Introduction
This is the sermon I preached at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., on Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 26-27, 2009, the weekend of the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. The special occasion for the weekend was the dedication on new pulpit and lectern Bibles and the blessing of worshipers Bibles.
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Readings
Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29
Psalm 19:7-14 (Antiphon: v.8)
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50
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Prayer
“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation[s] of [our] heart[s]
be acceptable to you,
O LORD, [our] rock and [our] redeemer.” Amen. (Psalm 19:14, NRSV)
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Message
We call it by a number of names:
The Holy Bible, the Good Book,
the Scriptures, the Old and New Testaments.
But whatever name we use,
we are pointing to a whole collection of writings
with a long and complex past
entwined together with God’s history among his people.
Protestants’ sixty-six or Catholics’ seventy-three books
in the Scriptures
are filled with stories and poems,
histories and letters,
wisdom and prophecies,
gospels and end-time literature.
They were shared by oral tradition
and originally written in a variety of languages:
Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.
Then the books were handed down
between the generations,
copied a letter at a time onto scrolls
and later onto folios of pages.
Within Judaism,
historians believe that the list of books
in the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament,
settled into its final format
by the end of the second century A.D.
And within Christianity,
the New Testament reached its current form
sometime in the middle of the third century.
Archeologists have found fragments
of these ancient heirlooms
stored in pots in caves in Israel
and in other sites across the middle East.
Scholars have dated and compared these pieces
and have sought to assemble
the best possible collection
of the most reliable manuscripts.
Then translators work
to understand the languages
and the words the texts use.
This is a complicated task
as there are no direct connections
linking a Hebrew or Greek word
with the words in modern languages.
The challenge is to offer
the best fit, the most apt translation.
Then there’s the whole question we face
of selecting which version to read.
It helps to explore the introduction in a Bible,
because there you can often find out details
about the approach taken by the team of translators.
Some attempt to create a literal,
word-for-word translation;
others try to translate the sense of whole sentences.
But regardless of which translation we use
and how the translations are created,
we trust that God is at work
in the text and through the faithful service
of those who brought the text into being
and who have touched it across time.
We trust God to use all of this
to make known to us his will.
Our congregation’s constitution includes
a Confession of Faith that summarizes our view of the Scriptures.
It states:
This congregation confesses Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and the Gospel as the power of God for the salvation of all who believe.
- Jesus Christ is the Word of God incarnate, through whom everything was made and through whose life, death, and resurrection God fashions a new creation.
- The proclamation of God’s message to us as both Law and Gospel is the Word of God, revealing judgment and mercy through word and deed, beginning with the Word in creation, continuing in the history of Israel, and centering in all its fullness in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
- The canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the written Word of God. Inspired by God’s Spirit speaking through their authors, they record and announce God’s revelation centering in Jesus Christ. Through them God’s Spirit speaks to us to create and sustain Christian faith and fellowship for service in the world.
This congregation accepts the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the inspired Word of God and the authoritative source and norm of its proclamation, faith, and life.
(Model Constitution for Congregations, 2007, C2.02.-C2.03.)
This tells us that the Scriptures and the Word of God
are connected, but are not exactly the same.
First of all, as John’s Gospel tells us,
Jesus Christ is the Word of God made flesh.
This means that in one sense
the Word of God is God himself, God with us.
The next part of the confession
states that we believe that
the proclamation of God’s message
is the Word of God.
This means that all preaching and teaching
and witness and action
that share God’s message with us and the world
are themselves the Word of God.
We hear and absorb this Word as Law, God’s judgment,
and as Gospel, God’s free gift of grace.
And thirdly, we confess that the Canon of Scripture,
the collection of books contained in our Bibles,
are the written Word of God.
God has inspired individuals of faith,
from the original judges and prophets,
poets and apostles,
to those who first committed the texts to writing,
through those who labor with manuscripts and translations,
to create and maintain and pass on
the written texts of the Scriptures.
We believe that the Good News about Jesus Christ
is hidden deep within and foreshadowed by the Hebrew Scriptures,
just as the promise of the long-awaited Messiah
is revealed and fulfilled in the Christian Scriptures.
And finally,
we confess that we live according to God’s will,
that we trust him to share his inspired Word with us
through the Canon of the Scriptures,
and that we accept the Scriptures as
“the authoritative source and norm
of [our] proclamation, faith, and life.”
This means that we come to God our Father
and ask him for the blessing of faith by the Spirit
that we may follow his Son Jesus Christ in obedience.
Along the way in our journey of faith,
we have been bathed in water with the Word,
we walk in obedience to that Word,
we hear God’s Word proclaimed to us,
we feast upon this Word in bread and wine,
and we read and hear and study this Word,
revealed to us in the Scriptures.
And we do all of this together,
by the grace and mercy of God,
as a community created by Word and Spirit
in God’s one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Amen.