been confronted by the living word.”  That ‘word’ was the Christ, Jesus. Jesus is the supreme act of self-communication.  Yet, we would not have known to expect the Christ, had we not been taught by the Hebrew Scriptures to expect the God of love to speak to us.  As the writer of Hebrews says in Chapter 1, verses 1&2, “long ago, God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets; but in these last days, he has spoken to us by a son.” (Willimon, “Shaped by the Bible,” p.11f)

The Bible is thus, the book of the Church. To be understood, it must be read politically, which is to say, it must be read from the viewpoint that it is written with the aim of forming a new people.  The central aim of the entire New Testament is the creation of a new people, which Paul calls a new creation.

If we read King Lear, we do not read it as history or science; we read it as drama.  When we read the Bible, particularly the New Testament, we should see, in it, the desire to engender a people.  And this “people it is seeking to develop” is counter to the culture of its time.

For Romans, as an example, no value was dearer than the family.  All civil rights, marriage, politics, economics, name and status were centered on the family.  The early Church ran counter to that sense.  The Church was ambivalent, or even hostile, to the family.  Paul advised against marriage.  In baptism, believers were re-born to a different way of life and were adopted into God’s family.  The old, traditional family was seen to be idolatrous and unimportant to the new family of God if it in any way superceded loyalty to God.  That understanding was fundamental in the formation of the early Christian community.

In the New Testament world, there were many religious viewpoints which gave meaning to life; pantheism, polytheism, eroticism, Epicureanism, stoicism etc.  To be a Christian was to be baptized into an alternative story of the world. (Willimon, p. 21)

Today, we have watered down the claims of the Bible and the Church to the point that the world doesn’t fear the Church much at all because there is so little different between it and the prevailing culture.  We have blunted the Bible’s message to us.  There is little alternative to the Church; we’ve largely ignored the Bible’s aim.

Remember when Jesus went to Nazareth to preach his first sermon?  The story is found in all three of the gospels: Jesus opens the scroll and reads to the congregation from the prophet Isaiah.  “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has appointed 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, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Isaiah, 61:1-2)

Then Jesus began to interpret the words of the scroll.  That is what the Church does; it interprets the words of the Bible.  Jesus says, “God is coming among us.  And the last time that God came among us, during the days of the great prophet Elijah, many of your own people were hungry.  But God’s prophet fed none of them. Only a widow from Sidon, a foreigner, was nourished.”

They are silent as he continues.  “And were not there many sick people in Israel during the time of the prophet Elisha?  Yes, but Elisha healed none of them.  Only Naaman, a Syrian, A Syrian army officer.  Now, the once-adoring congregation rises up against Jesus.  They are an angry mob and they want him killed.”  He says to them, “I said nothing new.  It’s all in the book, and it is YOUR book.” (p.18) The Bible has the power to shock people who are comfortable in their life style and beliefs.  As Christians, we need to be shocked; yet we compromise the teachings.

The Bible is written in the attempt to form a new people, but many, in its hearing, do not want to hear what it says.  The tasks of the contemporary preacher –– and these are tough tasks –– are to study Biblical sources, to be aware of the historical situation that prompted the writers to write, and to know the literary sources and their meaning.

To know to whom a passage was written, why it was written and what were the social understandings of that day, is essential; because not all of the ideas can be parachuted into our day and age and still be meaningful.

Yet as Fred Craddock states, the one great sin of our day is the sin of being dead or bored.  Years ago, Charles Dickens spent an afternoon with the clergy.  It was boring –– “yawn city” all the time.  Finally, he suggested to the group, “Why don’t we get up, sit around the table and join hands, and see if we can commune with the living.”

The Biblical stories must be told as the great stories that they are and be allowed to resound in our hearts, so that they still speak with power.  Because our faith begins with the Bible’s claims, our task is to interpret it wisely, so that the message remains.

In the early years of the 17th century, Galileo, after studying the work of Copernicus, challenged the viewpoint that the earth was a stationary planet about which all other heavenly bodies rotated.  The earth was not the center of the universe, he stated.  The Church –– in this case, the Roman Church –– took issue with the claims of Galileo, stating that his findings were contrary to the biblical view; therefore, he was wrong.

Galileo’s life was so seriously threatened that he recanted his findings.  The truth of his findings could not, however be suppressed, as every school student of today knows.  Yet it was not until 1991 that the Vatican admitted that Galileo had been correct. The confession of the Church and it literal interpretation came 350 years late.

The stories still confront us.  Take, for example, then, The Rich Man and Lazarus.  In 1989, Will Willimon was preaching on the topic of the rich man and Lazarus.  Do you remember the story?  It is found in Luke16.  A rich man, sumptuously rich, lived in a mansion.  At the gates of this mansion lived a poor man named Lazarus, who was so poor that he was filled with sores and desired to eat what fell from the rich man’s table.  In the story, the poor man dies and is carried to the bosom of Abraham.  The rich man also dies and was in torment in Hades.

He sees Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom and cries out, “Abraham, let Lazarus come and dip his finger in water and cool my tongue.”  Abraham replies, “Remember how, in life, you received many good things and Lazarus much evil; now, he is comforted and you are in anguish.”  Then he says, “Send him to tell my brothers, so they can escape what has happened to me.”  Abraham says, “No.  If they did not hear the word of Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”

Willimon was saying to his congregation, as I say to you, none of us has ever gone hungry; none have lived in poverty; we have all had enough.  We have received our reward, but that is not true for most of the world.  Then, Willimon read a newspaper article about poor people in Brazil selling their bodies’ organs for money.  The paper told of a man named Walter who had sold both of his eyes for $20,000.  Walter had two children and had never had a steady job in his life.  He said, “Now, I can see that my family has a better life.”  The life he wanted to ‘see’ was bought at the expense of both his eyes.

The next morning, Debbie appeared at the minister’s study.  “I couldn’t sleep last night.  I simply could not get that poor man out of my mind.  I woke up my husband this morning and said that the car we were going to buy does not need to be a new one, and that we don’t really need a new stereo.  We are going to increase our giving to the Church, if you can assure me that some of it will reach someone like Walter.”  Churches must allow room for inspiration, room for the charitable spirit to find expression, room for the real reason for the existence of the Church in the first place.

If the biblical story we read and preach is incapable of reaching people like Debbie, then no amount of scholarship will rescue it.  The best proof of the Bible is how it changes people’s lives.  The Bible is to be read for is stories and how they audit our lives.  As Frederick Buechner says, “to read the Bible as literature is like reading Moby Dick as a whaling manual and The Brothers Karamazov for punctuation.”

I am suggesting that we read the stories and let them speak to us.  I mean that we should read them as they are; not read back into them some of our own thinking.  Our task is to let the stories lead us; not that we put our spin on the stories.  If you do this, you will be disturbed.  The stories Jesus tells will haunt us and cause us to think long and hard.

In Matthew 20, Jesus says, “The Kingdom of heaven is like a farmer who, early in the morning, went to the marketplace to hire workers for his vineyard.  ‘Come to work for me,’ he says, ‘and I will pay you a denarius a day.’  Later he goes back and says to those still waiting to work, ‘go and work in my vineyard and I will pay you what is right.’  Again at noon, he went, and later at 3:00, and finally late in the afternoon saying, ‘go to work for me and I will pay you what is right.’ “

Now it is time to be paid.  Those who came to work last were paid first, and they were paid a denarius.  “This will be great,” thought those who had worked all-day; yet each who had worked, no matter how long, was paid the same.  Finally, those who had been there all day were given a denarius and they grumbled, “This isn’t fair!  We worked all day.”

You can hear the comments, can’t you?  I’ll bet some of you are thinking the same thing.  The boss says, “Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius?”  “Yes!”  “Well there you are.”

“But, but those people didn’t work as long as we did.”  The owner answered, “Do you begrudge my generosity?  Can’t I dispose of my money the way I want to?”

Now that is troublesome to us.

Don’t explain it: let it stand and work its way around your mind.  Let it disturb you.  Fred Craddock said that, when he read this story to a Church in Oklahoma.  A lady said to him, “Jesus never said that.”  He answered, “How can you be sure?”  She said, “He would never say that,” and she left the Church and never returned.

That is one way to get to know the Bible: tell the stories and let them work within the lives of the hearers.

Another is: learn the Bible’s beauty spots.  Who has not been soothed, comforted and surprised by The Psalms?  Read the great oratory of Isaiah and his passion for the people to follow God, or the inspired love portion by Paul in 1st Corinthians, 13.  Let the words of Jesus inspire, upset and soothe you.

Another way is to learn the books of the Bible. I am continually astounded by the individuals who haven’t the faintest idea where the books in the Bible are, or even if they are.  Ask a group to turn to a particular book, like Hebrews; you might find them looking in the early parts of the Old Testament, because they simply don’t know.  Know the books of the Bible.  There are 66 different books, and they do not agree, and they are not cohesive.  Learn them.  That is Step One to knowing what each is about and then when each was written.  Genesis, for example, is about beginnings, so it is placed first in the Bible –– but it is not the first-written, not by a long shot.

Get to know the characters of the Bible.  When you know Abraham, you get involved in the covenant.  When you walk with Jacob, you sense his concern and his dedication: you get involved with his 12 sons, and when his name is changed to Israel, you see the beginning of the twelve tribes of Israel, and suddenly, the history of Israel, and the affection for the, and then you see them all become historically real.

Learn of Hosea, Micah and the disciples; you will see them, as real people with real problems and questions, just like each of us.  Walk with Jesus and share his compassion and love for humanity, and see his courage in the face of those who disagreed.

Lastly, there are 6 ideas presented in the Bible, and each of them goes through a huge transformation or evolution in the roughly-1000 years it took for the scriptures to be written.

The ideas the Bible presents are:

a)      The idea of God: follow its development from the God who speaks out of smoke-and-fire on volcanic Mt Sinai, to the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

b)     The idea of humanity: from a person whose soul is in his breath, to a spiritual being in the New Testament whose aim is to please God through a right heart, and not through ceremonial procedure.

c)      The idea of right and wrong: start with a person whose ethic is the tribal ethic, and end with people who, to please God, must be morally right, and inwardly-and-outwardly, merciful.

d)     The idea of suffering: start with humans suffering from God’s curses, to the lofty illustration of vicarious sacrifice.

e)      The idea of fellowship with God: from an unapproachable deity, to one who hears and answers prayer and who rewards openly the believer who prays in secrecy.

f)       The idea of Immortality: from a God who presents the tree of life, and a God for whom death is not shared with humanity, to the towering message of Christ, who abolished death and who brought light and immortality to light, through the gospel.

Lay aside the idea of reading the Bible as a novel, and instead, read the Bible as a compilation of writings by individuals who were inspired by their relationship with God.  Wrestle with those concepts; let the Bible speak to you until you find, through its pages and its stories, the matchless love of a God who reveals himself through Jesus the Christ.

Follow that pattern.  Allow the Bible to speak to you –– not you speaking through its ideas –– and you will find that it is far from boring.  It is an exciting struggle to find meaning.  It is life.