You Have Heard
John Wilkinson Third
Presbyterian Church
October 15, 2006
Mark 10:17 –
31
Author Kathleen Norris, in her fine book called Amazing Grace,
tells this story:
One Saturday night in a local steakhouse, my husband and
I got to visiting with an old timer, a tough, self-made man
in the classic American sense. His grandparents had been dirt-poor
immigrants, homesteading in western South Dakota, living in
a sod house, barely making a living off the land in the early
years. But the family had prospered, and he and his brothers
had built up a large ranch of many thousands of acres.
This man had gotten where he was by being single minded
when it came to money, making as much of it as possible, and
spending as little as he could, except when it came to his wife
and kids; they always drove new cars. We knew him as a taciturn
man, but that night he was in a talkative mood, possibly because
he had recently encountered a situation in which all the money
in the world couldn’t help him. He was facing chemotherapy
for an advanced, probably terminal cancer.
He was a man we knew casually, and he knew us as oddball
writers, misfits in the region. What interested him most about
us was that somehow we made a living at it, and he often had
questions about the business aspects of the literary profession.
He marveled that it could take more than a few weeks to write
a book. We knew each other well. In the small town way of imagining,
we knew each other all too well.
Out of the blue, Arlo began talking about his grandfather,
who had been a deeply religious man, or as Arlo put it, “A
darned good Presbyterian.” His wedding present to Arlo
and his bride had been a Bible, which he admitted he had admired
mostly because it was an expensive gift, bound in white leather
with their names and the date of their wedding set in gold lettering
on the cover.
“I left it in its box and it ended up in our bedroom
closet,” Arlo told us. But he said for months afterwards,
every time we saw Grandpa he would ask me how I liked that Bible.
The wife had written a thank you note. We thanked him in person,
but somehow he couldn’t let it lie. He’d always
ask about it. Finally, Arlo grew curious as to why the old man
kept after him. “Well,” he said, “The joke
was on me. I finally took that Bible out of the closet, and
I found that Granddad had placed a twenty-dollar bill at the
beginning of the book of Genesis, and at the beginning of every
book in the darned thing. [laughter] Over thirteen hundred dollars
in all. And he knew I’d never find it.” [more laughter]
Deborah Hughes read from the book of Hebrews that the word
of God is living and active. How can we make that true for each
of us and for all of us?
Since our beginning, we Presbyterians have been people of the
book. We have embraced an understanding of the centrality of
the word. That comes out in all sorts of ways. It comes out
in worship every Sunday morning when we focus on scripture as
other traditions focus on the sacraments.
It seems to me, these days, that we could use a little renewal,
that word becoming active and living in our lives, in the life
of the church, in the life of the nation and the world.
I’m never quite sure what anyone takes away from a sermon
on any given Sunday morning. I want the takeaway this morning
to be more than “the preacher says you have to read the
Bible more.” That sounds overly pious and not particularly
helpful. And yet, what would it look life for us to do that,
for us to take it out of the white, embossed box, and crack
the spine, and look together at what the alive and active word
might be saying to us?
Earlier this morning our group of new members read through
the Brief Statement of Faith. In that brief statement the line
is included, “The spirit rules our faith and life in Christ
through scripture.” Through scripture.
Perhaps as children we memorized the old line from the psalm,
“Thy word is a lamp unto our feet.” What
would that look like? And how might that work?
You might know that we Presbyterians are some of the most studied
people in the United States. We even have our own internal research
unit, called the Presbyterian Panel. Some of you, perhaps, have
even participated in the panel. The panel sends out a survey
to a thousand or so of us once a quarter.
Several years ago the questions on the survey were about the
Bible. The spectrum looked like this: You could have an understanding
of the Bible as being the literal, infallible word of God, dictated
directly by God to the authors, and the Spirit working through
their hands to put the words on the page. The other end of the
spectrum would be an understanding of the Bible as a good book,
perhaps not much better than other books, with decent suggestions
for how to live life, but no more inspired by God than any other
good book might be.
You might be interested to know that we Presbyterians --- on
that question anyway --- responded in an almost textbook perfect
bell curve. That is to say we believe the Bible has authority,
authority beyond our own understanding and ability to interpret.
God and God’s spirit are involved somehow in the giving
and the receiving and the comprehending of scripture. But we
also understand that God gives us a mind with which to think,
and a community with which to engage these words.
We understand and interpret, and so we believe that somehow
in the process God calls us into activity as well.
I think we know that many of the controversies in church and
culture use the Bible as a central debating point. I think of
the Bible in that instance almost as a weapon to be used in
the battle.
I remember in a church in Chicago there was down the street
a well known biblical institute, and sometimes following worship,
when students from that place would wander down the street and
come worship with us, they would approach the preacher of the
day with the Bible clenched in their hands. I would simply say
to them, “Let’s open this, and discuss it together.”
I think that’s what we’re called to do these days,
in this conflicted world in which we live: open the Bible and
discuss it together. That must mean that we avoid presuming
to know what the Bible says or doesn’t say about any particular
thing, without actually looking into it. It means we must avoid
“proof texting.” That’s what the scholars
call it --- finding a particular biblical passage and using
it to support a position that we already have taken.
We must also be about the business of avoiding rejecting positions
with which we disagree. There have been times in my own life,
and perhaps in yours as well, that an engagement with the biblical
material has actually changed our mind, a kind of reverse biblical
fundamentalism that allows us to be open to what the Spirit
is saying to us. We must also do what is so easy for us to do
as well --- we must avoid dismissing biblical text that we don’t
like, simply because we don’t like them. At that instance,
it’s my understanding and my hope that the Spirit draws
us even fuller into a discussion and a debate and kind of faithful
wrestling match.
What I’ve learned over the past several years is to challenge
the argument that I read about frequently, that every problem
that we face in the church and in the nation is because we are
facing a crisis of biblical authority. I say this to my liberal
friends and I say it to my conservative friends as well ---
that this is not a battle over the authority of scripture. Rather,
at our best and at its best, it’s a conversation about
how the Bible is interpreted.
To say that this is a matter of interpretation rather than
authority does two things almost immediately. The first thing
it does is lower the temperature of the debate. It reminds us
that we are on common ground when we open the words of scripture
and engage them together. And by so doing it allows real and
true, faithful and honest dialogue to happen.
I was this week at a denominational meeting at our headquarters
in Louisville. We gathered around tables and opened scripture
together. The question on the table was the decline in membership
in the Presbyterian church, this year and in the past decades.
The text that we were asked to engage was from Matthew’s
gospel, the Great Commission, “Go and make disciples
out of all nations.” And without being too presidential,
the conversation turned into something like this: it all depends.
It depends on what “make” means. And it depends
on what “disciples” means. And it depends on where
you live, and what your task is, and what your call is, and
what your vision is. That did not mean that we dismissed outright
the notion of making disciples in every nation. What it did
mean is that we were able to have a rich and productive conversation,
with the pages open, and with our voices and ears attentive
to what each other had to say, rather than turning this into
another angry debate with the pages closed, filled with blame
over whose fault it is that the Presbyterian church is in such
deep decline.
I like to say that the Bible is not liberal or conservative.
It’s entirely beyond that kind of political conversation.
It’s a book; actually it’s a library of 66 books,
complex in variety and perspective, the story of people over
centuries, the story of their understanding of how God was present
in their lives, and how God was calling them into community.
It’s not a perfect people. It’s not a perfect text,
but it is what invites us into continuing relationship with
that community that has gone before us.
I’ve learned that it’s very easy to say, “The
Bible says this about that,” or, “The Bible says
this about that.” Those who have conversations about reproductive
choice head immediately to the Psalms, and that verse about
“Before you are in the womb I knew you.” Or those
these days who are arguing about the war, or any war, and immediately
turn to Jesus’ words about turning the other cheek. Or
those who are debating matters of human sexuality who gravitate
toward Leviticus or Romans, as if there’s some kind of
biblical checklist that you need to work through before you
can have any other kind of conversation.
What I want to say to those choices and all of the choices
that we make when we look at the Bible is, “Yes, but…”
Yes, the scripture says this, but it also says this, and this,
and this. And our task is to begin to put a quilt together of
biblical truth and biblical hope, to help us work through all
of the challenging issues that we face, you, and me, and all
of us together. It is complex, and nuanced, and glorious.
A recent Presbyterian document made the assertion that, when
you read the Bible, page by page, chapter by chapter, book by
book, certain themes need to come into play as you make any
interpretive decisions or try to take on any perspectives:
* The centrality of Jesus Christ
* The plain sense of the text, that is to say the Bible says
what it means and means what it says, that scripture interprets
scripture. If you have one hundred verses that suggest this
direction and one that suggests another, you should really pay
attention to where the conversation is taking you,
* If the
• rule of love and
•the rule of faith
* aren’t central to what you are reading, then you probably
need to read differently or more deeply or more broadly.
And if we do that, and if we do that together, we will be blessed
and benefited.
Where does that take us? I believe that each of us, if we were
to engage more deeply in the biblical material, if we were to
engage together in what scripture says to us, would discern
our own list of themes and directions, of questions. Here’s
my list. It’s not airtight, by any means, and if I were
to come up with one tomorrow it would include different themes:
* One is Love: God’s love
for us, and God’s insistence that we love the world and
love one another.
* Covenant: God’s desire to
be in relationship with us, and God’s desire for us to
be in relationship with one another.
* Peace: God’s strong desire
for us not to be at war with one another
* Reconciliation that seeks to heal
brokenness, the interior brokenness that each of us experiences,
and that we experience together.
* A sense of Vocation, story after
story after story where God calls us into something new and
different and better, and whereby God gives us gifts and abilities
to follow that call.
* And Stewardship: the understanding
that God gives us gifts including the gift of this world, to
take care of and to tend to, and to give back to God in as good
a shape or better as God gave it to us.
There are other themes. We can only discover them as we open
the pages of the book, each of us, even a minute or two a day.
And then if we do it together, in community, (we are working
more and more on that in our adult faith development opportunities
and our small group covenantal gatherings, in many of the places
where God is gathering members of this congregation together)
might we also be attentive to the word that God is giving to
us.
In this extraordinary story from the gospel of Mark, an earnest,
intent man approaches Jesus with the big question on his mind.
What do I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus tries to
put the question off. “Why on earth are you asking me?”
he says.
And then there is this great interchange that the scholars
typically gloss over to get to the more interesting stuff. Jesus
says, “You know the commandments.” And then he lists
items from the Ten Commandments that surely would have been
in the common parlance of the man asking Jesus the question,
and all those that would have been gathered around to hear this
conversation.
But you know the commandments, that simple reminder
from Jesus to this man implied that there was a common language
around which all could have a life-giving conversation.
That’s my image this day, for this congregation, for
the community in which we live, for the church of which we are
a part, for a nation and world that seems so at odds.
That’s my image, an open community filled with open minds
and open hearts, gathered around an open book, having a conversation
that can make all the difference.
And if we find a twenty dollar bill every once in a while,
or something even more precious than that, then all the better
to God’s glory. AMEN.
