What if those difficult parts of Scripture are there on purpose to take us on a journey to somewhere that we didn't even know that we needed to go? And I am convinced that that's a part of what Paul is talking about when he talks about Scripture is designed to make us wise in ways that you just haven't even imagined yet. All right. Hey friends.
Hello. Good morning. Don't mind me.
I'm going to open up a computer with an apple with a bite out of it. This is the height of irony that there'd be a reference to the Adam and Eve story on billions of people's computers all around the world. Anyhow, that's not what I came to talk about.
It's really an honor to be here. I did not know that this would be the first Sunday of y'all gathering in this space for a season. Is that right? This is the first Sunday? Yeah, so welcome to your new space.
If someone had told my teenage skateboarder self that I would get to travel across the world and talk to people about the beauty of Scripture, I would have not just laughed, but like mocked, fully mocked and made fun of such a person. and rolled away. But it really, one of the gifts that the Bible Project has been to me over the years is getting to meet so many sisters and brothers in Christ around the world who have the same heart and the same passion, who are plugged into the same source. Thanks for that image.
And it's just really remarkable to travel across the world and feel like you're at home among brothers and sisters. So it's really an honor to get to be here and to be in your land. Has anyone been up to the Lake District before? Anybody? Oh, my.
What a gem. What a gem. Where else can you go and spend all afternoon hiking the most magnificent peak up to 2,000 feet?
And, you know, you can go to one where there's loads of people. You can also find ones where there's no. buddy at all, except for the 20 sheep that had beat you to the top and pooped all over it for you so that you can enjoy that smell while you take in the lovely views. But just what a gift.
And so when Pete found out that we were going to be here and he invited me, it was an easy yes. It's a real honor to get to be here. You may or may not know about the Bioware Project. That's fine. But if you do happen to know about it, we may...
make animated explainer videos and podcasts to help people take their next step in discovering the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus. You could also say that we make Bible cartoons for the internet. I suppose it would be a more crass way to talk about it. But if someone had told my teenage self that that is what I would be doing with my adult life, as I said, I would have mocked them and rolled away on my skateboard. Um, I didn't grow up, uh, reading the Bible.
My parents, uh, are really dedicated, amazing followers of Jesus, but they also had a deep conviction that they wanted my sister and I, if we were going to follow Jesus, they, they really wanted it to be because of the work of God's grace and spirit in our lives, not because they forced it on us. And so I didn't really grow up reading the Bible much at all. Um, it was as as Pete said, was a church mostly full of elderly people, but with one rambunctious youth pastor who wanted to reach out to skateboarders in the kind of the urban core of Portland, Oregon. And so they funded the building of the skate park, a really amazing skateboard park, right in the heart of the city. And of course, that attracted all kinds of people, including me and my friends.
And mostly, you know, we would sit in the back and make fun of whoever was giving the Jesus talk because up to that point in my life, Jesus was associated with my parents. And because it's not universal, but almost that teenagers by default think that their parents are stupid. That's what I thought about Jesus and my parents.
And so, but when I began hearing these peers of mine who like ran and volunteered at the skate park and they would shut down the park in the evenings halfway. through the evening session, turn off the lights, and you would sign this waiver when you went into the park that you will sit through a Jesus talk, and if you want to skate for the second half of the night in the park, you have to sit through the talk. It's a great arrangement, actually. And so my friends and I would sit at the back and kind of make fun of who was ever giving the talk, but I began, week after week, began to pay attention and notice that one, all of the skateboarders and the leaders giving the talk, one they were really good skateboarders, that definitely helped me pay attention to what they were saying, but also that just the stories about Jesus they would tell and when they would give a teaching on something Jesus said or one of his parables, I don't know how to explain it other than to say something in my heart and my mind became engaged and Jesus became unavoidable to me. through my late teenage years, and when I was 20, there's a whole long story that I won't tell, but I had an encounter and an experience with Jesus that I had to respond to, and that was over half my life ago. What's interesting to me about that, though, is that I still hadn't picked up a Bible.
It was just Jesus and stories about him that were compelling to me through the mouths of his followers that I had met. And so, as I was going to the skate park and begin to get more involved and was trying to figure out what it means to follow Jesus, the guy who started the skateboard park invited me, I don't know what he was thinking, he invited me to teach a junior high Bible study to like junior high skateboarders. And I was like, I don't know what to say other than telling the experience that I've had, you know, over the last year. And I had just started to read the Bible for myself. And I knew that there were these four books and like that tell the story of Jesus and his teachings, but there's a much bigger book around it.
It's huge, actually. And I was like, well, most books begin at the beginning, yeah? And when I did look at the first page, after the table of contents, I found that the first words of the first book were in the beginning. It's a natural place to start. So that's where I started.
And I still remember vividly those early days of reading through the Bible from the beginning and how totally bewildered and confused that I was. And it was this interesting experience because Jesus was so compelling to me and so alive. And when I read his stories and what he said, I kind of understood some of the time.
But when I started from the beginning, it was like, I really don't know how to track with what's happening here. And so that sparked in me a very early interest that it was Jesus first and then the Bible. And the Bible for me was a way. to take steps towards a deeper encounter and a deeper experience of Jesus.
And that's the one that I was really after. And I've come in years since to be so grateful that that was my journey because the Bible became a vital tool for me to connect me to this person who was changing my life. So, basically, I'll summarize a very long story of my life to say Almost every single good thing that has happened to me in my life has been connected to my journey of fascination in studying scripture.
I ended up going to university. I had no plans to do that, but I did. And ended up, like most skateboarders do, majoring in ancient Greek and Hebrew and theology, and then going on to seminary.
And then, like most normal, well-adjusted people do, entering into a seven-year PhD program in Hebrew, Bible, and Jewish studies. But for me, all of it was motivated out of this experience and this passion and life-transforming encounter I was having with Jesus. Entirely positive.
My journey with the Bible has had moments of bewilderment, moments of confusion and challenge, but always on a journey of being pulled closer to Jesus. When I ended up in pastoral ministry, however, in teaching the Bible in a couple of local church settings, I began very quickly to realize this is not most people's experience with the Bible. A beautiful, fascination-filled encounter of following Jesus.
I began to meet people like my friend Matt. My friend Matt, who I met when I was doing my PhD studies, he had grown up in a Christian home. His dad was a Lutheran minister.
And Matt was confirmed at age 13, you know, in the Christian faith, and he was surrounded by the Bible when he was growing up. And when I met Matt, he was like in his 30s, and he was questioning everything about his faith, and he really wanted to kind of earnestly figure out whether or not he... believed any of this Christian stuff like once and for all. And so to do that, he felt like he had this instinct to read the Bible and figure it out for himself. And so he, like me, like many years before, started at page one.
And so I began to have conversations with Matt about this when he was about two-thirds of the way through the Bible, which is right around the time if you scan your table of contents when you get to a book called Ezekiel. which is one of the most bizarre and difficult to read books in the entire Bible. And that book is where he began to be so repulsed by the God that he saw portrayed in the first three quarters of the Christian Bible, which we call the Old Testament. And he was so disturbed by that point, one, with mostly the violence that's in the Bible and the violence perpetrated by the so-called heroes of the Bible that God keeps supporting and sponsoring.
you know, staying committed to. And he was highly disturbed by the violence that God has portrayed as participating in. And so through a number of conversations, and I was just trying to pay attention to Matt's journey, but he made a decision to walk away from his faith, abandon it altogether in that season. And we remained friends and remained in conversation, but he just didn't want to pursue the issues anymore.
And so I found it so fascinating that someone can have a life-changing positive encounter by reading the Bible starting at page one, and then someone can have like a faith crisis-inducing encounter with the Bible starting at page one. Are you guys with me? So I'm sure none of you have ever been bewildered, confused, or scandalized by what you read in the Bible, but Matt was. So those are two pretty extreme-like experiences of the Bible, the same set of texts of just... Totally positive and like really negative.
And maybe some of you, you know, in the room can resonate with my story or with Matt's story. My hunch is that most of us probably find ourselves like somewhere in between. But one thing that is true, living in the culture that you do on this side of the Atlantic and I do on the other side of the Atlantic, is that we live in cultures that have such a rich and long Christian history.
that nobody is ever coming to the Bible with a blank slate. All of us have a relationship to the Bible, whether we are aware of it or not. And I wish that we could come to it with a blank slate, but we can't.
And so maybe yours isn't entirely positive, like mine. Maybe it's not totally negative, like Matt's. Maybe it's a relationship of admiration.
You know, you can handle the scriptures. as long as they're filtered through the mouth of a teacher, right, or a preacher that you really enjoy listening to. But diving in for yourself, frustrating experience, you tend to leave it to the pros. Maybe you have a relationship of suspicion with the Bible because you or someone you care about has been hurt deeply by people using the Bible, for good or for ill, using or abusing, whatever. but you are suspicious of the way that the Bible can be used as a tool to hurt people.
But maybe you're having a more neutral experience, and you just consistently find passages or open parts of the Bible that you just have no idea what's going on, and it's just mostly confusion, like somewhere on the spectrum. But I would just invite you to observe a really fascinating fact. And it's what I already named, that none of us are coming to the Bible with a blank slate. All of us have a pre-existing relationship of some kind to the scriptures, and I know for a church community like Emmaus, this is a community where following Jesus, attending to his presence and the presence of the Spirit, listening to him, and that the scriptures becoming being a primary place where we listen to him, I know that's at the heart of this community. And so wherever you're at in your journey of following Jesus, at some point it will pay huge dividends to meditate on your relationship to the Bible and ask yourself a question, what would it look for me to take a further step of growth in how I engage with Scripture?
And I'm a lifetime Bible nerd. It's just what I talk about even when I can't really help it. And so this is essentially just what I'm going to invite you to do with the short time. that I have. And you'll probably, like Pete said, forget everything I say a year from now.
And that's okay. But maybe you might remember that you had a Sunday gathering where someone invited you to take a step deeper in your relationship to Scripture. And that is my humble offering here today. You guys with me?
How you doing? Okay, great. One thing about being in gymnasiums, which I've actually, we had a church we went to gathered in a gymnasium like this for some time.
It's bringing back lots of good memories, but it's such an echo chamber that I actually can hear myself talking three times over as I'm standing. I don't know if you can, but I can. I feel like I'm having a conversation with another person who's imitating everything I'm saying.
Okay, I just need to say that out loud because it's distracting me and maybe now it won't. So here's a fascinating question. If it's the case that in your culture and in mine, over in the States, everyone is coming with some kind of pre-existing relationship to the Bible, it raises an interesting question of like, well, how did that happen?
Like, if I want to grow in my relationship to Scripture, maybe I should take a moment to learn about, like, why is it I have the assumptions or feelings that I already have about Scripture without even really having thought about it before? And that is a really interesting question. It has been a curious habit of communities of following Jesus from the beginning, like going back 2,000 years, that the reading and the singing and the memorizing and teaching from this collection of texts has been central to the life of communities following Jesus all over the world from the very beginning.
This is a collection of texts. written in ancient languages, Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek, that apparently skateboarders like to learn. And I'm just guessing that you don't have like a group of friends in your life who get together on Sunday mornings and like sing from ancient Egyptian hymns, you know, or sit together and meditate on Homer's Iliad or something like that. I mean, maybe you do. I don't know.
This is England after all. But my hunch is that you don't. And so like... It's worth asking, like, why would people gather all over the world to meditate and hear teaching from and sing songs inspired by a collection of ancient Israelite texts?
Has that question ever occurred to you before? Well, it should. It should, and it's a good one.
So why would something like this happen in the world? There's many, many ways to respond to that question. Here's one. Probably most significant factor is the factor that Jesus of Nazareth himself held this collection of texts, which for him were his family ancestral texts, that he held these texts in the highest regard.
Jesus was constantly quoting from, alluding to these scriptural texts to explain himself, to explain who he was and what he was doing. in the world. And that conviction on Jesus'part is why he said things like this from Luke 24. He actually, I didn't think about this, but he actually said these words while he was traveling on a road that your church is named after, Emmaus, the Emmaus Road. Can you all see? Oh, yeah, here we go.
So he said things like this. This is what I told you. He's talking to a group of his friends and followers.
This is what I told you while I was still with you. Everything had to be fulfilled that's written about me in the Torah of Moses, in the prophets. And in the Psalms. And then he opened the minds of his apprentices so they could understand the scriptures. And he told them, this is what is written.
This is great. This is Jesus'summary of what the first three quarters of your Bible is all about. It's about this.
This is what's written. That the Messiah will suffer. That he'll rise from the dead on the third day. that repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.
So that little phrase, the Torah, the prophets, and the Psalms, that's Jewish shorthand in the first century for what Christians call the Old Testament, the first three quarters of your Bible. And this collection of ancient Israelite literature, it tells a story. It's a family story that Jesus saw himself a part of.
And essentially, this story is about a consistent history of encounters that this family, people of ancient Israel, that they had with a divine being whose name is the One Who Is. Which is the coolest name in the world, just the One Who Is. In Hebrew, you pronounce that name Yahweh, but what it means is the One Who Is.
So, the One Who Is had a revealed... the one who is itself, to this ancestor of the ancient Israelites, a couple named Abraham and Sarah, and made a promise to them, wanted to give a gift to them, that through this family, God wanted to restore... and give the gift of unending life. It's a pretty sweet gift.
Unending life and divine blessing through this family to all of the nations of the world. And so the one who is redeemed this family. family out of all kinds of really terrible situations, most famously, as you probably know, slavery in Egypt, and made a covenant relationship with this family. God wanted to enlist this family as a partner so that if they lived by the wisdom and the instruction of the one who is, that they would become, as in imagery of one of their prophets Isaiah, like a city on a hill and a light to all of the nations around them, which is a pretty sweet deal. Well, what could go wrong?
Well, what could go wrong? go wrong is the fact that God is working with humans. And that humans, while really glorious images of God, are also quite often real stupid and selfish and short-sighted.
And so what's really remarkable is that this family history, which, you know, a whole third of this is just telling the history of this family over the course of many centuries. It is not like a history written by the winners kind of history. It's a history where the people by whom it was written and about whom it is, is heavy with critique, heavy, heavy critique of the stupidity, the selfishness, of the idolatry, and of the neglect of the poor that happened among this family over the course of many, many generations. And this family actually so abused and misused this gift and promise that God gave them.
that God handed them over to their own self-destruction. That happened as this family was defeated and then taken into captivity by... multiple ancient empires, Assyria and Babylon and so on. But what's so remarkable also is that the one who is promised that he would never leave or abandon or forsake his people. Actually, those words that were spoken from Hebrews here this morning are themselves a quote given by God to one of Israel's ancestors in the book of Genesis, a guy named Jacob, whose other name is Israel, but his first name is Jacob.
same as Jacob, which means deceiver. I'm sure if you had a family ancestor whose name was deceiver, that you would probably usually like want to not tell his stories around the family campfire and so on. But there it is on display, a family that comes from a guy named deceiver and who destroyed themselves over the course of many generations.
That's essentially what the Old Testament is about. But God promised. that he would never leave or forsake them. And so there's this little group known in the Old Testament, a group of figures called the prophets.
And these prophets who had a lineage going back to the key guy Moses, who was instrumental in them being rescued out of slavery in Egypt, these prophets held out this hope that the one who is was going to rescue them, that the one who is would fulfill that promise to give the gift of unending life to all of the nations. And not only that, that he was going to come and personally dwell among his people, that his spirit and his presence would take up residence and fill the hearts and minds, transform and heal all of the stupidity and selfishness and these patterns of abusive thinking that we find ourselves in. And...
The one who is promised through these prophets that a leader would come, a figure, who's known as the messiah, who's known as the king, as the deliverer, who would come to do something for the human family that we can't seem to do for ourselves. And that's essentially how the story ends, in search of an ending. The first three quarters of your Bible called the Old Testament. And so when Jesus of Nazareth comes onto the scene saying the things like I read from just a little bit ago, what he's claiming is that this whole story, that the one who is, is doing something to bring resolution to Israel's crisis, to the human crisis that we or Israel couldn't do for themselves.
And so Jesus comes on the scene doing lots of different things. What I'm giving you is a concise history of the entire Bible right now. It's a little ambitious for one sermon, but there you go. Jesus comes onto the scene saying and doing lots of things, but through his actions and his words, two things come loud and clear.
He's claiming to be the Israelite through whom all of God's long history of promises to give the gift. of unending life to Israel and the nations to be the one, to be the human partner that we are all made to be but consistently fail to be. But here's what's so remarkable about the story of Jesus and how it's like the culmination to this whole story of crisis leading up to him. He claims to be, yes, like the human covenant partner that we're all made to be, but also he claims to be the one who is become human to be that human partner that we've all failed to be.
It's such a remarkable way that all of the threads of the plot conflict come together in one person. And so what Jesus does is, one, he, like the prophets, critiques all of these leaders and people in power in his day, and he accuses them of abusing and misusing this gift that God wanted to give to the nations through them. And so they, in this horrible moment, the most accomplished, sophisticated, sophisticated...
Justice system of the day, the ancient first century Roman Empire, who was the oppressive power over Jesus'people in that day, and also the leaders and the priests, the most devout religious people among Jesus'own family, partnered together to execute Jesus for healing the sick and telling people to love each other, and offering a pretty severe critique of how they've abused their power. And so Jesus ends up getting executed in this moment. where he takes upon himself the whole history of the collective stupidity and short-sightedness and sin and injustice of the human story, and he allows it to kill him. Such a remarkable story that the creator of the universe would come to be who we are all made to be and then allow all of our collective failures to kill him. But as Jesus said, no one takes my life from me.
I lay it down. I can pick it back up again. And in this remarkable act of love and new creation power, when Jesus is raised from the dead, it's this declaration that all of our stupidity put together over the course of all of human history isn't powerful enough to cancel. We're set aside God's infinite love and the infinite power of his creative, life-giving presence here in creation. And so when Jesus is risen from the dead, he shares his presence and his spirit with his followers.
And he says, this is great news. Death isn't the end. Your own stupidity is not the end.
God's love is stronger. And so he sends out his followers to go announce this good news to the nations that there's a way to actually become human that he pioneered on our behalf. And so he sends out, especially this crew, pretty small crew of figures named apostles, which just means people who are sent. And so they began starting Jesus communities all over the ancient Roman Empire. This is all happening 2,000 years ago.
And they were multicultural Israelites, so they knew it. Hebrew and Aramaic, and they knew their scriptures like the back of their hand, but they also knew Greek, which was the language of the day. And so they began to translate everything Jesus said and did into stories and teachings in Greek, and they began to collect these writings into these four accounts that we have about Jesus. And they began to write letters to all of these Jesus communities spreading around the Roman world, and eventually all those writings were collected into the rest of your Bible, which we call the New Testament. And so there, essentially, you have it.
This is why we, sitting here on the other side of the world 2,000 years later, have at the center of our community the person of Jesus and these texts that are all telling a story that culminates in Jesus and that also are meant to guide us in our own journey of following Jesus. Now, that's a long story. I actually could have... showed a five-minute animated video that would have done everything I just said a lot more concisely, but I chose to go for the longer route.
Okay, so that's one way to answer that question. Why is it that followers of Jesus all around the world are constantly reading from, singing, and meditating on these texts? But if that story is so important, and if Jesus can boil down what the story is about in like one sentence, like he did in Luke 24, it raises another kind of question.
Which is like, why is it that our relationships to the Bible are often so complicated? Like, how is it that you can have an experience like mine and an experience like Matt's? And then all of the other experiences in between that, like, you all are having.
Why is it so complicated if it's supposed to be so central and clear? It's a really, really great question. And there's actually 23 and probably 24 ways to respond to it. But here's one way to respond to it, at least that...
I have found really helpful. It just is a fact that while the Jesus movement has spread all over the world, these texts that bear witness to Jesus come from one people group. that lived in a specific time and specific place, and that spoke a really specific set of languages, Hebrew and Aramaic and then ancient Greek.
And any time humans try to communicate to each other across times and across culture, it's complicated. I mean, it's complicated just to communicate with the human sitting next to you right now. Are you with me?
I mean, it's remarkable to me, the longer that I'm married to my wife Jessica, the more I think she's the most amazing human being on the planet. And it's also remarkable to me that how unclear I am in the things that I say, but I don't know that until she looks at me as if I'm a Martian or something after I think I'm being perfectly clear. And then she'll say, do you know what? you just said and then she'll say back to me what I just said and I'm like, I said that? Oh God, what I meant to say was this.
Do you guys know what I'm talking about? It's the difference between what you say and what you mean. Sure, nobody knows. Nobody can resonate here.
So what we hear scripture say and what the people who wrote these texts actually mean, like there's a big delta in between those two. How do you close that gap? So that reality leads to what I call the hammer problem. And the hammer problem is this, is that most of us, I think, have really good intuitions when it comes to what the Bible is and what you should do with it. But then we develop less than helpful methods for dealing with it.
So this is a picture of my hammer. I took this picture while a really intense snowstorm was happening in Portland, Oregon. It's very rare. And why I chose to take it.
a picture of my hammer that day. It was the day I chose to take a picture of my hammer. Anyway, this is my hammer, and I keep it hanging in my tool shed.
And my sons, Roman and August, over half their lives ago, when they were four and six, discovered my hammer in the tool shed. And what they did with it when they discovered the hammer, I have asked their permission to tell this story, is that they chose to dig a hole with it. Did you know that if you turn the hammer around, so there's the hammer end, and then I've learned American English and British English have so many differences that I'm learning about over the last few weeks.
Do you call the back end of the hammer the claw? You call it the claw. That's great.
Okay. That's great. Then what it is then? So they were using the claw of the hammer like a pickaxe, right, to like loosen and chop up the dirt. And then they would just scoop the dirt out with their hands.
and occasionally rub it on themselves and do other... What humans naturally want to do with dirt, which is get dirty. So what was remarkable to me was I had never told them, like, what to do with a hammer.
They saw it and they had a brilliant intuition that was right. It's a tool. It's meant for swinging and hitting something.
But what is also the case is that sometimes our intuitions can be right but can lead us to a less than helpful method. And this is what I found. In this case, they were using the hammer for something it wasn't designed to do, but they could actually make it work pretty good.
They dug a really deep hole with it that signs of it might still be in our backyard to this day. So something like this, I think, happens to many of us in our relationship with the Bible. We have a right intuition, but because it's so strange, it's from such a different time and place and culture, we don't know what it is. we can, without even knowing, by ourselves and in our communities, develop habits of what to do with it that actually are not that helpful. And it's a two-fold tragedy because we might end up using the tool for something it was not meant to do, and sometimes it's neutral or benign.
type of consequence, but sometimes that could be pretty disastrous if you use something for a purpose that it's not fully designed to do. But then also you miss out on the full potential of what this thing is designed to do. And so in my experience, communities of Jesus and followers of Jesus end up having a hammer problem when it comes to the Bible. Good intuitions and less than helpful methods. And there's more than three, but there's at least three ways that I think are the most common.
And if I had been able to talk to my friend Matt years before, like way upstream of his crisis of faith, I wonder if these would have been helpful perspectives to him. And so I just offer these as something for you to think about. My hunch is that if you have a complicated relationship to the Scriptures, it might be something like one of these three good intuitions, but less than helpful methods.
How are you guys doing? Here they are. Three good intuitions about Scripture. Scripture is designed to teach us about what is true. Scripture is meant to give us wisdom about what is good.
Scripture is the place where we learn to hear from God. Scripture is designed to teach us about what is true. This really goes back to Jesus'own conviction about this collection of texts, namely...
that they were about him and that the God, the one who is, had been so trustworthy throughout the long family history that if that God were to speak to his people, those words would be trustworthy as well. It's a good intuition that scripture is designed to teach us about what is true. However, because again of that cultural gap, what at least in my experience is that many followers of Jesus end up Relating to the Bible, because it's so big and so complicated, we end up relating to it as a source of truth the way we relate to many other sources of truth. So if you have a question about yourself or the world or whatever, what's the tallest peak in the Lake District, we have ways to answer these questions. We have these things called encyclopedias.
We have things called dictionaries. Now, in the age long ago, like my childhood... These were in the form of books, like big multi-series books at your library.
Maybe your family bought a set from a traveling salesman or something like that. You guys remember encyclopedias? Yeah, these are fantastic. And so the way they're organized is not to be read from front to back. You need to know how to find what you're looking for, and then you find the page and the entry, the paragraph, and the sentence that answers your question.
as directly as it's addressed within the encyclopedia. Are you guys with me? So nowadays we ask our devices, you know, in our pockets, where we, you know, type in on the mighty Google, you know, what is the tallest peak in the Lake District, and then it, you know, spits out your answer right there on your screen, delivered to you by AI. right? That's where we are now, unfortunately.
So that's how we find information and answers to our questions in our world here today. And so we end up treating the Bible like that, like a dictionary. And so what's the question that I have about God or myself or the world or people or sin or good or bad?
And then, well, what's the page? What's the place on the page, the paragraph, and then the sentence? And then you read the sentence, maybe.
Maybe you read the sentences around it. Wow, you're really working hard at that point. And then there you go.
You have the answer. Maybe you'll memorize that, and you're good to go. And so many people end up developing a relationship to the Bible that's like that, like a reference book. But the challenge is that if something is not designed as a reference book, you're eventually going to be lost among pages and pages of detail, and you're like, this isn't relevant to my question.
This isn't relevant to any question I've ever had in my life. So I'm just not ever going to read that part in the first place. Anybody?
No one's ever had this experience by reading the Bible. So whole parts of the Bible end up being just... totally irrelevant to us because it's answering a question that we've never thought was important in the first place, which is back to our hammer problem.
We're more than likely to misunderstand or take out of context like the little bit that we think that we have understood, and we're going to miss out on the full potential of what this whole story and the poems and the letters and the narratives are trying to tell us in the first place. Because what this story is about... is the things that you actually are thinking about all of the time anyway.
The big questions that humans are wrestling with all of the time, whether you're conscious of it or not, are questions like, who are we? Where are we? Why are we even here? It's a pretty common question humans ask. What's the problem if you think that there is one?
And what's the solution if you think that it is one? Most of us in our waking hours are operating out of an assumed set of answers to those questions all of the time. And the story of the scriptures has a really specific angle on every one of those questions.
Human beings in the story of the Bible are glorious images of God, meant to be the embodiment of God's heavenly presence of wisdom here on earth, bringing God's order and beauty and goodness to the world in a covenant partnership and in a relationship of love. That's who we are. That's why we're here. We're also really stupid.
We're also bent towards self-destruction and tend to be pretty selfish. And so what is the problem? It's us.
But what's the solution? And this is what's really fascinating about the story of the Bible. The solution to the problem is both God and it's us. Because God is not going to scrap this creation and human partnership plan, God actually becomes the human who can be the human partner that we're made to be but that we failed to be.
It's actually one of the most remarkable ways of thinking about human existence and the human problem. It's one of the most profound and sophisticated accounts of reality that's ever been on offer in the story of human history. That's why we're here on the other side of the planet 2,000 years after Jesus. Are you with me? This story has power and it points to a person who's real.
and who has wisdom and power. It's a good intuition. The scriptures are designed to tell us about what is true, but how the scriptures answer all of those questions is through the medium of ancient Israelite narrative and poetry and letters.
And if we don't honor the form that God has given, the scriptures to us and we're likely to develop a hammer problem. Here's another intuition where we can develop a hammer problem. Scripture is designed to give us wisdom.
So many of us come from church communities where we assume that the Bible Bible is a source of what God thinks about this or that human behavior. So what is good for a human to do? Like be kind and loving and tell the truth. And so you can find sentences that happen within paragraphs. some pages in the Bible and you can learn how to like turn to that page and see that behavior that gives us like a divine thumbs up or thumbs down.
And there you can relate to the Bible that way, like a behavior manual. But one of the challenges is that because it's such a huge collection of texts and it's like so many stories and poems on many topics of human behavior, you can find a bewildering variety of directions. For example, can I show you an example?
Just because it's fun. Humans of most cultures at some point in their development discover that you can ferment liquid, yeah? And that when you ferment the liquid, it actually tastes terrible, but we can convince ourselves that it tastes great. And then, if you drink a lot of it, it makes you crazy stupid in your brain, and things that you would never, like, do otherwise, you think are, like, the best thing that you should do, and we end up hurting each other, often killing ourselves or other people when we're under the influence.
Anybody? So, what should humans do with substances like that, namely alcohol? Well, you could read Psalm 104, which is this beautiful psalm telling you about how God's orchestrated all of creation, especially the rain.
That God waters the mountains from his upper chambers and he satisfies the land and the fruit comes up. The grass grows for cattle and plants like grapevines for people to cultivate and bring up from the earth. And wine that gladdens the human heart. Yeah? So apparently wine is a gift from God to make us happy, which is something that regularly happens when they drink too much of it.
So enjoy a glass of wine and celebrate the goodness of God. says Psalm 104. But then you'll read on into the book of Proverbs, for example, and you'll come across the last chapter of Proverbs where this ancient king's mom gave him a bunch of wisdom, a guy named Lemuel. And here's what Lemuel's mom taught him. It is not for kings, Lemuel, to drink wine or for rulers to crave beer, lest you drink and forget what you've decreed and deprive the oppressed of their rights.
Like, don't drink on the job, you'll do something Something horrible to yourself maybe, but likely to the people that you're responsible for. Let beer be for those who are perishing, and wine for those in anguish, so they can drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more. Okay, so celebrate a glass of wine unless you're an ancient Near Eastern king, but if you are among the poor, ruled by an ancient king, drink up, because your life is terrible and you don't want to have to think about it.
But then you get to a story like Jesus, he goes to a wedding and they run out of wine. And so what Jesus chooses to do is turn all of these jugs of water into the best wine that anybody's ever had. So much so that the leader of the wedding banquet says, everybody brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after.
the guests have too much to drink, but you saved the best till now. So this is more like a Psalm 104 type situation, but I guess Jesus isn't an ancient Near Eastern king. Well, he is a king, but he's not ancient Near Eastern king style.
And he had a lot to say about the poor. I don't think he ever told them to get drunk though. So we'll think about what King Lemuel's mom said.
And then you get to a letter. written from Paul, one of those apostles, and he writes a letter to early followers of Jesus saying, yep, just avoid it altogether. Don't get drunk with wine.
It'll lead you to ruin. But then just a few, like, pages and letters look forward in the New Testament. He says to a protege named Timothy, stop drinking only water.
Have some wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses. Okay, how you guys doing? So, apparently, enjoy a glass to make your heart glad as a gift from God, unless you're an ancient Near Eastern king.
If you're poor, drink up. But if you're at a wedding, right, then definitely drink up, because Jesus made the wine. But then, I guess other times you just should, like, not drink too much.
Unless you have stomach problems, then drink a lot more. How you guys doing? So this is what it's like to treat the Bible like a behavior manual.
We could do this with about a dozen other topics. And if you don't... know how the flow of the story works and the context of every one of those sentences, how they fit into the larger works and where they fit into the larger story, you're going to come across these surface-level contradictions in the Bible all of the time. What is so interesting is that the same Paul, who said two very different things about wine, said this when he talked about the purpose of the Bible.
Writing to that same protege, who had stomach problems, apparently, He also said this. He said, Timothy, you from infancy have known the sacred scriptures that they're able to give you wisdom about the rescue that comes through trusting in the Messiah, who is Jesus. All scripture is God-breathed. breathed. It's useful for teaching, for challenging, for correcting, and training in what is right so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for doing every kind of good.
What's really interesting here is that the first word that comes to Paul's mind when he thinks about how the scriptures should influence our behavior is the word wisdom. Do you see that? The purpose of scripture is to give you wisdom.
Wisdom about what? Well, wisdom about a story. Do you notice he summarizes the story of the Bible in a really compact way?
It's a story about a rescue. Apparently, we all need to be rescued. And we need to be rescued by someone who he calls the Messiah, that is this divine and human one who can do for us what none of us seem to be able to do for ourselves. And how is it that you go about being rescued by this one? Well, actually, what you need primarily to do is stop.
Stop doing most of the things that you're doing and just trust. Learn how to trust this one who wants to rescue you. That's Paul's summary of the story of the Bible.
And apparently if you meditate on that story from a million, well not a million, but hundreds of different stories and poems and letters in this marvelous collection, then that will give you wisdom. And what's the... is it goes on to say if you have that wisdom in you it will teach you things that you've never thought to think before it will correct you right it'll point out ways that you're living and thinking that are hurting yourself and other people and then it will correct you say like man you probably should stop living and thinking that way like start living and thinking this way and things will go much better for you and your friends and your family members and then it trains you it actually helps you form new habits of mind and life and moral thinking and ethical decision-making that actually point you towards what is good so that you can actually contribute good into the world instead of the opposite.
And it's about wisdom. So here's what's interesting. Our intuition that scripture is meant to give us wisdom about what is good, we end up treating the Bible like a rule book, but rules can actually only help you make one decision in one type of situation.
Wisdom can help you begin to to work out how he should respond in any time and circumstance, in any situation. Wisdom is about the formation of the core of your values, what you think is most important, what you think is good, what you think you're even here for in the first place, and what are the other people around you here for. And when you are shaped to see the world through the eyes of God's wisdom, you don't need a rule book, though it's occasionally helpful to be reminded of the rules, but most what you need to be reminded of is who you are and who God is and who God is towards you. And if that is in your soul, you are on your way to learning wisdom, which is what the Bible is for. The last intuition is something that's really natural, I think, to many people in a church community like this, and that's that Scripture is designed to be the place where we meet God and hear from God.
It's like a venue, like this room. We go inhabit these stories and these poems, and we have an encounter with someone that's not like ourselves. Many of us end up developing a habit with Scripture. because it's so big and bewildering, is we come across like a sentence or a paragraph that's heartwarming, right? And that's beautiful and that reminds us of the love of God and who we are.
And so we'll fixate on that. We'll memorize that paragraph. And if that's where you're at with Scripture, way to go.
I keep doing that a hundred times. However, if we develop only ever that far in our journey, in our relationship to Scripture. we can end up without knowing it treating the Bible as like a grab bag of warm, spiritual, fuzzy lines.
Yeah? And what will happen is that you'll fixate on like the one line that makes you happy. And so you'll read a psalm about how glorious is the love of God that sets the foundations of the earth. And you're like the apple of his eye.
And then the end of the psalm will be, but kill my enemies and smash their teeth. And you're like, ooh, I don't know how I feel about that. And so you end up. kind of taking the Bible as piecemeal and kind of remaking the Bible in our own cultural image, avoiding the parts that don't make us feel those warm fuzzies.
And as more years go by in my journey of reading the Bible, what I am finding is that it's actually those parts that bother me the most that are the things that I need to pay attention to the most, because they'll represent an opportunity to challenge my ways of thinking. challenge assumptions that I don't even know that I have about myself or God or other people, and actually unearth new horizons, new perspectives, new patterns in my own life that I need to name and remake to become more like Jesus. And so what if those challenging parts of the Bible, like for my friend Matt, who didn't lean into them, who didn't press through the question to some new vista of understanding on the other side, if we give up Too quickly, you can actually short-circuit the work that God's Spirit is doing in our lives. What if those difficult parts of Scripture are there on purpose, to take us on a journey to somewhere that we didn't even know that we needed to go?
And I am convinced that that's a part of what Paul is talking about when he talks about Scripture is designed to make us wise in ways that you just haven't even imagined yet. And this collection of texts has been doing that. for followers of Jesus all around the world for the last 2,000 years.
And so, I don't know where you're at this morning. I don't know what baggage you are bringing into a gathering like this. Maybe you're dragged here. Maybe you're here with enthusiasm. I don't know what your relationship is to the Bible.
Maybe you don't even fully know what your relationship is to the Bible. But my hunch is that if you were to start to think about it, you know that there is some... area of your engagement with the Bible that's open for growth and for development. Maybe you have a story of pain in your background with how people have used or abused the scriptures to hurt you or hurt people that you care about.
Maybe there's areas of confusion, and the more you've asked the people around you, they just tell you to like stop like trying to be too detailed and just believe, which is just really not a helpful thing, and you shouldn't ever say that to somebody because their questions are precisely... a marker that God's doing something in their lives and doing something in their hearts and in their minds. So I don't know where you're at.
My hunch is that all of us are at a place where we could take another step forward in our relationship with Scripture. And again, this isn't about an ancient book as such. It's about following Jesus. It's about following and becoming attentive to His voice and His work in our lives and in the lives of our communities around us.
And so I'm thoroughly convinced that this is a community where the Spirit of God is at work, where God's guiding people to greater experiences of His love, of His presence, of discovering the wisdom of God that's become human to us in the person of Jesus. But as for what exactly that means for your journey of following Jesus in Scripture, I have no idea. The Spirit of God has every idea. what's happening in our journeys. And so I think I'm just going to pass the mic and allow the Spirit of God to do whatever the Spirit of God needs to do in this time that we have.
Thank you for letting me come and speak on this really significant Sunday in your gathering. I'm really honored to be here. And thanks be to God.