Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's October 17, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service.

---

Everybody probably thinks they have the hardest job around. Of course, you’re all wrong, because I alone can lay claim to that distinction! At least, if you read II Timothy with both eyes open, can there be any other conclusion?

Here, in what is commonly called one of the pastoral epistles, a letter especially offering guidance for pastors, we have a kind of laundry list of duties for which this young pastor named Timothy is responsible. Think about these expectations: “Proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, encourage, and (what I am sure must be your favorite) rebuke (meaning keep all of you straight, -- now there’s a hard job!), all to be done with the utmost patience in teaching. Be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.”

What’s more, this is just one snippet of obligations for the pastor (there are other lists of duties in these letters) -- as if these aren’t already enough!

The door you heard slamming shut was most ministers running the other way upon reading passages like this one.

But there it is. Timothy is getting an ear full of encouragement and practical advice from a mentor figure, traditionally assumed to be Paul, but actually, as scholars now know, an anonymous someone in the school of Paul who had taken up the mentorship mantle of the Apostle.

Timothy has found himself, as we all do, knee-deep in the messiness of ministry. He no doubt was perplexed about how to pastor the church with all of its complexities, disillusionments, and challenges – and all those adversaries and adversities that came with the turf.

We, like Timothy, also live in an age when polarized adversaries posture, each, in turn, urging “politically correct values.” Then, as now, Christianity was, at least until the 4^th century conversion of the Emperor Constantine, a minority movement that had to compete for growth in the hothouse of the religious marketplace. Then, as now, there is no established religion, no consensus on many of the pressing social issues of the day, when conversation about religious differences is difficult, at best.

Into that context, Timothy was to proceed with the work of ministry, but to do so, especially by staying grounded in the word and world of scripture, which, for him, would have been the Jewish scriptures, our Old Testament. Furthermore, he was instructed to stand firm in the example of those who had gone before him.

I’d like, today, to talk about the admonition given to young Timothy concerning the role of scripture. “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness . . . .” Few verses from Holy Writ have caused as much debate and dissent, discussion and diatribes, as that phrase, “All scripture is inspired by God . . .”

Just what does that mean? I’d like to draw upon two books I have read. One, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart by Peter Gomes and the other by Marcus Borg, entitled, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith: How We can Be Passionate Believers Today. Both of these authors seek to make Christian piety and our interpretation of the Bible and faith more relevant at a time when the Christian right and conservative versions of orthodoxy have come to dominate public discourse about the Bible and its place in the life of faith.

What does it mean when we agree with the writer of Timothy, that “All scripture is inspired by God . . . .”

The Bible seems to be everywhere. In fact, if you are one of the few who doesn’t already have one, the next time you stay in a motel, feel free to steal the Bible in the drawer. It’s the one time the Gideons won’t get mad at you for violating the 8^th Commandment!

The Bible, because we and many others do believe it is divinely inspired like no other book, continues atop best seller lists year after year, but one wonders if it has more symbolic value than it is valued as a book actually read, studied, pondered, prayed over or treated as a tool for spiritual discernment.

A recent poll discovered that one out of every ten persons believes that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife, 16% thought that the New Testament contained a book by the Apostle Thomas, and 38 % held that both the Old and New Testaments were written a few years after the death of Jesus (Gomes, 5).

The Bible has been, not only at the center of Judaism and the Church for thousands of years, but once Christians put the Hebrew and Christian scriptures together into one book, the Bible gradually became both the essential and normative guide for faith no less than the foundational work of literature in western civilization. You can’t really read any of the classic authors of western culture – like Milton and Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Flannery O’Conner without being able to appreciate their allusions and references to scripture.

Yet, the Bible has become a stumbling block for many. Marcus Borg argues that in the last half century, more Christians have left the Church because the old way of reading the Bible just didn’t make sense. They were brought up to see the Bible as a document that must be read as infallible, historically factual, and with a sense of moral and doctrinal absolutism. And so, they have been turned off by those who insist that the creation had to happen in 6 days, that a worldwide flood destroyed all of life save for those on the ark, that God repeatedly ordered the slaughter of foreign people, including women and children, that God legitimated slavery, that God ordained the subjugation of women, that unbelieving Jews are children of the devil, and that the second coming of Jesus will involve the destruction of most of humanity, save for a tiny remnant.

If we say that the Bible is inspired, do we mean that the actual words of holy writ have been breathed into human mouths and hands by God? Did God take the finger of Moses and actually trace out the divine words into the tablets of the Ten Commandments? Were there actually people with papyri in hand taking down notes as Jesus told parables or gave instructions about discipleship? I think not. Some would want to read the Bible as inerrant, that is, without error, in a view that is called plenary inspiration, that is, fully inspired in its original autographs, and therefore they feel justified in viewing it in literal terms and as always definitive on certain matters of science, history, and morality. But, I think not.

On the other hand, some would say that the Bible is like any other classic or great work of western literature – that it is a decidedly human document whose authors were inspired to write important truths about the human condition. Is, then, the Bible to be read as no more authoritative than Moby Dick, America’s constitution, or the poetry of Robert Frost? I think not.

Needless to say, we find ourselves wandering around somewhere between these two positions. “All scripture is inspired by God . . . .” What does that mean? How can we affirm the sacred status of scripture yet agree to its very human origins and editing and preservation processes? How can we come to regard the Bible as a way to see God and to see what our life together with God should be like?

Perhaps we can best come to an agreeable understanding of the word “inspiration” as we think about another word “interpretation.” Some would want to say that the Bible doesn’t need to be interpreted, that its “plain sense” is available to anyone with “common sense.” That because, all of the Bible is equally inspired, one can let it drop open to any page and the import of the divine guidance will be the same as on any other page, much like opening a Chinese fortune cookie.

Thus, you may of heard of the person who opened the Bible and put his finger at random on the verse “and Judas went out and hanged himself” in Matthew 27:5. Trying again, he happened upon Luke 10:37: “Go, and do likewise.” That is one way to read holy writ.
But I would beg to differ that it is the best way. The Bible is not one book but a library of books with different literary styles, different purposes, different authors, different audiences, different types of instruction, even differing angles of vision on who God is and what God is about in the world.

I see it as the “record of holy encounters with a holy God . . . encounters that have been reckoned to be decisive and compelling, and that have been preserved from generation to generation because they remind each generation of the presence of God and the search for God when God seems absent.” (Gomes 34)

If the Bible is truly regarded as inspired and inspirational, then we have to go another step, take a stand, and interpret what it means.

This interpretation process means that we must avoid three things:

One, we must beware of turning scripture into an idol. Remember the story of the golden calf. Moses had gone up to Mt. Sinai to receive the tablets of the law from God. While he was away, his brother, Aaron, was left to contend with a people restless for some tangible sign of God’s favor, and for a deity who could compete with the Egyptian fertility gods. We are not to worship the Bible as some golden calf, but always, to worship the God who transcends even the Bible itself. The Bible should never be interpreted as a surrogate for God, as if God were limited only to what got recorded in scripture. More than that, the word of scripture must always be read with one eye towards the other Word for Christians, the Word made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.

It is not easy, is it, both to take the Bible seriously as authoritative for the life of faith but not to allow it to become the object of worship. The interpretive role of the Holy Spirit is always one that beckons us beyond the sacred page to a deepened understanding of what God in scripture would lead us to believe and to do. Such reliance on the Spirit, especially in the communal setting of the corporate interpretation of the Bible, can allow us to see beyond our own intellectual and cultural limitations to what God’s unfolding truth for us and all of creation is really all about.

Second, we must avoid the temptation to interpret the Bible literally. If you and I are both literalists, what happens if my literal interpretation doesn’t agree with yours? Who’s going to adjudicate the difference?

It’s not unlike the story of Walter and his wife Ann who attended a Marriage Encounter weekend. They listened to the instructor declare, “it is essential that husbands and wives know the things that are important to each other.” The instructor then addressed the men, “Can you name and describe your wife’s favorite flower?” Walter leaned over, touched Ann’s arm gently and whispered, “Pillsbury All-Purpose, isn’t it dear?” And thus began Walter’s life of celibacy.

When church folk of different stripes hear the same words of Holy Writ, but with very different interpretations, it is often our own marriage with scripture that suffers the most. We withdraw or divorce in anger or frustration and don’t even know how to have a conversation about the differences.

By far the easiest way to read the Bible is to go and find verses that support a particular position – something we all do to a certain extent. What inevitably happens, however, is that those who practice this type of interpretation go to scripture with a preconceived notion about what they want to find. Thus, southern white slaveowners and ministers went to Paul’s letter to Philemon to defend slavery and some churches still go to I Corinthians 6 to deny women the right to speak in Church – as if anything could keep women silent in churches! You know, as well as I, that prooftexting can be used to justify and defend a stance on any number of hot button social issues. But that manner of interpretation isn’t necessarily helpful, because it so often fails to put the verse in its immediate context, or even more a problem, into the context of the whole of scripture.

We need the practice of corporate discernment of the spirit of the text, thereby avoiding the trap of literalism and its destructive potential.

Some of you are aware of the controversial in-school assembly at Roane County High School several weeks ago that included the handing out of a booklet filled with quotations from the Bible, the handing out which was a clear constitutional violation of the prohibition regarding the state sponsorship of religion. That violation aside, I have great quarrels with the booklet and its prooftexting presentation of scripture citations, including the idea that the Bible should only be read in the King James, that if we had the 10 Commandments in the classroom the only problem would be chewing gum in class and talking out of turn – just as it was in 1940s, that these 10 Commandments, and I quote from the booklet, “are God’s standard that He will judge you by on Judgement Day. When you stand before God on Judgement Day will you be innocent or guilty. Guilty, of course! (BradleeDean, 51). It is scary to see the Bible used so thoughtlessly and in such a blatantly non-Christian fashion. I and others want to offer a rebuttal to such a narrow view of the Bible.

And third, perhaps the greatest temptation to the misuse of scripture, is a culturalism that tries to read the Bible just based on our own contemporary culture and times and our predominant values. We read scripture as if its sole purpose is to provide moral sanction for our own cultural values. The gospel of health and wealth, for instance, gets used to defend God’s blessings of America and American dominance in the world. P An early 20^th century African proverb put it this way at a time when colonial powers were subjugating tribal groups in Africa: “When missionaries came, they had the Bible and we had the land. Now, we have the Bible and they have the land.” In other words, the Bible can get used to justify cultural preferences and the desire for ownership and power, land and goods.

To a certain extent, we cannot help but read the Bible in light of our own cultural values. The trick, of course, is finding a way to allow the Bible to be a critic of those values, and not just a means to invoke divine blessings upon those values.

It is no easy thing to balance the Bible, which as the letter to the Hebrews says, is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and the culture that is forever changing and evolving.

That is why, when I read the Bible, when I affirm that it is inspired by God, I believe that I must be ambidextrous: On the one hand, I believe that it is given from God, preserved by the Spirit, authoritative for the life of faith; but on the other hand, it is a human product, full of poetry and parables and prayers, full of advice, aphorisms, and apocalyptic prognostications, full of midrash, metaphor and miracle, full of narratives that describe truths but are not necessarily accurate history, full of texts and textual difficulties that try interpretive patience and demand careful scrutiny in the light of a holistic reading of holy writ.

Finally, I believe that how people read and interpret scripture is the single most important factor in how they (we)m practice their faith. And I agree with the preacher Barbara Brown Taylor that our desire should be to “bless the questions” instead of shutting down conversation by declaring, willy nilly “because God says so in the Bible.” That means that instead of presuming to master God by mastering scripture and its interpretation, our stance should always be that of a student, open and willing to learn, to see beyond convention and tradition to the reality of newly evolving truths and teachings.

One author puts it this way: “if you look at a window, you see fly specks, dust, the crack where Junior’s Frisbee hit it. If you look through a window, you see the world beyond. Something like this is the difference between those who see the Bible as a Holy Bore and those who see it as the Word of God which speaks out of the depths of an almost unimaginable past into the depths of ourselves.” (Beuchner, Wishful Thinking, 12)

If we can see beyond the window of scripture to the God who made the window, then we can accept and act upon the instruction given Timothy, “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”

So may it be. Amen.