Acts
8:26-39
January 20, 2013
Then an angel of the Lord said to
Philip, ‘Get up and go towards the south to the road that goes down from
Jerusalem to Gaza.’ (This is a wilderness road.) So he got up and went. Now
there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the
Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to
worship and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the
prophet Isaiah.
Then the Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go
over to this chariot and join it.’ So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading
the prophet Isaiah. He asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ He
replied, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ And he invited Philip to get in
and sit beside him.
Now the passage of the scripture that
he was reading was this:
‘Like a sheep he was led to the
slaughter,
and
like a lamb silent before its shearer,
so
he does not open his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied
him.
Who
can describe his generation?
For
his life is taken away from the earth.’
The eunuch asked Philip, ‘About whom,
may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?’
Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to
him the good news about Jesus. As they were going along the road, they came to
some water; and the eunuch said, ‘Look, here is water! What is to prevent me
from being baptized?’ He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them,
Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. When
they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the
eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing.
You know, this story about the Ethiopian eunuch became
the first story of millions of stories like this throughout Christian history.
Over the past 2000 years, an incredible multitude of people have had their
lives transformed simply by reading the Bible. What other book has had this
kind of lasting, transforming power? There’s a reason the Bible is consistently
the top-selling book, year after year. It has a transforming power unlike any
other book.
It’s not just people like the Ethiopian eunuch who’ve
been transformed. It has transformed people you know, too. For example, do you
remember Pat Summerall? You may remember him as a football broadcaster. He was
paired with Tom Brookshier for many years, and then with John Madden. He was
known for his deep voice and casual manner of doing the play-by-play. He also
has had the honor of broadcasting 16 superbowls. He’s retired now (when I
originally gave this sermon I mistakenly said that he had died), and living in
retirement. He’s also struggled with health problems from a bad liver, the
result of many years of hard drinking.
Summerall had a difficult life growing up. Due to his
parents’ unstable marriage, he was raised by his aunt and grandmother, and at
one point was almost put up for adoption. He also was born with a clubfoot. To
correct it he had to undergo a series of painful operations, which today are
commonplace, but in the 1930s were very experimental. After healing, he
discovered that he was a good athlete and fell in love with football. He
eventually played at the University of Arkansas, then professionally for the
Detroit Lions, the Chicago Cardinals (who eventually became the St. Louis, then
Arizona, Cardinals), and finished his career with the New York Giants.
In retirement from professional football he became a
broadcaster. And he was great at it. The problem, for him, was that the
combination of residual body pain from his playing days, and long, boring hours
in hotel bars as he traveled to announce football games, Summerall became an
alcoholic. He was a functional alcoholic, meaning that he was able to work and
succeed, but the drinking was taking a toll on his body, his family, and his
whole life. Eventually a family intervention convinced him to check into the
Betty Ford Clinic so that he could become sober.
In interviews he has often said that he is deeply
thankful for the help he received at the clinic, but that what really
transformed him was the fact that in the clinic he only had two books to read,
and little else to do for entertainment. His choice was to read the Big Book of
Alcoholics Anonymous of the Bible. He read both, but it was his reading of the
Bible that really transformed him.
Summerall grew up in a religious family, like many people
did. And like many kids growing up in church, he didn’t necessarily let the
religion penetrate deeply. He kept his religion at a surface level. But when
his life needed to be transformed, that’s when he opened up and discovered God
in a whole new way, simply by reading the Bible.
The fact is that reading the Bible transforms people’s
lives, and yet it is not an easy book to read. I know this from personal
experience. I hadn’t really read the Bible at all until the summer before going
to seminary. That summer I read the Bible cover-to-cover, and I figure that I
understood about 20% of it. For the most part it was REALLY HARD to do. Each
summer afterward, while in seminary, I read it again, cover-to-cover, each time
understanding it a bit more, but still being perplexed quite a bit of the time.
The fact is that some parts of the Bible are very easy to
understand, while some are really hard to understand. For example, when I read
the prophets, it was confusing. There are seventeen of them, and they all sound
the same. They all just seemed so ticked off all the time. I couldn’t
understand why. It wasn’t till much later, when I learned more about each one,
that I discovered their anger had to do with the injustices they saw toward the
poor, the lack of faith they saw in the Jewish people, and the personal attacks
many of them suffered.
What also makes the Bible hard to read and understand is
that some parts are timeless, while some are completely bound in their times.
For example, the Sermon on the Mount is timeless in its wisdom. But some, like Deuteronomy
21:18-21, teach completely time-bound messages, such as “If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his
father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his
father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of
his town at the gate of that place. They shall say to the elders of his town,
‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a
glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death.
So you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel will hear, and be
afraid.” Stoning an unruly child may be biblical, but it certainly isn’t
acceptable in our day and age.
Understanding how the Bible came to be formed actually
explains why it’s so hard to just sit down, read, and understand it. The fact
is that the Bible is probably the most complex book ever written because it
wasn’t really written as a book. The Bible is a collection of books that span a
1000-year period, but contains orally handed down stories and beleifs that may
be as much as 1000 years older. All of these books are written not by one
person, but by hundreds of people. And the Bible doesn’t necessarily put all of
their writings in a nice, neat order. Sometimes it throws two different,
contrasting stories, one after the other, with no explanation or determination
of which one is right.
As a result, the Bible does not present one theological
and spiritual perspective. It provides many perspectives. For example, just
looking at the first five books of the Bible, there are as many as 4 different
perspectives, all written by a collection of people, and all jammed together.
For example, there is the Elohist perspective. You know you are reading the
works of an Elohist writer whenever you see God being called “God.” If you see
a sentence that says, “And God said….” then you are pretty sure it was written
by an Elohist. Whoever these writers were, they were called Elohists because,
writing in Hebrew they used the name, “El-ohim” for God. Their understanding of
God was more transcendent. They saw God as being somewhat detached from the
world, residing in heaven, and having created everything as good. You find
Elohist writing in the first chapter of Genesis, as God creates the world in
seven days.
The Jawist perspective is marked by those writings in
which the name for God is translated as “the LORD.” That is the way the Bible
normally translates the name, YHWH, or Yahweh. You find this in the second
chapter of Genesis, which tells the Garden of Eden story of Creation. Thus, in
the very beginning of Genesis you have two different perspectives on creation, each
telling completely different stories. We modern Americans have a need to jam
them together to make one story, but the fact is that they come from two
different Jewish religious perspectives, and each one tries to teach a
different view on God.
There is also the Priestly perspective, which you find an
example of in the Noah story. The original story comes from the Elohist
tradition, but there is a priestly version that is different, and even calls
God by the name YHWH rather than El-ohim. In the Elohist version Noah puts two
pairs of every creature on the ark. The priestly version puts seven pairs of
every ritually clean animal, and two pairs of every ritually unclean animal.
The priestly writers cared deeply about ritual purity, so for them it was a way
of telling the Noah story while emphasizing the importance of purity. Again,
the Bible doesn’t try to reconcile the two stories. It puts them side-by-side,
and this is what makes reading the Bible hard. The priestly tradition is seen
mostly in the book of Exodus, where the written laws emphasize what we need to
do to maintain purity in our lives.
The fourth perspective is the Deuteronomic perspective.
The Deuteronomists cared most about the Law and obedience to the Law. The
deuteronimic laws are different from those of the priestly laws, which care
about purity. The Deuteronomic laws flow more from the Ten Commandments, and
have to do with relationships within the Jewish culture and religion. You find
this perspective mostly in the book of Deuteronomy.
So, you can see how complex just the first five books of
the Bible are. Beyond there, you also have other perspectives: Wisdom,
Prophetic, Exilic, Post-Exilic, Gospel, and Apostolic. Even when it comes to
the gospels, there are four different perspectives. Again, we try to jam them
together to make one, nice, neat version, but the Bible doesn’t do that. No
wonder so many people want to read the Bible, but aren’t really sure how to do
so in a way that makes it understandable. The Bible isn’t a book like other
books.
All of these different perspectives aren’t a weakness.
They are the Bible’s strength. The fact is that the Bible is a 1500-year
collection of people’s experiences and understandings about God, life, and the universe.
Any other book about God and life, including mine, are time-bound and
culture-bound. Even the holy books of other religions are limited. The Quran
was reportedly dictated to the prophet Mohammed over a 23-year period. The word
“Quran” itself literally means “the recitation.” The holy book of the Hindus,
the Bhagavad Gita, was written at some particular point between 800 and 500
B.C., but is said to be the dictation of a story by Krishna. Again, these come
from one religious, spiritual, and theological perspective. The Bible is
incredibly expansive in its view, and will not force people to look at it from merely
one perspective, not matter how much we demand that it does.
What makes reading the Bible even more confusing is our
contemporary tendency to only read it from one religious perspective when there
are so many different perspectives. There’s the Protestant perspective, which
tends to make the Bible the central authority while recognizing all the
different perspectives of the Bible I just spoke about (that’s why you’re
hearing this sermon, which you wouldn’t from preachers coming form other
traditions). There is the Roman Catholic perspective, which holds the Bible up,
but treats it as equal to their religious tradition and theology. Then there is
the Evangelical perspective, which is concerned with simplifying the Bible for
those who are new to faith. As a result
they tend to homogenize the Bible by insisting on seeking the one, true
perspective on interpretation. There’s the Pentecostal perspective, which
emphasizes the work of the Holy Spirit. Add to these the Eastern Orthodox
perspective, and even an atheistic perspective (there are atheists who do read
the Bible, but treat it merely as a great piece of literature or a flawed book
of history). What this leaves us with is a book that offers a wide variety of
perspectives on God, that is interpreted by a wide variety of religious
traditions. This makes the Bible even harder to read and understand.
Brian McLaren, a pastor and author who has written a
number of really good books, talks about all of this in his book, A New Kind of Christianity. He says that
the modern problem is that we tend to treat the Bible like a constitution, much
in the way we use the U.S. Constitution. When we argue over the Bible, we pick
and choose passages that promote our belief, even if another passage of the
Bible might conflict with it. He says that treating the Bible like this forces
it into a use that it’s not designed for. It’s not a constitution, but the greatest
holy library ever collected. And just as in a library where we don’t demand
that the different books agree perfectly, but instead read them all to learn
and grow, we should treat the Bible as a great collection of books to grow from.
In essence, the Bible isn’t a book but a collection of holy books designed to
help us grow ever closer to God by learning how to live a God-filled,
God-permeated life.
All of this makes the Bible a really hard book to read,
no matter how much it can transform us. We want it to be a simple, easy book on
spirituality, much like the books we might find at Barnes and Noble or at
Amazon.com. But it’s not. The reason is that those books take piece of the
Bible and distill them down so that they are easier for us to read, but in the
process they always lose the depth and breadth of the Bible.
So what do you do? Preachers like me keep telling you that
you’re supposed to read the Bible, but then I’ve just said that it’s hard to
read the Bible. Let me simplify it for you, without trying to reduce the
Bible’s teachings. If you are going to read the Bible, read it the way the
eunuch did, that Pat Summerall did, and that so many others have done over the
past 2000 years. Read it to discover what God is saying to you about how you
are to live your life. Don’t read it as a constitution telling you how to argue
over the great political and social issues of our day. I’m not saying to ignore
these issues when trying to figure out what you believe about them. I’m just
saying that if you really want to understand the Bible, read it with YOU in
mind. Here are three suggestions:
First, start with the gospels and get to know them the
best. Don’t do what I did before going to seminary, where you read it cover to
cover. That just makes things harder.. Start with Matthew, then move onto Mark,
then to Luke, and then to John. When you’re finished, move onto Acts. Then
start all over again. Whenever you feel that you have the gospels down, then
move onto the rest of the letters of the New Testament. Then, when you’re ready
to go into the Old Testament, start with the psalms and Genesis, and move
forward from there. Make this a ten-year project, not a one-year project.
Second, use a study Bible. I don’t think it matters all
that much which kind you use. There are literally hundreds of good ones. I use
the Life with God Bible, but there
are other ones such as the Spiritual
Formation Bible, the Women’s Devotional Bible, the Men’s Devotional Bible, the
Harper Study Bible, and so many more.
The point is to pick a version and go with it. You’ll learn from any of
them.
Finally, whichever one you use, and whatever part of the
Bible you read, read it “spiritually.” That means reading it slowly,
reflectively, prayerfully. Take your Bible-reading in small chunks. You may
spend 30 minutes in reading, but only read for ten minutes while you pray and
think over what you’ve read. And you may only cover a chapter, a paragraph, a
sentence. Break it up by reading what feels natural. You don’t have to just
follow the chapters and numbers. The whole point is to read in a way that helps
you hear what God is saying to you about your life, and let God teach you what
God wants you to know so that you can live a full, loving, joyful life.
You don’t have to become a Bible expert to grow from the
Bible. You only have to read and listen.
So, to answer the question in the title of this
sermon, we bother to read the Bible because the Bible teaches us how to live.
Amen.
