The Word is Love

The Word is Love
Rev. Alan Claassen
Psalm 119:105-112 Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
July 13, 2008

Prayer before Sermon
Gracious God, May more light and truth break forth in our lives today from your Holy Word in ways that transform us and influence the world around us. Amen.

Can you tell I’m excited?

I am excited. And remembering my sermons back in May, I might even say that I am enthused this morning. It’s summertime, the time of the summer vacation, cross country trip,to see relatives or cross continent trips to see some foreign country such as Italy, the Netherlands or Costa Rica.

But the trip I am enthusiastic about is not back to Tulsa, Oklahoma or Amsterdam.

I am thinking about this journey that I have decided to lead us on this summer. This journey that begins in Genesis and ends in Revelation. This journey that will be filled with stories to tell when we get back home. In fact, that is one of the main stories of the Bible, leaving home, living away from home, living in a strange land and making it feel like back home, seeing our land as our home, and seeing strangers as our own family.
There will be stories about creation and creativity, there will be stories of being lost and found in the wilderness, of corruption and courage, there will be stories of wise men and women and children, there will be stories of dying and living.
Can you see why I am excited?
Now I am know that some of you are thinking that you have been to these places before. You know these stories. But I am not worried about you. You know that these stories are worth seeing again. You might say that you will be seeing them again for the first time.
You know that as you open up these stories they open you up, they open up your heart, your strength, your soul. No, I am not so worried about you all.

I am concerned that some of you might need persuading that this is a journey worthy of our excitement. And I understand that. And so does our tour guide, Marcus Borg, who has written our travel itinerary.

And so let me take just a moment to talk to you folks who are not persuaded that the Bible is not the best place to go on a summer vacation.

Marcus Borg sees three reasons why the Bible, at least as it was taught to most of us when we were growing up, is no longer persuasive.
One of the reasons is because “We are aware of the world’s religions in a way that most people have not been for most of human history. We are now global citizens. Either through the Television series by Joseph Campbell or Huston Smith, or just meeting some of our neighbors we are coming to some level of familiarity with the world’s religions and wisdom traditions. And so many find the exclusivist claims of Christian tradition impossible to accept. Some of us know that there are others ways to God than the way that Jesus taught. And if the Bible is used to say there is only one way then some of us are likely to go another way.
A second reason why some find the Bible no longer persuasive is that we are aware of the influences of cultural relativity; “that how people think is shaped by the time and place in which they live, as well as by their social and economic class. Our concepts, images, language, knowledge, beliefs, are all profoundly shaped by culture.” And so when the Bible is used to say that the ideas of some middle eastern men are true for all time and all people some people are likely to go look elsewhere for meaning and truth.
A third reason that people have been turned off rather than excited about reading the Bible is that we are modern people, influenced by science. Much of what we know to be true is based upon knowledge gained through experimentation and not revelation. And so when the Bible is used to give scientific explanations for the creation of the universe we are likely to say, “You must be kidding.”
The sad thing is that many people leave the church not knowing that the church has been living quite well with this knowledge of the wisdom of the world’s religions, the influence of cultural relativity, and the gifts of science for decades. In fact, applying the techniques of what in seminary is called “historical criticism” has brought the Bible back into play for many people. When the Bible is not taken literally, but is taken seriously, as a way to transcend our self-centered egos and see ourselves, our neighbors, and our planets from the perspective of our God-centered selves we experience the charity, compassion, loving-kindness that is the core of all the world’s religions.
My own father is the perfect example of this. Both my Mom and Dad were active in church when I was growing up. They taught the college age group at church when I was in grade school. They were loving kind people. But my Dad always, trained as a lawyer, also felt a little disconnected from what was often taught in church. A few years ago I began sharing with my Dad some of the books that I was excited about, including books written by Marcus Borg.
After he read a few of them he was upset. He asked me, with an equal measure of frustration and disbelief, “Why didn’t you ministers tell us about this 25 years ago?”
I noticed a similar experience last Fall when a small group of us studied Marcus Borg’s book, The Heart of Christianity.” Several in the class commented that the ideas that Borg was sharing were ideas that they had already, or questions that they had already been asking, but that they didn’t know it was OK.

Now the gift of a scientific approach to reading the Bible has given us a new appreciation for how the Bible came into being. Rather than thinking that it was written by God and is so holy that we cannot touch it, the results of approaching the Bible as a historian, a cultural anthropologist, a linguist, enables us to see the human beings who wrote the Bible. It enables us to see what made the Bible sacred, what gives it authority, what makes it a sacrament, a bridge between us and God that carries us to the promised land of compassion, tolerance, and caring for the earth.
So I hope that I have persuaded some of you reluctant ones to go on this journey with the rest of us. And if I made those of you were already excited, a little nervous, remember one the core ideas that you learned from your study of the Bible. Be not afraid.

Now I would like every to listen to this. What does it mean to refer to the Bible as sacred Scipture. We say that the Bible is the Holy Word. We say that the Bible is the word of God. But we don’t say that God wrote the Bible. Another way to say that is that Bible is not the words of God, it is the word of God.
“The Bible is a collection of divinely inspired written clues that by the power of the Holy Spirit reveal mysteries about God's nature and intent to real people. It was written by real people struggling to understand "God," --real people who became holy reflections and human witnesses of Divine intention.” (Ron Bufford)
As your tour guide let me share with you the first interesting fact of this journey. It took a long time for the Bible to be considered sacred. “The first five books of the Hebrew Bible, which we commonly refer to as the Old Testament, were regarded as sacred by the Jewish community around 400 years before Christ. But some of the writings and stories in those first five books of the Bible are approximately 4,000 years old.
The second part of the Hebrew Bible, the Prophets achieved sacred status by about 200BC. And the third part, the Writings, which include the Psalms, Proverbs, and Job became considered as sacred by the community 100 years after the birth of Christ.
For the 27 books of the New Testament the process took about three centuries. Though most of the books of the New Testament were written by the year 100 the first list that mentions all 27 of them as having special status is from the year 367.” Pg 29
The Bible became sacred, not because it was thought to be written by God, not by its origin, but because over time people treated certain documents differently in study and in worship.
This gives us an awesome responsibility. What is sacred for us in the Bible? On what basis can we say that a passage is no longer meaningful for us today? Can we just pick and choose which passages we like and leave out the rest? How do we decide?
There are certain sections of the Bible that we no longer consider as valid for our time.
Many of us enjoy eating pork and shellfish. Why did the Jewish community write into its laws and Scriptures that the eating of shellfish is an abomination?
According to the Book of Timothy in the New Testament some in the early church thought women had no place in the church. Women were not allowed to speak. Certainly not be lay leaders, or serve communion. I am sure there are many in this sanctuary who remember a time, not so long ago, when women did not serve in worship. How did we come to the conclusion that we could disregard this section from Timothy?
The women told us to.
In our class sessions on the book reading the Bible again for the First Time we have the benefit of short guest lectures by Marcus Borg on DVDs. In the presentation we heard last week Borg said that Adult Theological Education is the most pressing need in the church today.
The Bible shapes us, is our foundational document, our moral compass. And so it is vitally important that we know, both how it was written and what it means for us today. It is a living word, not a dead one. And that even though we are not to take it literally, we are to take it seriously, if we are to call ourselves Christian. Being a human document written in response to God we are called in our day to let it be a bridge between us and God. But all bridges need inspecting. There are some planks that need to be replaced. The plank that says women are inferior is one that in most, but not all, churches has been removed.
So we are almost ready to get begin our journey into the stories and the history of the Bible. In fact, the one thing remaining before we depart is to understand that in our journey we will be seeing history and story, fact and metaphor, two ways of telling the truth of God’s presence in our lives, the reality of love.
I am excited to be at the beginning of this journey. I have done a few sermon series in my ministry but never one on the Bible in 9 weeks. I am excited to see what is familiar, and I am looking forward to making connections I have never made before. After last week’s sermon someone came up to me after church and said that they were going to go home and read their Bible. Now that made me feel real good.

This coming Wednesday evening some of us will be discussing a book written by Eckhart Tolle called a New Heaven. I recently learned that Mr Tolle took the first name of Eckhart after discovering an entirely new approach to Christianity through the writings of the 12th Century monk, Meister Eckhart. A New Heaven is filled with Biblical references and through Eckhart Tolle we are invited to read the Bible again for the first time.

Meister Eckhart said that every creature is a word of God. I’d like to close with this poem by Meister Eckhart. I’d like to dedicate this to Clarissa, Murphys’ town burro..
LOVE DOES THAT

All day long a little burro labors, sometimes
with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries
about things that bother only
burros.

And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting
than physical labor.

Once in a while a kind monk comes
to her stable and brings
a pear, but more
than that,






he looks into the burro's eyes and touches her ears

and for a few seconds the burro is free
and even seems to laugh,

because love does
that.

Love Frees.

~ Meister Eckhart ~

That’s what the Bible tells me.
Love frees.

Blessed be the gospel that unbinds
our hearts and sets us
as a community
free.