An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Sacred Writings and Itchy Ears

A sermon on 2 Timothy 3:14 – 4:5 by Nathan Nettleton

In last Sunday’s Baptist Union ordination service, there was an exhortation that included an image from one of tonight’s scripture readings. The presider said to the newly ordained pastors:

The calling into which you have now been ordained
is leading to resurrection and life,
but in the footsteps of Jesus,
it will take you by the way of the wilderness and the cross.
You will be tempted to stray from the path
and to preach the sweet lies that people are itching to hear.
But so that you may remain true,
we present each of you with a Bible,
our complete reference for the journey of faith.
Welcome it as it pierces mind, heart and spirit,
and remain faithful in ministering the living Word of God.

And in tonight’s reading from one of Paul’s letters to Timothy, we heard him say that “the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth.” But you, Timothy, says the Apostle, have long “known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” And then he goes on with the famous line about all scripture being God-breathed and useful for various things. But of course, many of us have had the experience of setting out to read the Bible through, and finding it to be a bewildering hodge-podge of random old stories from a bygone age that don’t seem very well connected to each other and certainly don’t seem to speak with any sort of unified voice about anything much. So what is the Apostle on about?

A few years back, I set out to read The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my life, and a friend, who had read it many times, told me that not only should I read The Hobbit first, since it was the prequel, but that before that I should read The Silmarillion, which was the prequel to the prequel. Having taken his advice, and ploughed resolutely through The Silmarillion, it is a wonder I ever read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings at all. Like many people when they first approach the Bible, I couldn’t make head nor tail of The Silmarillion. It seemed to be a bewildering hodge-podge of random old stories from a fictitious bygone age that didn’t seem very well connected to each other and certainly didn’t seem to speak with any sort of unified voice about anything much. But funnily enough, I think I will read it again one day. Because now that I have read The Lord of the Rings several times, I have a feel for the world for which The Silmarillion is like sacred scripture. I think its strange old stories will be far more intriguing now that I will be able to recognise them as the foundational mythology of a world I have come to know. The Bible can be much the same. If you are not yet familiar with the culture of the communities of faith that it has shaped, then you will probably have a hard time making any connections between the random old stories in the Bible and the world we now inhabit. This is not a book that is likely to hold anyone’s attention for long if approached as a novel. Whatever it has to say, it has to say through its ongoing relationship with a living community. So tonight I want to try to unpack a little more of what the Apostle Paul is saying about the place of the Bible in our shared life and faith.

To begin that, though, I want to begin by acknowledging the depth of the problem. There are major sections of the Bible that seem to be carrying on a sustained argument with each other. For example, books like Nehemiah invoke God’s name to justify a very hard line policy of racial segregation. Any Jew who has married a non-Jew is to divorce them and expel them from the community. Racial purity and strict segregation are seen as the will of God, and when you read such material in the Bible, it is not hard to see how the Bible was used to justify apartheid. But other parts clearly oppose Nehemiah’s understanding of racial purity and keep pointing out that Moses had foreign wives and King David was descended from Ruth, a Moabite, and that God blessed these gentiles and blessed Israel through these gentiles. Some passages portray God as a violent warrior, and others portray God as the great reconciler and peace-maker. I could multiply the examples, but you know what I mean.

It is easy to see why it is often said that you can justify anything from the Bible, and why you often see people waving Bibles as they hurl abuse at some group that they hate. And those people whom Paul and our ordination service talk of as having itchy ears for some teaching or another that appeals to them often don’t have to entirely abandon the Bible to find it. They can usually find someone who will be teaching whatever it is they want to hear from the Bible, as of course happened with apartheid and any number of other heresies. So how on earth can the Apostle Paul seriously claim that “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness”?

Well, one of the most important bits, and the most contentious bits, is what is meant by that phrase “inspired by God”, or more literally, “God-breathed”. All scripture is God-breathed.

Some people make this phrase the foundation of a theory that the Biblical writers were little more than human typewriters through which God dictated the scriptures word for word, and that therefore every sentence of the Bible is equally and literally and independently the word of God, fixed and unchangeable and utterly authoritative. But that is a rather overblown theory to build on a single phrase that it is clearly open to other meanings, and you don’t have to read too much of the Bible to see that the personalities and emphasises and varying beliefs of the individual authors shine through on every page. The marriage-wrecking, ethnic cleansing manifesto of Nehemiah was clearly not dictated by the same composer as the book of Ruth with its romantic celebration of the gentile heritage of King David. Or when you turn from the letters of Paul to the letters of John, there is no mistaking the change of style and language. These are not the works of one author on two different typewriters.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are people who suggest that all scripture being inspired by God simply means that the people who wrote it were feeling inspired at the time. In much the same way that a songwriter might say “I was feeling inspired by the sunrise yesterday morning, so I wrote this song”, so a biblical author might have said “I was feeling inspired about God yesterday, so I wrote this epistle”. One of the problems of that interpretation is that it is rather dependent on the modern usage of the English word “inspired”, and it doesn’t seem to work very well when you remember that Paul wrote in Greek and used a word that more literally means “God-breathed”. And it also doesn’t seem to be nearly robust enough to explain why Paul, in the same passage, would describe the Bible as “sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation” and as “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.”

I can’t give you a definitive theory and guarantee that it is 100% accurate, but it seems to me that to get to the heart of this image of scripture as God-breathed, we have to take the images of God’s breath and breathing a lot more seriously. As much as the dictation theory people want to say that their theory gives them a very high view of the authority of the Bible, it also leaves it as something that has been breathed rather than something that is being breathed. In their attempt to elevate its authority, they leave it as stale as the air blown last week into a now wilting balloon. I sometimes think they end up treating the Bible as the last will and testament of our dearly departed God.

The real power of the Bible is not so much in what was written once long ago, but in what happens when we gather around it to listen and expose ourselves to the breath of God breathing through it now. Or, since in both both languages of the Bible the words for breath and spirit are the same, I might equally or better say, when we gather to listen and expose ourselves to the the Spirit of God breathing through the Bible now. You see, there is something mystical and sacramental that takes place here. In much the same way that Christ promises to make himself present and known in our breaking of bread at his table, so the Spirit of God promises to be present and known when we gather to read and hear the scriptures, breathing life into us, teaching us, correcting us, training us in doing right, and instructing us for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. There is no particular power or life in the words inked on the pages, but when they are opened and read in an expectant community, God breathes through them and into us with urgent whispers of love and longing and hope and truth and life.

And when that happens, the Biblical contradictions and arguments are no longer so threatening or bewildering to us. In fact, they come alive themselves, and we find them mirroring and unmasking the contradictions and tensions in our own hearts even as we find the breath of God blowing through, reproving and correcting and teaching and thus helping us to unravel the mess and be carried deeper and deeper into the gracious reconciling heart of God. And surely one of the most important keys to that is what Paul says when he speaks of the sacred writings instructing us for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. He doesn’t say anything about faith in the Bible. He says faith in Jesus. If we want to gain any benefit from the Bible, we must read it and hear it through our faith in Jesus. Jesus is the key to the Bible. Not the other way around. The Bible on its own will not instruct you for salvation. In fact, there is every danger, depending on which page you start on, that it could just as easily instruct you for the sort of corruption, hostility and violence that saw Jesus crucified. But when we begin with our faith firmly invested in Jesus, then even a book like Nehemiah becomes a sacred writing through which the Spirit of God can breath as Jesus leads us to acknowledge our own feelings of racial or cultural superiority and find new ways in which we might be as zealous as Nehemiah while being as boundary defying as Paul. Indeed, the whole complexity of the human heart and human culture is found in these pages in all its glory and ugliness, and when we gather expectantly and the Spirit breaths life to us through it, the pathways to grace and truth begin to open before us.

Friends, do not make of this book an idol, but do not brush it aside as though it were nothing more than The Silmarillion either. It is a mere book only in as much as what’s over here is mere bread and wine. They are, but here in the midst of this gathering, we come expecting God to breath and live and be present and transform us for the life of salvation, and in Jesus the Christ, God has promised not to let us down.

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