Christian Middle

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

Last week I had the privilege of speaking to Eastern University’s Campolo Scholars – students who are considering a call to parish ministry. I was asked to speak about the role of scripture in shaping Christian community.

What is the role of scripture in shaping our Christian community? When I received this prompt for my remarks, I found my mind going in several directions at once. I began with gratitude that in this sphere we can agree that scripture ought to have a role. The populace outside the Christian community likely deems the “Good Book” irrelevant; but usually they know very little about the Bible, and what they think they know is often incorrect. On the other hand, some within our community, both now and in the past, have weaponized the scriptures as a means of defining who is on God’s side (with them) and who is destined for destruction. Clearly, we want to steer well away from these extremes.

Let’s begin with some common ground – hopefully even for those who don’t yet believe. The Bible is a tour de force of literature, rich in both poetry and prose, and one of the best-preserved artifacts of ancient culture. As a former English teacher, my priority for approaching scripture is to read it closely, looking for its depth. My task as a believer, is always to seek its overarching context. This comes from my faith that the Bible is one of the ways that God has chosen to reveal the divine self to us and that the Old and New Testaments held together tell a single story about God’s amazing and enduring love for us humans as bearers of the divine image.

Although he has only the Old Testament to offer when Paul tells Timothy (2 Timothy 3:16) that all scripture is God-breathed and useful, he speaks to our faith that the canon which the community of Israel confessed, and to which the community of Christians added the New Testament, is God’s gift to us for its usefulness in teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. The Bible never claims that every word is God’s; rather the scripture acknowledges God’s choice to make the production of the Bible a collaboration with humans. Neither does the assertion that all scripture is valuable mean that all is equally helpful. One of my pastors once compared our Bible verses to money: all our bills are valid currency, but 50’s or 100’s are worth more than 5’s and 10’s. The difficulty for us is that our verses aren’t marked: the community of faith must wrestle with what it all means, especially as time goes on and our awareness of God grows, hopefully, more acute.

Yes, one of the most intriguing things my study of the Bible has demonstrated to me is this growth in human understanding of God. Within scripture it is something like an evolution of awareness of the hugeness and goodness of the Lord. Look at the elaborate prescriptions for the various sacrifices that we read about in Leviticus. Then remember how many times the prophets from a later era remind Israel that “[God] desires mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6).

The Exile leaves Israel duly chastened about her proclivity to copy the religious practices of her neighbors and the Judaism that reestablishes itself in the Land they call Israel, now ruled by others, vows never to allow herself to be corrupted again. By the time of Christ, Jews have gotten so good at this that despite the Diaspora, people of Israel reside all over the Mediterranean. They attract attention as “people of the book” whose ways set them apart as both fascinating enough for the Greek world to read their translated scriptures and persnickety enough that none of their conquerors can extinguish them. They put their trust in these scriptures that promise the coming of a Messiah but aren’t focused on the verses that name him one who will be a “light to the Gentiles” (Isaiah 49:6), and that their God will one day write His law on the hearts of all (Jeremiah 31:33). Even after the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2:17-21), Peter can quote Joel (2:28): “I will pour out my Spirit to every kind of people” and still think that this scripture applies only to every kind of Jew who has gathered in Jerusalem. It is not until his rooftop vision in Joppa (Acts 10) after which he witnesses the Holy Spirit descend upon the Roman centurion Cornelius and his household that he apprehends the thorough meaning of Joel’s prophecy. Even Gentiles are to be saved.

Paul sees all of this very clearly when he writes to the Galatians (3:28) that in Christ there is no Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, for all are one in Christ Jesus. Yet, Paul himself doesn’t tackle the inequities of slave and female rights head on. That work is left to the generations that have followed.

The abolitionist movement makes a good case in point for the proper role of scripture. The trade in African slaves added a new chapter of horror to world history. Whereas in the ancient world slavery was the accepted consequence of defeat in war, there was no way to identify who was a slave by their physical appearance. Slaves were even able to earn money during their off hours to buy back their freedom. African slave trade offered none of these safety valves. The heavy blot on the Christian legacy results from the people who called themselves Christians perpetrating this gruesome practice. Here is a recent example of believers wielding scripture for a purpose antithetical to God’s biblical presentation of justice. How was this even possible? People hi-jacked verses out of context with the overarching message. They failed to see Paul’s subtext in his letter to Philemon, because they were reading to corroborate their own agenda. Providentially, other Christians saw the mandate for abolishing slavery in those same scriptures.

The question for us today is how to continue to grow in our awareness of God’s call on us to strive for righteousness within the place and time we inhabit. The English teacher in me is searching for an appropriate metaphor and I’ll try this one out with you. What if the role of scripture in shaping our current Christian community is to be a lighthouse? A lighthouse functions in two ways: as a beacon to the coastline (God’s country, as CS Lewis might call it), but also as a warning about nearby dangers of shoals and rocks which can ground or wreck your ship. Often the lighthouse keepers served as the first responders for a boat in distress, providing rescue to shipwreck victims.

In this era of GPS and other forms of satellite guidance this may not seem germane to our circumstances. But let us boil it down to scripture giving us light and warning of danger. This is where the Bible’s predominant literary feature – story – offers us wonderful opportunities to explore its layers of meaning. On a primary level, the characters of the Old Testament present us with authentic, recognizably human portraits. We understand Abraham rationalizing his lie of calling Sarah his sister to Abimelek by saying, “I was afraid, and besides she is my half-sister” (Genesis 20:12). We know families with two children where the father favors one and the mother, the other as in the case of Esau and Jacob. We resonate with Gideon’s desire to lay down a fleece so that God has to prove God’s call on our lives (Judges 6). We appreciate David’s anguish over his sons’ bad behavior while we sympathize with his leaders’ exasperation over the king’s inability to discipline them properly (2 Samuel 13-18).

Let me not for forget the women! We admire Sarah’s resourcefulness in subscribing to that falsely attributed to the Bible policy that God helps him who helps himself when she urges Abraham to get a child from her maidservant Hagar (Genesis 16). We laugh with her as she overhears God’s messengers claiming that her old codger of a husband will sire a son with his menopausal wife (Genesis 18). We recognize both Naomi’s bitterness and Ruth’s loyalty; we ache with Hannah (1 Samuel 1) and the many women struggling with fertility. We nod at Esther’s combination of female cleverness and courage in a seemingly impossible situation because we’ve seen women do these amazing things.

Of course, these are only from the Old Testament.

More than providing us with good characters, good stories always speak to us on more than one level. Underneath the progression of the narrative a larger story emerges that allows us to see ourselves better. Take the story of the Exodus. The Hebrews are in misery as slaves in Egypt. They call out to God for rescue. God sends Moses. Moses has a difficult time negotiating with the very stubborn Pharaoh. In an odd turn of events, Israel must sacrifice the blood of a perfect lamb and smear its blood on their doorposts so that God’s angel of death can literally pass over them, sparing them the penalty that Egypt will pay. This signature act of salvation then becomes the initiating incident in a larger narrative that gives Israel her identity. Our God is the God who acts in history. The Lord saved our lives in the Passover, rescued us again by parting the Red Sea, provided us with water and manna for forty years in the wilderness and blessed us with the Promised Land, laden with milk and honey. Whenever the Hebrews are in trouble, they must remember what God has done for them in the past and have faith that the Lord will help them again.

Then we come to the New Testament, and we see another layer. Here the perfect Lamb of God’s blood sacrificed at Passover now saves God’s people from their slavery to sin, and sin’s penalty of death.

All these layers testify to the overarching theme that God will go to any lengths, including putting Himself on the cross, to demonstrate God’s love for us. Alongside this theme is God’s will that just as the Lord loves us, we ought to love each other. There is no other way for us to experience the fullness of the joy God has built us for, without that added component. We could go back to all the biblical stories and witness how often our failure to love one another has brought us woe. This is clear in all of Jesus’ parables and all the early church leaders – Paul, Peter, James, John – as they plead with their communities to get along with each other. The rest of the world will know God through the love we have for each other.

As people considering a call to ministry, I hope it helps you to think of scripture as a lighthouse: both a beacon and a warning of danger. Maybe being a pastor will partly involve being a lighthouse keeper. The keeper must know the ins and outs of how the lighthouse works, how to keep the flame well supplied with fuel, and how to weather fierce storms. The keeper also needs to spend much time alone with the lighthouse. Ministry will require a familiarity with the Bible not so much in terms of how many verses you’ve memorized (although that will come with the territory), but with that overarching context that permeates its whole. Scripture will surely not be the only way that God will communicate with you, and guide you, but it will be an important way. Expect it to challenge you as much as it consoles you, and most of all expect it to surprise you. As I said in the beginning, God has been in the story all the way through, but humans have had to grow into being able to see the Lord’s message beneath the surface of the Bible’s stories. The children in the Narnia series learn this truth when, with each successive visit to Narnia, they tell Aslan that he looks bigger. Aslan explains, “I am the same; but as you grow, you see more of me.”

Here’s hoping that we continue to see more of the Lord as we live each day.