Stewards of the Story
Psalm 119:97-104
This week I told a friend that I wanted to preach a sermon expressing my great love for the Bible.
Being a preacher-type herself, she got very excited and asked what the Gospel text was.
I responded, “I’m not using the reading from Luke this week—
it’s one of those confusing parables I just hate.”
Ironic, eh?As much as I claim my love for it, there remain parts of scripture I just can’t comprehend—
passages that make no sense to my social conscience
or don’t reconcile with my experience or understanding of God.
So I avoid them.
Unlike today’s psalm, which I clearly love J.
You may be familiar with Psalm 119 as the longest psalm in the Bible.
176 verses.
176 tedious verses, I sometimes think,
when I’m flipping through, skimming the Psalms for some briefer inspiration.
As you pray or meditate through this psalm—because meditation it what it seems most to be meant for—
you find that almost every one of those 176 verses contains either the word “torah” or one of its many synonyms: decrees, statutes, commandments, precepts, ordinance, word.
And while “torah” has generally been translated as “law,” it actually holds much more meaning—
God’s on-going instruction, God’s part of the conversation.
Psalm 119 has only one theme: the relationship between God’s teachings and human response:
“Oh how I love your law!...How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!”
When was the last time you experienced the Bible with such sensual delight?
Sometimes, when I hear progressive Christians speak of the Bible and how they learned to read it,
it sounds more like they’ve tasted brussels sprouts or liver and onions than honey—
something supposedly good for you but to be avoided if at all possible.
We seem to be anxious of opening the Bible, as if we were reaching into a bag of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, hoping for lemon meringue but fearing it’ll be earwax.
Scripture is full of challenge, that’s clear.
As I admitted, I myself was caught, this week, with my unthinking response about a parable that makes
no blessed sense to me—yet I still stand by my claim to love the Bible as a whole!
I love that we have these stories of ancient people—
our ancestors in faith!—
struggling to make meaning out of their lives just like we do.
Why me? (-Job)
Why my family? (-Joseph)
Do I have to? (-Jonah)
How can we make this world better? (-Every one of the disciples, including Judas).
I love that we have stories that are about heroes coming to the rescue,
either by hot-headed action or with deliberated wisdom—
Samson and Deborah and Ehud and Jael.
To me their stories seem a bit like the stories of the knights of the round table.
I know I’ll never find myself actually relating to or putting myself personally in to the medieval stories—
I’m too feminist to be a Guinevere in distress and
too peace-loving to be a broadsword-bearing brute—
none of the stories portray really great people!
But they’re very human people, so I still love the Arthurian legends.
And I love the campfire reminiscences passed down by our Israelite ancestors,
even though they’re often messy in their values,
frustrating in their cultural standards and
sometimes downright violent.
So is history.
So is the present.
And what can I discern from their responses to life about how I might respond, or what I might avoid?
~~~
These past 3 weeks our children in Sunday school have been learning several stories about David from the 1st book of Samuel. Sarah Wernsing, Plymouth’s amazing Children & Youth Ed. Director, has prepared some challenging texts to make sense for kindergarten through 5th graders.
In fact—her renderings are good for all of us!
One was about friendship, and how, sometimes, it faces obstacles that try to keep us from getting close.
David and Jonathan were supposed to be enemies because Jonathan’s father, the king, didn’t trust David.
How can friendship overcome the prejudices of previous generations? How is God like a very good friend to us? How can we become better bearers of friendship?
Another lesson taught about anointing—a blessing from God—when young David was chosen above his older brothers because of his inner gifts, his character, rather than the outside appearances that society still considers so very important.
And the very familiar story about David facing down Goliath—
how can our faith help us face down the very real giants in our lives?
I recognize that each of these stories, when taken in context, is bothersome in very real ways—and we know that David, as a grown man and king of Israel, abuses his power and does some awful things
(much like what people in power do today).
So how can I remain frustrated, even appalled by this collection of stories, and still love them?
How can I learn and grow from an ancient people’s experiences and expectations of God
while still wanting to rail at them for believing and acting as they sometimes did?
How can I keep returning again and again, still finding beauty and hope there?
It sounds like every good relationship that has ever existed.
A relationship.
Not passive and accepting of everything, even when it’s harmful—
because we know sometimes relationships are abusive,
and the most loving thing to do is get out!
The Bible has been used to harm…
…but we now get to help shape this relationship—
you get to choose to learn from it and argue with it
yet never give up and kick it out of your life.
It’s the same way in healthy relationship with a parent or sibling or child or spouse or friend:
Frustration and growth and confusion and learning and apology for being wrong
and discomfort at being challenged and in everything the promise—the covenant—
of love love love.
Tough love. Tender love. Comforting love. Eternal love.
We are in relationship with scripture.
Or we should be. (Yes, folks, I just should on you all.)
The Bible demands a relationship with us.
Throughout the Gospels we see Jesus wrestling with these texts—
“You have heard it said…,” he says in his sermon on the mount—
then he deliberately argues with the scripture he’s quoted;
then later he turns around and states: “the greatest commandment is this…,”
and he quotes directly from Deuteronomy.
He’s in relationship with his text.
And as we all know, there is both joy and crankiness in relationships. J
~~~
You’ve often heard us say that at Plymouth we take the Bible seriously, not literally.
The UCC’s former General Minister and President, John Thomas, has written a great article about how to do just that. In a seeming statement of the obvious, Thomas writes:
“Taking the Bible seriously means to read it…. [But] far too often our reading of the Bible is really an effort to make use of the Bible [—to seek answers to troubling questions, to justify our opinions]…. The reading that takes the Bible seriously…is a kind of attentiveness to the narrative in its broad sweep, and to its text in all its intricate detail, that make the Bible more a companion than a tool, something we listen to, attend to long before there is anything we can ‘do’ with it, and long after its ‘usefulness’ has become dated”[i] (emphases mine).
In other words, savor it like a drop of honey—
don’t gulp it down like it’s prune juice.
Enjoy its sweetness, not for its health benefits, but for its flavor.
As Christians, we must be in relationship with the Bible.
And we, having inherited the scripture from our ancestors in the faith story, then become part of the story, and pass the relationship on to our descendents.
~~~
Frederick Buechner has described the Bible’s prophet-preachers as
“put[ting] words to both the wonder and the horror of the world, and the words can be…interpreted, passed on, understood, but because these words are poetry, are image and symbol as well as meaning, are sound and rhythm, maybe above all are passion, they set echoes going the way a choir in a great cathedral does, only it is we who become the cathedral and in us that the words echo.”[ii]
How can we feel like we are that cathedral through which God’s Word echoes?
How can we taste for ourselves the honey that the psalmist is so very passionate about?
Both of our education directors, Sarah and Mark, have offered concrete insights
into this through their Placard articles this month;
and one of my own favorite ways to reenter relationship with scripture is at the very basic level—
reading the Children’s Story Bible that we’ve put in the pews alongside the NRSV.
And then… and then there is the psalmist’s own way of entering the relationship:
“it is my meditation all day long… it is always with me….”
 |
| Saint John's Bible |
This scripture is our inheritance—
a relationship that spans millennia—
cherished and kept alive.
May we take it seriously
and pass it on to our own children
in faith. Amen.
0 comments:
Post a Comment