Sermon: Scriptures – the Great Divide
Text: II Timothy
October 17, 2004
Kendall Brown Kendall's Notebook Page 34
Last Monday, I took to the Monday morning class the same Scripture for study that is our focus text this morning, Paul’s second letter to his disciple, Timothy. I offered a 20 minute or so presentation, through which the class dutifully sat and listened. I thought things were going just fine. I used power point graphics which gave visual parallel to the thoughts being discussed. How up-to-date we are in classroom technology.
Then, I stopped, as is the custom after tossing out some food for thought and made room for conversation. At that point I couldn’t believe what happened. The classroom erupted into an explosion of disagreement that made Mt St. Helens look quite tame.
That experience gave me many second thoughts about venturing forth this morning with the same text in the pulpit, especially considering that this morning is the next time that I was considering ending the meditation with an opportunity for discussion. (It will be a matter of time.) The lesson this morning also brings back a flood of memories formed in the years of my very first parish after seminary.
I was called to be a partner in a co-pastorate in Northern Vermont. My co-pastor and I tended a flock scattered across what is called a four-point charge - four smaller churches in four villages nestled in Green Mountain valleys. We were about the same age, my co-pastor and I. Bob was one year older and was just as new to the parish as was I.
Bob graduated from Gordon College and Gordon Conwell Seminary. Those schools comprise the bastion of Christian conservative thought in the Northeast. I would not say that I attended schools that made up a bastion of liberal thought. My seminary, Bangor Theological, has always had its nose to the grind of down to earth training in the practicalities of parish ministry. The elasticity of liberal scholarship did provide the foundation for that practical training, but the school was more into ministry as a profession than professing an ideology. Nevertheless, Bob and I were seen as two pastors who were there to balance each other out. In fact, the chairperson of the search committee even told me that I was being called to bring a liberal balance to Bob’s conservatism in the co-pastorate. That of course did not offer much help to either of us when it came to the basic day-to-day business of simply working together in shared ministry.
Today’s text brings all that back for me. It is natural that those memories surface in the presence of II Timothy. The discomfort around the poles of conservative/liberal that Bob and I experience in our first pastorate has become since then the heated source of friction in the wider church today.
Throughout history, Christians have always done a good job at chewing each other up over the central symbols of our faith. In the first few centuries of church history, feuds, friction and fission in the church was sparked by the central question of who is Jesus the Christ to the church. The question was tossed about in debates over the Incarnation and was finally worked out in the ancient creeds that were agreed to by consensus and historic councils.
The sacrament of communion was a central point of argument and debate, even warfare, during the Reformation, with the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation being the lighting rod for irreconcilable differences between the Protestants and Catholics. Sometime when reading Church History, it is hard to get the impression that Christians are really nice people. In fact it is that lack of niceness in the church that Paul is addressing in his letter to Timothy offering Timothy counsel as to what to do about it.
The Protestants and Catholics finally went their separate ways, thus ending the fight over transubstantiation. Transubstantiation is the teaching that when the priest blesses the bread in the prayer of consecration, the bread really becomes the body of Christ. It is not just a symbol. It is not just a spiritual thing. But in some way beyond our comprehension the bread is really physically the body of Christ. This is why in the Catholic Church and other orthodox churches the hosts is given such special attention and so carefully taken care of. In a service of deconsecrating at St. Mary’s, the host was taken from the old chapel and moved to the new chapel, which by the presence of the host becomes a place consecrated for the celebration of the Eucharist.
But Protestants weren’t on their own for long before another central symbol of Christianity was a huge source of conflict. Now the fight was over Baptism. What a field for a fight Baptism provides! There is the debate over the proper form immersion or sprinkling. There is the debate over the age of the one baptized – children or adult. Then there is no end to the points to argue in a discussion about what is Baptism? Did Jesus himself ever baptize anyone? Is the Holy Spirit present in the baptismal act – sort of our own protestant transubstantiation debate – just changing the format a bit – instead of Christ in the bread – it is spirit in the water. Can one know salvation without baptism? Is baptism about entrance into a community or about a believer’s relationship with God? And so forth. We Christians really enjoy cooking stew.
Today, the struggle among God’s children is over the Scriptures with sides lining up under pennants sometimes labeled conservative and liberal. That struggle is the underlying struggle of many other controversies today including women’s rights and place in the church, whether or not the church should get involved in politics, stem cell research, abortion, teaching creation in schools, and the ordination of a gay Episcopalian priest. Boil down all of these arguments and debates to the core, and what you have is a difference over how to read Scriptures.
My co-pastor and I in our different points of view were on the cutting age of what was to become the wave we are all riding today in the church.
In today’s lesson there is one verse that Bob, my –co-pastor, and I could never see eye to eye on. “All Scripture is inspired by God.” For Bob, these words meant that all scripture – both the Old and the New Testaments were inspired by God. I insisted that the Apostle Paul was referring to what he knew and was well versed in – the law and the prophets, the Torah – or what we know today as the Old Testament. Furthermore, Paul’s epistles were written before the Gospels and Paul was dead before some of the Gospel development took place, so why would he be referring to that which did not exist? But my co-pastor insisted on the literal translation of each word and if the Bible says, “All Scripture then it means all scripture, period.”
How do you get around that? They are two completely different viewpoints and I don’t think that you do get around it. Bob and I did learn some things with each other and from each other.
One of the things we learned was the real source of our discomfort and arguments. We were both young and inexperienced and quite insecure. That insecurity as much as anything made us uncomfortable with each other and our obviously different viewpoints simple served as a lightening rod for those other discomforts. Getting along with each other didn’t happen by taking magnifying glasses and looking over each other and each other’s arguments trying to find the flaws and weaknesses to tear apart. Getting along with each other, finding some oneness and there was plenty of that to find, meant picking up mirrors and looking at ourselves. Our outer differences over scriptures were but an outward sign of an inner tension inside of each of us caused by our individual insecurities.
Another lesson I learned in that first parish is that having a label doesn’t mean that you have a corner on the market in the area of truth. Conservatives don’t know it all and neither do liberals or anyone else no matter what flag they are flying. As the Gospel of John says, “I am the way, the truth and the light,” says Jesus. If anyone has a corner on truth’s market, it is Jesus. Turn to him his teachings, way and story and there you will find truth.
When we read the Scriptures, there is an interpretive principle for us to follow. The way to read the Scriptures is to let Jesus be our guide. If one of the Psalms sings about dashing enemies children’s head against the rocks with a certain amount of glee read the story through Jesus eyes and his heart. If Jesus grieved over enemies then grieve with him over dashed children.
What I am preaching here is a very Biblical teaching. It is neither liberal, nor conservative. It is just biblical. The New Testament writers themselves read their ancient Scriptures through Christ. As Christ came alive to them, the Scriptures came alive to them. Matthew is a good example of this, although all the New Testament writers used Christ as their interpretive principle. Matthew was constantly using the phrase, “you have learned by the prophets and teachers, but I say unto you.” Matthew begins his Gospel with Jesus’ genealogy - that long and boring list of Jesus’ ancestors. Adam and Eve begat….and so forth all the way to Jesus. What Matthew is doing is retelling there the OT story but with a new spin, given to that story by the birth, life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus.
The way for the Scriptures to come alive for us today is through Christ being alive in us and in his spirit seeking what God would have us do. Amen.