"What Is Our Best Sacrifice" (Abraham and Isaac)

            11/25/12                     Genesis 22:1-19                    Grace UMC

We have just celebrated Thanksgiving as a nation.  It is a time of year when, as we think of things we are thankful for, we often think of sacrifice.  We remember that there have been countless people who have sacrificed their lives so that we might be free in this country.  We also remember that our parents sacrificed and did without so that we might not have to.  As Christians, we often think about sacrifice in terms of what Christ did for us.  In Christ, we see that we do not only have other human beings who have sacrificed for us, but that even the God of the universe has allowed himself to be sacrificed for our sakes.  It is a sacrifice that does not only free us on the outside but brings us freedom in the depths of our humanity.

One of the most fascinating stories in the whole Bible to me is the story of Abraham and Isaac, where Abraham is called to sacrifice his son on a mountain in the land of Moriah.  This story has been the focus of significant attention by those outside of the church in recent years.  Christopher Hitchens, the recently deceased journalist and committed atheist had the following to say, referring to the story of Abraham and Isaac.  "And not scorning the three delightful children who result— who are everything to me and who are my only chance of a human glimpse of a second life, let alone an immortal one, I’ll tell you something: if I was told to sacrifice them to prove my devotion to God, if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said, “Yes, I’ll [kill] my kid to show my love of God,” I’d say, “No, f[orget] you.”"  Actually, his language is somewhat stronger than that.

This is not a recent concern.  Going all the way back to the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, the profoundly significant philosopher who casts a shadow even over our lives today, said this. "Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: ‘That I ought not to kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God—of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even if this voice rings down to me from visible heaven."  What is certain for Kant is the moral code.  It is higher than God and is able to stand in judgment over what God may or may not say or do.

Another interesting point of view surrounding this passage comes from Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher and committed Christian.  He was deeply aware of the fact that, even though we consider Abraham a hero of the faith, if anyone else were to do what Abraham was prepared to do, we would not consider them a hero of the faith but a murderer.  What Kierkegaard wanted to know is why we don't think of Abraham as a murderer.  This is, of course what Hitchens and Kant were getting at in their own way, but whereas they came to the conclusion that, in fact, we ought to think of Abraham, as well as the God who set all this into motion, as murderers, Kierkegaard was gripped by faith in a way that would not allow him to rest content with that conclusion but wanted to press deeper.

So the first thing I want to do is to make it clear that if you have ever read the story of Abraham and Isaac with fear and trembling (the name of Kierkegaard's book on the passage) or with disgust or dismay, you are not alone.  There have been many who have found it to be profoundly disturbing.  If you have never read the passage and wondered whether that says some things about God that we might not want to hear, at the very least you should be aware of the fact that others have thought so and it is passages like this that those outside of the church often turn to in order to make Christians look foolish because, at least if looked at from the right angle, it can certainly seem that God is somewhat barbaric.

Now, I have never met a Christian who believed that this is the best way to read the passage.  In spite of all the barbarism that seems to be there, we are too strongly persuaded by Christ to believe that God is truly bloodthirsty and wanting child sacrifice.  But if that is the case, how should we read the passage?

By far, the most common way the story of Abraham and Isaac is talked about in the church is to say that the real point is not that God wants child sacrifice, since looking at the whole of the biblical tradition makes it clear that he doesn't, but that Abraham was prepared to give up the best that he had for God so we also should be prepared to give our best to God.  It is a common interpretation, but is that really what the story is about?

Kierkegaard uses the story of the rich young ruler that Jesus told to give up all he had in order to follow him to shed light on this kind of interpretation.  He argues that the rich young ruler would not have become like Abraham, even if he gave up the best that he had.  He says, "What is left out...is the anguish: for while I am under no obligation to money, to a son the father has the highest and most sacred of obligations.  Yet anguish is a dangerous affair for the squeamish, so people forget it, notwithstanding they [still] want to talk about Abraham.  So they talk and in the course of conversation they interchange the words 'Isaac' and 'best.'  Everything goes excellently.  Should someone in the audience be suffering from insomnia [that is, actually awake and listening attentively to the sermon], however, there is likely to be the most appalling, most profound, tragic-comic misunderstanding.  He goes home, he wants to do just like Abraham; for the son is certainly the best thing he has.  Should that [preacher] hear word of this, he might go to the man, summon all his clerical authority, and shout:  ‘Loathsome man, dregs of society, what devil has so possessed you that you wanted to murder your own son?’  And this [preacher], who had felt no signs of heat or perspiration while preaching about Abraham, would be surprised at the righteous wrath with which he fulminates against that poor man; he would be pleased with himself, for never had he spoken with such pungency and fervor before…If the same [preacher] had some slight excess of wit to spare he would surely lose it were the sinner to reply coolly and with dignity:  ‘It was in fact what you yourself preached on Sunday.’  How could a [preacher] get such an idea into his head?  And yet he did so, and the mistake was only that he hadn’t known what he was saying.”

If we read the story of Abraham and Isaac and say, "Abraham was willing to give up the best he had, Isaac, and so we should be willing to give up the best that we have," how can we possibly avoid the implication that we ought to be willing to give up our children, since that is the example?  If that conclusion disturbs us we must either reject God, reject the passage, or push deeper to see if it is possible that we have misunderstood the text.  Given those three options, I think it is best to choose to push deeper.

This is all the more clearly the right choice when we remember that God is consistently telling his people that he absolutely does not want child sacrifice.  The issue is deeper than we might think, but I believe that it will become clear that the God portrayed in this story is not bloodthirsty but is better and more gracious than we ever dreamed.

The question we have to ask is why Abraham was willing to do this at all?  Perhaps it is nothing more than what the writer of Hebrews says, "By faith, Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac.  He who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, of whom he had been told, ‘It is through Isaac that descendants shall be named for you.’  He considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead – and figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.”  It may have been that, but I think that it there is more to it.  Though this story is the closest Israel ever got to affirming child sacrifice, it was a common practice elsewhere in the Ancient Near East.  The followers of the Ammonite god, Molech, for example, practiced child sacrifice regularly, precisely because it was an offering of the best that they had.  Ancient tribes in South America played games not altogether unlike our modern game of basketball and sacrificed, not the losing but the winning team, again precisely because it was an offering of their best.

There is a certain logic to these practices that horrify us today.  If God demands from us total commitment, does that not trump even our commitments to our family?  In spite of the fact that this way of reasoning has been so common throughout history, it has been conspicuously absent in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Why is that?  The reason is that the obligation for total obedience to God does not just mean that we need to surrender our devotion to everything else when compared to our devotion to God.  It also means that we need to surrender the right to decide for ourselves what the best that we have to offer is.  We don't get to decide for ourselves what God wants, but we need to listen to him to hear what he has to say about the matter.

As frightening as the whole story can be and as often as God and Abraham get criticized for doing what they do, we must never forget one absolutely crucial point:  Isaac is not actually killed.  He survives the whole situation.  If the interpretation that says that Abraham's willingness to offer Isaac was nothing more than a willingness to offer his best is correct, can we not assume that the conclusion of the story tells us that that willingness is enough, that God will never actually require our best from us?  If that is so, then we can make a show about our willingness to give everything up while comforted by the fact that God will never actually demand it of us.  However, I don't think this is the case, I think there is something much more profound at work here.

Even though he was tied down to the wood and the knife was raised, Isaac did not die, but something did.  Blood was shed and something was offered to God, but it was not Isaac, the beloved child of Abraham.  It was a ram whose horns were caught in the thicket.  What do we read actually happened?  "Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.  So Abraham called that place 'The Lord will provide.'"  The sacrifice of the ram is incredibly significant, above and beyond what a sacrifice of a ram would have meant in any other context.  The ram was not just offered, but was offered instead of Isaac, it was offered in his place.

This is where the interpretation of Isaac as Abraham's best has something to contribute.  At the end of the day, what was the sacrifice that God wanted?  Abraham was willing to offer what he would call his best.  His son was bound and he had lifted the knife to kill him, but God would not allow it.  Instead of allowing Abraham to follow through, he gave him a substitute.  That means that God in a very real sense did not want Abraham's best; in point of fact, God wanted a sacrifice that was better than Abraham's best.

Now, you might be wondering, "How is a ram a better sacrifice than Isaac?  After all, Abraham probably owned many rams, but only had one beloved son."  And yet, God didn't tell Abraham to stop, go back home, get one of his rams, and then bring it back.  Instead, God provided his own lamb.  Even if we might think that a ram is insignificant compared to a human child, the reason why it was a better sacrifice is not because of the value in the eyes of Abraham or any other human being.  It was a better sacrifice because it came from God.

I wonder if, sometimes, we think about sacrifice the way we often do because we like it.  If we either choose or are forced to make a significant sacrifice, there is that bit inside of us that feels pretty good about it in the sense that we feel that nobody can ever say to us, "You never had to sacrifice."  When we sacrifice, we can prove to ourselves that our devotion isn't just made up of words, but that it makes some kind of difference in our lives.

The story of Abraham and Isaac is extremely offensive, but not because of how we would ordinarily think.  It is not offensive because a bloodthirsty God commanded a man to sacrifice his beloved child.  It is offensive because, at the end of the day, God does not accept it, but provides a sacrifice in his place.  God knows that Abraham will go through with the sacrifice; after all, in any other culture at the time, it would have been a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  But right when he is about to follow through, God stops him.  This is an act of mercy, but it is more than that.  It is a declaration that God doesn't want child sacrifice, doesn't want Abraham to give what he thinks is his best.  It is a sacrifice unwanted by God and so, in point of fact, it is not the best Abraham has to offer, regardless of what he might think.  The best sacrifice is the one that God gives in place of what we think is our best.

It is an offensive story because it makes it seem that God's ways are cheap, that it is too easy to be one of God's people.  This should come as no surprise to us, since that is precisely what people have said, both in the early days of the church and today, but is it really true?  Is it too easy?  It means a wholesale renunciation of doing things our own way, of admitting that sin impacts everything we do, everything we are, and everything we think, including our notion of what are the best things to offer as a sacrifice to God.  To follow God means to allow our own sense of justice and righteousness to be challenged and realize that the ways of God are not just different than ours, but deeper, richer, and fundamentally better than our ways.  It means that we need to give up our right to judge, not only the actions of others but even our own actions, and allow God to have his way.

The story of Abraham and Isaac is also tremendously humbling.  It tells us that we cannot make an appropriate sacrifice on our own terms.  We must open our hands in faith, emptied of all our supposed righteousness and goodness, and receive the sacrifice that God has to give in place of the best that we could ever give.  It is scandalous, it is an attack on humanity because it says that God is justified in insisting on what he gives instead of what we give, but it is oh so very liberating, because God has already made the sacrifice.  He has given us his Son.  It is a sacrifice that is absolutely free because it offered without price but it is desperately costly because it calls us into question to the roots of our being.  We cannot accept the sacrifice without it challenging us to our core, but it is a challenge to be freed from sin, to be empowered by the Spirit and live in a better way than our world has to offer.  It is a sacrifice that changes everything and it is better than any sacrifice we could ever have dreamed up.  Rejoice, for God is not waiting until you make the perfect sacrifice, only for you to trust in the one he has made on your behalf and in your place.  Let us pray.

AMEN

Why Do We Doubt (Matthew 14:22-33)

         08/27/12                    Why Do We Doubt?               Grace UMC
As a pastor, I have met many people who, because they are not pastors, think that they are unable to understand or explain the Bible.  They are quick to point out that they have not gone to seminary and so they are aware that there is much about the Bible that they simply have never been exposed to.  While many people have to endure their seminary experience, I loved seminary.  I learned a lot and got challenged in every kind of way you can imagine.  However, even though I think that seminary can be a wonderful experience, I am all too aware of the fact that there are times when seminary training does no more than teach people to read the same passages in the same ways over and over again, never learning anything new, never growing, never imagining that there might be something simple that speaks volumes that they might have missed.  Often times, these kinds of things are completely unrelated to the things you learn in seminary; that is to say, they are things that laypeople are every bit as equipped to discover as clergy.  In fact, it may be that lay people are even more prepared to notice them since they don't have their heads filled with all kinds of issues that may or may not be related.
I say all of this because I am amazed at how often a little detail, that I have never noticed but has been in the passage the whole time, something that seems so simple, will hit me like a ton of bricks.  This is the case with this passage we have just heard.  It is so simple that it doesn't seem like much at first.  It is so obvious and basic that the story simply couldn't have continued if it wasn't the way it is, and yet it is routinely ignored.  Let us consider the story.
Jesus has just fed the five thousand.  He had his disciples start across the Sea of Galilee while he stayed behind to dismiss the crowds and then he went off by himself to pray.  Several hours later, he was still on shore while the boats had gone on ahead.  A storm rose up and the disciples, experienced boatmen, were unable to make any progress, but here comes Jesus walking on the water.  At this point, Peter does something interesting; he decides that he is going to get out of the boat.  But first, he wants to make sure that he isn't dreaming or that all the hard work hasn't made him start seeing things.  He asks Jesus to invite him out of the boat, which he does.  At first, Peter does pretty well, taking a few steps as if he were on land.  However, his fear and doubt begin to get the better of him and he begins to sink, so he cries out, "Lord, save me!"  Jesus grabs him and chastises him a little, saying to him "You of little faith, why did you doubt?"
Now, we could go on all day about the virtues of faith and obedience, about how important it is to trust that, when God tells us to do something, we shouldn't doubt but do it with all our might, that Jesus has given us no reason to doubt him, and all those are good things to remember.  However, there is just one detail that seems to me to be absolutely crucial to this passage that I feel that we keep forgetting.  Peter loses faith and the consequences are significant.  After all, he starts to sink and it is serious enough to provoke a critique from Jesus.  However, we must never forget that, even when all this happens, Peter doesn't drown.  Now that seems a little bit silly, doesn't it?  Isn't it obvious that Peter doesn't drown?  After all, he is in the rest of the story of Jesus' life and he continued to be in ministry long afterward.  It is so clear that Peter does not drown that it doesn't seem worth mentioning.
And yet, I think it makes all the difference in the world.  Look at it from this point of view.  The disciples are being overwhelmed by the storms.  They simply cannot make any progress, even with all their strength.  Then along comes Jesus, just taking a stroll across the stormy sea; not concerned, not even working up a sweat.  It is as if the dangers of the storm and the sea simply do not exist for him.  They certainly aren't impacting him the same way they impact the disciples.  Peter looks out and, because a disciple in ancient Israel was accustomed to doing everything that his Rabbi did, and seeing that it is better to walk on the water than to be defeated by the storm, asks to be invited out of the boat.  Eventually, he starts to doubt and begins to sink.  So now we have three different kinds of people.  We have Jesus, who has absolute faith in his ability to walk on the water, we have Peter who has a bit of faith, but it isn't as strong as he might like, who has some success but then his faith begins to fail, and we have the other disciples who were so terrified of the storm that they didn't dare to get out of the boat at all!  The point is that not one of them died that day.  Not one of them was defeated by the storm.  In fact, the storm was defeated by Jesus when he stepped into the boat and they all made it safely  to the other side.
Why didn't Jesus sink?  He didn't sink because his faith was so strong that he simply could not be defeated by the storm.  Why didn't Peter sink?  He didn't sink because when he went down, he was secured by Christ's hand grabbing him.  Why didn't the disciples sink?  Because Jesus calmed the storm and made a way when there had not been a way.  Not one of the disciples made it to the other side on their own strength; Jesus made it possible, even for those whose faith wasn't even strong enough for them to get out of the boat.
It is very easy to get caught up with the quality of our faith.  We look at ourselves and we see how often our faith has failed.  We look at others and we see how much stronger their faith seems to be than our own.  The single most significant issue that marked the Reformation was a revolt against the kind of attitude that said that you had to do all kinds of things right before God would accept you.  If you sinned, you needed to do penance, and if you didn't do it, it didn't matter what else you did, you still fell short of salvation.  There was always this sense that the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ wasn't quite enough, that God did most of it, but we still had to finish the job.  That kind of attitude only leads to pride, if we think, wrongly, that we have it all together, or despair when we realize that we don't.  If that is our position, than we can only say that Peter wasn't good enough because his faith wavered and the other disciples were really not good enough since their faith didn't even go as far as Peter's.  We would have to say that the story of Jesus walking on water is a story of the radical failure of humanity to be good enough for God.
Maybe it does teach us that, but is that all that it teaches us?  I don't think so.  It seems to me that there is something profound that is here that goes above and beyond what it says about our ability, or at least our track record, to do what we should.  Peter's faith wavers, but Jesus catches him.  The disciples can't move their boat forward, but Jesus calms the sea.  The success that saved all of them was not in any way, shape or form based on their abilities, as we see with the other disciples, or even in the strength of their faith in Christ, as we see in Peter.  The success of the whole trip depended on the strength and faithfulness, not of the disciples, but of Christ.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul takes an entire chapter and points out that the Jewish people, and remember that Paul was Jewish, shouldn't boast in the fact that God gave them the law if they don't even follow it.  He pointed out that if the Gentiles follow God, even if they have never heard the law, they are more fully God's people than the Jews were who had the law but didn't follow it.  What is amazing is that he immediately follows this up with a question that might be put to him.  "Then what advantage has the Jew?  Or what is the value of circumcision?"    The question is basically this, "The Jewish people, by and large, were not accepting Jesus and being transformed.  Is there really anything special about the Jews?"  Paul's response is passionate.  "Absolutely!  For in the first place, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God."  God had singled the Jewish people out for special interaction through the years and spoke to them in a special way.  But the question could come back.  "Paul, but what if some of them, or even most of them, were unfaithful?"  Paul's response is amazing.  "Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God?  By no means!  Although everyone is a liar, let God be proved true."  Every pastor, every Christian, could be a liar, but that does not make God any less truthful.  Every human being could be absolutely faithless, but that does not mean that God has become unfaithful.
That is why everyone made it safely across the sea.  Peter's faith didn't get them across and the other disciples' lack of faith did not prevent Jesus from delivering them.  It was the faithfulness of Christ that does not give up when we make mistakes or when we aren't as good as know we should be that made it happen.  When we talk about having faith, the point isn't, or at least shouldn't be, to get all excited talking about how strong my faith is or how strong your faith is.  When we say we are saved by faith, we don't mean that faith is something that we do and, because we reach a high enough level of faith, we are considered good enough for heaven.  In many ways, that is just taking the Medieval notion of salvation by works and substituting faith in as the new work that we have to do.  Now, instead of having to reach a certain level of moral perfection, we have to reach a certain level of perfection in our faith, in order to be saved.  That is what the Reformers fought so hard to get rid of.
When we say that faith is important, what we mean is that it is the one in whom we have faith, that is important.  It is not a question of how much we believe but in whom we believe.  We are saved by grace through faith, but the reason that we are saved is not because we are so good at being faithful, but because Christ is so good at being faithful.  The good news of Jesus Christ for the one who has never done a good deed in their lives and has never even given a thought to God before is that, when they stand before God they can say, "I have nothing to bring.  No deeds that made people think that I was a good person, no wise words that built up my brothers and sisters, nothing of any value at all.  If what Jesus did on my behalf and in my place isn't good enough, then I have no other hope.  All of my trust, all of my hope is in Christ and if it fails, I have nothing left.  I would be as lost as Peter if Jesus had not grabbed him when he began to sink."  What makes that good is because that is all that is asked.  In fact, it is the only thing that any of us can say before God.
So why do we doubt?  That is the question that Jesus asked Peter.  What if the question about why Peter doubted is not a question of criticism, that is, what if it wasn't a way for Jesus to say, "Peter, you know you are supposed to believe, so why did you doubt?"  What if the question was a real one, one that Jesus asked because he simply could not understand why Peter could have any reason to doubt?  I can imagine that Peter might answer like many of  us would.  "But Lord, I got out into the middle of the sea and I began to realize that I can't do it.  I can't walk on water, so I began to doubt because I found myself doing something that I am not able to do and I didn't think that I could keep it up."
What would Jesus' response be?  If the real point of faith is for us to have strong faith just for the sake of having faith, as if faith in an of itself is a good thing, or if we take the modern attitude of self-help and the power of positive thinking as our guide, the question, "Why did you doubt," would be, "Peter, why did you doubt?  Do you not trust in the power of believing in yourself?  Keep trying and you'll make it someday."  But if that is not the case at all, if the point of faith is not that we believe but that we believe in Jesus, not that we trust our own abilities to do anything but trust in Jesus, who lives his life in us and through us, then the question is not, "Peter, why did you doubt yourself," but "Peter, why did you doubt me?"  Jesus was the reason why Peter could walk on the water in the first place.  His own abilities had absolutely nothing to do with it.  There was no reason to doubt because the ultimate responsibility to stay on top of the water didn't lie with him but with Jesus.
So that is the question for us this morning.  Why do we doubt?  And by that I don't mean to say that there is not room for a healthy curiosity about what we believe about God.  Anyone who has had a substantial conversation with me knows that I am all about probing beyond popular opinion about God.  What I mean is, if God has loved us so much that he stepped into our world of space and time in order to become one of us and one with us; if he was willing to not just come but to take our brokenness upon himself and take it all the way to the cross in order to deal with it once and for all; and if he did all of this, not when we had our act together but while we were yet sinners, before we even gave a first thought to God, why should we doubt whether God really loves us, whether God actually cares about us, whether God actually wants to redeem us and be reconciled?
Listen to Paul's reflections on this topic.  "What then are we to say about these things?  If God is for us, who is against us?  He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?"  If God loves us so much that he did that, why would we doubt that he wants to finish what he has started?  Paul continues.  "Who will bring any charge against God's elect?  It is God who justifies.  Who is it to condemn?  It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us."  Paul is saying that the only one in all of the universe who is in a position to bring a charge against you or to condemn you is God, but this is a God who not only loves you with a love that will not let you go, but one who has gone through tremendous lengths to make that love real for you and prays for you, even to this day.
Our God is not a God who sits up in heaven with a chart to keep track of whether you are good enough or whether you have believed hard enough or not.  Rather, he is a God who calls you to do things above and beyond what you were ever capable of on your own, to do things that are amazing from a human point of view.  And in the midst of that calling and empowering, you might make a mistake, but you can trust that, when that time comes, Christ will grab you so that you will not drown and remind you that you do not need to doubt, because your trust and faith are not in yourself, but in him, and he has strength to support all of creation.  Let us pray.

AMEN

1 Corinthians 12:12-31

03/11/12 1 Corinthians 12:12-31 Grace UMC

What exactly is the church? For some it may be nothing more than a place to go when it is time to get married or buried. Others might see it, additionally, as a place to get their children baptized. I suppose that it is all of those things and, to the degree to which those things get people to think about the grace and mercy of God and the abundant life as promised to us by Jesus, it is not a fundamentally wrong way to look at the church, though it is far from being adequate. Seeing the church as primarily a dealer of spiritual goods and services for people to come and consume is really not very helpful, though it is incredibly common in our world today. It is seen as a place where we can go and receive things that will help us to live our lives. The ministries of the church are understood to be a kind of spiritual marketplace, where we can pick and choose what we think will be relevant to us and, if nothing seems overwhelmingly appealing, we just walk on by and go about our business.

Now, there is probably at least one person here this morning who, when I asked, "What is the church" began to think these words: I am the church! You are the church! We are the church together! All who follow Jesus, all around the world! Yes, we're the church together! The church is not a building, the church is not a steeple, the church is not a resting place, the church is a people. Those words come, of course, from a hymn that, for better or for worse, we are not singing this morning. The point that it makes so clearly is that, at the end of the day, the church is not about the building or the pews, or the pulpit, or even the singing and sermon, but the people. But even according to that hymn, it isn't just any old group of people, is it? No, it is "All who follow Jesus all around the world." Though neither of the Wesley brothers wrote that hymn, it certainly agrees with everything that John Wesley wrote about the nature of the church.

One of the most significant passages in the entire Bible about what the church really is can be found in 1 Corinthians, chapter twelve. Paul begins with this observation. "For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body - Jews or Greeks, slaves or free - and we were all made to drink of one Spirit." I think that Paul's use of this idea of Christians being bound together as the Body of Christ is incredibly interesting. You have a body and you have the members that make up that body. In spite of the fact that you can't have a body without the members, you really can't say that a body is nothing more than two arms, two legs, a torso and a head. The parts of the body aren't parts of a body unless they are related to one another, joined together in some coherent way. What Paul is saying is that we are not just isolated Christians, we are bound together as the body of Christ, that we might only be part of that body, but we are what we are because we are related to everyone else who is also a Christian. I have said before and I will say again that, as important as it is to get your own personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ settled, there is no such thing as an individual Christian, a Christian who is not bound to other Christians. There are only Christians-in-community. Whatever else a person may be who has isolated themselves from the community of others in the hope of doing things their own way, they are not a Christian, according to the Bible.

So, we are bound together, but what does that really mean? Thankfully, Paul gives us some very helpful guidelines. "Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. if the foot would say, 'Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, 'Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be?"

This tells us a few things. First, it tells us that God has not allowed us to exempt ourselves from the body of Christ. It does not matter who you are, what your gifts are, or what you do in the church, you are fully a part of the Body of Christ. In fact, you are much more dear to the proper functioning of the church than you realize. You should never say, "Well, I only do this. It really isn't that much." Every time you say that, you are saying that, because you are not a hand or an eye, that is, because you aren't doing one of the things that you think is crucial to the life of the church, your ministry does not matter, that you are infinitely replaceable, that anyone could do what you do. Nothing could be further from the truth. The longer I live as a human being and the longer I serve as a pastor, the more I see that it is seldom when two different people share the same gifts, graces and passions. The simple fact of the matter is that, whether you realize it or not, you have gifts that the church, both locally and at large, need. And if you allow yourself to fall into the trap of assuming that, because you don't do certain things, because you aren't a preacher, or because you aren't leading a particular ministry, you aren't doing vitally important work, you have missed Paul's point. Not one of us has the permission of God to excuse ourselves from our calling to participate, in whatever way, in the life of the church.

It also tells us that if a church ever becomes made up of the same kinds of people, people who all value the exact same things, it is something very much other than what the church was meant to be. The church is meant to be made up of all kinds of people, people who have different backgrounds, who have different gifts, who can do things that other people cannot do, or perhaps do not want to do. If everyone was a pastor, who would be in the congregations? If everyone led some ministry or group, who would be participating in them? The church was never meant to be a collection of people who all do the same things. The beauty is that we are called to be in this together.

Paul continues. "As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you,' nor again the head to the feet, 'I have no need of you.'" If the first part of Paul's argument teaches us that we are not allowed to exempt ourselves from being part of the body of Christ, this part teaches us with equal force that we are not allowed to exempt anyone else from being part of the body of Christ. Unfortunately, this is something that has been all too common in churches throughout the years. It is no secret that there are many different Christian denominations in the world today. Some denominations are closer to being like each other than others are, but it seems as though every group of Christians has at least one other group of Christians that they do not believe are really Christians. It takes several different forms, depending on who we are dealing with, but it is altogether too common.

Our tendency to exempt others from the body of Christ is not less unfortunate within the context of a local church. It is entirely too common that people who are excited about one particular issue or ministry cannot see the forest for the trees and tend to behave as if the ministry that they are doing is the only ministry worth doing or the one that the church should really be focusing on. I cannot tell you how many people I have met over the years who have a great passion for ministry that is helpful and healthy for the church but aren't doing what they feel called by God to do because someone, at some time, told them that they couldn't or that it wasn't important, or that they should be involved in some other, real, ministry. What is this but the eye or the head saying to the hand or the feet, "I have no need of you," or perhaps the even stronger, "The church has no need of you?"

According to Paul, this must not be so. "On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. if one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it." Paul is making rather a bold implication here. He points out something that is still as true for us as it ever was during his time. We go out of our way working on ways to take the parts of our body that we are less comfortable with and make them more presentable. We try to wear clothes that fit us well, that highlight our best features and downplay our worse ones. If we cannot avoid people seeing our less attractive parts, we do what we can to make them less embarrassing. This desire that we have to highlight our strengths and downplay our weaknesses as far as our bodies are concerned is the basis of the entire makeup and clothing industries, among others.

What Paul is suggesting is that maybe it is not altogether different in the church. The parts are interrelated in a way that is deeper than we might expect. There are, of course, certain parts of the church that we tend to think of as being "more important" than others and those that we think of as "less important" but it would be misleading to think this way. For example, speaking as a pastor, I cannot help but notice that the most faithful people I have ever met in my life have not been pastors but laypeople; the most capable workers and most dedicated people I have ever seen in the church have often been the people that everyone else may have overlooked. Does the church need dedicated leaders in order to be what it has been called to be? Of course, but this does not mean that such leaders are necessarily the most brilliant, most organized, most faithful people around; it simply means that they have been called to do what they do. I sometimes wonder if God called me to be a pastor because I have, in all reality, a fairly narrow skill set and that, because there are relatively few things that the church needs that I can do, I might be able to encourage others to use their skills for the greater health of the whole body.

The point is that, if we take what Paul has to say seriously, we find that our whole sense of "better" and "worse" in ministry is turned upside down. His point is that we are integrated together in the body of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit and that this unity is so profound that to cut anyone off in any way is parallel to the amputation of the human body. It is true that the body might be able to live without a particular part, but it isn't how the body was designed to be and if we get too excited about cutting off body parts, there isn't much of a body left.

Let us look at one more part, at the end of Paul's words for us this morning. "Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret?" Paul asks this series of rhetorical questions, knowing that the answer that we have to give to each one is, "No." Not everyone does any particular ministry, but the important thing is not that everyone does a particular thing but that someone does it and that we rejoice as a body that it is being done, even if it isn't us who are doing it. Not everyone is an apostle, but there are some who are called to be apostles. Not everyone is a prophet, but God does indeed call people to the prophetic ministry. Not everyone is a teacher, but there is still a great need for capable teachers. If everyone did something, it would destroy the church. We need everyone to work together, doing what they are passionate about, making what they care about a reality. If we all simply listen to what God is saying to us and step forward in faith, God will take care of our needs.

Let me put it this way. What good is it for a church to have wonderful outreach into the community if they do not have any way to nurture the people once they become active? What good is it for a church to have brilliant preaching if there are no structures in place to provide follow-up for those who are struggling with how to respond? What good is it if a ministry is excellent at convicting people of their sins and making them aware of their need for God if they have no way of joining them with others to help them grow and be assured of their salvation? What good is it for a church to have a strong ministry to the poor in their community if they are not prepared to welcome them into their midst in the worship service?

We need people who are comfortable bringing the love of Christ outside of these walls, but we also need people who are comfortable with making people feel welcome in a church they have visited for the first time, which can be an incredibly nervous experience. We need people who are gifted and passionate about ministry to and with elderly people, people who are excited about ministry to and with young people and with every age in between. What we need more than anything else are people who are listening to the prodding of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit is indeed prodding you, and taking what the Spirit says and turning it into a reality. Your pastors have gifts and graces, just like you do, but we don't have every gift and every grace. There are some things we get more excited about than other things and if a Church has to wait until the pastors can get through all the pressing concerns that face them on a daily basis before we can make ministries a reality, there is much ministry that we could and should be about that will simply be left undone.

So, if you have given of your time, talents, and energy for many years now, thank you for your service; keep it up, we need you. If you have never acted on what God has called you to do, do it now, even if it is for the first time. If you have criticized the ministry of others because it doesn't fit in with what you think are the most important things for the church to focus on, I ask that you would stop doing so. If there are aspects of the ministry of this church that you don't think are as important or as respectable as others, consider treating them with even more honor, as Paul suggests. And finally, if you used to be active in ministry in whatever form but you have been told that your ministry wasn't important or were discouraged from doing what God called you to do, I beg you to forgive whoever discouraged you and give it another try. God loves us and the world too much to let little hurdles get in the way of being joined together in passionate ministry in the world. Remember, everyone you meet is someone for whom Christ has died. Let us join together, in whatever way we can, and be the church, for as different as we may each be from each other, we are all part of that same body of Christ. Let us pray.

AMEN

Genesis 37:12-36

01/18/12 Genesis 37:12-36 GUMC Youth

We've been spending the last few weeks looking at some of the major and crucial stories in the book of Genesis in order to help us understand who God is and what it means for God to interact with us. What we find is that these early stories help shape the way we see and understand the world and they help us to realize that there are some ways of looking at the world and at the Bible that are simply not all that helpful. With that in mind, I want to turn your attention to the story of Joseph's brothers selling him into slavery.

But before we can get into the story and what it means for our understanding of God and life in general, we need to do a little bit of background work. Jacob, Joseph's father, had twelve sons and he had daughters above and beyond that. Lots of kids. He had a total of four wives who were the mothers of his children. Joseph was the first of only two sons that were born to his favorite wife, Rachel. As you may or may not know, the firstborn child, especially the firstborn son, was really important in those days. Now, Joseph wasn't exactly the firstborn. In fact, he had ten brothers, or more exactly half-brothers, who were all older than him. So here was this kid who was basically the youngest, but his father treated him differently than he did his other children. He gave him a special coat that seems to have been incredibly elaborate and expensive. Nothing makes siblings more jealous than having just one of them get a special gift.

But that isn't all. We read earlier in chapter thirty-seven that Joseph once told on some of his father's other wives, the mothers of his brothers, which probably didn't make them, or their sons, happy with him. Beyond that, Joseph started having dreams, which isn't so bad, but he started telling everyone about them, which may or may not have been a mistake. Listen to the dreams he had. He said, "There we were, binding sheaves in the field. Suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright; then your sheaves gathered around it, and bowed down to my sheaf." As you might imagine, a dream that basically had his brothers bowing down to him and treating him like a king probably didn't make them very happy. How about this other one? "The sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me." Now, the dream doesn't just have his brothers bowing down to him, but his father and mother, too. I don't know if you have ever been jealous of your brothers or sisters or if they have ever been jealous of you, but this is one surefire way to make them mad.

That brings us up to the start of the story as we just read it. Jacob sends Joseph to Shechem to visit his brothers who are shepherding there to bring back a report about how they are doing. When they see him coming, though, his brothers decide that they are going to kill him. After all, the only certain way to ensure that all those dreams he had aren't going to come true is to take him out. Now, conspiring together to murder your half-brother is not a good thing to do, as you might well imagine. Reuben, the oldest brother knew this and he wanted to do what he could to prevent his brothers from actually killing Joseph. He convinces them to just throw Joseph into a pit, planning to go back later and rescue him, but before he can save his brother, the others have sold him to a group of Ishmaelites (who would be like modern day Arabs, though this is long before the rise of Islam), who take him to Egypt.

Now, you all know the rest of the story, right? Joseph is sold to be the servant of Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh's guard. Eventually, Potiphar's wife tries to sleep with him and he runs away, only to have her put him in jail. While he is in jail, he is trusted enough to help and be the right-hand man of the jailer. He becomes famous in prison as someone who is able to interpret dreams so he is called for when Pharaoh has his dreams about the fat and skinny cows and the healthy and withered ears of corn. He so amazes Pharaoh that he is made to be the second most powerful person in the whole kingdom of Egypt. He then almost singlehandedly saves the nation from famine and makes Pharaoh incredibly powerful at the same time. Because of that, Joseph isn't just the second most powerful man in Egypt, he was probably just about the second most powerful man in the whole world at the time.

Anyway, the famine that the Pharaoh's dream predicted that Joseph interpreted does actually come and it has tragic consequences for people all over the region, including where Joseph's father and brothers are. They come to Egypt to get food twice and end up face to face with their brother, the brother they sold into slavery all those years ago, the brother they told their father was dead, as the only one who can save them. Joseph actually does save them and gives them a place to live and takes care of them so they can last out the rest of the famine.

But here is the problem. So long as his brothers never had to see Joseph again, so long as they kept him out of sight and out of mind, they could pretend that they really hadn't done anything all that bad. But when God brought Joseph back into their lives again as their savior, they realize that they could be in some serious trouble. They can relax a little because they are pretty sure that Joseph won't get back at them while their father Jacob is still alive, but what happens when he dies? At the very end of the book of Genesis, this is what we read. "Realizing that their father was dead, Joseph's brothers said, 'What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?' So they approached Joseph, saying, 'Your father gave this instruction before he died, "Say to Joseph: I beg you, forgive the crime of your brothers and the wrong they did in harming you."'"

Do you see what they did there? They made up a story (Jacob didn't actually tell them to say what they said) in order to get off the hook, in order to save their own skins, so they don't get the punishment they so completely deserve. What is amazing is what Joseph does in response. "But Joseph said to them, 'Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. So have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.'"

The question that I want to ask in light of this story, where it really plays itself out in our lives today is, "Was the selling of Joseph into slavery by his brothers good or was it evil?" This might seem like a silly question, because you probably already have an idea of whether it is good or evil which may or may not be based on what the Bible says, but it is incredibly important; so important that, once you know where to look, you find the answer people give to this question and those like it shows up all over the place.

Now, it seems to me that the most commonsense answer to the question, "Was the selling of Joseph into slavery good or evil," is "It is evil, of course." After all, it is the dominant opinion in our modern American world that slavery is evil and if selling someone into slavery is evil in general, surely it must be even more evil (if that is possible) to sell your brother into slavery. But that is not the only way people answer the question. There are some people who look at the end of the story where it says, "Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good," and say, "regardless of the fact that we want to say that Joseph's brothers did something that was evil, God was intending something good to come out of it. It is true that we could never encourage someone to sell their brother into slavery, but if God used it for good, we must conclude that it was actually a good thing. After all, if Joseph was not sold into slavery, he would never have interpreted the Pharaoh's dream and would have never been put into a position where he could save his family. Lots of things that are undeniably good came from it and we can see God's hand at work in it, so it must be good."

I should mention at this point that this is not my position. I disagree at some really important points with this view. You need to understand that if we actually take this view seriously, it eliminates any concept of real tragedy and ends up driving us to pure fatalism and determinism, the idea that things only happen the way they do because they are planned to happen that way, that they could not have happened in any other way. It also completely destroys any concept of good and evil because we can never say if anything is evil because we don't know what good God might be causing to come of it. It is not much of a step between saying that, because God saved the Israelites through Joseph being in Egypt, his brothers were right to sell him into slavery to saying that, because many people grow a lot as human beings through battling hard against cancer, cancer must be good. Even if people die from it, this view can't acknowledge that cancer might actually be an evil that is in violation of God's good purposes for humanity because we never know but God might bring something good out of it.

The real question that we need to deal with here is whether things are ever really evil. The view that says that Joseph's brothers did good by selling their brother into slavery is saying that things really aren't ever truly evil, or even if they were, we would have no way of knowing whether they are really evil until the end of time. At the moment that Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery, it seems clear that they are doing something evil, but once we see that it was through Joseph being in Egypt that God brought about the deliverance of his family, this view says that we have to go back and say that we were wrong when we said that the selling of Joseph into slavery was evil.

Do you see the problem with this? It completely robs us of any ability to judge whether things are good or evil, even based on a standard given to us by God himself. How do we know but that every tragedy in our lives might someday be revealed to be the key piece in the puzzle for something far better to happen that we can't imagine would have happened without it? Think of all your personal tragedies, and I'm not talking about times when you didn't get to do something you wanted to do, but times when your or people you love were broken by sickness and tragedy, when someone you knew died unexpectedly or tragically. Think of all the tragedies you have heard about, about the people who, in spite of all the growth they had while fighting their cancer, ended up dying because of it, of all the fatal car crashes and sudden heart attacks that have taken people. Think of all the national tragedies, of the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, of the senseless attacks in schools or military bases, or anywhere by crazy people with guns. Think of all the tragedies that occur on the international scale, of the Holocaust, of various genocidal movements, of angry wars that get waged. There is evil and tragedy everywhere we look, it seems sometimes. Is it really possible that somehow, in some way, God will bring some kind of good out of all of those tragedies that will somehow make them all better?

I want to share one more thing from a famous book I read that is interesting. There is a book by Fyodor Dostoevsky called Crime and Punishment. In the book, the main character has written an article where he argues that extraordinary people, people who have made incredibly important contributions to our knowledge and lives, would have been justified in doing whatever it takes to do those things, even if it meant breaking our laws. Specifically, he says, "I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound... to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity." This same main character has, at the time we find out about this article, killed two people. The question is raised whether this man considers himself to be one of the extraordinary men that is exempt from the law and also it asks how we are to tell, ahead of time, whether someone is that kind of person. The moment we decide that good and evil can't be decided at the time but need to be determined in light of what happens later, we have gotten ourselves into all kinds of problems.

My point is that tragedy happens; evil happens, and the solution to the problem is not to pretend that it doesn't, it isn't to pretend that somehow, when enough time has passed and we see the big picture, it isn't really tragic and evil. We don't do justice to the tragedies that people experience if we pretend that, someday, they will come to realize that they were never tragic, but just seemed like they were. Further, I think we do a tremendous disservice to the gospel, if we pretend that there really aren't any problems, that evil really isn't real. The amazing lesson we learn from the story of Joseph being sold into slavery is not that God causes things that we think are evil but that are really good if we just really understood them. The amazing thing that we learn from the story of Joseph is that our God is a God who can work good out of the most astonishing evil. There is no denying that selling their brother into slavery was wrong, that it should not have happened, that it is a crime against God's will for us, but God was not stopped by that evil act, but used it and made good come out of something that seemed like good couldn't have come out of it. When Jesus was crucified, it wasn't an act of goodness by human beings, it was the evil rising up of people like you and me against the God who loved them. And yet, God was not defeated or stopped because of that evil, but used it as the very place where we are joined to him forever. That doesn't show us that the crucifixion was actually good, but it shows us that God is really amazing and is not stopped by evil.

So when your life is attacked by evil, when you experience tragedies, when things that shouldn't happen actually do happen, know the power of God is a power that takes these tragic, sometimes even stupid events, and does not abandon you in the midst of them. When you feel overwhelmed and ready to bust out into tears, don't let anyone tell you that the tragedy is for the best, that it was somehow meant to happen, because when tragedy strikes, when real evil happens, there is good reason to cry, because it is a sign of the brokenness of the world in which we live. When Jesus' friend Lazarus died, he wept, even though he knew he was going to raise him from the dead. However, even though tragic things happen, and the things are really tragic, do not give up hope that the God who has been able to use the evil of Joseph's brothers to save a whole nation, and the God who took the cross where Christ was murdered and transformed it into the salvation of the world, can use the tragedy in your life and bring good out of it. Let the good that comes out of tragedy teach you, not that tragedy or evil is good, but that God is better than we could ever imagine. Let us pray.

AMEN

God Trusts Us

12/21/11 God Trusts Us GUMC Youth

Last time we got together, two weeks ago, I said that we live in a culture that just kind of assumes that everyone is a Christian, that we live in a "Christian nation." When I say that our culture does this I don't mean to say that it is a good thing, like many other people might. I am not at all convinced that it is a good thing to think of America as a Christian nation and I will tell you why. When we say, "We live in a Christian nation," it is all too easy to get blinded and tricked into thinking that what is Christian must be American and, even more dangerously, that what is American must be Christian. If we tried, we could probably make a pretty good list of things that we do as Americans that are completely acceptable in the eyes of the culture that, when we look at it through the eyes of the gospel, maybe we shouldn't do.

My point for bringing this up over and over again is not to give America a black eye. I am glad to live here and not somewhere else. I am not anti-America in any way. I am, however, so radically and completely pro-Jesus that I refuse to take my cue of what Christianity is all about from what I see in American culture. With that in mind, I have been trying to focus on things that Christmas teaches us that are more important than what we might imagine from looking at our secular culture during December. Last time, we talked about how, because at Christmas we celebrate the coming of God into our world, the Creator becoming a creature, Christmas is actually the center of all of space and time. Tonight, I want to talk about how Christmas shows us just how much God trusts us, which is a pretty amazing thing.

Now, when we ask the question, "Does God trust us," it seems at first glance that we can only take our answer in one of two directions. The first way we can look at it is to say that, because we are such sinful people and God is so holy, it would be hard to imagine that God really trusts us. It seems that every single time God entrusts anything into human hands, things fall apart. God calls Abraham and he starts telling lies to keep himself out of trouble. He calls Moses and he makes excuse after excuse to get out of doing what God wants him to do. He takes David from a small farming town and makes him one of the greatest kings that Israel ever had, and yet he responds by committing adultery and murder. There is no end to the examples we could put forward of how human beings continually let God down because they keep doing stupid things. Not only that, we can all look into our own hearts and see that we are all capable of doing stupid things, even if we don't do them all the time.

If we want to look at things from this angle, we could say that there is probably no greater example of why God should not trust us than the crucifixion. When God, in all his love and mercy, comes to meet us where we are, what do we do? We nail him to a cross. Back in the 90's, a singer named Joan Osborne asked the question, "What if God was one of us?" That question isn't an abstract one for us Christians. In Christ, God actually did become one of us. What if God was one of us? We have shown by our actions that we would kill him. If the very coming of love into our midst could only provoke anger and hatred from us, why should God trust us?

Now, we could look at it from a completely different point of view, one that our modern culture might like pretty well. After all, we don't need to look very far to find that the view that human beings are basically good and trustworthy by nature is amazingly common. Never mind the fact that human beings consistently commit horrible crimes against each other, never mind that our world seems to be continually torn by war, human beings are basically good. Even though it is clear where I come out on the issue of the inherent goodness of humanity, let's try to take it seriously and see where it leads us in this question, "Does God trust us?"

Now, if human beings are basically good and trustworthy, then the answer to the question whether God trusts us is a resounding "Yes!" And why not? After all, I do what I can to be good and trustworthy and I am sure that many, if not all of you do what you can to be good and trustworthy people. Being "good people" is really important to our culture today. What is interesting is that, because our whole culture teaches us to be fixated on ourselves, we sometimes don't realize how much we get in our own way to be good, especially because everyone around us seems to be doing the same things. I have some friends who have committed to giving away quite a bit more of their money to their church and other causes than the average person. Once, some friends said to them, "Boy, I wish I could give more, but I just don't have enough money to do it." The fact of the matter is that these same people who wanted to give more "go out" every weekend, which is a kind of code for, "going out to eat at a nice restaurant and getting a few drinks (and alcohol can be expensive)" which costs a lot of money if you do it all the time. The fact of the matter is that these people have plenty of money to give if they wanted to, but because they have believed the lie that says they have to spend all their money on themselves and they look around and see everyone else around them doing it, too, they simply can't see it.

Even if we put those kinds of situations aside, how many of you would say that there are people in the world who are not good people? How many of you would say that there are people you go to school with who are not, to all observers, good people? How many of them, if asked if they were a good person, would say "no?" Probably not any, or very very few of them. We all know people who are not good people, and we can see that human evil is a very real problem in our world, but we really want to believe that human beings are, at their core, good. Why is that? I am more and more convinced that it is because we want to convince ourselves that we are good people. After all, if I were to ask you, "Are you a good person?" you would probably say, "yes," right? What would you have to do before you would consider it possible that maybe you weren't as good as you would like to think you are? We desperately want to say, "Yes, God trusts us," because we want to think of ourselves as people that are worthy of trust, as people who are good enough for God to rely on.

So, we have two ways of looking at things. One of them says that God trusts us because we are trustworthy people, but can only say it by pretending the Bible doesn't say what it says, or by pretending it doesn't mean what it so obviously means. The other view says that God does not trust us because we cannot be trusted. This view takes the failure of humanity very seriously, but that seems to be a pretty depressing view of our situation and our relationship with God. In fact, it actually makes God seem kind of stupid, since he can't seem to figure it out that human beings keep messing things up, that every time he tells them to do something, they seem to find new and creative ways of sinning in the middle of it.

If you have gotten to know me at all over the last six months, you can probably tell that I don't quite fit into either group. On the one hand, it is clear that I don't think that human beings are, by nature, good. Yes, God created human beings good, but if that is the last word, we have forgotten the whole story of the Fall and the countless examples of human beings not being what they ought to be that we find in the Bible. And yet, though I feel that way about human beings, I didn't title this message "God Doesn't Trust Us," but "God Trusts Us." Unless I am being sarcastic (which I'm not), I must think that God actually does trust us. If that sounds odd, hopefully it will make more sense in a minute.

This is the whole reason why I had us read the passage from Luke's gospel where the angel speaks to Mary and tells her that she is going to be the mother of Jesus, of God when he stepped into his creation. Have you ever thought about how much God must have trusted Mary? There is so much that can go wrong in a pregnancy, especially two thousand years ago. God is saying to Mary, "I trust that you are going to take care of yourself throughout this whole pregnancy, I trust that you are going to be able to stand strong when people make fun of you for getting pregnant before you got married (because you know the truth that they don't and maybe even can't understand), I trust that you will make a good mother, that I will even allow you to raise Jesus, the God who created you." There is not a single parent in the history of the world who could say with absolute confidence, "I was a perfect parent." They might say, "I did the best I could do," or "In spite of all my faults, my kids turned out alright and that's all I can hope for," but I have not met anyone who would say, "I did everything right as a parent, every single day." And yet, here we have God entrusting the raising of Jesus into the hands of this ordinary, fallible human woman. That is pretty astonishing.

Once we begin to see that God actually might trust us at Christmastime, we start seeing that trust all over the place. Think about it; God comes into our midst, lives his life, has a teaching and miracle-working ministry, but he doesn't stay forever. Jesus eventually leaves. He is killed, raised from the dead, but within two months, he ascends back to his Father and is no longer among his disciples in the personal and physical way he had been before. At the end of the Gospel of Matthew we read what has come to be known as The Great Commission. "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age." And then he leaves, he ascends to heaven.

Do you see what Jesus has done? He was raised from the dead in glory, he did not have to leave, but he did. He left the ministry that he, that is God himself, started, in the hands of ordinary people like you and me. Not only that, as we talked about a few months ago, it is a pretty odd group of people that he entrusts his ministry to. The one that we usually remember is that he trusts his ministry in the hands of people like Peter who denied him three times on the night he was betrayed, but that is not all. He also trusts it in the hands of people like James and John who were hot-tempered, impulsive people, and people like Simon the Zealot and Levi the tax collector, people from two groups that hated each other so much, it is amazing they can even be in the same place at the same time without violence, and Thomas the skeptic. When we look at the people that Jesus actually trusts to carry his message into the world, we realize that they are just like us, weak and broken people who have made a lot of mistakes. It is true that he sends his Holy Spirit to strengthen those disciples, but it was in their hands nonetheless.

So, what about all the failures of humanity that we pointed out earlier and are on nearly every page of the Bible? I mentioned that there are some who might say that because we are so unfaithful, God does not or at least should not trust us, but that isn't what I believe. That is because when I look at the failures of all the people in the Bible I don't just see them but I see something else, too. I also see God's plans not hindered by it. The sin of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, the disciples and a host of others did not stop God from doing what he was trying to do.

Here is some good news. We can look at the Bible, the whole of Christian history and even people in our lives today and see that God can do mighty things when people wake up and listen to him. It comes as no surprise that God moves when people are faithful, but does God only use our successes? What about our failures? Can God use them, too? It is clear that God absolutely does use our failures, and sometimes uses them as the most powerful expressions of his grace. We all know Peter denied Christ three times on Good Friday. After he was raised, Jesus asked Peter if he loved him, but he didn't just ask it, he asked it three times. It is almost as if Jesus was undoing those denials. Jesus showed Peter that those denials from back then did not stop him from being his disciple right now.

To give another example, look at the crucifixion. Was there ever a more evil act of humanity than the betrayal and murder of the Son of God? Was there ever a greater failure of human beings to respond in faith to what God was doing? In all of history, the single greatest failure of humanity is in the crucifixion of Christ. And yet, that astonishing failure did not stop God from using that very moment as the most profound expression of his love for us. The crucifixion has been so completely transformed by God, so completely used by God for his own purpose, that many people find it very difficult to appreciate the human evil expressed in it.

The point is that God is not afraid of your evil. That doesn't make your evil good, and he is still going to work with you to get rid of that evil, but he is not afraid of it. In fact, it is very likely that he will take your biggest mistakes and transform them into the the means by which you are bound all the more tightly to him. When I look back and see all the times I have made mistakes, I realize that God's grace is bigger than all of them. That God is powerful enough to use me, even when I am weak and broken and can't seem to get my act together.

God trusts us, even if we don't think he should, because he knows something that we often forget: That we are his children, that he loves us with a love that will not let us go, that he will not abandon us, even if we might want him to. So, when you go back home and back to school, remember that God has given you a mission, a great calling that you can't get out of even if you wanted to because God trusts that you can do great things, and that he can use even your failures for his glory. So go and be bold, for through his Holy Spirit, God himself dwells in you and has made you his own. Let us pray.

AMEN

Emmanuel, God With Us

12/18/11 1 John 1:1-10 Grace UMC

Several years ago, at a different church, when I preached my very first Christmas Eve sermon, I made a statement that the birth of Christ was a relatively unimportant event. I did not say, nor did I mean, that it was unimportant, but that it was relatively unimportant. In the message, I spelled out some of the things that Jesus did not come to do: he did not come to give us an extravagant, human-centered holiday, he did not come to brainwash us and make everyone conform to some narrow definition of "the Christian life," he did not come to make everyone happy and, perhaps most importantly, he did not come to leave us how we are. Then I raised the question, "If those are some of the things that Jesus did not come to do, what did he come to do?" I took the response from John's first letter, where he says, "The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil," which happened most fully and finally in the death and resurrection of Christ. That is to say, Jesus was born so that he could die.

While I still stand by the fact that the death of Christ is of supreme importance for us as Christians and that we cannot correctly understand the New Testament witness to what Jesus has done on our behalf and in our place if we forget about Good Friday and Easter, I will never again make the point that the birth of Christ is unimportant, relatively or otherwise. You see, it is not just important that we have a God who dies for us, as amazing as that might be, but we also have a God who lives for us, a God for whom no sacrifice is too great, even becoming a creature and entering into his creation.

The reason I said what I said my first Christmas as a pastor is because I had been misled by a well-meaning but inadequate understanding of just who Jesus is and why he came, which is quite common in our world today. If you were to ask many Christians, "Why did Jesus come?" the answer would often be something like this, "Jesus came because God needed a perfect human to die for us so we could be forgiven." If pushed, they may continue and emphasize that Jesus' teaching ministry was important as well, that we needed to learn from Jesus as well as have him die for us. The radical humanity of Christ tends to play nothing more than an instrumental role in God's plan; that is, it serves as a vehicle to get a perfect human being from the cradle to the cross, but not much more.

I don't mean to imply that the things this view emphasizes are fundamentally wrong. It is absolutely true that Jesus lived his life in utter human perfection, that if he had not lived in such perfection, it would call into question God's saving act through his death. It is true that we benefit from Jesus' teaching, which often surprises us and catapults us out of our comfort zone. My point is that the reality of what God has done in, through, and as Jesus is far more dynamic and staggering than this view leads us to believe. As true as it might be, we cannot collapse all of what God has done in Christ to simply the formula, "We had a debt, God paid it, now we are free."

When we look closely at what John tells us in our passage for this morning, we see that he, at least, understood the coming of God in our midst to be of supreme importance. "We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life." According to John, the word of life is not just a concept, not just an idea that we can learn once and then never worry about again. The word of life is something that does not stay "out there" but something that comes and meets with us, that is something that entered into our world of space and time, that was actually encountered by real human beings. Jesus of Nazareth was not just a man, but the very word and truth of God, taking up residence in the same world we live in, walking around real places that we can visit today, using real human words, eating real human food, interacting with and building relationships with real human beings not unlike you and me.

I don't know how often you think about the fact that the God who created the universe with nothing more than a word, who never needed to create the universe or people to live in it, actually stepped into it, God becoming a man, the Creator becoming a creature, but it is truly astonishing. In Jesus we have a word that we don't just hear, but that we can see and touch and enter into relationship with. In the baby in the manger we have nothing less than all the fullness of God in our midst, the God of all as a human infant, the Creator of all the vastness of the cosmos so small you could hold him in your hand, the very Word of God unable to speak but reduced to cries to communicate with his parents, those he had created. When I think about the earth-shattering idea that God himself has met with us, I am so overwhelmed, I can't hardly get over it.

Though the coming of God into our world in Christ has become a fairly common notion, something that we affirm, often without thinking about it, it was not always so. There have been many people who have found it impossible to believe that God either could or would become a human in our midst. The ancient Greek philosophers argued that God was so utterly detached from the world that we live in that God could not come among us, even if he wanted to. The Jewish thinkers of the first and second centuries who engaged in dialogue with Christians affirmed that God could become a human being, but that he never would do so, that they simply could not entertain the idea that the holy and glorious Lord and God of the universe would stoop to such a lowly position as to become a human being.

The offensiveness of this central claim of the Gospel, that in the man Jesus of Nazareth, we have to do with God himself, did not go away. Arius, a church leader in the early fourth century, said that God would not have come among us, so we must think of Jesus as a creature, a lofty messenger, but not God. A group called the docetists taught that, if Jesus really is God, then he cannot really be a a human, but only seems to be like us. Apollinaris of Laodicea argued that, in becoming a human, God refused to take on a real human mind, since it is so diseased by sin, and so Jesus is not really a human in the same sense that we are.

Even when Christianity became the dominant religion in the West, resistance to this idea that God would really meet us and make himself accessible to ordinary humans like you and me continued. Isaac Newton, the great physicist, thought of God as the great container of the whole of space and time. If that is the case, to say that God entered into his creation is like saying a box contains that contains many things, also contains itself, which would be ridiculous. Even today, we are surrounded by people, theologians, biblical scholars, and many others, who simply cannot bring themselves to really believe that when we look into the face of Jesus, we see the face of God, a face that we have never seen anywhere else and that we could never see in any other way. The reality of the incarnation, that the God of the universe has come among us, is repeatedly domesticated into the idea that Jesus was just really good at being good, that we follow him like we would follow any other human leader, that the real work of Christ is to provide us a model to follow in our lives (though even when we look at it this way, we usually stop short of suffering and dying, like he did), and in other ways as well.

Why do we do this? Why is it so hard for human beings to admit the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Jesus is who he claims to be, truly united to the Father, the Son of God in whose hands the Father has placed all things, the one who is in the Father and in whom the Father dwells, the one through whom all things were made and without whom the Father does nothing? I think it is because we are terrified to see the coming of God into our world for what it really is: an invasion. It doesn't take much to see that we live in a world that is dreadfully infected with sin. It isn't just that we commit sins, but that sin goes down to the core of who we are. We don't just make mistakes, we don't just make wrong choices because we don't know which choice is right and which is wrong. All too often, we know all too well what is the right thing to do and choose the wrong thing anyway. And it isn't just that we sin, but our neighbors sin too, and it is isn't just we as individuals who do what is wrong, we as a society sin, too.

In the midst of all this sin, it really is no surprise why we would rather find some way, any way, to keep God from meeting us here in this world of ours. So long as God remains "out there," we are like kids who have made a huge mess while our parents are out of the house. We keep telling ourselves, "We'll fix it in time, we'll get it all cleaned up before they come home." But every time we try to clean up our mess, in spite of our best efforts, we make it worse. So long as God has not actually come among us, we can still convince ourselves that there is still time to make things right on our own; we can still get our act together, we can still pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Maybe, just maybe, God won't even notice that we haven't been as good as we would like to think and we'll be let off the hook. Maybe we'll get it all cleaned up in time, maybe we'll never have to face the consequences for what we have done. As soon as we admit that, in Jesus we have to do with nothing less than the very God of the universe, we realize that we are out of time, that we were out of time even before we were born. We have made a mess and we didn't get it cleaned up. Indeed, we realize, when we are face to face with God, that we never could have cleaned it up on our own.

But when we realize that the jig is up, that we didn't, and even couldn't save ourselves, when we realize that the high and holy God has actually come near, has met with us, who has, by his Spirit, probed into the depths of our hearts, we find that all the consequences we feared do not come to pass. When we come face to face with God in Christ, we are asked to open our hands and give up everything we have. We are asked, not only to give over the mess we have made, but we are asked to give up even all our best attempts at cleaning it up, and God takes them from us and takes them to the cross. The only way we face punishment is if we stand before God and say, "I never made that mess; it was someone else; I was set up," or perhaps, "Yes, I made a mess, but I did my best to clean it up, so that should count for something."

We read in the New Testament that there will be a judgment, that we will all be judged. This can be, and has been a frightening thing for many people, but we need to ask, "When we are judged, who will be our judge?" We are told in the book of Revelation that the one who oversees the judgment is Jesus, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, the one who conquers, but when this Lion is revealed, what is it that we see? "A Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered." Our judge is not a vindictive human being like we can so often be, but one who has been sacrificed in atoning reconciliation on our behalf and in our place. The one who will judge us is not some angry pagan god who weighs up our good deeds and our evil deeds and we had better hope and pray that we've done more good than bad. Rather, the God who judges us is the God who has made our cause his own who, when he set out to redeem us from our sin and death, did not count it too great a sacrifice to become one of us, God of the universe though he was, live in our broken world and finally take our disease, sin and death on his own shoulders and take them to the cross.

As Charles Wesley wrote, "'Tis mystery all, the immortal dies, who can explore his strange design. In vain the firstborn seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. 'Tis mercy all, let earth adore, let angel minds inquire no more."

If we were in a situation where we had simply built up a debt that needed to be paid, then all we would need is a savior who would be willing to die for us. If all we needed was a savior who would die our death on our behalf and in our place, then we could say that Christmas only matters because there has to be Christmas before there can be Easter. But we are not just people who commit sins, we are sinners. The fact that, in Christ, we see God walking as one of us and one with us, we see him enduring our temptations and overcoming them, we see him confessing our sins when he is baptized in the Jordan, we see him being faithful where we are all too often faithless, shows us that we do not only need a God who dies for us, but a God who lives for us. We not only have a God who offers up his own death so that we do not need to suffer the eternal death that would separate us from God, our God also comes and lives the life that we could not live and offers that in on our behalf and in our place. To believe in Jesus is not just something we say, not just something to check off our list of things to do in this life, but a profound trust that, when God judges us, it will be the God who sacrificed himself for us and that this God will accept, not only the death of Christ in the place of our death, but the life of Christ in the place of our lives.

Because of what God has done, we are bound to Christ in every way. Listen to these words of Gregory Nazianzen, one of the most important leaders in the early church. "We needed an Incarnate God, a God put to death, that we might live. We were put to death together with him, that we might be cleansed; we rose again with him because we were put to death with Him; we were glorified with him, because we rose again with him." In everything we do, whether in life or in death, we find that it is in Christ that we live and move and have our being. Our God is a God who does not abandon us, but meets us where we are, long before we ever dreamed of turning to him. Though the coming of Christ is an invasion into this world of sin and that means even our sin is under attack, it is not an attack that destroys us, but liberates us and makes us free to love like we have never loved before. O come, O come, Emmanuel. Let us pray.

AMEN

Biblical Inerrancy

Biblical Inerrancy

A topic that comes up in conversation for me with some frequency is that of Biblical inerrancy. It is something that sneaks itself into various conversations on a wide range of issues and seems to be surrounded by all kinds of assumptions that I feel are simply not true. To that end, I have decided to write out my thoughts on the topic of Biblical inerrancy.

Before I begin, I feel that a disclaimer is in order. It must be said at the very beginning that I do not identify myself as one who subscribes to Biblical inerrancy (precisely for the reasons outlined below), but I would like to encourage, as much as I can, for anyone who reads this to do so knowing that this is in no way intended to be an anti-Bible essay. I believe the Bible to be remarkably important, it is truly the sole source and norm for our faith and practice and that it is an irreplaceable witness to what God has done that is vitally important for us to take very seriously and to submit ourselves to the radical critiques that it makes on our lives. Reading the Bible has had an absolutely transforming effect on my life. I continue to read and study the Bible and I continue to use it as the basis of my preaching as a pastor. It should also be noted at the beginning that, though I do not subscribe to Biblical inerrancy, neither do I identify myself as a theological Liberal. To me the Liberal tradition is just as deeply problematic. In fact, a large portion of my critique, though at a tacit level, is that Biblical inerrancy has Liberal roots, inasmuch as it is, in its modern form, just another way of dealing with the challenge of Liberalism and so bears its stamp.

A distinction must be made here between Biblical inerrancy and Biblical infallibility. From one point of view, the words inerrant and infallible are synonyms; from another, infallible is actually a stronger term because while inerrancy implies that there are no errors, infallible implies that there can be no errors. However, in spite of how the words might be used elsewhere in discourse, within the context of this issue, they have become technical terms. Specifically, inerrancy is a stronger term than infallibility. Biblical infallibility states that, in matters of faith and life that is, what we believe and how we live, the Bible is absolutely trustworthy and must be taken seriously. Biblical inerrancy asserts that every part of the Bible (down to the very words) is true in every sense of the word. The reason for this is because, if it were not true in any sense of the word, the whole authority of the Bible would collapse.

It should be noted that the mainstream of inerrancy, when pushed (or even just when clarifying their position), will qualify their position by saying that the Biblical texts are inerrant "in the autographs," which means the texts were inerrant when they were originally written. Now, why would someone feel it necessary to make that clarification? Why not just say the Bible is inerrant, especially since that is how it plays itself out in day-to-day Christian life? The reason is because even those who hold to inerrancy are not convinced that the copies we have today are really inerrant. The impulse for affirming that the autographs were inerrant is understandable because such a view needs to affirm that the text, at least as given by God, is perfect in every sense of the word, but it is my contention that such a qualification actually destroys the whole inerrancist position.

The point is made that the Bible must be affirmed to be true in every sense of the word because if any part is not true in any sense of the word, the authority of the Bible falls to the ground. The reason why this is the case is because, once you have made the argument that one part of the Bible may not be true, we are left with the question, "Why do we say that about this part and not about some other part?" Before long, a questioning of one part of the Bible becomes a questioning of the entire Bible. If we judge the text to be errant based on some extra-biblical criterion, why can't we apply that to the whole of the Bible? And yet, the admission that the Biblical texts are only inerrant in the original autographs brings the problem back in for this simple fact. We do not have access to the original autographs. It is true that the Bible is just as reliable, both from a literary and a historical point of view, as any other ancient text, but what we have is not identical to the original autographs. However, though we have a high degree of certainty that our copies are not the originals, we cannot be certain precisely which parts were in deviation from those autographs. After all, if we could, we could simply restore our copies to the original. However, if our copies are not identical with the autographs, and we can not point to precisely where those discrepancies are to be found, what can stop us from saying that any particular point is in deviation from the originals? Yes, there is an absolutely reliable source of doctrine, but if we have no access to it, we are back to square one.

Another interesting weakness to the inerrancist position is put forward by Donald G. Bloesch, a leading evangelical theologian who passed away just recently. In his Essentials of Evangelical Theology, he says this. "The rise of pseudo-Christian cults that champion biblical inerrancy has been a source of embarrassment to those who contend that this doctrine is the foundation stone and practical guarantee of orthodoxy." He names groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons in the endnote as concrete examples of this tendency. Clearly, Bloesch notes, inerrancy as such does not guarantee orthodoxy. It should be noted that, though the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons also have other authoritative texts outside the Old and New Testaments (or rely on a particular version of them), other groups such as Unitarian (Oneness) Pentecostals fall into the same boat.

There is one more methodological objection to Biblical inerrancy before I go into a concrete analysis of the shortcomings of the position and how I deal with the problems posed by the Biblical text. It is my greatest concern that, in point of fact, Biblical inerrancy ends up being an idolatrous position. My biggest concern is a theological one, not that it takes the Bible very seriously, allowing it supremacy over our culture and our own opinions, but because it also gives it supremacy over Christ himself and transforms him into nothing more than just one more of the doctrines that the Bible teaches and one we should affirm on the basis of that Biblical authority, rather than emphasizing that the Bible is the written witness to the living Word of God that actually encounters us.

An example is appropriate here. A local physician and leader in a nearby local church wrote an essay in defense of Biblical inerrancy which was made part of his church's official resources for its members. It is a fairly long treatment of the issue, but in my judgment only the first few paragraphs actually dealt with the issue of inerrancy and about the alleged difficulties that arise, merely from denying it. The overwhelming majority of the work was concerned with demonstrating the historical reliability of the Bible, especially as compared to other ancient writings. In this, I agree in every regard. There is a reason why, when archaeologists have wanted to locate an ancient city in the Ancient Near East, they go to the Bible first to try to find out where it may be located. There have been doubts about the existence of groups of people spoken of in the Bible that have been consistently cast aside by subsequent research. If we ignore the problem of induction (which plagues all science, not just historical science), there is much to compel us to conclude that any other parts of the Bible that are open to doubt will be vindicated eventually.

What is interesting is that, though this is a fairly common way to articulate and defend Biblical inerrancy, it actually undermines it and proves my point. The question is whether the position of Biblical inerrancy relies on justification from historical and archaeological science to stand. If it does not, it makes one wonder why so much effort is taken to demonstrate the Bible's historicity. If the Bible's authority is supreme, even over historical and archaeological science, why use the results of such science used as reasons one should believe in the inerrancy of the Bible? If the legitimacy of inerrancy does indeed depend on the findings of historical and archaeological science, it undermines the position altogether. After all, it implies that the Bible is, in point of fact, not of ultimate authority but rather that historical and archaeological science has the final word. It is my contention that, in this particular treatment of the issue, the amount of time and energy spent on defending the historical reliability of the Bible shows that inerrancy cannot stand on its own but must be bolstered by an outside authority.

I would like to move now to a concrete examination of how Biblical inerrancy plays itself out, but before I do so, I must make one more observation. The real problem that we are trying to overcome with a doctrine of biblical inerrancy is the problem of interpretation as opposed to looking at what the text actually says. Once we cross the gap from looking at what the words on the page say to what we say they must mean (that is, placing a particular interpretation on the words that cannot be reduced to the words themselves), we have given up inerrancy. Allow me to demonstrate.

1 Kings 7:23 is a relatively unexciting text. It lies merely in the account of the building of Solomon's Temple, specifically within the context of Hiram the bronzeworker making various items for it. It reads this way (NASB), "Now he made the sea of cast metal ten cubits from brim to brim, circular in form, and its height was five cubits, and thirty cubits in circumference." The problem that arises here, that many have noticed, is that the text says that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of this circular object is 3:1, which is not true (that is to say, it is not true in the absolutely most strict sense of "true" which is what we are talking about when we are dealing with Biblical inerrancy), as the ratio is π:1. This is a more striking issue than even the evolution controversy, since we are not concerned here with a question of evidence, but the simple fact that such a ratio is not 3:1.

Now, many people have come up with explanations for this, most commonly by running to 2 Chronicles 4:2 where the same details are given and by pointing out that 2 Chronicles 4:5 names the thickness of the sea as a hand's breadth. The argument goes that, if we take into account the thickness of the brim and compare the inner diameter with the outer circumference, we get a result that is remarkably close to the value for Pi (though again, not exact, though we will not press this point). My concern is that this, first of all, does not deal with the text as it appears in 1 Kings but interprets it in light of another text altogether. At the very least, this technique demonstrates that all parts of the Bible are not evenly weighted, that 2 Chronicles 4:2, 5 is a more important text than 1 Kings 7:23 and the latter should be interpreted in light of the former and not the other way around. I think that this raises the question "Who decides which texts are more accurate and how can we determine which texts are clear and which are unclear?" but that is not the direction I plan to go with this.

The fact of the matter is that, in both texts, the diameter and circumference are mentioned in the same breath, without even so much as a hint that we are not dealing with two different circles. It certainly appears, based only on the text, that regardless of whether we are talking about the inner or the outer circumference, we are dealing with the same circle. To argue that we can use the diameter of one circle and the circumference of another requires that we make an argument that goes above and beyond the words on the page and stems from a preconceived notion of precisely how we must get the words on the page to work out. That is, the text does not stand on its own, but must be interpreted to bring it into line with mathematical observations, so it must be carefully interpreted to make it work out.

So, we are left with a few options if we hope to keep this text while still holding to the innerancist position. The first is to say that, whatever mathematicians have found, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of circles in general is actually 3:1. This falls to the ground unless we wish to subscribe to a wholesale rejection of mathematics, which would be, in my judgment, a foolish thing to do. A more moderate position is to say that, whatever might be the case with other circles, this circle has a ratio of 3:1. This, however, does not solve the problem, because now we have an example where the events and items spoken of in the Bible have no real connection to anything else in our world, which undermines its authority to speak to us.

A third option (which encompasses the standard solution just mentioned above) is to say something along these lines. "Look, if we look at the history of mathematics, we find that human beings have always known that the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle is a little more than 3:1, but they only began to get any kind of conceptual clarity around the issue until about 400AD. The text in question is describing events that took place around 1000BC, 1400 years earlier. Maybe, just maybe, God wasn't concerned with getting such minute issues exactly right, as they have no bearing on any aspect of life, and maybe when the text says 'circle' it means 'something pretty darn close to a circle.' In that case, what good would it have been for God to say 'Make it 10 cubits across and 31.4159265359... cubits around?' None at all. It would only have bewildered the people. What really mattered? Getting the thing built. What harm is there in saying that God simply said, 'Make it ten across and thirty around; it's close enough for jazz?'" This is a position that I wholeheartedly embrace, but there is a serious problem for Biblical inerrancy that only becomes clear when we play out its implications.

The fact of the matter is that I know of no Christian, inerrancist or otherwise, who would say that any aspect of Christian faith stands or falls depending on our interpretation of 1 Kings 7:23. But if we take this third option, we have made a tremendous step. We have said that the text as a text cannot stand on its own; we must interpret it based on what we know to be the case independently of the text itself (whether simply because of mathematical considerations or by saying it must be interpreted in light of another text and is inadequate on its own). We have made a significant leap away from the text as such into the world of interpretation. We have said, "The text might say that the ratio is three to one, but what the text means is that it is close enough or that there is some other explanation." Let us now move on and see what can become of this position.

What would happen if we were to turn to Genesis 1? What if we were to say, "The text might say that creation took place in six days (defined as the sun coming up and going down, implying a day of 24 hours), but what the text means is that creation took place in an orderly way that follows this general pattern but that the word 'day' must be interpreted as 'period of time.'" Not every Christian would object to this, but there are many that would. And yet, at the end of the day, the crucial distinction between what we did with 1 Kings 7:23 and what we have done here are not fundamentally different. We have taken a text and said that it cannot stand on its own but must be interpreted in light of something we know elsewhere. Nothing but a sheer force of will can make someone say, "We can take that step with 1 Kings 7:23 but we cannot take it with Genesis 1."

To take it a step further, let us look at the accounts of Christ's Resurrection from the dead. What if we were to say (as many have done), "The text might say that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead in glory, but what the text means is that, on Easter morning, the disciples had such a profound encounter with the spirit of Christ (not without parallel in the history of Hinduism) that it was as if he had been raised from the dead." This is where many (if not all) Christians, myself included, should stand up and say, "That is going too far." If there is one thing that is necessary to keep the New Testament documents from falling into unintelligibility, it is the physical, literal resurrection from the dead. The resurrection is not just another doctrine to believe, it forms the epistemological cornerstone of all our faith. If Christ was not really raised from the dead, as Paul says "We are of all people most to be pitied."

And yet, if we have made the leap into interpretation based on external insights back in 1 Kings 7:23 (or anywhere else, I might add), on what grounds can we stand and say that a purely metaphorical interpretation of the resurrection is unacceptable? I think that, ultimately, this gets at the heart of the whole impetus of the Biblical inerrancist position. Nobody thinks that the gospel stands or falls with the diameter of the sea in Solomon's Temple, but it certainly does with the resurrection of Christ. How can we be flexible (or even self-consciously non-literal) with the former and not with the latter? It is precisely because it is hard to find a way to do this within the interpretational worldview fostered by Western culture that we find ourselves pushed into an affirmation of inerrancy. We desperately want to defend the resurrection and the incarnation and the only way we can see to do this is to affirm inerrancy.

I think that the whole view of Biblical inerrancy is an inverting of how things ought to be and a simple observation from our most basic Christian experience should help to make it clear. Very few, if any, of us, became Christians because we had a high doctrine of the Bible first and then were convinced of the gospel because it was in the Bible. Most of us encountered the living Lord first and only after that were driven to the text. We do not believe in Jesus because the Bible teaches about him (as if the Bible was the supreme authority and Jesus was merely one of the many doctrines taught in it), but rather we read the Bible because we have been confronted by God in Christ and through the Holy Spirit and the Bible is the only place to turn for reliable information about Christ.

So, as I said at the beginning of this essay, I do not subscribe to Biblical inerrancy. For what it is worth, most inerrancists whom I have taken through this whole line of thought have said that they don't take as rigid a position as I portray. My response is that, in point of fact, whatever term they may use, they are not inerrancists in the classical sense, but are likely infalliblists, which is based on weaker claims (weaker in the sense that they do not claim as much, not that they are weak arguments). One might ask me, "If you reject Biblical inerrancy, do you affirm that the Bible is inspired?" My answer is that yes, I do indeed believe the Bible is inspired. My understanding, however, is that biblical inspiration is much more complex and dynamic that most people think.

As is clear by my argument so far, I do not think that the Bible is primarily inspired in its writing, that is, I do not think that God is the only author of the Bible in the sense that the words are merely a transcript of God's words to the human who actually put pen to paper. Some strands of inerrancy argue that the Bible is even a transcript of the very thoughts of God (a view that is not the mainstream and has disastrous consequences for our doctrine of God). I used to think that this view was a fairly recent one, that it only arose in protest of theological Liberalism. I have been convinced since then by Karl Barth that this has been present in at least a few thinkers throughout the whole history of the church (Barth's argument and historical survey is long, but culminates in his Church Dogmatics I.2, pg. 529-30).

I commented at the beginning that, though I am not an inerrancist, I am also not even close to what many would call a theological Liberal. I believe in a literal incarnation, virgin birth, resurrection, and miracles. In light of this, it should come as no surprise that I do not believe that the Bible is primarily inspired in its reading. That is, though I believe that God actually does speak anew to us as we read the Bible, I do not think that we can reduce all the inspiration of the Bible to the activity of the Spirit as we read the text. After all, if it were nothing more than the Spirit moving and the text is not involved, why should we expect God to speak through the Bible and not other works of literature (such as Huckleberry Finn, as a professor of mine suggested)? I think that, though we cannot reduce the inspiration of the Bible to the text on the page, it must involve it or else we will end up with a view that is even less satisfying than inerrancy.

My understanding of inspiration flows more or less directly from my doctrine of Christ. It is my contention that Christ is, in the final analysis, the real foundation of the Christian faith, that it is not on the inerrancy of the Bible but on the living Person of Christ with which the gospel stands or falls. This manifests itself in dialogue with some Christians as a need to place Sola Christus above Sola Scriptura or even Sola Fidei. It manifests itself in dialogue with others by modifying the statement, "God will never reveal anything to you through his Spirit that is contrary to what is written in the Bible," with "God will never reveal anything to you through his Spirit that is contrary to what he has revealed of himself through Christ." It is given tremendously clear expression in the words of T. F. Torrance. "Now if we think of Jesus Christ in this way as the Truth in his own Person, our statements about him, biblical or theological statements, cannot be true in the same sense as Jesus Christ is true, for they do not have their truth in themselves but in their reference to him away from themselves, and they are true insofar as that reference is truthful and appropriate" (Reality and Evangelical Theology, 124).

My understanding of the role of the Bible is also deeply connected to the Christian doctrine of the ascension of Christ. In Christ, God himself came among us in a particular place and at a particular time. During that time, he taught, he lived and he formed a community of redeemed sinners to take the good news out to the whole world. And then, after he was raised from the dead and met with his disciples for forty days, he ascended to heaven. There is not only a particular location in space-time where God came to meet with us, there is also a particular location in space-time where God departed from being physically present. By doing so, God has marked off the years of Christ's earthly life and ministry to be the covenanted place where he can be met; he has subordinated all theological activity, all pretended claims to inspiration to those concrete years and that concrete revelation of himself in our midst.

It is because of this, because of these Christological considerations, that we cannot do away with the radically important place of the Bible in our Christian lives. To try to avoid the Bible as the source and norm of our Christian knowledge is to try to avoid the centrality of Christ and to look elsewhere to find God, that is, to search for God where God cannot be found. Not only this (as one might claim that the argument so far only sanctions the use of the gospels), but the fact that God did not become incarnate in a cultural vacuum but did so in Israel as a Jew, "born of a woman, born under the law," we must take the Old Testament seriously for without it, we cannot rightly understand the revelation of God in Christ. Additionally, because Christ did not simply come and go, but specifically commissioned the apostles to go and proclaim, their post-resurrection activities and pastoral correspondence is of incredible importance and cannot be jettisoned without tremendous disaster (not to mention the arrogance of assuming that we can understand Christ from our foreign culture and language better than those who lived with him for years). Unless one can find another collection of texts that so comprehensively bears witness, not just to Christ, but to the whole historical context, both before and the generation after Christ, we are not free to dispose of Biblical revelation.

I do not expect that everyone will agree with these arguments, and some may even become angry with me as I have come from a decidedly Evangelical background and am self-consciously departing from orthodoxy as defined by that community. I only stress once again that my doing so is not rooted in any way, shape or form in a rejection of the Bible, but in absolutely radical devotion to Christ as the Lord and center, not only of my life, but of all.