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For The BIBLE Tells Me So - By Rev. Dr. Orville James

Rev. Orville James / May 4, 2008

“All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting ad training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” II Timothy 3:16 & 17

A.J. Jacobs is a NYC writer, and the editor of Esquire magazine. He grew up without any religious training but became increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world. So he decided to dive in headfirst and attempt to obey the bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vowed to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. AND also, to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to play a ten-string harp; to stone adulterers. (I’m pretty sure I’m in trouble… this shirt is a cotton polyester blend; and me playing the harp? Forget it!). A.J. Jacobs wrote a book –‘The Year of Living Biblically: one man’s humble quest to Follow the Bible as literally as possible’; it makes you see history’s most influential book with new eyes. The Bible is many things –probably first and foremost a maze of confusion, and seeming contradictions. We’re going to spend the next two months (9 Sundays) looking at 8 pages of it. Two short letters, from Paul, a great leader in the early church, to Timothy, his young apprentice. Here’s some quick background: Timothy is a young Christian from the region known today as Turkey. He was the son of a Jewish mother and a Greek father. He became an assistant to Paul in his missionary work, traveling around the Mediterranean world to various cities where Paul started churches. In the city of Ephesus, Timothy stayed to nurture and lead the small church they’d begun, Paul kept going. Paul wrote letters back to his young helper, and at least two of them were saved. They’re chock full of information about what was going on back then, what early Christians were trying to sort out, what problems they were having. I hope that you’ll read them. In the coming weeks we’ll look at different themes we can learn from. To launch the entire serieswe decided to start with a verse that proclaims the value of studying the Bible.
LISTEN: “all scripture is inspired by God, and is useful for teaching, for rebuke, for correction and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” II Timothy 3:16 & 17 (RSV)

We need to unpack this a bit. Paul says, “All scripture…” Well, how should we understand that? To Paul and to Timothy, the scriptures were the writings contained in the Old Testament, NOT what he was writing on parchment to his young apprentice. Paul was just writing letters, the most common way of communicating across distances and separation. Yet a few hundred years after Paul wrote his letters, Christian leaders decided they were so valuable, that they should be included with 4 books about Jesus, (the Gospels we call them) and be added to the collection of writings called scripture. So we have these 66 books –some long, detailed history, others brief letters. And it’s complex and confusing –and frankly some of it bugs us. LOT’S of the Bible is confusing and irritating, but I’ll just give you these examples. Here we are about to spend two months on Paul’s letters to Timothy –scripture; and Paul has just told us scripture is inspired by God –and profitable.
OH REALLY? Listen to this – “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” I Timothy 2: 11 & 12.
When I read that here in church, there’s just one word I want to say, YIKES! On the surface of it, we’ve got ourselves a problem don’t we? We could spend the entire sermon on the cultural and historical background to that verse, on what was going on in the specific church in Ephesus, with aggressive domineering women taking over.
Instead though let me read you something else that Paul wrote, also now scripture, from his letter to Galatians “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (3:28; NIV).
So which opinion of Paul do we take as God’s directive for inter-gender relationships? Women should submit and keep silent? OR –followers of Jesus are all equal –there should be no racial, gender or economic boundaries between us – all are equals.
Obviously our church understands scripture as saying we are all equal. Like a lot of you, I’m pretty happy about that –it means we have the best people we can get into leadership –regardless of gender. Those who have been here for a while know that we have been incredibly blessed by our female staff – Heather Mackey (9 years), Rhonda (7 years), Katie (4 years) and I await with anticipation the great contributions of Heather Weaver-Orosz, when her medical recovery is concluded. Then I think about volunteer leadership -3 of the last 5 Board chairs have been women –Tori, Marg Torrance, Lindsay Foster. What a great contribution they have all made. See, I think God’s word to us in scripture is that gender doesn’t matter: for disciples of Christ Jesus, everyone is equal –no discrimination between races, sexes, or economic position. We are one in Christ.”
So What that Galatians scripture does is challenge us to always take the message of the Bible very seriously, without isolating verses and applying them literally.
Paul seems to contradict himself in two separate letters.
Women should submit & be silent –Women are equal.
This happens in the Gospels too. In John 14, Jesus is quoted as saying, “I am the way, the truth and the Life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.”
That can make Christianity seem pretty exclusive, restrictive, and narrow. Some have insisted that unless you are Christian, that God will reject you from Holy love and eternal grace. In this thinking, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, are outside ‘The Way’ to God. However, a few pages before that in chapter 10 Jesus says, “ I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me…I have other sheep that are not of this flock. I must bring them also.” Many scholars and Christian leaders think that Jesus was proclaiming a broad welcome to people of God in other faiths –(other flocks).

So we come back to this verse of Paul “all scripture is inspired by God, and is useful for teaching, for rebuke, for correction and for training in righteousness,”
If that is true, what do we do with these seeming contradictions? And the Old Testament is FULL of them. Rob Bell points out that ‘We all understand that ethnic cleansing is evil, and …yet there are passages in the Bible in which God orders ‘his’ people to kill innocent women and children. The famous story of the people marching around the wall of Jericho, blowing their horns, and then the walls falling down is also a story about slaughter of the innocent. The text reads, “they devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it –men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.” The section ends with this verse: “So the Lord was with Joshua.”
God was with Joshua when he killed all those women and children?
Is God really like that ?
What does a thinking, honest person do with a story like this?

Now I think the Bible is the most amazing , beautiful, deep, inspired, engaging collection of writings ever. This ancient book continues to affect me, and connect me to God in ways no other book does!
But sometimes when I hear people quote the Bible, I just want to throw up. Can I just say that?
Sometimes when people are backing up their points and the Bible is used to prove that they are right, everything within me says, “There is no way that’s what God meant by that verse.”
So how should we resolve these troublesome scriptures? Well –the account of Joshua and the slaughter of the people of Jericho comes from approximately 1300 B.C. In that ancient world, filled with tribal rivalries it was a very violent culture. The people of that day believed that God wanted them to slaughter their enemies, and so they recorded their history to say that.
But 13 centuries later, a man came who taught the opposite –who in fact said, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” This was a new way, and in light of who we believe Jesus was, we now know that God does NOT wish the slaughter of innocent women and children. So scripture must be studied with care, and individual verses cannot be taken in isolation, as the literal directive of God.
I accept St Pauls proclamation that “all scripture is inspired by God, and is useful for teaching, etc…”
And some of the ways it is useful is to show us the mistakes and the Bad ideas of early religious thinking, and teach us how NOT to live. So we must take the entire Bible very seriously, but we must be very careful about interpreting isolated verses literally.
Rob Bell put’s it this way: “the Bible is open-ended. It HAS to be interpreted… It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says. We must first make decisions about what it means at this time, in this place, for these people”. (P46 of “Velvet Elvis: repainting the Christian faith”)
How can we do that? How can we live wisely, according to Paul’s teaching that “all scripture is inspired by God, and is useful for teaching, etc…”?

First of all we need to trust scripture. We need to develop a respect and an affection for the writings in this book, and read and study it with confidence.

INTEGRITY of the CHOSEN Scriptures. Let me say a word in support of the Bible that we have, and by implication, in resistance to recent speculations that other ancient writings which did NOT get into the Bible ought to now be trusted and studied as much. Last year there was much talk about a ‘Gospel of Judas’, and a ‘Gospel of Thomas’. These were being touted as worthy of our time. One United Church minister from Toronto, Rev Gretta Vosper, gets lots of headlines, with statements proclaiming that we need to re-invent Christianity (with or without God) because the New Testament can’t be trusted, and there are many other equally valuable writings. Nope. Wrong Gretta.
The Gospel of Judas was written in the second century AD. 150 & more years after Jesus. We have no text in the original language, just a fourth-century translation. It comes from the Gnostics, who wanted to make Christianity into a secret society.(if you read or saw ‘The DaVinci Code’ you know that it was a pretty sketchy, scary group of people). The early church agreed that Gnosticism was not what Christianity was all about. They chose to focus on The Gospels we have – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They were all written in the first century, early enough that the writers knew Jesus personally, or spoke with many of the eyewitnesses to Jesus life. We have complete manuscript evidence from the fourth century as well as fragments from the second and third centuries, all in the original Greek. So Matthew, Mark, Luke & John were accepted for very good reasons. Other books were screened out for equally good reasons. We can trust the integrity of the Bible we have. St Paul is correct: “ All scripture IS inspired by God and profitable … toward righteousness.”

UNITY of the OVERALL Message & Theme: There is a grave danger in reading the Bible with blinders on. (do you know what blinders are? Leather screens that are strapped onto a horses head to keep them from being distracted by something in their side vision; it radically narrows the horses view, forcing the horse to see only a limited picture –only what is directly in front of them.)
Reading the Bible with blinders causes you to miss the big picture. You see only isolated incidents –innocent people slaughtered supposedly according to God’s will. The BIGGER picture, the longer view says that was NOT God’s will. For a while the ancient people thought that’s what God was like. But later parts of the Bible revealed a different story. When we understand this, we read the entire Bible through the lens of Jesus Christ. He becomes our frame of reference –
And the direction he was pointing humanity indicates where we should be moving in our relationships with God and people.
So Everything in the Bible should be taken very seriously, but Nothing should be understood literally or obeyed blindly, if it seems to contradict what Jesus taught or role-modelled. In the end maybe we should become…

‘Read Letter’ Christians – There are recent translations of the Bible that have the words of Jesus printed in red. Tony Campolo says that for most of us, a good place to start in living the Christian life is to be a ‘Red Letter Christian’. Follow Jesus –do what Jesus says, -live as Jesus taught.
Makes sense to me. Let’s try it.

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