Sermons

---

Bumper Sticker Theology
September 14, 2003
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
2nd in a series on “Tough Issues”
2 Timothy 3:10-17

If you didn’t get last Sunday’s sermon…then today’s won’t mean anything to you! Let me explain.

In the next six weeks, we’re going to tackle some very tough issues for people of faith in Christ…poverty, sexuality, the presence of evil and others. If we are going to approach these with more than just our own thoughts to work with…then we’ll have to be in God’s written word…the Bible.

I said last week that something amazing happens when we read scripture: We encounter God. And my encouragement last week was very simple: We need to read the scripture.

Now, in case you found that to be a little simplistic, this week I came across a recent study amongst Presbyterian Christians (who DOES these things, anyway?). Here’s what it said:

The percentage of Presbyterians who said they read the Bible either infrequently or not at all?

• 62% of church members
• 56% of elders

And over half NEVER read it in the context of a group study of the Bible.

If we are going to be available to the Holy Spirit speaking through the written word, and pointing us to the Living Word in Christ…we need to pick it up and read it…regularly. That was last week.

But if we are in scripture, or at least want to be…The next logical question, …is HOW do we read scripture? That’s what we want to talk about this morning. As we do that, let’s mark this time in God’s Word by lighting our scripture candle…and hear the words from Paul to his assistant Timothy, as found in 2 Timothy 3:10-17.

I found myself behind a car this week that had so many bumper stickers plastered to the back of it…that even at a very long stop light, I couldn’t read all of them. But here are the ones I remembered:

• the spiritual one -- “Lord, help me to be the person my dog thinks I am”
• philosophical one -- “If you can’t change your mind, are you sure you have one?”
• leftover from ’60s -- “Question authority” (not even an old VW bus)
• my favorite, for Bethany’s northern contingent -- “Free Ballard” (alt: What if the Hokey Pokey IS what it’s all about?)

And, if you watch bumper stickers enough, you will inevitably find the classic one that says:

“The Bible says it, I believe it, that does it” (usually on a Chevy pick-up with a gun rack in the back window)

The Bible says it, I believe it, that does it.

That’s not enough for me. I’ve seen the Bible misused too many times. Many, many people claim they have found “the plain meaning” of the scripture, and we should listen to them and not complicate it. Just read what it says. Well, this opens the door to two problems. The first problem is that if we take some of the things that the Bible says at literal, bare meaning…we will not only be unhappy, we will be heretical.

• In 1 Corinthians 15:29, it says something about baptism of the dead. Now, there is great unanimity amongst scholars…that we just don’t know what this means. It’s the only place in scripture it is mentioned, it’s unclear what the cultural reference point may have been, it is one of the foggiest half-sentences in all of scripture. And…some people indeed (Mormon religion) baptize the dead.
• At the end of the book of Job, after all of Job’s travails, it says that “the Lord restored the fortunes of Job…and the Lord gave Job twice as much as before.” I read about a church this week in Seattle that began to chant the word “double” as they collected the offering, because the preacher had told them if they gave… they would receive back double…because “The Word says so.”
• In the laws of Exodus it says: “You are to take a life for a life…an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Shall we? The Bible says it.
• Jesus says in the sermon on the Mount: “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.” (I notice our congregation is not full of left-handed people.)

Just because the words appear somewhere in the Bible…does not mean we understand them. Bumper sticker theology is bad theology.

The second problem occurs when we won’t consider what the scripture does say. We end up saying things like Bishop John Spong, now a best-selling author, who feels it his duty to “rescue the Bible” from patriarchy, sexism, fundamentalism, conservatism and cultural influences. In doing so, he casually tosses aside such minor Biblical issues as the cross, redemption and the divinity of Christ…in favor of his own view of what scripture ought to say. This leaves him, of course, as one author says,

“sitting in judgment on the Biblical text in such a way that the living God has very little chance of sitting in judgment on him…”

But even if we reject both bumper sticker theology AND modern psychological re-writings of scripture like Bishop Spong’s…the range of possibilities in reading scripture is endless:

• an uneducated woman in a rural part of Virginia wakes each morning and reads the scripture over her morning coffee, listening for what God might say to her.
• a professor with 25 years of experience and a Ph.D. spends 25 hours a week parsing Greek verbs, reading great theologians and wrestling with historical and redactional criticism as he readies his lecture for the next week.

How do we hear God speak in the scriptures? How do we read?

What I want to suggest to you this morning…are

• four things to do
• three things to remember and
• two final words.

(I was tired of 3-point sermons, so I decided to try 9!)

Four things to do in reading the scriptures:

1. Ask questions. Maybe the most important thing that has happened to me in last 10 years…is that I learned that it is okay to ask questions of a scripture text. Maybe those questions are technical: “What does this word mean? Where else is this person mentioned in the Bible?” More importantly perhaps…there are questions of God. For example, how can one read the story in Acts of Ananias and Sapphira…the couple who keeled over dead because they withheld some money from their church community…without saying “God, how can you be part of something like that? Must I be afraid of you?” Any time I teach or preach or read, I try to start out just by sitting down and reading the passage, and listing out every question that comes to mind. The ones that need answers will tend to stay with you. It’s not only okay to ask questions of the text, it is good. God can handle our questions.
2. Read together. The discernment of God’s Holy Spirit in the teachings of scripture is a job for the whole community. Certainly God speaks to individuals, but no one individual can consistently understand and apply scripture accurately by studying privately. It takes the reading, the voice, the listening, the prayers, the conversation with the whole community. The most trouble the Church has gotten in through history…is when one person claims or is given a monopoly on interpreting the Bible. And so in pairs, as families, in small groups, home groups, Sunday school classes …WE read the scriptures and listen for God’s voice.
3. Read all of the scriptures. Particularly when wrestling with a particular topic as we will in coming weeks. Read ALL of the passages that are relevant. If we deal with poverty and read only Jesus’ words, “The poor will always be with you,” without the many admonitions to care for the poor, to serve the poor, to share possessions…we will be blaspheming the whole voice of scripture. We have to read ALL of scripture…rather than taking one verse and holding it up as “proof” of our position. For years the church blindly justified slavery because Paul wrote in Colossians, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything.” Somehow they missed Galatians: “Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery,” or “Here there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave or free…” Read ALL of the passages…even if there is some tension in them.
4. Read first to understand what scripture meant…to the people who first read it. The entire Bible is filled with things written into particular times and cultures. Our first job is to study and read and think and try as much as we can to understand…what the original receivers would have heard…to understand what it meant so that we might understand what it means. The scripture has immense value to the 20th century, and timeless application, yet it was written centuries ago. When we read the story Jesus told about the Good Samaritan in Luke 10…we easily read it as a tale of helping the unfortunate…a good thing to do. But it is only as we learn of the bitter enmity between Samaritans and Jews, about how some would travel scores of extra miles to avoid coming into contact with the other people group…only then do we get a taste of how radically this story of Jesus calls us to define “neighbors.” Jesus’ original hearers would have instantly known. But we need to study and learn and put ourselves in their position…before understanding what God might call us to.

So, four things to do…now three to remember:

1. We depend on the Holy Spirit…to help us hear God in the scriptures. John Calvin says, “Our senses are so feeble that we could never understand a single word that God says to us, unless we are illumined by his Holy Spirit…” Jesus said the Spirit would remind us of all he had said. Ultimately, it is the Holy Spirit that bridges the gap between first century Christians and us in the 21st century. It is the Holy Spirit that sheds light on the passage in Acts 2 of the community sharing possessions and is able to challenge our patterns of accumulation. It is the Holy Spirit that causes the rural woman in Virginia to have her heart quickened by some timely encouragement at 6 a.m. AND the seminary professor to “stumble” upon a new thought as he sits over the scriptures. Every time we read…we need to begin… “Lord, breath your Spirit through these words.”
2. We depend ultimately upon God’s revelation in Christ for our perspective on scripture. We read the Old Testament in light of the New…the New Testament is a lens through which we read the Old. If we read only the Old Testament, we could build our lives around the issues of power, warfare and violence. But when we read the Old Testament through the cross of Christ, through the strength of weakness, through the self-sacrifice of Jesus…it causes us to see it differently. The entire Bible becomes the unfolding story of God’s redemption…culminating in Jesus Christ. The prophecy and preparation in the Old Testament, the fulfillment in the New.
3. We interpret scripture in humility. There is nothing as frustrating as an arrogant Christian. To stamp “the Bible says it” on every argument without being aware of even the possibility of our own inadequate listening is totally irresponsible. Every time scripture identifies sin, we must look first at our own lives. We need to acknowledge that we have blinders and biases, and desperately need the Holy Spirit and others to help us walk.

SO…three reminders.

Before I give you the two final words…I want to just remind you of where we started. We started by reading a story from 2 Timothy: Once upon a time there was an evangelist, a church-planting pastor who had an apprentice working for him. The apprentice was an ideal #2 man: loyal, faith-filled, followed up on details, sensitive, trustworthy. But he was also young, underconfident and a bit timid…probably not a good candidate for a high profile job. But one day the pastor was thrown into prison, and the young apprentice was thrown into being a pastor of a church which, by every appearance, had a lot of problems. So when Paul was in prison, he wrote to Timothy, his partner in ministry, about staying in ministry in this troublesome church in Ephesus. And in the midst of all the advice Paul wants to give him, Paul finds it imperative to ground him in the scripture with these powerful words:

“Stick with what you have learned and believed, sure of the integrity of your teachers- why, you took in the sacred Scriptures with your mother’s milk! There’s nothing like the written Word of God for showing you the way to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Every part of Scripture is God-breathed and useful one way or another- showing us truth, exposing our rebellion, correcting our mistakes, training us to live God’s way. Through the Word we are put together and shaped up for the tasks ahead.” (The Message)

Showing us truth….exposing our rebellion…correcting our mistakes…training us to live in God’s way. In light of this, then…

Two final words. And so we read, we study, we pray, we seek God’s Holy Spirit in the scripture, and each time we read…we wonder: Is God calling me to do something, to be someone, to believe something here?...as a result of what I have read?

And each time we read…we live it out: We embody the scripture into our life in Christian community.

Does our time in the scripture produce fruit?Does it produce people and communities whose character is becoming more like Christ? We can spend all the time in the world reading…but are we listening when the Word comes, and willing to go where God takes us?

Soren Kierkegaard said it this way:

When you read God’s Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, “It is talking to me, and about me.”

So: Four things to do, three to remember, two final words…way, way too much to fit on a bumper sticker. As it should be.