Why Bother,... Reading the Bible

Click Here to Listen to This Sermon

-->

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.

Why Bother,... with Worship?

Click Here to Listen to This Sermon

-->

Matthew 6:1-6

January 13, 2013

Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.

So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

      And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

            Why are you here?  Seriously,… what do you expect to get by coming to worship? Are you here out of guilt, thinking that something bad will happen to you if you don’t come to church? Are you hoping that your sins will be forgiven? Are you hoping to find God?  You could be home, sitting in your jammies, enjoying another cup of coffee. Why get up early one more morning of the week? Don’t you get up early enough five other days of the week? Why are you here?

            Actually, you’re here to get healthier, and you’re doing it in more ways than just spiritually. Did you know that coming to church on Sunday actually makes you healthier? It does, and that’s not just my opinion. There has been a lot of research done over the past 25 years showing that going to church on a regular basis makes you a healthier person. David Larson, M.D., Ph.D., who died a few years ago, discovered this through his research. He was a medical doctor and psychiatrist who was trained by, and worked at, the Duke University Medical School before he eventually became the director of the National Institute of Healthcare Research. As a young psychiatrist, he had often heard his colleagues say that religious pursuits were a sign of mental weakness and disorder, and that people who were truly mentally healthy didn’t need religion.

            Like a good scientist he decided to see if research supported that conclusion. He did a survey of hundreds of scientific studies testing the impact of religion on health, and he found the exact opposite to be true. Religion didn’t make us weaker. It made us healthier. He found hundreds of studies showing that when extraneous factors were controlled for (a fancy way of saying that they made sure there couldn’t be some other reason for the result), the research overwhelmingly showed that people who attended church were healthier than those who didn’t. He found that obese churchgoers lived longer than obese non-churchgoers. He found that smoking churchgoers were healthier than non-smoking non-churchgoers. In every survey the health differences were significant. So just by being here in worship you are healthier than those who aren’t here.

            It’s not just adults who get health benefits from being in church. So do kids. When you are willing to brave the morning arguments to get your kids up and out to church, you make a difference in every part of their lives. A few years ago I was interested in seeing what the connection between going to church and childrens’ lives was, and what I found was pretty interesting. Google “church attendance and health,” and see what you find. One website I found cited the benefits found that church attendance:

§  increases the average life expectancy of your children by 8 years;

§  significantly reduces their use and risk from Alcohol, Tobacco and Drugs;

§  dramatically lowers their risk of suicide;

§  helps them rebound from depression 70% faster;

§  dramatically reduces their risk for committing a crime;

§  improves their attitude at school and increase their school participation;

§  reduces their risk for rebelliousness;

§  reduces the likelihood that they would binge drink in college;

§  improves their odds for a "very happy" life;

§  provides them with a life-long moral compass;

§  and even gets them to wear their seatbelts more often.

            As the website says, “These findings are supported by research from Duke University, Indiana University, The University of Michigan, The Center for Disease Control, Barna Research Group, and the National Institute for Healthcare Research” (http://www.sundaysoftware.com/stats.htm).

            Going to church makes you healthier, it makes your kids healthier, but can’t you get the same benefits just by being spiritual but not religious? You would think doing your own thing spiritually, by virtue of being spiritual, would offer you the same health benefits, but it doesn’t. According to a recent article in the British Journal of Psychiatry being spiritual but not religious is not the same as being religious, whether you are or aren’t spiritual at the same time. In fact, the “spiritual but not religious” struggle significantly more with drug abuse and addictions, as well as with mental issues  (http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/09/the-spiritual-but-not-religious-likely-to-face-mental-health-issues-drug-use-study-says/?iref=allsearch). 

            But I know you’re not here to get healthier. You’re here to get God, and the health benefits of church are a side effect. Why do we bother with worship? We bother with worship because it is the best way of finding God. I don’t say this because I’m a church guy, I say this because I’ve experienced it. You’ve heard me talk about this before. I walked away from the church at 15 and decided to do spirituality on my own. For nine years I described myself as spiritual but not religious. But then I went through a crisis. And it was in the midst of that crisis that I realized something significant about why religion has such a powerfully positive influence on people’s lives.

            It’s not just that religious worship helps us find God, but it helps us find God TOGETHER. This is a really significant point. One of the problems facing those who call themselves spiritual but not religious is that they pick and choose beliefs and practices from different religions, but in the process they generally ignore one of the most important attributes. Every religion, whether you are talking about Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Native American, or any other, emphasizes community. They emphasize the communal nature of seeking and finding the Holy, the Divine,… God. Every single one of them emphasizes that you cannot be truly spiritual if you do it alone. There may be times when adherents are sent out by themselves, but that’s an episode in which they leave the community to eventually return to the community. Whether it is Buddhists worshiping in a temple, Muslims in a mosque, Jews in a synagogue, Native Americans in a sweat lodge, or Christians in a church, it is essential that we seek and worship God TOGETHER.

           

            This insight was so significant to me, and my experience of finally deciding to relent on my solo journey in order to join a church, so profound, that I used the experience as the basis of my Ph.D. dissertation. This is a 400-page dissertation exploring the movement from an individualistic to a communal spirituality.

            What I learned at 24 is the age-old message of church. This is that we can try to find God on our own, but we can’t truly find achieve it on our own because finding God is communal. That is why worship is so important to spiritual growth.

            Worship is unlike any other event in life because it’s sole focus is the connection between God and us. What other activity in your week do you take part in where connecting with God is the focus? There is no other event in the week that emphasizes that as a group. Worship offers practices that are designed to hit us at the conscious, subconscious, and soul levels. Think about the whole worship experience.

            Our church’s worship begins even before you walk into the sanctuary. We have meditative music playing throughout the church. It is intended to put you in the right spirit. As you walk through Fellowship Hall, we place tablecloths on the tables that reflect the church season, and you see a large, lighted stained glass window of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Walking into the sanctuary you enter a space filled with religious symbols and artwork, from banners, to Celtic crosses, to stained glass, to special lighting. The whole idea is to get you centered and ready to encounter Christ before we start worshiping.

            After we do the announcements, we sing a chant together and do a silent prayer. The point is to help us become quiet and centered so that we are in the right place to open up to God. We read passages from the Bible to get us thinking about God. We then sing a hymn meant to get us praising God. We confess sins so that we can put aside our pride and selfishness. Then we do a children’s sermon so that we can speak to kids about God. We do an anthem, which is designed to inspire us and prepare us to reflect on God’s Word. The Sermon is designed to hit our cognitive brains, and to get us thinking about God, our lives, what the purpose of life is, how we can connect with God, and so much more. The offering is designed to give us a chance to practice generosity—to give back to God. The prayers and sacraments are meant to get us to go deeper in God. And then the final prayer is to prepare us to take this hour into our hearts and manifest it throughout our lives. What other practices do you engage in throughout your life that has this kind of God intention and intensity? Worship isn’t just a tradition or a ritual. It is essential to connecting with God because it hits every part of our being: our conscious minds, our subconscious minds, our emotions, our thinking, our bodies, and our very core.

            Like exercise, eating right, and getting enough sleep, worship is a discipline that leads to spiritual growth. And like exercise, it requires a willingness to do it regularly. It’s something offered to you to help you get healthier in every way. The key is that it’s something we offer, but don’t force on anyone. We don’t take attendance in order to determine whether you have or haven’t been her. And if you stop coming, we don’t run out to find you or find out why. It’s not because we don’t care about you. It’s not because we’re ignorant. It’s because we understand that what we offer is an opportunity to grow closer to God, but that you bear the responsibility to take up that offer. You have to develop the maturity to come to God with passion, and if you can’t, you’re responsible for asking us to help you, which is a big part of what we do. Rev. Frierson and I are here to primarily help people connect with God. If you need us to run after you to get you to go to church, you aren’t ready to meet God. Worship is about being mature and seeking to grow more spiritually mature. If your maturity requires us to coax you to church, you won’t grow, and our efforts are wasted.

            The fact is that taking up the discipline of worship is hard. There are a lot of forces that keep us from wanting to worship. Many are internal, but others are external. Even if we do attend worship, there are forces within and without that keep us from wanting to worship with openness, passion, and a deep desire to connect with God. Let me show you what I mean.

            A number of years ago there was an older woman who decided to clean out her basement freezer. At the bottom of it she found a Butterball turkey she had put there 23 years earlier and had forgotten about. She didn’t want to throw it out and waste it, but she wasn’t sure if it was still edible. So she decided to call Butterball’s helpline.

            The man on the line asked how he could help, and she told him about her 23-year-old turkey, asking, “Can I still eat it?” He said, “Did you keep it below zero all that time, or were there any significant power outages that might have allowed the turkey to thaw?” “Nope, it’s been in deep freeze all these years,” she replied. He paused and said, “Well, then it’s probably good to eat, but it’s not going to taste very good. I mean,… it has been sitting in a freezer for a really long time. “ She replied, “That’s okay. I’ll just give it to my church.”

            This is how many people are with worship. They don’t come giving their best. They give their frozen, stale parts to God in worship. They see worship and church as secondary activities that don’t really matter that much as long as they do what’s necessary. Their focus isn’t on connecting with God. Their focus is on slogging through.

            As flawed as it is, worship is here to keep us in connection with God. In a funny way, some of the people who attend the least understand this the most. It’s not a huge number, but we have some people in the church who show up mainly when their life is going wrong. They go through a crisis, and then they start coming to church. After a bit their lives improve. Unfortunately, they then disappear until the next crisis. But they still have a very clear understanding that church helps them connect with God when in need. It’s just that they walk away from that connection when they no longer feel that need. For that short while, though, they understand the need to come to God with passion.

            As we ending to all this, I have a question I want you to reflect on. Think about how you are when you come to church. When you worship, do you come to really worship?

            Amen.

Bearing the Light of Christ

Click Here to Listen to This Sermon

-->

Ephesians 3:1-13

January 6, 2013

This is the reason that I Paul am a prisoner for Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles—for surely you have already heard of the commission of God’s grace that was given to me for you, and how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I wrote above in a few words, a reading of which will enable you to perceive my understanding of the mystery of Christ. In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become fellow-heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

Of this gospel I have become a servant according to the gift of God’s grace that was given to me by the working of his power. Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him. I pray therefore that you may not lose heart over my sufferings for you; they are your glory.

             A number of years ago there was a mother who volunteered a lot in her church. And when she did she would bring her young daughter with her. The daughter loved being in the large, stately sanctuary of the church. She especially liked to study the stained glass windows. One day, while her mother was doing something to set up the front of the church for communion, her daughter pointed to the windows and asked, “Mom, who’s that?” “That’s St. Peter,” her mother replied. “And that?” “That’s St. Paul.” “And that, and that, and that, and that?” “That’s St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John.” The girl continued to study the windows for a long time. The next Sunday in worship, as they were singing a hymn, the girl tugged on her mom’s sleeve and said, “Mom, Mom. I know what a saint is. A saint is someone the light shines through.”

            A saint is someone the light shines through. That little girl captured the essence of who we are called to be as Christians. When you think of a saint, what do you think of? Most of us are used to thinking of them in the way the Roman Catholic Church sees saints. They believe that saints are those who have been truly great Christians who exceeded, and transcended, normal life. Many of them did miraculous things during their lives. Others were incredible teachers. Others lived exemplary lives. While these are people truly to be admired and held up as examplars on how to live the Christian life, the Bible has a different definition for what a saint is. In the New Testament, a saint is simply someone who has faith. Literally, it is someone God has made sacred through faith and grace. You are a saint already, if you are a person of faith. You don’t have to die to be a saint. And as saints, we are called to be people through whom God’s light shines through.

            What really binds us together as Christians is our willingness to let God’s light shine through us. And what harms us as Christians are those times when we unplug from God, turning off our lights. I believe in this idea so much that you’ll notice that at the end of the worship services, during my closing prayer, I often ask God to help us to be light-bearers and Christ-bearers to the world. We are called to be people through whom God’s light shines through.

            Jesus said that we are called to be light in his Sermon on the Mount: “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:14-16).

            The more I study the Bible, theology, spirituality, history, and human nature, the less confident I’ve become that anyone has the right answers. We’re all so divided by our theologies and beliefs, and yet we’re all so convinced that it’s we who have the right answers. I’ve seen this early on in my adulthood in the division between Catholics and Protestants. Having married a Roman Catholic, who’s family is VERY Irish Catholic, and having gone to a Catholic university for my Ph.D., I’ve spent a lot of time around Catholics who are so very sure that the only true way to God is through Roman Catholicism. And I’ve been around just as many Protestants, if not more (because I AM Protestant), who are so very sure that to be Protestant, or a strain of it (Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran, etc…), is the only true way to God. I’ve also come across conservative and liberal, evangelical and progressive, Protestants who are all so certain that their understanding of God, Christ, the Bible, and life is the only true belief. How can each one be absolutely right and the other so wrong?  

            For a long time I’ve been fascinated by how we form opinions, and the certainty we have about truth. A significant influence in this has been my interest in Near Death Experiences, or NDEs. I don’t read as much about them as I used to in my 20s and 30s, but periodically I’ll read a new book, or look online for NDEs. One of the things that has been consistent among virtually all those who’ve experienced NDEs is how they feel like they entered a heaven, a dimension, a… something, where they were able to access instantaneous answers on the truth of everything. They consistently say that the beliefs and truths they thought mattered so much didn’t. They discovered that what they thought was true wasn’t. At the same time, they all emphasize learning the lesson that what matters is love, being light to others, and being a positive, compassionate presence in life. In other words, it didn’t matter so much what they believed as it did how they lived.

            In our Science and Spirituality group, we are about to start studying a book by a Harvard-trained neurosurgeon who worked both at the Harvard University and University of Virginia medical centers. His name is Eben Alexander, M.D. He describes himself as having been a typical rationally-minded, scientifically-oriented doctor who believed in the here and now. He went to church, but only on Christmas and Easter, and mainly out of obligation. His belief about NDEs was that they were simply the musings or hallucinations of an oxygen starved brain. His belief was that the brain did this to comfort someone who was dying.

            That all changed when he contracted a certain strain of bacterial, e. coli., meningitis that put him in a seven-day coma. He literally had no brain activity other than his brainstem for seven days. He came out of it after being on the point of death. When he got better, he studied his seven-day EEGs, and realized that there was no way his brain could have conjured up hallucinations. There was no activity there to conjure anything. But during those seven days he had intense experiences of heaven, experiences he said were more real than what we experience now. Like other NDE experiences, he received instantaneous answers. And like so many others, he said that what seemed to matter was not beliefs about economics, politics, theology, or the rest, but how we live and care about others.

            He also had another interesting experience. He said that the whole time he was in heaven (or whatever it was), he kept hearing this incredible music. It had a melody that was both incredibly simple and complex. He couldn’t remember the tune, but it haunted him. Then, the first Sunday he went to church after coming out of his coma he heard that music in every hymn and anthem. He said that it wasn’t the tune that was the same, but the spirit of the music. He could hear heaven in them. And when he sang, which he hadn’t done much of previously, he felt as though he was singing the holy

            What I have become confident of is that what matters is not so much the purity of our belief, but the brightness of our light. I think that in the end, Christian faith comes down to the simplest thing, which is to what extent are we light to the world, radiating God’s love and grace?

            Do our small actions throughout the day—how we treat co-workers, how we treat family members, how we treat people who struggle, and even how we treat people who bug us—shine with love and light? No matter what we do, does is reflect God’s light? If we are a teacher, an accountant, a writer, a nurse, a store owner, a computer programmer, a student, a secretary, a plant manager, an architect, an engineer, or a pastor, do we shine through with God’s light?

            It’s not the rightness of your opinions, or the purity of your belief, that matter. It’s the ability of your words and actions to bring light to other people’s lives. I believe that how brightly we shine all has to do with the extent to which we are able to pause spiritually long enough to be light-bearers and Christ-bearers.

            As a final thought, I want to share some musings on phrases. I’ve been captured by how some phrases that seem so certain can be changed if we just pause for the Spirit. For example, look at this phrase below, which reflects the beliefs of so many atheists:

GOD IS NOWHERE

           

            If we take that phrase and pause with it, we can discover in it a whole different idea:

GOD IS NOW HERE

           

            Many agnostics, and those who are religious, often believe that God is not part of this world, and that God is up in heaven, watching and waiting for us to die in order to judge us. They are like the Deists, the movement that held many of our founding fathers, believing that once God created the world, then God stopped being part of the world. So they would believe in the phrase below,

GOD IS APART

            Again, if you pause for the Spirit, you can discover another message:

GOD IS A PART

            In other words, God is a part of our lives, not apart from our lives.

            Each of us is called to be like stained-glass—to shine with God’s light so that we brighten people’s lives. Look at your life and ask yourself one simple question: “With what kind of light do I shine?”

            Amen.