Learning from Jesus

The scriptures referred to are in the sermon.

I confess! I was one of those kids who loved school. It's not that I was enamored of homework but I loved learning new ideas and new skills. For instance, I desperately wanted to learn to read and to be able to decode all of the hieroglyphics on signs and buildings and on TV and in the newspapers and books. Reading gave my parents an advantage in understanding and getting around in the world. Besides, I love finding out things I previously didn't know as well as how the things I did know actually worked.

And so I loved—for the most part—my teachers, even those I feared. (And we did fear our teachers in those days. It wasn't that they would physically do anything to us but that they would tell our parents if we did something bad or goofed off. And in those days your parents would take the teacher's side. So we listened to our teachers and did what they said.)

I remember most of my teachers, especially the ones who had a great impact on me. That's the measure of a teacher: the effect he or she had on you. You couldn't attribute it to any single model of teaching they used. They were all different, with a variety of styles, approaches, moods, strengths and weaknesses. But they changed me. They made me see things and do things differently.

The word “disciple” is just a fancy way of saying “student.” The men and women who followed Jesus were his students and he was their rabbi or teacher. We know that Jesus radically changed their lives. The question is how? And how is he still doing it today?

One of the first things that strikes me about Jesus as a teacher is that he challenges his students. He doesn't always lay things out in a plain, straightforward way. He loved to use parables, little fables that sometimes were allegories where everything stood for something else, but often they had one simple and sharp point. The parable of the good Samaritan was the answer to the question “Who is this neighbor I'm supposed to love as I do myself?” And Jesus' answer is: anyone you encounter. The story, with its politically incorrect hero, makes the answer more memorable. (Luke 10:30-27)

Jesus was a skilled speaker and though what he said was true, he drove the truth home using such things as hyperbole and paradox. Jesus did not talk like a lawyer and so we must be careful to evaluate what he says in context and with an eye to his use of rhetoric. Jesus sometimes used simple contrast to highlight what was good and what was not, such as the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the temple or the different kinds of soil on which the sower's seed falls. (Luke 18:1-14; Mark 4:3-8, 14-20) He used a lot of humor and exaggeration, though this often gets lost in translation or through familiarity. But how else are we to react to the mental picture of people walking around with planks of wood in their eyes, trying to get close enough to help others with mere splinters in their eyes? (Matthew 7:3-5) Or the image of a camel squeezing through the eye of a sewing needle? (Mark 10:25) Who doesn't smirk a bit when Jesus illustrates the efficacy of persistent prayer by telling how a pit bull of a widow wears down an unjust judge until he rules in her favor? (Luke 18:2-8) And I think the parable of the dishonest steward only makes sense if Jesus is telling it sarcastically, as a dig at the way the Pharisees operate. (Luke 16:1-14) Finally, Jesus uses paradox to express truths that seem to simultaneously contradict and compliment each other. The metaphors he uses in John's Gospel, such as today's assertion that his flesh is food, either cause you to give up trying to understand Jesus or lead you to a deeper understanding of the nature of God and of our dependence on him.

By challenging his disciples to keep up with his thoughts, Jesus changed their perspectives on the world, on the kingdom of God and on himself. Let's go back to his saying that a camel could more easily get through the eye of a sewing needle than a rich man could get into God's kingdom. I've heard explanations involving special gates into cities. Forget them. They didn't exist until the Middle Ages. Jesus wasn't saying it was merely difficult; he was saying it is impossible. He was overturning his culture's way of looking at the wealthy. The common view in his time was that riches were a sign of God's favor, and poverty was a punishment for lack of faith. Some modern day prosperity preachers say the same thing. But it's not true. That's why Jesus singled out the rich and why his disciples were so shocked by his statement. “Then who can be saved?” they asked, thinking that if the prosperous didn't have an automatic “ticket to heaven” then the poor were completely out of luck. But Jesus points out that it is impossible for any human to earn his or her way into the kingdom. (Mark 10:27) We are none of us as good as we think we are. We must put our trust in his mercy and not in our own self-righteousness. We are all, rich or poor, dependent on God's grace.

Jesus often uses things his audience knows to explain things they don't know. He employs a lot of everyday imagery to illustrate spiritual truths. So he talks about tax collectors and wineskins and moneylenders and lost coins and foolish bridesmaids and birds and hired agricultural workers and building towers and occupying soldiers and vineyards and shepherds and mustard seeds and the Jerusalem city dump. When it comes to the kingdom of God, Jesus says it isn't totally foreign to our experience; we just use the wrong similes and metaphors for it. We think that there's an inevitable link between earthly success and spiritual worthiness. We mistake worldly popularity for God's approval. We confuse our values with God's. But Jesus says the real parallels are more organic and more surprising. So the kingdom of God is like a shrub, like yeast, like an outwardly disobedient son who changes his mind, like a field with weeds, like a slave deeply in debt, and like a wedding reception.

Jesus not only challenged his students to see and think differently but to act differently. People tend to forget that before he fed the 5000 he told his disciples “You give them something to eat.” (Mark 6:37) I don't think he was bluffing. Jesus authorized them to heal the sick; why not use that power to feed the poor with a handful of bread and fish? Jesus let at least one of them try walking on water. (Matthew 14:25-32) Jesus challenged them to step out on faith. He never intended what he said to remain theoretical. Christianity is not esoteric but practical.

Jewish culture has always revered learning. A religious Jew is to keep studying God's word his whole life. Somehow that has gotten lost in the modern church. We've dumbed down the gospel to “God loves me no matter what I do,” and figured that's all we need to know. It's amazing how many churchgoers are ignorant of 2000 years of Christian thought. For most of the last 2 millennia, the majority of astute philosophers, scientists and writers were Christians. There's no insurmountable obstacle to that being true again. The problem is that we have sold our birthright for the fast food of “spirituality for dummies.” We fill our bellies with the empty calories of comfortable sentiments while starving our minds of nourishing Christian food for thought. Studies show that churchgoers are only marginally better acquainted with scripture than non-believers. Only half of all Christian adults can name all 4 gospels. Our personal theologies consist of catchphrases and simplistic explanations of how God operates that are often wrong. How else can we explain that the Bible verse most people say they know—“God helps those who help themselves”—is in fact from Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac?

If you read 3 chapters a day, you can read the Bible in a year. If you look in most bookstores or search online, you will find tons of translations and stacks of study Bibles with helpful notes and articles on the text. Or to save money you can go to biblegateway.com or biblehub.com, or download their apps, and read any number of Bibles on your tablet or phone. Got tough questions about the faith? Go to christian-thinktank.com for intelligent answers to questions posed by the most skeptical critics. Or look up books published by Intervarsity Press or Zondervan or Baker Books for books on every issue and topic followers of Jesus have ever faced or have to deal with today. In the Middle Ages the average person was illiterate. Only the clergy and certain rich people could read and the local church's one Bible was chained to the lectern. Today there's no reason not to know what you believe and why you believe it.

Jesus told us that the greatest commandment was to love God with all our heart and strength and soul and mind. His last command was for us to go out into all the world and make students of his from all nations. Let us rise to the challenge our Lord and Teacher has issued us. After all, the world does not seem to be overflowing with moral and spiritual wisdom. Many popular preachers and spiritual teachers seem more interested in seeking earthly power, lots of money and even illicit sex. They are more focused on enjoying the worldly definition of the good life rather than equipping their students for the real good life: eternal life with the God who is love and who is revealed in the teachings, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

People need guidance as they seek the truth about love, peace, justice and something to hope for. And though the Bible has an awful lot to say on these things, it's not fashionable to look there anymore. People think it's been tried and found lacking. But as G.K. Chesterton said, Christianity has been found hard and not tried. It may be because such hard questions about life have hard answers. And what's hardest is swallowing our pride and realizing that we need to be like children again, not pretending to be too cool for school but eager to learn new stuff, to see familiar things differently, and to be open to new experiences. For the young at heart, school is never out. And for the Christian, the challenging curriculum our Teacher expects us to master and put into practice may be scary at times, but like him, it's never going to be boring.

This was originally preached on August 23, 2009. It has been updated and revised.

The Value of Wisdom

The scriptures referred to are Proverbs 9:1-6, Ephesians 5:15-20, and John 6:51-58.

When I first preached this sermon, an upcoming starlet had just had scandalous pictures of herself posted on the internet. And while I don't remember the actress involved or the details, I can guess what happened. Either she let her boyfriend take the pictures or she took them and emailed or texted them to him. Then either somebody hacked her account and posted them or else she and her boyfriend broke up and he released the pictures. The specifics really don't matter because the whole problem wouldn't have happened if the pictures hadn't been taken in the first place. Nowadays, anybody should know that. Even non-famous people have had this behavior backfire on them. But you would think that this would be obvious to famous people, folks constantly followed by paparazzi, who are eager to get pictures of celebrities misbehaving. They have to know that there is a huge market for this kind of thing. And, sadly, once these photos hit the internet, they will exist there forever.

This is another example of how our incredibly smart technologies are used in incredibly stupid ways by people who should know better. Sorry. Maybe instead of the word “stupid” I should use the word “unwise.” Because what happened between the woman and her boyfriend did require some technical smarts to use these tools. What such actions didn't require, unfortunately, is wisdom.

Wisdom is not the same as having a lot of knowledge. It's knowing how to best use the knowledge you have. There are different kinds of wisdom. What I was talking about at the beginning of this sermon was common sense, the “well, duh!” kind of reasoning that most of us are capable of. Like “Don't smoke while pumping gas.” Or “Don't text people while driving.” Or “Don't expect loyalty from someone who wasn't loyal to their previous partner.” These are no-brainers but apparently common sense isn't as common as we might hope.

Another type of wisdom is what we call “street smarts.” These are shrewd observations about how people act. For instance, “Making something forbidden or exclusive makes it more desirable to some people.” Or “You'll be more popular if you tell people what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear.” Or my favorite: “If you want to predict how an organization will act in a situation, imagine it's being run by its worst enemies who want it to fail or at least look bad.” Some of these are counter-intuitive because they are based on what people actually do as opposed to what they ought to do or what they say they do.

These two types of wisdom are practical. They come from making good observations and from using good judgment. They are derived from experience but more importantly, from experience that's been correctly perceived and evaluated. For instance, I knew a man who was in a car accident in which he was thrown through the windshield because he wasn't wearing a seat belt. The car then caught fire. Though most people thrown through a windshield are killed or seriously injured, and despite the fact that cars rarely burst into flames in an accident, because he miraculously survived he concluded that not wearing a seat belt was safer than wearing one. That's an unwise conclusion to draw from a freak accident. If I hadn't been wearing a seat belt during my accident I probably wouldn't be here. As it was I broke both legs, both arms, broke my sternum, collapsed a lung and tore up a lot of internal organs. I'm glad I wasn't also thrown onto the road to be run over as well. My experience taught me that seat belts can save lives even in the worst of accidents. And the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has studied the matter, has estimated that between 1975 and 2017 seat belts have saved 374,276 lives. But one guy out there trusts in his extraordinary experience instead.

Another problem is that each individual's experience is somewhat different. Any cop knows that if you have 4 eyewitnesses, you get 4, or possibly 5, versions of what happened. The witnesses all have the same experience but they all notice different things and they see or experience what happened from different perspectives. A smart cop knows that some of what they say they saw may be wrong. He also knows that some details were left out of their accounts, either because they weren't considered important, or because they weren't noticed, or even because they were embarrassing. So experience is not on the same level as reason. Like rocks brought up from mines, experience is the raw material which has to be sifted, evaluated and refined before it is useful as wisdom. And wisdom doesn't depend on your personal experience alone. You can learn from the experience of others, like how being polite helps a coworker get better tips or how doing drugs messes up the life of someone you know. Wisdom is the product of all kinds of data, reasoning and good judgment.

A third type of wisdom is the subject of our lectionary texts. It's spiritual wisdom and it seems to fly in the face of common sense at times. It is more than counter-intuitive; it often finds truth in paradox. For instance, Jesus says, “He who wants to save his life will lose it and he who loses his life for my sake will save it.” (Mark 8:35) And “Many who are first will be last and the last will be first.” (Matthew 19:30) And “For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.” The last comes from today's Gospel and caused many of his followers to turn away from Jesus. It confused and, I daresay, revolted them. They didn't get it and walked away from Jesus. (John 6:66)

Understanding spiritual wisdom requires God's help. It is far from the obvious wisdom of common sense or even the “this is how the world really works” wisdom of street smarts. We need the illumination that the Holy Spirit provides. That means prayer and a willingness to listen and learn. It means studying the Bible. It means talking with other Christians about the things you and they discover through prayer and Bible study. Because God can speak through other Christians as well.

Spiritual wisdom usually requires personal experience as well, especially the experience of doing things on the basis of faith and out of obedience to God's commandments. That's why spiritual wisdom seems like nonsense to non-Christians. They can't understand the relationship of faith to wisdom, often because they think that faith goes against all logic and clear thinking. And so they don't try it. But it's like driving on ice and going into a skid. It doesn't seem reasonable to turn in the direction of the skid. But if, like me, you've done it both ways, you will find that turning in the right direction, though it seems to go against common sense, actually works.

Spiritual wisdom is often at odds with worldly wisdom, especially in matters of dealing with others. Though we pay lip-service to the maxim “Honesty is the best policy,” we more often practice the policy of “What they don't know won't hurt them.” Or more honestly, “What they don't know won't hurt us!” Worldly wisdom says, “Look out for Number 1!” Spiritual wisdom puts the love of God first, followed by loving our neighbor, neither more nor less than we love ourselves.

Worldly wisdom says, “The end justifies the means.” In other words, if the goal is good enough, then it's OK to use any method, no matter how evil, to achieve it. Spiritual wisdom says, “Goodness is the path as well as the goal.” Winning the Olympics is a worthy goal, but if you cheat to win, you won't really have proved you were a better athlete than the others. In fact, you will have invalidated the first place ranking you “won.” The means of doing something must be in harmony with the end you want to achieve. If your goal is becoming good, you can only achieve it by actually being good.

Worldly wisdom says, “Your worth depends on your position, your power and your prosperity.” Spiritual wisdom says, “Your worth is based on the fact that you were created in the image of God and on the fact that Jesus Christ died to save you.” (Genesis 1:27; Romans 5:8) Since our worth is based in the love of our unchanging God, not the changing opinions of mortals, everyone has value.

In fact, one of the chief differences between worldly wisdom and spiritual wisdom is the question of values. Oscar Wilde once described a cynic as a person “who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” That's a fairly good description of the worldly wise. This bottom-line mentality explains why we tend to use the price of something to indicate how much we value it. We see the way big companies has analysts who work out whether it is cheaper to recall defective products or to simply pay out settlements to those injured by them. This reveals that they value money more than the lives of their customers.

What we are willing to pay shows how much the values of this world diverge from God's values. We pay movie stars, pop singers and sports figures—people who merely entertain us—thousands of times what we pay teachers, cops and nurses—people whose jobs are to make life better. Just 15 years ago we were paying $94 billion a year to fight a war in Iraq, that is, to kill people in a different country, but we were arguing whether we should pay $100 million, just 6% more, to improve healthcare in America, that is, to save lives in this country. And we Americans were buying 80 million copies of a fiction book called The Da Vinci Code but only 30 million copies of either In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? or The Purpose Driven Life. So the highest ranking Christian books on the list of all-time bestsellers were apparently of equal value to us as The Valley of the Dolls. (On the other hand, the number 1 bestseller of all time is the Bible, with between 2.5 and 6 billion sold. Ironically, it is also the book most frequently shoplifted! And I'll wager that it is the least read book in most households.)

To paraphrase Einstein, what counts can't always be counted. Spiritual wisdom recognizes that the most valuable things cannot be quantified—things like love, faith, character, hope, peace, justice, humility, self-sacrifice, and even wisdom itself. The world values cleverness over wisdom. Unfortunately, the people who make the most trouble in the world are often some of the cleverest people. Being clever is not the same as being wise.

What we need is to seek and respect wisdom more. We need to teach our children that a more important question than “Can we do this?” is “Should we do this?” More essential than “How will this benefit me?” is “How will this benefit others?” More vital than “Will this make me look good in the eyes of my friends?” is “Will this glorify God?” I know such a question sounds old-fashioned but it's not. C.S. Lewis wisely noted that whatever is up-to-date is eternally out of date. Wisdom is timeless. Proverbs 8 tells us that from the beginning, God made the universe with wisdom. As the body of Christ, working towards the new creation in Christ, we need his always fresh, ever relevant, eternally valuable wisdom.

This was originally preached on August 16, 2009. It has been updated and revised.

The Imitation of Christ

The scriptures referred to are Ephesians 4:25-5:2.

In journalism, not revealing what is the most important point in a news story at the very beginning is called burying the lede. You are supposed to put it in the first sentence or paragraph and then get to the supporting details. There are times however when you might want to build up to a conclusion to show that it follows logically from the facts you've already established. The conclusion you come to might be so startling or controversial that to open with it might turn people off and they won't go on to read or listen to the reasons that led you to it.

Here's an example. When I was working as a nurse, the doctor who was the Head of Neurosurgery came to the nurses desk and told me to follow him. We went to the hospital room of one of my patients and the doctor had me stand outside the door while he went in to talk to the patient. And he said, without prologue, “If I were you, I'd get my affairs in order, because you are going to die! We can't do anything else for you. You are going to die!” And then the doctor left. He had brought me there to pick up the pieces of the patient who was shattered by this brutal delivery of his prognosis. There is no good way to tell a patient that nothing more can be done for him but that had to be the worst way. He could have started by enumerating everything they had tried and then as gently as possible let him know that they could not stop the inevitable.

In a way Paul buries the lede in today's passage from Ephesians. But since we are reading a nearly 2000 year old book, I think we don't have to worry about spoilers and we can put Paul's central theme right up front. And it comes at the end of our reading: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

By this Paul does not mean to pretend to be all-powerful or all-knowing or to command others to worship you or go about smiting those you think are evil. Those are all things that people think what being like God is all about. But in mere humans they are signs of being self-centered and arrogant. Remember: the first sin was wanting to be like God in that kind of way. (Genesis 3:4-5)

So in what way should we imitate God? Paul gives the answer in the second part of the verse: “...and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us...” God is love and we are to imitate him by imitating the self-sacrificial love of Christ, revealed in his life, death and resurrection. People who claim to be God or Jesus Christ never display that side of God, his giving up of himself to save others. Because it's the opposite of human arrogance and self-centeredness.

In the verses leading up to his conclusion, Paul gives us concrete examples of ways we can imitate God. First of all, he says “Putting away falsehood, let us all speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.” Trust underlies all healthy relationships. And there is no faster way to break that trust than by lying to one another. Lie to your partner or your child or your friend or your co-worker and they will never totally trust you again. They will always doubt that you are telling them the truth. They will suspect that you are hiding something from them, perhaps something very bad. And that will make the relationship hard to maintain.

Being a false witness is condemned in the Ten Commandments. (Exodus 20:16) It says in Proverbs, “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully are his delight.” (Proverbs 12:22; cf 6:16-19) Jesus called the devil “a liar and the father of lies.” (John 8:44) And the Greek word for devil, diabolos, literally means “slanderer” and “false accuser.” Lies are his work. We do not serve God with lies.

To be fair, even Jesus' critics knew him to be honest. They said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are truthful, and teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You do not court anyone's favor because you show no partiality.” (Matthew 22:16) In imitating Jesus, we are to be honest.

This does not mean we are always to be blunt, like the doctor I mentioned before. Earlier in this chapter of Ephesians, Paul talks of “...speaking the truth in love...” Generally a soft opening, showing that you are speaking out of concern for the person's well-being, rather than out of your own self-righteousness, is more likely to help the person accept the truth, however painful. You want to avoid what one preacher said we often do. He said, “We often approach evangelism like this: 'Have you heard the good news?' 'No. What is it?' 'You're going to hell!' That is not good news.” Unlike that poor neurosurgery patient, there is a cure for what ails us. The one who can take away the spiritual cancer of our sins and selfishness is Jesus.

Paul goes on to say, “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.” Sometimes anger is not sinful, for instance, like the anger at injustice that motivates people to change systems and societies. Anger at the death of 123 women and girls and 23 men in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, due to the doors and exits being locked to prevent workers from taking breaks and to prevent theft, led to legislation that improved factory safety standards. The anger of the abolishionists at slavery eventually led to it being outlawed in the 13^th amendment to the Constitution. Jesus was angry at the lack of compassion of those who were more concerned about their human rules of what could and could not be done on the Sabbath than they were about a man with a withered hand whom he could heal. (Mark 3:5) He was so angry with the greedy money changers and dishonest merchants selling things in the temple that he drove them out. (Mark 11:15-17)

So how does anger become sinful? Obviously when it is unjustified or when it causes harm. But also when it is nursed over time and becomes more or less permanent. We have all seen relationships break up and families torn apart by some dispute that never got resolved. I had relatives who never spoke to one another over a ring that each claimed my aunt had intended them to have after her death. They alienated their own flesh and blood over a thing of cold hard minerals that could not show them love.

So Paul says not to let the sun go down on your anger. Put your disagreement to bed before you go to bed. If not, you are leaving open an opportunity for the devil to act and make it worse. And remember that the word for devil can mean slanderer or false accuser. When two people won't speak to each other, tongues wag and people come up with their own ideas of what happened or what the people's motives were and they spread gossip. And that poisons the relationship even more. Don't let that happen.

Next Paul says that thieves must give up stealing and take up honest work. According to William Barclay, to whose analysis of this passage I am indebted, the two places where people in the ancient world experienced the most theft were the docks, where goods came in, and the public baths, where, like a pool or beach today, anything you left behind when you got into the water was vulnerable. It is interesting that Paul doesn't say that the thief should make money with his own hands to support himself but rather to have enough to help the needy. The thief must go from being a person who helps himself to others' possessions to a person who helps others with his own possessions. Again he or she is to imitate the selfless love we see demonstrated by God in Christ.

In that same spirit, we are not to let unwholesome words spill out of our mouths but stick to speech that is beneficial and builds up the one who needs to hear things that reflect God's love to us. When someone is down they don't need to hear things like “Serves you right” or “I told you so!” They'd rather hear “How are you doing?” or “What can I do to help?” Jesus came not to condemn the world but to save it. (John 3:17) We should not be quick to condemn but to help people find their way back to wholeness and health through Jesus.

Next Paul tells us not to “grieve the Holy Spirit of God.” The Greek word for grieve means to experience deep emotional pain. How can we cause God's Spirit pain? By doing and saying things that go against what he is trying to teach us. Parents are distressed when their children do stuff that goes against how they were brought up to act, like being cruel or rude or nasty to others. Since God's love is poured into our hearts through his Spirit, when we act in ways that are unloving, it causes him to grieve. (Romans 5:5) If we are to return the love God has shown us, we should act in ways that cause him to delight in us.

Paul next tells us to put away every kind of bitterness, anger, rage, quarreling and slander, together with all malice. Bitterness or long-standing resentment can both lead to and result from those other things in the list. And the word for malice can also be translated as a vicious disposition. A Christian should never do or say anything out of spite or malice.

Rather we should “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” Kindness, compassion and forgiveness are key aspects of God's nature and therefore things that we should exhibit as we follow Jesus.

Which brings us back to being imitators of God. Paul points out that beloved children imitate their parents. That is a primal desire in children. We even see it when children imitate our worst actions and habits. If you swerve to avoid a careless driver and then hear from the back seat a little voice cursing like a sailor at the other driver, you know that you need to clean up your act around your children. You want your children to imitate your good qualities. We are to imitate God's kindness, compassion and forgiveness.

We were created in the image of God. (Genesis 1:27) We have marred that image through our misuse, abuse and neglect of his good gifts to us. In Jesus we see the image of our loving, forgiving, healing God. (Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3; 2 Corinthians 4:4) And through Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit within us, we can have that image restored in us. But we have to cooperate and let the Spirit do his work in us. Part of that is imitating God our Father. And the clearest way to do that is to live in love as Jesus Christ has, loving us and giving himself for us. Too often we put other things ahead of this, burying the lede. But as we've seen, Jesus won't stay buried. In his resurrection, we have hope that we too can rise to the life he created us to enjoy.

Biblically Balanced

The scriptures referred to are Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16.

While America produces some of the best situation comedies, only the British seem to manage to create satirical sitcoms that are actually funny. One of my favorites was a series called Red Dwarf. The creators of the show seem to have taken a page from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and realized that science fiction is the perfect genre for satire. Thus politics, social customs, sex and, of course, religion are all fair game. In Red Dwarf, when spaceship maintenance man Dave Lister refuses to turn over his unquarantined pregnant cat, he is punished by being put into time stasis until the ship returns to earth. When the ship's computer finally releases Lister he finds that the crew has all been reduced to dust. They were killed by a radiation leak and so the computer kept him in stasis until the radiation levels were safe—a process that took millions of years! The only other living being on the ship is a humanoid that evolved from his cat's kittens. They were protected from the radiation by the ship's bulkheads where Lister had hid his pet. When Lister asks where the other cat people are, he is told that they wiped each other out in a religious war. It turns out that Lister's plan to retire to the island of Fiji and sell hot dogs and donuts, which he whispered into his cat's ear, got seriously twisted over 2 million years. Lister became their god and Fiji became the paradise Fushal. The cause of the war was a dispute over the color of the paper hats to be worn at the hot dog and donut stands: red vs. blue. Lister hears this sad tale and pronounces it pointless—the hats were supposed to be green.

To keep Lister, the last human, sane the ship is able to create one hologram of a dead crew member. Unfortunately it chooses Arnold Rimmer, who was an irritating person when alive. Later we find out that this officious, neurotic little tyrant was raised as a Seventh Day Hoppist. A misprint in their Bible said that the 3 great virtues were faith, hop and charity but the greatest of these was hop. So they hopped all day on Sundays. The only way to survive Sunday dinners was to wear a raincoat and asbestos underwear!

The basic technique of satire is to take some often small absurdities and magnify them or carry them to their logical conclusion. Thus a satire might show the animal rights organization Peta succeed in getting people to stop eating animals and then have to work on the more difficult problem of getting animals to stop eating each other. Things are so crazy that the internet has come up with a principle called Poe's Law which states that real news is now so absurd it is hard to distinguish from satire. And yet before the internet I remember how a church spokesman seemed oblivious to the obvious irony of what he said. Pope John Paul II was speaking with some dissident American Catholic women. This very educated man somehow thought it was logical to tell them they couldn't become priests because God's purpose for women was to become mothers. The problem was he was speaking to a group of nuns! Talk about a Catch 22!

Because the key to satire is the exaggeration of one trait to the point where the behavior it motivates becomes unbalanced, it is easy to satirize extremism and hard to satirize moderation. Unfortunately, even without trying to be satirical, most depictions of religion in the media tend to focus on its fringes. Religious people in TV and movies are either irrational fanatics, hypocrites or saints. Most religious people are not any of these three but that makes them uninteresting both to writers of fiction and to journalists. It doesn't help that a lot of fanatics, hypocrites and journalists don't know their Bible.

I went to church when I was very young and then my family stopped going until I was nearly a teen. So when I read the Bible for the first time, I didn't have a lot of denominational or theological preconceptions. I also discovered writer C.S. Lewis who became a Christian after being an atheist for a few decades. Lewis took the Bible seriously but didn't leave his brain behind at the church door. He read the New Testament in the original Greek and was able to distinguish between what the Bible actually said and what people thought it said. He acknowledged too the difference between what the Bible says and his interpretation of what it says. I also remember how Francis Schaffer said that what the Bible says about God is true but cannot possibly be exhaustive. God is too big. My professors at Wheaton College were not afraid to say, “I don't know” when faced with some seemingly insoluble theological problem. They would then sketch out the various approaches to the problem that were taken by other Christian thinkers, both past and present, so we had enough information to make a rational decision.

Well-informed Christians don't see faith and reason as necessarily in conflict. In fact the 2 overlap to a significant degree. And reason is not a position on any issue. It is merely a tool which can be used to examine any position, even a religious one. The problem is not that Biblical Christianity is unreasonable. The problem is that people aren't always reasonable.

Most problems in Christian belief and practice are due to overemphasizing one or a few aspects of it to the point of imbalance. The problem with fundamentalists is not that they strongly believe the Bible; the problem is they don't differentiate between the trivial, the important and the essential. And they aren't really fundamentalists because they don't stick to just the fundamentals. They are, as one expert puts it, “extreme superficialists.” Fundamentalists read the Bible (or in Islam, the Quran) without regard for the long history of interpretation and its many schools. They act as if everything is laid out plainly. But not all of it is. Some parts need a knowledge of the original language, the cultural background, and the history that led to its writing to understand it better.

More than that, superficialists go to scripture with some unexamined assumptions about what they will find. This means that they overlook or ignore verses that contradict those assumptions. If you think being righteous only means staying personally pure, you have not paid attention to the more than 800 verses about how the righteous help the poor, the sick, the disabled, widows, children without fathers and immigrants. Superficialists also tend to gloss over fine distinctions and qualifiers or explain them away. They mentally edit scripture to say precisely what they expected it to say—or more dangerously, what they want it to say.

The solution is not to emulate the superficialists by overemphasizing the bits of it you like and ignoring the parts they like. Nor is the solution to abandon the Bible as some people have suggested. The solution is to be biblically balanced. While the Bible contains 66 books, 1189 chapters and over 31,000 verses, there is an amazing unity on the major doctrines. But there is an undeniable diversity in some details. The Bible has to be read as a whole and its passages interpreted in the light of other passages. For instance, Romans 13:1 says to obey the government but Acts 5:29 says we must obey God rather than men. How can we do both? Obviously they are speaking to different situations: Paul is writing before Nero started persecuting Christians; Peter is responding to the temple authorities telling the apostles not to preach about Jesus. We must think about which situations call for which actions and when. While the fact that not all verses are “one-size-fits-all” can be dismaying if you have a simplistic view of the Bible, it's actually what we should expect from a God who made an extraordinarily complex but nevertheless cohesive creation.

There's a Buddhist parable of some blind monks encountering an elephant for the first time. The one who grabs its tail says that the elephant is like a rope. The one feeling its ear says the elephant is like a big leaf. The monk feeling its side says the elephant is like a wall. The one touching its leg says the elephant is like a tree. The monk being probed by its trunk says the elephant is like a snake. The one with his hand on its tusk says the elephant is like a spear. Usually folks conclude that they are all wrong. But in fact they are all right—about the particular part of the elephant they are touching. It's unwise to throw out some or all of their observations. But if another monk, standing back, was to put their observations together, along with their relative positions, he'd have a rough idea of what an elephant is like. For that matter, the longer they spend exploring the elephant and the more of him they encounter, the more fully they'd understand what it was like. In this case, superficialists would be resistant to acknowledging that there is more to the elephant than what they have encountered. They would be reluctant to readjust their ideas about him. And by extrapolating on the one or two features they know well, any individual monk would construct a lopsided one-dimensional version of an elephant.

We don't need a lopsided one-dimensional God, either. You get a lopsided God when you emphasize his holiness at the expense of his ability to forgive. You get a lopsided God when you emphasize his love at the expense of his call for all to repent. You get a lopsided God when you emphasize his displeasure at one category of sins, like sexual sins, at the expense of other sins he also condemns, like social injustice. You get a lopsided God whenever you cherry pick what parts of the Bible you pay attention to.

In today's passage from Ephesians Paul says, “We must no longer be infants, tossed about by every wave and blown around by every wind of teaching, in the manipulations of men, in craftiness for the purpose of deceitful scheming.” (my translation) Paul is seriously mixing his metaphors but what he is getting at is clear. Children initially construct a very simple idea of how the world works. Maturity consists of accurately revising this superficial understanding of reality in order to be able to navigate the world and survive. Paul then switches to language suggesting a rudderless ship being tossed by a storm.

Finally Paul switches the image to that of swindlers. The Greek word I translated “manipulations” actually refers to a game with loaded dice. Paul recognizes that people not grounded in Christian truth are likely to become prey to unscrupulous people. Like those who end up in cults where the leaders violate clear Biblical laws against adultery, dishonesty, coveting money and resorting to violence rather than turning the other cheek. I've never understood how anyone steeped in the Bible could ignore these red flags. But then a key way to manipulate people is misdirection: highlight what you want them to see so that they don't notice what you're really doing. That's one reason why it's easier to manipulate extremists and superficialists. Their focus has already been narrowed to one or two things. Keep it that way and they won't notice what's being smuggled into their faith behind their backs. It's like putting blinders on horses. It keeps them from seeing that they are not transporting treasure but just hauling a load of garbage.

But if scripture is so vast, how do we achieve a balanced view of it? What is its fulcrum, its balancing point? Jesus Christ. By centering on him, we keep from falling into one kind of error or its opposite. He is both just and merciful. No one in the Bible mentions hell more often nor speaks of forgiveness as frequently as Jesus does. He holds us to a high standard for both personal morality and social morality. Jesus protected a woman caught in adultery from being condemned and stoned as prescribed in the Old Testament and yet he told her to “sin no more.” (John 8:2-11) He condemned divorce in the strongest of terms and yet offered eternal life to a woman with 5 ex-husbands and a current live-in lover. (John 4:1-42) He drove the money changers out of the temple using a whip and yet told Peter to put up his sword when the authorities came to crucify him. (John 2:13-16; Matthew 26:51-53) He is fully God and fully human. In Jesus we see both what God is like and what we can become.

Small wonder that when the church summarized the teachings of the Bible in the form of creeds, Jesus is at the center of them. Paul seems to formulate a proto-creed in the early part of our passage. “[There is] one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is over all and through all and in all.” Here, too, Jesus is at the center. The one body is the body of Christ, Paul's favorite phrase for the church. (1 Corinthians 12:27) The one Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, sent as an encourager when Jesus went to the Father. (Romans 8:9; Philippians 1:19) The one hope is the hope of resurrection, which comes with the high calling to live up to the good news of the risen Jesus. (1 Peter 1:3-4) He is the one Lord, of course. The one baptism is the baptism into his death and resurrection in which our old sinful life dies and is buried and we are raised to new life in union with Jesus. (Romans 6:3-4) The one God and Father of all is the Father whose nature is revealed in the Son. And the oneness that keeps being referred to is the oneness we find in Christ, who has put to death all enmity on the cross and reconciles us all in him. (Ephesians 2:14-16)

Jesus, the living Word of God, is at the heart of the written Word of God. To diminish one is to diminish the other. It is to chisel away at the foundation of the church. Every building needs a strong foundation if it is to stand, just as its upper floors need to give a little to withstand the winds. Again there has to be a balancing of the principles to make the whole thing work. But Jesus is very clear about what happens if your foundation shifts. The house falls. (Matthew 7:24-27)

The foundation of God's house is the whole Word of God, perfectly balanced on the incarnate, crucified and risen Jesus, God's Son, anointed as our prophet, priest and king. He speaks through it, all of it, even the bits we don't like. Just as God did not abhor the virgin's womb or hesitate to become flesh to reveal himself, so he did not disdain to speak through the humans who wrote the Bible—mixed metaphors, bad grammar, cultural thought forms and all. Because the paradox is that both God's living Word and his written Word are inextricably human and divine. Jesus was a 1^st century Jew as well as the cosmic Christ. The Bible is both an ancient Near Eastern book as well as the timeless Word of God. When we try to separate which parts are which, so we can discard some of them, we are guilty of a kind of Gnostic spirituality. The Gnostics tried to separate the physical and the spiritual, looking down on the concrete and revering the ethereal. But God created both. And we humans are, as C.S. Lewis put it, amphibians, able to live in both the physical world and the spiritual. We are mammals and yet we are made in the image of God. When we try to reduce the reality of God or Jesus or the message of the Bible to just one thing, either spiritual concerns alone or earthly ones only, we become caricatures of Christians, fiercely fighting over the trivial things like the color of hats, or hopping around precariously on one leg. As absurd as that is, people do it because that is easier than maintaining a firm and balanced stand on the not always simple, yet always true Word of God.

First preached on July 30, 2006. It has been updated and revised.