Questions. That’s what we’re about for the month of August: Questions. Questions about our faith, questions that you long to ask but might be embarrassed because you figure you ought to know already. Questions about stuff that just never made sense to you. Questions that came from someone who doesn’t share our faith and wanted to quiz you, and you weren’t sure how to respond. Questions that came during a difficult moment and the easy cliches no longer satisfy, but you were afraid to ask for fear that cliches are all we have. Questions.
Specifically, there are questions that the community submitted a few months ago and that I’ve been living with for a while. Some were very challenging questions that touch on the core of our faith and theology, our practice and our understanding of who God is and who we are to God. Some were wrenching questions of tragedy and confusion. Some questions that made me smile because of the faith inherent in it and the desire to go deeper, live more fully. And, frankly, some were questions about my own courage as a leader and pastor of a flock full of questions.
I took these questions and put them in general categories. This week we will look at Bible questions. Subsequent weeks will look at Church questions, Theology questions and what I called Christian Living questions. We’ll take two weeks on those, because they were so many and various it was hard to do justice to the variety in one week’s worth of worship. There is a certain arbitrariness to the categories, I’ll confess that. Some questions could have been in more than one category, some weren’t clearly in any. (Hence the “Christian Living” category which sounds so much more profound than Miscellaneous!) But I wanted to find a place for them all. I don’t promise detailed answers to every single question, but what I hope to do is to open a dialogue that might lead to further conversation, more answers and, yes, more questions. I’m still a little nervous about how this will work on the fly in the worship service, but I’m all in. Let’s do this thing!
But we start with the Bible. A very good place to start, I thought. There were some very deep and profound questions that I don’t know I’d be able to answer in a week’s worth of lectures on the Bible. And there were some simpler sounding questions that just might be hiding something deeper underneath. For example: “Was Jesus a rabbi?” In the garden on Easter morning when Mary is startled by the recognition that the One she thought was dead and gone suddenly standing there talking to her and loving her, her exclamation is “Rabbi!” Yes, Jesus was a rabbi in the sense of a teacher, of having followers, disciples who were committed to learning from him. But his authority wasn’t recognized by the hierarchy of the time, he didn’t meet with the Board of Ordained Ministry and get voted on and handed credentials by the overseeing body. Things were different then. Sometimes we forget that.
No, we don’t. Really. The Bible is picturing a world so radically different from ours that it is sometimes hard to read, certainly hard to apply in our day to day life. We call it a guidebook, with rules for living, and it is, in a way, but not like we usually mean. There is an interpretive process that has to take place in order for us to understand and apply the wisdom of the Bible. Sometimes that process is easy and straight-forward. Sometimes the Bible is a “duh” book, so obvious that we wonder how anyone could miss it. But the other times it feels like a different world, certainly a different way of using language and image and metaphor and story. We hardly know how to approach some of the things that Jesus says let alone try to apply them faithfully to our complicated lives.
That’s why we wrestle with the Bible. It keeps throwing curves when we expect slow pitch, a fastball when we aren’t even in our stance. Even those who claim to follow every word choose which words are more important, which words are worth our time and energy, and which we just let slide by. Even people in the Bible did that!
The question is really what is it for, this Bible thing? What are we supposed to do with it? What purpose does it serve. Well, Jesus had an idea about that.
John 5:39-47 "You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. 40 Yet you refuse to come to me to have life. 41 I do not accept glory from human beings. 42 But I know that you do not have the love of God in you. 43 I have come in my Father's name, and you do not accept me; if another comes in his own name, you will accept him. 44 How can you believe when you accept glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the one who alone is God? 45 Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; your accuser is Moses, on whom you have set your hope. 46 If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. 47 But if you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?"
The Bible, Jesus says, has one purpose, and that is to bring us to Him. The Bible points to Christ, and our job is to go through, go beyond the printed page to a deep and sustaining, living relationship with Christ. The problem is we can hold a Bible in our hands but we can’t hold Christ in the same way. We can see the pages and the words, we can flip through and read and reread, but standing shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand with the Savior is a much harder, less tangible thing. So, we expend a lot of energy on the book and not as much on following Him. Understandably so.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Bible. I love the study and the examination. I love reading and rereading. I love the stories and the songs, I love the characters, as flawed as they all are, but I love them. They feel like family. Every time I spend time with the Bible, I feel like it is a reunion with the colorful part of the family. It is, powerfully, like going home. I also think there is great wisdom there, guides for living that if we only paid a little more attention we could avoid some of the pratfalls that our family members had. If we took seriously the descriptions of a godly life, we might be a little closer to the One we want to be like, the One we want to follow. The One who said “love one another as I have loved you.” He told us to copy him, to emulate him. How can we do that if we don’t spend time with the Bible?
But we are not worshipers of the Bible. We are not “Bibliolaters!” We are Christians, worshipers, followers of Christ. Which means that we have to listen and learn and grow in our use of the Bible. And one of those growing points is to ask ourselves what is there in our reading that doesn’t reflect Christ? What representations of God in the Bible do not present the God that Jesus wanted to introduce to us? And if the God being revealed does not match why is that? Is it a problem of interpretation, do we just not know what it is really saying? Or is it something else? And what might that something else be?
What do we do with words like “inerrant” and “inspired”? What do we do with ideas like the end of Revelation that seems to say if you add or take away from the words in the Bible, God will punish you eternally? What do we do with ideas like the end of the Gospel of John that implies there is more to the story than what is printed in the pages of the Bible? What do we do with the idea that our own article of religion states that the Bible contains everything necessary for salvation, which I now consider to be an unfortunate choice of words?
Questions. You’ve got them. I’ve got them. The Bible is a wonderful and confusing book, containing puzzles and insight, “aha’s” and “huh’s?” alike. And I think that is just great. It is not my goal in this series to simply answer all these questions in a definitive, take it or leave it kind of way. My purpose is two-fold. One to proclaim that to ask questions is not the antithesis of faith, not a sign of weakness or failure, but a part of the journey toward Christ that never ends in this life. The bigger worry is when you stop asking questions, because that is a sign that faith is no longer important to you. So, ask away. And I want to help point toward answers, not to just give them, because if you don’t find them for yourself they won’t be your answers. The second part is to say questions aren’t barriers or handicaps to faith, but the means by which we grow and stay alive in Christ. Even when there aren’t easy answers. So, keep asking. You’ll be glad you did.
Shalom,
Derek
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