Luke 4:16-21… He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
"The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."
With these words, Jesus began his public ministry. He chose the 750 year old words of the prophet Isaiah to make this announcement. He was, because he was speaking them in this place, resurrecting those words, bringing them back from the dead: “Get ready,” he was saying, “these words are about to live again.”
Over the next four messages, I am going to be exploring some topics- controversial topics- that I, like many preachers, tend to shy away from. I do so not because I am particularly courageous, or because I want further fractionalize Christianity more than it already is. I do so because of what Jesus said he was about that day in the synagogue in Nazareth. He was about words of life, wonderful words of life. John would later describe Jesus as “the Word made flesh, who dwelled among us.”
The words of Isaiah on that day Jesus spoke them were 750 years old. They had become ritual words, liturgical words, words to be memorized then coughed up by the priest occasionally during a Sabbath reading. The words of Jesus, as recorded by the gospel writers, are now almost 2000 years old. And I am afraid sometimes that they have become, because of their familiarity, because of their age, and because they have become something other than what Jesus intended them to be, less and less relevant, more and more dead to increasing numbers of people, including Christians.
In the coming three weeks, I’ll be talking about evolution, global warming, and Islam- all topics that Jesus knew nothing of, so, of course, said nothing specific about. But we do need to talk about them, because the Word made flesh walked among us for a reason, and that reason was to reconnect us to the God of all Creation. And once that re-connection has been made, we, too must translate these 2000 year old words into the relevant, living, and revolutionary words that Jesus intended them to be, and as he spoke them.
When my opinions today and in the next three weeks are personal, I’ll tell you, and I will also emphasize that you don’t have to agree with me. My name is David Weber, not Jim Jones. And if you don’t know who Jim Jones was, Google him up when you get home and discover the modern hell that can be created, when Jesus language is used to feed human egos. When Christians disagree, they should, they must, talk to each other. They should not, must not, build forts around their egos and opinions and start lobbing bombs at each other or anyone else who disagrees with them. We have a long history and highly developed habit of doing that in the Church of Jesus Christ, and untold millions have died because of it.
So I begin today with these words (the Bible) because they are the source of more historical and modern controversy than any of the other topics I will be talking about. These words have not only transformed lives, but they have been used to destroy lives, from the Crusades across southern Europe all the way to the Middle East; from the streets of Belfast, the slave plantations of Mississippi, and the diamond mines of Sierra Leone, to Hitler’s Europe and the jungles of Guyana.
When the Bible has been misused as a weapon, every time it has been used to support the arguments and worldviews of one people over another, a particular and specific phenomenon has happened. There is something common in all of the misuses of the Bible over the centuries, and it is this:
It has been turned into a set of doctrines and dogmas by those who want power or are in power. The words of the Bible were hammered into swords and molded into bullets to defend the fort of fashionable interpretation against other interpretations, other imaginations, and anything new which has been revealed about God’s universe.
An example, and I’ll talk a little more about this next week. The book of Genesis is one of my five favorite books of the Bible. (The others are Psalms, Luke, John, and Revelation.) Genesis is one of my favorite books not because it reveals to me anything concrete about science or history, but because it one of the oldest records of how our ancestors in this faith first began to think about and understand God. These are the campfire stories of countless generations, passed on from fathers and mothers to sons and daughters, before they were finally begun to be written down, once there was a written language in operation, around the year 2000 B.C. These were the stories through which people could understand God, the Creation in which they lived, and each other.
They spoke of God as Ish (the fire always burning) and of humans as ishtar (the sparks which rose from the flames, glowed brightly, and then died, returning to the fire.) They were the stories of God’s relationship to this nomadic tribe of Hebrews, their choseness through Abraham, their dispersion and increase through Jacob, and their salvation through Joseph. It was a love story between God and humans, humans and God.
The “facts” of Genesis are irrelevant for me, in comparison to the Truths of God revealed in Genesis. Using the telescopes of their time- their eyes- they looked at the bright lights in the sky- the sun, the moon, and the stars- and knew that God had created all of it for good. Using the radar of the day- their ears- they could hear God’s continuing presence, God’s continuing creativity among them in the whirlwinds, the thunder, and the oceans waves.
That we’ve learned more about each of those phenomena in the intervening years does not take away one jot or tittle from those Truths about God, it only adds to them!
In Jesus, those words from Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, Isaiah, Habakkuk, Micah and all the rest of the Hebrew Bible’s books, all of those words, spoken around campfires, written down on leather and copper scrolls, and kept in safe-keeping by the priests, all of those ancient understandings of who God was, became flesh. Again, those ancient manuscripts, which been taken from the liveliness of campfire gatherings and been locked up in the synagogues to become dead words of legalism and liturgy, were about to become alive again. No longer would they be the proprietary possessions of the priestly class, they were about to become good news to the poor.
No longer would they be the mere doctrinal and dogmatic words they had become, they would proclaim freedom for the prisoners.
No longer would humans be held in the dark prisons of unquestioning, puppet-like obedience; there was about to be a recovery of sight for the blind.
Jesus had come to release the oppressed, and that is what is he continues to want to do today. Let me share one example.
The story of the Good Samaritan- you know that story- it begins with a discussion between Jesus and a lawyer.
“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” That’s the lawyer’s question. It’s a “do” question, not a “be” question, nor even a “believe” question. Like Jesus, he has been raised on Torah, which is about how to live, not what to believe. His question concerns practice and not belief. He wants Jesus to tell him in plain language what kind of life he should be living now in order to live in God’s presence forevermore. It’s a good question, even if it is a test. You’d like to know the answer, wouldn’t you?
Well, you’ve come to the wrong rabbi, because the only answer that interests Jesus is the lawyer’s own. “What is written in the law?” Jesus asks him. “What do you read there?”
Woody Allen: Why does a rabbi always answer a question with a question?
Rabbi: Why shouldn’t a rabbi always answer a question with a question?
Jesus and the lawyer both know what is written in the law. Either one of them could look it up, but the Word Made Flesh doesn’t want chapter and verse. He wants to hear the living word come out of the lawyer’s own mouth.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind,” the lawyer says, “and your neighbor as yourself.”
In Luke’s gospel, it’s the lawyer who gets to give the summary of the law, not Jesus. Jesus just stands there quietly, waiting to hear what the lawyer has to say. It’s almost as if Luke is standing behind each of them with a sign on a stick. The sign over the lawyer’s head says, “The Word.” The sign over Jesus’ head says, “Made Flesh.”
Here’s how it sounds.
Here’s how it acts.
Meanwhile, the lawyer’s answer is almost chapter and verse from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, but inventive—two pieces of Torah scotch-taped together. And Jesus likes it very much: “You have given the right answer,” Jesus says to him; “do this, and you will live.”
It’s not unkind, but it’s a sucker punch all the same—a way of letting the lawyer know that getting the words right is not the same thing as giving them flesh. Answers weigh about as much as the breath it takes to expel them. Like helium balloons, they come out of the mouth and float away, leaving no footprints anywhere on the ground.
A right answer, a doctrine, has never picked up a frightened child, or put an ice chip in the mouth of a dying friend. A right answer, dogmatic as it may be, has never written a check to the Red Cross, or cleaned the vomit of a sick person from the back seat of the car. A right answer, no matter how many people have memorized it, has never even showed up at the polls to vote on election day, or taken to the streets in peaceful protest. It kind of makes you wonder why religious people spend so much time fussing and fighting with each other on right answers, when the truth is that a right answer alone never changed a thing.
“You have given the right answer,” Jesus says to the lawyer; “do this, and you will live.”
You won’t find Jesus preaching doctrine and dogma anywhere. We will find him, over and over and over again, saying “follow me,” “go and do likewise,” “leave everything else behind, get going”, and “follow me” again. And again. When the flesh of Jesus is reduced to a group of words, and when those words become a stopping place instead of a call for action, then they have become perverted. They become more bad news for the poor, they become bigger jail cells for more prisoners, a deeper darkness for the blind, and longer, larger chains for the oppressed.
This (the Bible) is a book. It is not an idol, it is not an object of worship. It is the very best window we have into the realms of God, but every bit of it is written in the always expanding language of humans. There is, therefore, more to say about God. There will always be more to know about God.
Going back to the story of the Good Samaritan for a moment. If anyone were to follow the Bible literally, word for word, as so many are very proud to say they do, then we would still be pouring oil and wine on our wounds instead of antiseptics and antibiotics. We would take injured people to innkeepers instead of doctors. And we would carry them there on the backs of donkeys instead of in an ambulance.
Do I mean to say that the word of God is still being written? Am I saying that there is more to know about God than we can learn from the Bible? Yes, and yes! Jesus said, recorded in John 14, “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these…”
In other words, we must not think for a moment that all that God has to say has been said. We must never relax our brains, our intellect, our imaginations; we must never be lulled into spiritual sleep by the easy lullabies of literalism. There are greater things to do than even Jesus did- he said that, not me. We must never be tempted to stop with the words about him, the word made ink; we must be willing to follow him, the word made flesh.
This (the Bible) is where we begin, not where we stop.
It is where we jump from, not what we land on.
It is a gate, not a corral.
It is the key, not the lock.
A window, not a wall.
A love letter, not an indictment.
A map, not a destination.
The Bible gets us near to God, maybe closer than we have ever have been before. But Jesus says “Follow me,” then reaches his hand back for ours. It’s the warm hand of flesh felt by lepers, a paralyzed man, a bent-over woman, children, babies, and the disciple Thomas. It’s the hand of his flesh in yours, the warmth of his skin, your skin, his pulse, your pulse. His hand in our hand, his gospel, now our gospel in the world of 2007.
Keep reading it; but- above all- keep writing it: his gospel, your gospel- and keep doing it!
