rich’s blog

Introduction: Difficult or Seldom Seen

 

Introduction:

Well, friends, welcome back to normal days…although, we’re still in the historical Christmas season, you know; twelve days of Christmas and all that. They are over tomorrow, but I hope that they’ve been good to you.

 

This morning we’re beginning a new message series…and we’ll see how it goes.  Over the next couple or few months we’ll look at passages from the Bible that fall into two categories: they are either really difficult to understand, and because of that we don’t look at them all that much.  Or they are ones that for all sorts of reasons, they are passages we just never end up reading.

 

And I’d ask for you help in this, that today and over the next couple of weeks, that you all would suggest to me some passages that fit into these categories: difficult or seldom seen passages.

 

And I will not promise that we can talk about every bit of Bible that’s suggested–but we can talk about some of them, I suspect. So suggest passages, suggest books, suggest whatever you have always wanted to hear someone else talk about, and I’ll see what I can do.  No hard feelings if we don’t discuss it, though, right?

 

Today:

So, Today is an introduction sort of day.  And although introductions don’t always make for the most interesting half an hour of our lives, we’ll see what we can do this morning.

 

I hope that this morning will set us up for what’s to come, will articulate some things that we’ll need to know as we talk about all sorts of different passages from the Bible, and why we need to understand these things well.  And although my guess is that anything I say today will be review for many of us,  we still need to hear it, because it’s good, basic stuff.

So: with that hopeful statement ringing in our ears, let’s pray.

 

Prayer: 

Father: We are talking about foundational things today, important things. Help us to hear them well.  Help today to position us for the series we’ll walk through in the coming weeks. And position us this morning to gain the understanding you would have us gain, that we can become more like your son.  Keep me from confusing us, keep me from confusing us.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

 

We should probably ask… 

So. If we’re talking about difficult or seldom seen passages from scripture, we should probably ask what scripture is, why it matters knowing what it is.  And we should wonder why we skip over parts of it, why parts of it are hard to understand.

 

Reasonable things to talk about, right?  Relevant things to look at when we’re talking about what we’re talking about.

And the same goes for dentists. Dentists are incredibly relevant to today’s conversation.

 

Dentists? 

Let’s talk about dentists.  If you were going to a dentist, you might ask a couple of things.

 

We might ask, “Is this dentist legitimate?”  We’d wonder where she was educated, if she had any training.  We want to know if she knew what she was doing as a dentist.

 

But even if she had a ton of training, and was educated at a wonderful place; just very capable.  We’d still want to know something else, which is sort of different: we’d want to know if she’s trustworthy.

 

If a dentist’s hands are going to be all up in my grill while I’m out of it, I want to know both that she knows what she’s doing, and she’s going to work on behalf of my dental health, my good.  I want to know if my dentist is legitimate, and I want to know that she’s trustworthy.

 

We should ask the same things about the Bible: is it legitimate, reliable; does it know what it’s talking about.  And even if everything we read in it is factually right on; can we trust it?

 

Do these sound like important questions? They are. Let’s talk about them!

 

Where? 

So we could ask, “Where does the Bible get its authority?”

 

And we’d answer that it gets its authority from its witness to God’s work in history, the work God did to redeem humanity, which culminated in Jesus and the establishment through the Holy Spirit of the early church.  (And you know, this work to redeem creation is still being worked out through us, right?)

 

The Bible gets its authority through its unique witness to the Word of God, Jesus, and the way God acted through history, through Jesus, to redeem the creation that rejected Him.

 

But this collection of books, gives such a unique perspective into Jesus’ life, it’s so closely tied to Jesus, that we’ve ended up calling it the Word of God, too, a lot of the time.

 

And we would say, that this word of God, this Bible, doesn’t just give us a unique picture into God’s work in history and Jesus life, but it in fact gives us the picture of Jesus that God wants us to live our lives by.  All review, right?

 

Who? Why?

But we could, and should ask: “Who decided this was Scripture, and that other things weren’t?”

 

Because they were buckets of other written documents floating around the ancient world that talked about stuff that happened with God’s people, Israel, and stuff that happened in Jesus’ life, talk about what it means to be a Christian and live in the world. And even though they might be instructive, helpful, interesting–they aren’t Scripture, right?

 

“Scripture,” seems to be more than just whatever we find between the worn leather cover of our grandparents’ Bible, but it’s also, in some ways, a set of conditions that a written work has to meet.

 

A set of conditions that a written work has to meet. 

 

Have Mercy, History Professors: 

Cause here’s what happened once upon a time.

 

For years following Jesus’ death and resurrection, people talked about what happened.  Eyewitness sources told stories about Jesus, people sent letters about what Jesus did and said, and said to them.  Paul’s letter to the Galatians predates the written gospels; but it doesn’t, probably, predate other written things about Jesus, which were supplemented by what other people read, and supported or denied by what various eyewitness sources said.  And in this mix is the idea that oral information is valuable and good; that we’d rather not read about something, but be told it by a source who learned it from an eyewitness source, who talked about it with his buddy.  Today we don’t trust anything unless its written down, and some of us not even then–but the ancient world valued oral tradition and oral history.  All together?

 

And for years people read Paul’s letters, and read various documents, and lists began to be drawn up as communities of faith wondered, what should we trust? What should we listen to?  And after going to the dentist for a teeth cleaning, because their dentists were professional teeth cleaners, they would go to their pastors, who were professionally invested in Jesus stuff, and ask, “What written sources should we believe? What is trustworthy in all this mess?  And their pastors, who cared a lot that people had the best information possible, and also believed they’d be judged by God if they misled people, would give them the best, Holy Spirit led advice they could.  And this situation happened for a hundred years.

 

But people started to introduce ideas that really, disrupt everything Christianity is built on, and weren’t really true, you know: ideas like Jesus wasn’t skin & bones, didn’t have a body like a person has a body.  That the resurrection didn’t happen: stuff like this.

 

 

But one thing in particular happened, around 144 ad: A guy named Marcion read the Old Testament, and new about the New Testament, and said; look, I read the old Testament, I don’t see a God of love.  I see a bully.  And so, when Jesus is talking about his Father, he must be talking about someone else.  So Marcion decided that Christianity should reject this Bully, and said that Hebrew Scriptures were no longer relevant for the life of a Christian. He got rid of them. And he got rid of much that would become the New Testament–many documents we have in our Bibles were already named and accepted as authorities on Jesus by this time–except some of Paul’s letters.  He took a sharpie to Luke.

 

But Marcion was left with a very tiny Bible, and he was a man of influence, and those who followed him said, “Okay.”

 

But other people of importance and influence, who had been trying to live their lives in line with the message that the early apostles had handed down,  were like, “No! Not Okay!” We can’t just get rid of stuff we don’t like, or that’s confusing, or that challenges our perspectives on things!”

 

But because of Marcion and others like him, church leaders were forced to start really talking about what Scripture is and what it isn’t in a way they never had before.  He forced the church’s hand, forced the church to start asking, “What makes a written work Scripture?  What makes it trustworthy?”

 

And what the majority of people came to agree on, through debate and discussion and ultimately consensus, over decades, is that for something to be Scripture it had to have a few qualities, it had to “measure up,” in a some certain ways.

 

It had to be sourced in the apostles, in the message that the apostles shared.  This was critical.  It had to be consistent with the basic apostolic message: Jesus was born, he lived, he died, he rose again.  And these things have major theological importance, fit into a big theological framework that the early church nurtured and discussed: if we cut out the resurrection, or cut out the incarnation, we aren’t talking about the same Jesus as the apostles were.  And a book had to be one that was more or less universally used by the church, one that Christians all around could say, yeah, God has used that book in dramatic, universal, Spirit-filled ways.

 

And people talk about these qualities in different ways.  One scholar, Gerd Theissen, discusses the way all these texts that measured up carried a “family resemblance” to one another (182, Fortress Press Intro to NT).

 

But over time, and spurned on by Marcion and others, it was the books we have in our Bibles today that were the ones that measured up, that seemed to be marked by the Holy Spirit in a special way, a unique way, a legitimizing way.

 

And for us to answer, is this Scripture trustworthy? Can we believe what’s in it?  We do have to remember that many early Christians died for the things we read about here; that many people spent all their equity, all their influence, on ensuring that we get the best account we’ve got of God’s work in history, and they didn’t do this to protect their own interests, but to ensure that those who would come after them would know what really happened when Jesus came into the world.

 

And we need to not forget that God had a hand in all this, that the Holy Spirit was a part of this process, and an important part; and the things that were read to us this morning about the the way Scripture works in the world: to guide us, to remind us, to speak into our hearts even when we’d rather it wouldn’t, with power and insight and wisdom–all these things are still going on all the time.

 

We’re the proof of it.

 

Us: 

Now; we’re not like Marcion, right?  We don’t cut up our Bibles and snip out every part we don’t want to read.

 

We just skip the parts we don’t feel like dealing with.

 

Library: 

And at least one major difficulty we have with the Bible–and I’m speaking in generalities, right? If you don’t have this problem, praise the Lord and pray for the heathens to your left–is that we often discover, over time, that we really like, say, Paul’s letters, and we spend most of our time there because we like them, or worse.. we go to the gospels, and we try to read them as though they are letters from Paul.

 

Or we do the more common thing, and we try to treat every part of our Bible as Wikipedia, as a handbook we can shake factual bits of information out of, like Scripture is a Dishwasher installation Guide.  We treat the Bible like a textbook, instead of treating it like what it is…which is a library. 

 

And you can’t read every book in a library the same way, and its not the healthiest thing to spend all your time in just one section of the library, either–especially if what you need is way over in another genre, another area.  The Bible is a little mini-library, and we need all of it if we’re going to keep being a part of God’s work in the world.

 

And we also need the help of one another.

 

An Aside: Hitting us over the head with a bat about Christian Community: 

Just like it took a holy-spirit filled community and a lot of time to discern what really is Scripture and what isn’t, it really takes a holy spirit filled community and time to understand Scripture well today; how to be transformed by it and just not informed by it.

 

Of course, some of us, if we’ve been to a library, find out that we’re too…I don’t know–proud, embarrassed, self-sufficient or distracted–to ask where something is, and how to find it.  But you might miss a good book, of miss a part of the good book–terrible pun–if you act that way.

 

So we forget that this Bible is a mini-library, that we need one another not to get lost in it, and you know: we forget other things, too: we forget things like context, and genre, and the individuality of the authors who’ve written for God, for us.

 

And if we’re going to be people who understand these difficult passages or the ones we’ve barely looked at, and be transformed by them, we need to also understand, at least, context, genre, and individuality.

 

So.  Let’s talk about Context.

 

Context:  

Let’s think of texts, a text: it’s a chunk of words, right? As far as this morning is concerned, let’s call a text, a chunk of words.

 

Text=Chunk of Words

 

Context, is the stuff that goes with the text, okay?  “Con,” means “with,” or “together.”  Context, means, “with the text.”

 

Context=Stuff with the text

 

Connecticut, means, “with necticut.” I’m Kidding!

 

So when we talk about context, we are talking about everything that might go along with the text.

 

And there are all sorts of things that go along with any text we could talk about, aren’t there:

 

Immediate Context–words that come before and after what we’re reading.  There’s narrative or book context–the place in the story or letter or poem or whatever that we find our little text, and we can learn from that; if we find an introductory passage in the middle of what should be a conclusion, we better notice it and whatever is going on there.  We could talk about Canonical context; where a passages fits between Genesis and Revelation. There’s socio-historical and cultural context–the things going on in the society or cultural or history that inform us as to what the text might have meant when it was originally written.

 

And all of these things inform how we should best understand the text that we happen to be looking at.  But most of us, when we open these little libraries of ours, don’t have this stuff at hand, we just don’t.  And Study Bibles are great, but even the NIV Study Bible doesn’t have all this stuff, does it?

 

(I love my NIV Study Bible, by the way.)

 

And this library isn’t just one sort of book over and over and over; we already talked about that, but these difficult or seldom seen passages come in all sorts of genres, don’t they?

 

Genre: 

And a genre is simply a way to categorize something, in our case a written thing.  It’s a way to talk about texts that share similarities.

 

And the Bible is full of them.  There’s the ones we know and love:

narrative or story; prophecy; letter; poetry; and there are others.  Lists, Wisdom Literature, Proverbs, Genealogies, Song, Apocalyptic, Creation story, Dream Recounting, Woe Oracle, Parodies, Curses.

 

This library is full of these genres and more!

 

But each of these genres have special qualities about them that we need to know if we’re going to best understand and apply what we read.  There are rules of interpretation that accompany every type of genre the Bible contains. And we often foolishly and dangerously ignore genre, and try to interpret every bit of Bible using the same rules.

 

Or we read our bibles and see things in it that look similar to genres we’re familiar with in America, and we make mistakes.  For example, we’ll try to read the gospels as if they are biographies, and get really, really upset that we don’t know what Jesus’ favorite breakfast was, or where he went to Middle School–while the gospels are most like a Greek genre of writing called a “bios,” a “life,” which were works written about heroic people, and highlighted the death of the hero, from which we could learn about the hero’s life.

 

Or we’ll do sentimental things, like call this whole library “God’s love letter to us”–which is fine, except that I don’t think an ancient Canaanite would have read it that way.  We simplify and generalize too quickly, without gathering all the information about genre, and about context, that we should.

 

And we don’t take into consideration the fact that God used people to write these inspired, Spirit-filled texts for us.

 

Individuality: 

How can I talk about this without getting recalled?

 

There are some musicians–and its not fair to call them snobs–who will only record their music on vinyl records, right?  Because they feel like its more honest; it sounds better; and if a blip or a hiss happens now and again, that’s part of the experience, you know: the joy of vinyl recordings.

 

God likes vinyl. He likes the blips and hisses. He chose to record the story of creation, its fall and redemption and future on it.

 

The writers of Scripture were all sorts of different people, in all sorts of different places, who wrote in all sorts of different languages.  People with different personalities, different emphases they bring out, different ideas about what is most important to mention.  And these are just the blips and hisses that give Scripture the character God wants it to have.  He thinks its important for us to hear these differences, and value them.

 

We need to be people–totally snobs, it’s cool–who value the fact that God recorded history on 220 gram vinyl.  God wants us to have all the weird idiosyncratic differences that exist between one author and another in this little library; because they’re important in a world where its all sorts of different people who are trying to become like Jesus.

 

An easy example; this will knock your sarx off: What does Paul mean when he talks about “flesh?”  (Which is “sarx,” in Greek, thus my lame joke).  He often means “the sinful nature,” right?  Or that inclination inside us to do what is not pleasing to God, not good for creation, stuff very unlike Jesus.

 

But if we take Paul’s usual-but-not-always meaning for sarx, for “flesh,” and decide to think of that every time we read the word in our Bibles, Old & New Testaments–we’ll end up a mess. It’ll be a translation mess.  Paul hisses and blips in a unique way, which we have to value, which God values and has offered us, but we can’t generalize Paul’s usage of words to every single other author.

 

And we could, this morning, talk about all sorts of other we could talk about all sorts of other things we should be aware of when we open this library, this Bible, and decide to enter into it…

 

Worth it? 

But if we buy the idea–and it’s for sale, it is! It costs one Messiah. If we buy the idea that this thing we call scripture is not simply legitimate, but also trustworthy, and in fact, can begin to order our lives around the things it teaches us.  We can begin to become a part of God’s redemptive work in history.  And if we buy this, why is it that we still pull a little Marcion now and then, and just skip the parts of Scripture we don’t like, or decide not to read it all.

 

I think about this a lot; why don’t I read the Word of God-Scripture, so that I can know the Word of God-Jesus, better?

 

What if someone came by your house, your place, and said, “Turn it in.”  Turn in your Bibles.  Turn ‘em in, c’mon.  I know it’s the record of God’s work in history for you, I know you aren’t going to find this stuff anywhere else.  But too bad, so sad: we’re taking it.”

 

“Turn it in.”

 

How would we respond?

 

And here’s why I ask: The world is all the time, asking you to turn your Bible in, give up on Scripture, give up trying to work through the difficult parts, spend time only in the genres you like if you spend time in it at all.  Ignore the ones that make no sense to you.  You are being asked, right now, to turn in Scripture, drop it off: by the world, by the Evil one, by friends, sometimes, on accident.

 

What I hope we can do these Sunday mornings, in these small group times we have together, is to decide not turn in our Bibles, but to turn to them.

 

To look again at those passages and places we’ve ignored or skipped by, believing that all of God’s Word is God-breathed, inspired by God, and useful for all sorts of amazing things, but mostly for shaping us into people who look like the true Word of God, Jesus.

 

I hope that we can become people who take into account, and value, the contexts, the genres, the unique authors that we find inside this gift God has given us.  And I think, if we take seriously the challenge to be an interpreting community, a Spirit-filled group of people who discern together what it means to understand Scripture and bring it into our lives, then we’ll find that less and less of the stuff in our Bibles is seldom seen by us, and we know longer are scared of the difficult parts.

 

I pray so, anyway.