Proper 28 C

“Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.” This collect identifies what Holy Scripture is for Episcopalians.

Proper 28 C

Transcribed from a sermon

Given on November 20, 2013

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Luke 21:5-19

2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

As I was sitting down to prepare this sermon I read in the Gospel where it says, “Make up your minds not to prepare in advance.” (laughter) I seriously thought about that, but then I realized I would never be able to sleep on Saturday night if I really tried to do that.

I wasn’t terribly inspired by the readings so I went back to read them over again and noticed the Collect at the beginning. The Collect is a prayer that collects the thoughts for the day. In the Prayer Book there is a Collect for every Sunday of the year, so each week we have a different Collect. These are based on great prayers that have come down through time and have been chosen for the different weeks. The one for this week talks about Holy Scripture. This prayer identifies what Holy Scripture is for Episcopalians. It says, “Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.”

The holy Scriptures for us are something that we interact with. We are not passive with the scriptures. We are even here praying that we will be engaged. It says first that we should hear them so at church services we hear the scriptures. And it is important to hear them. Scientists have found now that when we hear something different parts of the brain are activated and we remember it differently then when we read it with our eyes. So the experience of listening is important. At times I’ve said we really shouldn’t give out the readings on Sunday because then people are busy reading it with their eyes instead of listening with their ears, but I have been overruled on that. To listen triggers a different response so we are to hear scripture, and that is what we do when we gather for worship. The truth is that if you came to church every Sunday for three years you would hear the entire body scripture, except for a few passages from the Old Testament. You would hear the entire breath of scripture. The Collect says we are to hear.

But we are to do more than that. We are also to read them, which means looking at scripture on our own, not just in community. We are encouraged to read for ourselves.

Then it says to mark. Now I know that it is hard to mark up the Bible. How do you take a highlighter on scripture? But if you have a Bible that you can’t stand to mark, get a cheap paperback one and a yellow marker and a pencil and when you read it, mark the stuff that moves you, that you are going to want to look at again. Take your pencil and write notes on the side because you want it to be your scripture. You want to fully engage with it. They find with students that if they can have their own books that they can mark up, it becomes theirs, and they have a different relationship with it. It is your scripture. This is for you. It was written for our learning. So we are supposed to mark up the Bible. Did you know that? Isn’t that really an awesome thought?

And then to learn, to study it. We are always learning. The wonderful thing about scripture is that every time you read it, every time you go through it, there is something new there. There is something new to be learned. We need to approach scripture as a student, to see it as something we are going to learn from. Some of you are still in school, and some of you long graduated, and some of you have graduated and gone back to school in your retirement. We are healthiest when we are always learning, and there is always something new to learn in scripture.

Then it says to inwardly digest - an interesting way of describing our relationship with scripture. To inwardly digest. Well if you think about it, reading and marking it are a way of consuming it. We are grasping hold of it. And when we eat something, first we take a bite of it and then we chew it up. So that would be like taking a bite of scripture and chewing it up by thinking about it and seeing what other people have said about it. Then you swallow it and take it in. If you think about our food after we eat and enjoy it it goes into our system and we are no longer conscious of the process that takes place, but our system manages to pull from it the nutrients that we need to be healthy. So to inwardly digest scripture means that after we have studied it, then it goes into us and becomes a part of us. It sits in there and transforms us and strengthens us. So we are to have that kind of relationship with scripture, an active, interactive relationship with scripture. And the reason, the reason we go to scripture is so that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life. That’s the purpose of scripture; to help us have that faith, that assurance, that knowledge, that life is eternal. Think about it. That’s what we say in this prayer that is part of our tradition.

So this then leads me to talk about the scriptural passages that we read today. Sometimes we get pieces of scripture that we are not comfortable with. Or perhaps we are not comfortable with because we know people that have taken some of it out of context in a way that makes us uncomfortable. In this reading from the second letter to the Thessalonians there is a passage that I’ve heard taken out of context. I don’t know whether any of the others of you have run into this but I’ve heard people say that the Bible says anyone unwilling to work should not eat. I don’t know whether anybody else has run into that, but I have. And it angers me to say that is from scripture because it is taken out of context. So to understand this we first of all we might look at the context of what the entire letter is about. Secondly there is a real question about the authenticity of Second Thessalonians.

So let’s take each one of those. First of all, let’s talk about the nature of scripture. The canon of scripture is something that evolved over time. Unlike the claims of some traditions, God did not write down on a piece of paper what the Holy Scriptures were for Christians. Rather, what happened was that after Christ’s resurrection the church began to grow. Different things were written down. Of course there were no printing presses, so the things that people liked they would then copy and send to their friends. If Paul sent a letter to a church and they go, “Wow, this is a great letter, somebody would copy it,” when they went to another church they would take it. And then that church would read it and say, “That’s really good,” and would copy it and send it to someone else. Over time certain of the things that were circulating were read a lot and others were found to not be quite so helpful. But different churches considered different ones to be helpful. So by about 150, the middle of the second century, there were some churches that acknowledged that there were four books or writings about Jesus, which would be our four Gospels and they were reading the letters of Paul and giving them a great deal of respect. There were other churches that said there was only one Gospel that was worth reading, and it wasn’t always the same Gospel in different parts of the community. There wasn’t any consistency. Up until quite late there were real questions about Revelations and Jude and some other of the letters. So over time what was considered scripture changed and grew and was argued about. By about the third century it had pretty much settled down to what we have today but it wasn’t finally formalized until the seventh century.

It was an ongoing consideration of which of these readings are really useful - which are ones that we are going to say are inspired by God? There was general agreement that the letters from Paul were inspired. But as people began looking in more modern times at the letters of Paul they started thinking that some of these letters probably were not written by Paul - the writing is different, the theology is different. How are we to know which ones are written by Paul and which ones are not? There are some that we are pretty sure that Paul wrote, like Romans and Corinthians, but Second Thessalonians, that is argued over. It is about 50 / 50 when you talk to Bible scholars. Some say the Second Letter to the Thessalonians couldn’t possibly be from Paul because it is too much like the first letter to the Thessalonians. It sounds like someone copied it. In addition, the eschatology, that is the story of the end times, is different in that then it is in some of Paul’s other writings. Others say no it is legitimately Paul. So they argue about it. So the first problem we have is that we are not even sure if Paul wrote it.

In addition, we should look at the context of the statement “Anyone who is not working shouldn’t eat” within the letter itself. The writer is talking about a group of people who were waiting for the end time. They were so sure that the end time was coming any day now they figured they didn’t need to work any more. They just were idle busy body gossips who sat around and talked. These was not people who were unable to work. This was not the poor. This was not somebody who had lost their job. The culture wasn’t quite like that at that time. It wasn’t like it is today. And Paul in his other writings is very clear that it is important to care for the poor and it is important to give to the hungry. He even went to the various churches and said, “There is a famine going on in Judea. Let’s give money to help them out.” And he and Barnabas took that collection to Jerusalem to give to the people in Jerusalem. So he is not against helping someone who is in real need, yet this little passage can get taken out of context and used.

We also have an interesting thing in terms of scripture as Jesus prophesized the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Some scholars say that the fact that he prophesized the destruction of the Temple means that Luke must have been written after seventy AD when the temple was destroyed. That the writer of Luke put in that prediction to fit in with what had happened. But there are others saying that there is evidence that Luke was written earlier than that. So what are we to make of that? Imagine that you were not involved in a church, you weren’t a Christian, but you found a spiritual teacher that inspired you. You were living in the Midwest and that teacher said that now we are going to go and visit New York City. Suppose this was in the year 2000. As you and your group approach New York City you looked across the Hudson and saw all those buildings. You were very impressed by New York City and all those buildings so the teacher said to you, “There will come a day when those buildings will be destroyed and even the tallest one will be but ashes on the ground.” Now a wise teacher who has some perspective on things knows that every building at some point is going to be ashes on the ground. They are all going to fall down at some point because nothing lasts forever in time. No civilization has survived where it cities are intact. His prediction has no time set. Anybody can predict that yes every building in New York City will at some point be rubble. We don’t know when, but at some point. Yet when 9/11 happened a year later those people would think about their leader’s prophesy.

Suppose Jesus had said what we read today to try and teach the disciples to not be attached to a building where God is supposed to reside and that God is not in a structure because a structure is of time and will be destroyed. Seventy years later there was a rebellion in Israel and the Romans responded by destroying everything in Jerusalem, especially the temple. You can imagine when the Romans quite literally took every stone down that the disciples looked back and remembered what Jesus had said.

(At this point the recording ended.)