Sunday 4th December, 2011
Sermon
Isaiah 40: 1 – 11
Lessons
St Mark 1: 1 – 8
Prayer of Illumination
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, enlighten our hearts with the truth of Your Word, that we may ponder and
love the things that are pleasing to You; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The prophet Isaiah wrote, ‘Surely the people are grass. The grass withers,
flower fades. But the word of our God stands forever.
Isaiah 40: 7b – 8
In the sixth century BC, around two and a half thousands years ago, the prophet
Isaiah said, ‘The word of our God stands forever.’ In the sixth century BC,
many of the people of Israel had been taken into exile, to Babylon, but when
Babylon was itself conquered by the Persians, the people of Israel were allowed
to return to their land. The prophet wrote, ‘Comfort, yes, comfort my
people....Speak comfort to Jerusalem.’ The decades of exile had ended; the
people had cause to rejoice – for themselves and their children. Using the
image of a shepherd, the prophet says of God:
He will feed His flock like a shepherd;
He will gather the lambs with His arm.
And carry them in his bosom.
And gently lead those who are with young.
It is an incredibly beautiful and tender image of God lovingly caring for His
people. Yet mixed in with these pastorally sensitive verses, we hear God say of
1
all people that they are like grass and grass withers and flowers fade. The
prophet reminds the people that only the word of God stand forever. What
does that mean: the word of God stands forever? Today is the Second Sunday
of Advent. It is also known as Bible Sunday, the Sunday on which we reflect
on the Bible as the word of God. The Bible has a central place in the life of all
the churches: Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran and Reformed.
In each tradition, authority for much of what is said and done is found in the
Bible. Verses of Holy Scripture are used to justify the thinking and action of
Christian denomination. This morning I want to take the phrase from Isaiah,
‘The word of God stands forever’, and reflect on what that may mean.
Every one of the mainstream Christian traditions holds the Bible as a sacred
text, an ancient authority, which knows no parallel. Every recognisable service
of public worship in a church will be shaped around the Scripture readings for
that day. In a sense, we live from the word of God. It is a primary vehicle for
the individual Christian’s encounter with God but, and I’m sure you knew there
was a ‘but’ coming, the great issue with Scripture is how to interpret it. All
traditions are happy to call the Bible the word of God, but interpreting that word
is a minefield and often there is disagreement. The prophet Isaiah says, ‘The
word of our God stands forever,’ but what is that word saying? The theologian
and philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, once said, ‘Stupid clergyman appeal quite
2
directly to the Bible directly understood.’ This morning I want to offer my
thoughts on how we can approach the Bible and thereby encounter the Holy.
In the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, the people of Israel are told that
when they receive the cities that the LORD God will give them, when they
conquer those cities, they, the people of Israel, are to kill every living thing in
them. The LORD God commands what we would call ethnic cleansing: every
single Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite and Jebusite is to be ‘utterly
destroyed.’ In the Book of Leviticus, anyone who does not obey the moral and
ceremonial laws of Israel is to be stoned to death. We read:
The man who commits adultery with another man’s wife, he who
commits adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the
adulteress, shall surely be put to death......
If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them
have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death.....
In the First Letter to Timothy, written in the name of St Paul, we are told about
the ordering of the Church. Women should not be wearing costly clothing or
gold or pearls. Women should learn in silence and there are no circumstances
in which a woman can speak in church: ‘I do not permit a woman to teach or to
have authority over a man. Adam was formed first, not Eve.’ In St Paul’s
First Letter to the Corinthians, he instructs the women of church to keep their
3
heads covered. In the Book of Exodus, there is instruction about how to sell
your daughter into slavery and, in the same book, we read:
Work shall be done for six days, but the seventh day shall be a
holy day for you, a Sabbath of rest to the LORD. Whoever does
any work on it shall be put to death.
These are just some of the texts with which we might have difficulty.
This week much was made of the Church of Scotland’s response to same-sex
marriage. The response is more nuanced than the BBC or The Scotsman
reported but it was the contribution of Ann Allen which was most striking.
Ann is a former convenor of the Board of Social Responsibility for the Church
of Scotland and she vigorously defended the institution of marriage. As with
the Church’s response, Ann spoke of the Scriptural references to marriage and,
like the Church, she forgot to mention that, in the biblical context, all women
are property. For me, that changes the nature of the relationship entirely but,
what was worse, here was a Christian woman speaking in public, outside the
parliament no less, and Christian men, including the Cardinal, stood listening to
her - and her head was not covered! Not content with several hundred
protesters, Ann later appeared on national television to speak to hundreds of
thousands of people and, again, her head was not covered. St Paul would have
something to say about this! Though Ann Allen, the Cardinal and the Church
of Scotland seek to deny equality to homosexual people, they all stopped short
4
of calling for homosexual people to be stoned. Regularly, the text in Leviticus
concerning two men is cited but always the punishment which goes with it is
omitted. My point is not to mock Ann, the Cardinal or other genuine followers
of Jesus but to illustrate just what a minefield it is to interpret Scripture. ‘The
word of our God stands forever’, but what does that mean?
Here is the crucial point: the question for the reader of the Bible should not be
‘What did God say?’ ‘What did God do?’ but rather ‘How did these people of
ancient times see God?’ ‘How did they see God?’ ‘What did they think God’s
purpose was?’ Biblical stories are not moment by moment commentaries on
events as they unfolded. On the contrary, they are stories written in most cases
hundreds of years after the events they purport to describe. We may ask, ‘How
adequate was their view of God?’ In the Bible, there is murder, rape, lust,
theft, deceit, friendship, love, compassion and justice. There is military
conflict, victory and defeat, as well as economic prosperity and hardship.
There are good kings and bad kings. There are parables, poems, prose and
myths. Crucially, we must ask, ‘How did these people see God?’ What can
we learn from that? How do we apply that learning today? And are there
things we should leave behind us?
In the Jewish Torah, there are 613 laws, almost all of which have been qualified
or altered. The Jewish Talmud and midrash are bodies of writings which have
5
accumulated over thousands of years in which the rabbis have interpreted and
re-interpreted the laws of God in the Torah in order to seek God in the present.
God is incarnational, that is, people encounter God in their lives, in their
experience, within the terms of their understanding and, importantly, within
their limited cultural context. None of the churches started by St Paul would
have been interested in becoming eco-congregations. It simply could not be:
such issues are not their issues. The marriage of two persons of the same
gender is not a question in their context: appeals to the Bible directly
understood are stupid. In the Book of Micah, we read, ‘What the LORD
requires of us is this: to do what is just, to show constant love and to walk
humbly with our God.’ What is just is what we, through God-given rational
thought, decide what is just. We live, think, act and pray within our limited
cultural context.
We also need to understand the history of the period before we can more fully
understand the thinking of the people about God. In our Gospel lesson today
we are told that John the Baptist was clothed with camel’s hair and a leather belt
around his waist and he ate locusts and wild honey. What does that tell us?
Was he mad? In fact, it tells us that he was a desert monk who lived by strong
ascetic standards. We are told that he baptised with water. Was this
something new? Was it a rite which he initiated? No. The Jews already had
baptism; it was a common practice. They had two kinds of baptism: one
6
which was for ritual cleaning of Jews and was administered regularly and could
be repeated daily; it ritually cleansed the Jew each day, both men and women.
The other kind was for the admission of Gentiles to the faith, converts to
Judaism. What was new about John’s baptism was that it was a once-for-all
cleansing and it was for Jews: it was an initiation into a new life. According to
Josephus, John had a colossal following and there could be no better start to the
ministry of Jesus than that John commended Him as being even greater than
himself.
Mark opens his Gospel calling Jesus the Son of God. Written at that time,
Caesar was the Son of God, the Lord and Saviour of the world, the one who
brought peace on earth. For Mark to call Jesus ‘the Son of God’ was to place
Jesus in direct opposition to the emperor, to all that Caesar stood for. The
Kingdom of Christ, the reign of Christ, was a different value system.
Elsewhere, we are told that God or Christ sits on a throne. God doesn’t sit on a
throne, nor Christ. It is a metaphor and the Bible is full of them: they are on
almost every page and in each piece of writing, parable, poem, prose or myth:
there are many layers of meaning to be had. The Bible is a spiritual text:
through its pages, every hour of every day, people encounter the Presence of the
Holy. Through its pages, God can and does speak to the heart. It is our
spiritual food but being definitive about interpretation is almost always
dangerous and relying on single verses to justify ethics or doctrine is madness.
7
The word of God stands forever: I believe that because the Bible is a conduit
through which God speaks and reveals Himself to us. It is holy ground but we
need to approach it with our God-given rational thought and with our sense of
justice as we tackle the issues and concerns of our day.
Amen.
8