Into the River

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Luke 4:14-21

January 13, 2013 • Portage First UMC

VIDEO INTRO

Eighteen years ago—though it seems like just yesterday—I stood at the edge of the river. Several months before, in a youth planning session, someone had suggested we take the youth group whitewater rafting in the summer. Sure, I thought. Why not? Never mind the fact that I’m not a swimmer. Why does that matter? We’ll be in a boat! So we did the research, found out that one of the best places to raft is the New River in West Virginia, and we drove out there, two vans full of youth and adults. The next day, we loaded into the company’s vans and drove down to the river. As we travelled, I remembered the safety instructions we had been given that morning. You know, they had told us comforting things like, “Whitewater rafting is an adventure sport that could result in death or other serious injury.” Then they said, “Please sign this waiver.” Death or other serious injury? I’m sorry; to me, death is more than an injury. I was starting to wonder what I had gotten myself into.

When we arrived at the launching point, there was another group ahead of us, so I watched as they loaded into their rafts and started down the river. Then it was our turn. Now, as a non-swimmer, I would have been perfectly happy at that point had they said, “I’m sorry, the rafts are full, we need someone to stay behind.” Me! Me! Pick me! But they didn’t say that. Instead, they said it was time to get into the river. So with the threat of “death or other serious injury” hanging over us, we dutifully drug our rafts into the water and then jumped in and began to paddle. Miraculously, we all made it to the end of the river in one piece, with very few actual injuries. But you know, what made the difference in getting down the raging river safely was the fact that there were others with me in the raft. I wasn’t alone. I didn’t have to do all the paddling, and I didn’t have to keep the raft afloat by myself. And once I knew I could survive it, I actually had a lot of fun. We went back a couple of other times to get into the river.

Because if you’re going to experience all that whitewater rafting has to offer, you have to get into the river. You can’t stand on the shore. You can’t watch from a distance. We brought home a video of our rafting trip, and while watching it was fun, it wasn’t the same experience as being in the river, surrounded by others who are experiencing the same thrill, the same discovery, the same journey, only from different perspectives. You have to get in the river, and I’ve been thinking about that during this series we’re working through on reading and studying the Bible. There are a lot of folks who want to approach the Bible the same way I tried to approach whitewater rafting. We want to stand on the side, maybe hear a few words from the Bible on Sunday, but we’d really rather not get too involved in this book. And sometimes we’ll say it’s because we don’t understand what we read. After all, as Chris Webb puts it, “The Bible comes to every one of us as something wholly strange and unusual, a world sketched out in awkward and irreconcilable angles. It alternately comforts and jars, inspires and grates. Scripture is untidy, unwieldy, difficult. We stretch our minds to make sense of it…Yet the Bible resists us at every turn. It will not cooperate, it will not conform to our schemas, it will not be tamed” (Fire of the Word, pg. 31). I can relate to that. There are things I don’t understand, but deep down, sometimes, like Mark Twain once said, I should be more worried about the parts I do understand than the parts I don’t. There is a lot in the Bible I understand but just fail to live, to follow, to do. And so I stand on the shore, not wanting to get into the river because it might sweep me away. It will do that. However, if we’re really going to encounter Jesus in the pages of this book, we have to get in. We need to get into the water.

And we’ll need others along on our journey. We can’t do it alone. So this week and next, we’re going to be talking about what it means to read the Bible in community. Next week, we’re going to talk about the importance of small groups, but today, I want us to focus on reading with what the book of Hebrews calls “the great cloud of witnesses” (12:1), the larger body of Christ. Within the Christian tradition, there are at least six streams of living water, six traditions or ways of approaching the Christian faith. One of the beauties of the Methodist tradition, and one of the reasons I continue to be a Methodist, is that John Wesley had this wonderful way of pulling out the best of many different streams of the faith, many different traditions and helping us experience Jesus and the living God in many different ways. Each of these streams or traditions could be a sermon by themselves, but this morning I want to just briefly look at these six streams and, more importantly, help us see what each part of our faith brings to our understanding of the Bible. How do these various Christian ways of viewing life help us read the Bible? And then the question I’m going to ask at the end is this: which of these streams are you lacking? Because we really need all of these streams coming together to form the river of life, the river that John in the book of Revelation sees as flowing from throne of God (cf. Revelation 22:1). If we’re going to read the Bible effectively, we need to get into the river and allow others to come along with us.

The first stream is the contemplative tradition. Now, that sounds to some of us like going out in the wilderness to a monastery and becoming a monk or a nun. In reality, what we’re calling “contemplative” could also be called the prayer-filled life. It’s not a life that only a few are called to; it’s a life we’re all invited to participate in. In the midst of their busy lives, Jesus invited his disciples to “come with me by yourselves to a quiet place” (Mark 6:31). Paul called believers to “pray continually,” or, as some translations say, “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). And of course the Bible is full of the prayers of God’s people, especially (as I mentioned last week) in the psalms. The psalms are prayers of all sorts and have brought both comfort and challenge to praying people for centuries. In many ways, prayer is the language of love between ourselves and our creator. I mean, think about those you love. If you never talked to them, would they know? What kind of a relationship would you have? It would be like the man and woman who had been married for forty years, but she was ready to leave. When they went to counseling, the counselor asked what was wrong. “He never tells me he loves me,” she said. The counselor asked the man if that was true, and he said, “I told her I loved her forty years ago, and if that changes, I’ll let her know.” You can’t have a relationship with someone you don’t talk to. The contemplative life calls us to engage Scripture prayerfully and helps us see the Bible as a book of prayer.

The Gospel of Luke is, many scholars say, the Gospel of prayer (cf. Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pg. 21). From the very beginning of the book, people are in prayer. Zechariah, Simeon, Anna, and perhaps most importantly, Mary, the mother of Jesus. In Luke 1, Mary encounters an angel who tells her the greatest news she’s ever heard: she’s going to give birth to the Messiah, the Savior. The song she sings later in that same chapter is one of the great prayers of the Bible (Luke 1:46-55). Mary was just going about her business; she wasn’t a priest or a religious leader. She was just a girl living in a small town, living her day-to-day life. Her life reminds us how the contemplative life is not a special vocation. It’s not just for religious professionals. It’s a calling to be prayerful as we approach the Scriptures, and to pray the words of Scripture. As we jump into the stream of the contemplative life, we experience the nearness and the love of God pouring forth through the pages of the Bible. Prayer is the language of the heart.

The second stream we can call the virtuous life, or the holiness tradition. Early on in his dealings with the Hebrew people, God told them, “Be holy, because I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44), a theme Peter picked up in his writings (1 Peter 1:16). Jesus told his followers, “Be perfect…as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). The call to holy living is all throughout the Bible. Unfortunately, we hear “holy” and we think of “holier than thou.” We think of people who lord their “right living” over others and feel compelled to judge others because they are so virtuous. But that’s not what holiness is. There are right ways and wrong ways to live. There are things that please God and things that do not. No question about that. The Bible is clear. This gets us back to those things we do understand and simply don’t follow. But we confuse the call to holiness and make it a call to legalism. The Bible’s call is to holiness of heart. It’s not about rule keeping; it’s about loving God and loving others. It’s not about getting into heaven because of our good works; it’s about cooperating with the work of the Holy Spirit in our world. It’s not about appearing perfect. There are plenty of people who try to appear perfect. I think I’ve told you before about a women in my home church when I was growing up who seemed to have it all together. A good marriage. The perfect family. A seemingly deep faith. And one day she left it all. She walked out. It meant nothing to her any longer. It’s not about appearing perfect; it’s about purity of heart, about having our hearts in tune with God. And it results in joy. Holiness is not meant to be a burden, because it’s living life the way God intended it to be. Jesus described it this way: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30). That simply means that what he calls us to do and who he calls us to be—this call to holy living—is meant to bring joy, not to be a burden.

So in the holiness tradition we read the Bible seeking to know how God calls us to live. What does the holy life look like? Unfortunately, even those who have been a part of the “holiness tradition” have often settled on outward symbols of holiness, and do you know why? Because those are easier to measure and manage than inward holiness of heart. The college that sat across the street from my seminary was often that way. There were strict rules, even in terms of what people wore to class. One of the rules (that was done away with when we were there, by the way) was that women had to wear dresses to class and in public on campus. Now, what a dress had to do with holiness is beyond my ability to figure out. I’m not sure how that showed some deeper love for God. The holy life is not about focusing on externals or judging someone by your list of rules. It’s about seeking to live the way Jesus would have us live and leaving the judging to God.

The third stream of the Christian life is the charismatic tradition, or the Spirit-empowered life. For some of us, that word “charismatic” brings up all sorts of images, not all of which are positive. But the word itself simply refers to the the work of the Holy Spirit, something the Gospels and all of the Bible attest to. The “charismata” (to use the Greek word) are simply the gifts of the Spirit, what he gives to believers and to churches in order to see the work of ministry accomplished. Jesus is described as having the Holy Spirit descend on him at the time of his baptism (cf. Matthew 3:16-17) and we know from Acts 2 that, when Jesus returned to the Father, the Spirit came to live within believers, to give gifts and abilities so that the Gospel would be proclaimed throughout the world. The Spirit has worked in all sorts of ways throughout history, up to the present day. In fact, if the Holy Spirit is not working in a church, it’s not a church. Now, it is the case that some branches of the Christian church have become overly focused on particular gifts, especially those that are supernatural or look like magic of some sort. But the picture in the Bible is that, while the gifts of the Spirit are given here and there, the deeper work of the Spirit is to grow the fruit of the Spirit in us: “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). The real evidence of the Spirit’s presence is not a particular gift but the growing fruit.

When we neglect the Spirit’s work, it’s far too easy to reduce God to someone manageable, someone tame, someone small. The Spirit reminds us that, ultimately, we are not in control. When we read the Scriptures in the charismatic tradition, we’re see God who is bigger than we can handle. We see a God who calls us to do things that, if he doesn’t show up, will fail. We learn to trust in a God who doesn’t always tell us all the details but leads us on the path we should go. We often talk about the Bible being “inspired” by the Holy Spirit, and some people take that to mean that the Spirit dictated each word. That’s not what we mean when we talk about the inspiration of the Scriptures. Rather, the Spirit worked through individual human beings, and sometimes communities, to be able to show us what God wanted us to know. The Spirit continues to do that as we read these ancient words. The charismatic tradition calls us to trust that, even when we can’t control it or understand it, God is working.

Next, we come to the compassionate life, or as some call it, the social justice tradition. Here is one where we Methodists tend to excel. This tradition hears the clear call of the Bible to care for the least, the last and the lost. The prophets in the Old Testament make this call over and over again. Micah, for one, says it clearly: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (6:8). Jesus picked up that same theme, because the people he most often hung out with were not the wealthy, the well-to-do. He didn’t hang out with power brokers or politicians. He hung out with prostitutes, beggars, fishermen, widows, lepers, children—in other words, those who had nothing, those who were worth about nothing in their society. Jesus came to bring healing and hope to the folks who were on the underside of life. When we swim in the compassionate stream, we hear the Bible’s call to reach out and make a difference in the lives of others.

As Luke tells it, this was Jesus’ primary mission while he was on earth. In the Gospel lesson we read this morning, Jesus gets a chance to preach at his hometown synagogue. According to Luke, this is the first time Jesus preaches after his temptation in the wilderness. Now, he’s not actually the preacher of the day. He is “clean-up batter.” At the end of the synagogue service, there was and is a portion of Scripture to be read called the haphtarah, and any young man from the community might be asked to read that and make a comment on the passage if he wanted to. That’s what Jesus is doing here. He selects a passage from Isaiah to read; remember, he’s reading from a scroll without chapter or verse numbers, so he’s very intentional about the passage he chooses to read. It’s a brief reading from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (4:18-19). Then he says, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (4:21). This is shocking, because what he’s read is really a reference to the year of Jubilee, a year promised (cf. Leviticus 25) by God to happen every fifty years, a year when everything would be reset: slaves would be set free, land would return to its original owners and all debts would be cancelled. Now, it’s not hard to see why there is no evidence that, despite a clear Biblical command, the Hebrews never practiced Jubilee. It’s too much for us to want to give up the debt, the slave, the land. But Jesus says in him, Jubilee has come to pass. Everything is about to be made right. Slaves to sin will be set free, debts to God will be cancelled, and our eternal inheritance will be secured. He is the fulfillment of the promise of Jubilee (cf. Card 69-71). Things are about to be made right for all people, and that’s why they try to throw him off the cliff near Nazareth at the end of this story. He’s a threat. He’s dangerous. Making the world right, leveling the playing field—that’s more than we want in a savior. He has not come to make us feel good; he has come to give us himself—to set things right. Jesus calls us to see the compassionate life in the Scriptures. And from this moment in Luke’s Gospel, he goes out and brings healing, hope, life. Compassion flows from him as he attends to the needs of others. The same should be said of us as we read with compassionate eyes.

The next stream is the evangelical stream, or the word-centered life. The word “evangelical” has, unfortunately, become all-too-political these days, but it wasn’t meant to refer to a particular political persuasion. Rather, the evangelical tradition centers on a personal experience of conversion to Jesus Christ, an insistence on sound doctrine, and a call to share the good news with others. In some ways, disciples like Peter and preachers like Paul remind us of this. Their teaching and preaching was deeply rooted in Israel’s history, in their Scripture. On the day of Pentecost, when Peter tries to explain to the crowd what has happened to them, he reaches back into the Old Testament to show that such a day had been promised, and then he invites people to put their trust in Jesus, the Savior (cf. Acts 2:14-41). Paul was also deeply rooted in the Scripture, and held it with high esteem. In his letters, you can see him wrestling with what those ancient words meant for people in his day. You also hear him calling people to trust even more in Jesus. No one in our time has lived up to that sort of calling more than Billy Graham, who faithfully preached the gospel to millions around the world, calling people everywhere to trust in Jesus. Now, I know there have been detractors for Graham’s methods, and undoubtedly there have been some who have gone forward for the altar call and haven’t stayed with Jesus. But I’ve known many, many more who have. The reality is, the same thing can be said of the local church. We call people to Jesus, some choose to trust in him but not all stay with him. And yet we keep offering Jesus, inviting people to follow him.

Reading the Bible with evangelical eyes, contrary to what you’ll likely hear on most Christian television, is a call to share our faith, to witness about Jesus has done in our lives in every moment. It’s rooting our faith firmly in what the Bible says—so we’ll have to know what it says. And then it’s taking that faith out, living it out, speaking about it, and holding firm to this faith we have been handed. You know, there are a lot of temptations and pressures today to compromise, to change the faith we’ve been given. One Episcopal bishop even wrote a book titled Why Christianity Must Change or Die. That challenge and that pressure is nothing new. Paul wrote to his young protege Timothy these words: “I give you this charge: Preach the word…For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths” (2 Timothy 4:1-4). The word-centered life equips us so that we can share the truth of the gospel.

And that brings us to the final stream: the sacramental life or the incarnational tradition. The word “sacrament” simply means an outward sign of an invisible grace; it’s something we do that represents something happening inside of us. In the Protestant church, we have two sacraments: baptism and communion. Baptism uses water to represent God’s claim on us, God’s cleansing of us. Communion uses bread and grape juice to represent what Jesus did for us, that he gave his life to save us from sin, death and the grave. In both cases, we do something in order to represent something that can’t be seen. The incarnational tradition calls us to take what we’ve read, what we’ve experienced, the ways we have encountered Jesus in the text and live it out. It invites us to celebrate what one ancient author called “the sacrament of the present moment.” It reminds us that every moment is a moment for worship, service and love of God. Paul probably best described this tradition in his letter to the Colossians: “Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (3:17). Living in such a way calls us to recognize that every moment and every action is informed by what we’ve read and by the ways we’ve been influenced by Christians past and present. Every moment is a moment in which we either live to give honor to God or in which we turn our backs on God. When we live out the faith we have read, we are honoring him. When we deny the faith we have read, we turn our backs on him. Everything is an occasion for living our faith: putting away the dishes in the kitchen, reading the Bible or any other book, shopping at the store, cheering your team on to victory or defeat, the way we talk about others, the way we treat our spouse and our children, showing up at work on time and being ready to do the task we’ve been assigned—I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. Every moment is a God-moment.

The sacramental or incarnational tradition brings all of the traditions and all the ways we read the Bible together. It’s, again, like my experience on the New River. Any one of the smaller streams that feed into that river would not suffice for a full whitewater rafting experience. It’s only when they all come together, when they flow together that you get the whole thrill. The same is true in our reading of the Bible. If we lean on one particular tradition, we can become unbalanced. We need to learn to read in the midst of the whole river of God, the whole scope of Biblical and Christian tradition so that we can hear the whole message of God. Saints from past generations, brothers and sisters from this generation from different traditions come together and enhance each other’s understanding of the text. We need each other. One of the richest times of my life was many years ago when I was part of an ecumenical group of pastors who got together each Tuesday morning to talk about what we were going to preach the next Sunday. We would talk about the texts we were going to be working with, and then invite others’ input. That was rich because in that group were people who were more conservative than me and some who were more liberal than me. They all enhanced my understanding, because I needed those other traditions. I may not have changed my reading of the text, but hearing those other perspectives gave me a better vantage point from which to preach. We need each other. We need all the streams to come together, and we need to be in the river with each other.

One more story, this one from Luke 10, a story many of you probably know. Jesus has come to a town called Bethany to visit his friends, Mary, Martha and their brother Lazarus. Martha immediately does what she knows she is supposed to do. The Middle Eastern culture, still today, is governed by strong rules of hospitality. You take care of guests, no questions asked. So Martha goes to the kitchen to make dinner for Jesus and his twelve disciples. I mean, just picture what you be like if thirteen big, burly fishermen suddenly showed up hungry for dinner. Martha’s a bit frazzled. Mary, her sister, however, joins the men in the living room. She sits down at Jesus’ feet, like any disciple would, to listen to what Jesus is saying. Now, the houses were not so big that Martha couldn’t hear Jesus in the kitchen. I’m fairly certain she was listening, but she’s also beginning to stew a bit because she needs help. Mary has no business sitting in there with the men. It wasn’t proper in that time and place. Luke says that the longer this went on, Martha became “distracted,” and finally she’s had enough. She storms in, interrupts whatever teaching Jesus is giving, and says, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” And of course, Jesus should have. That would have been the “right” thing to do. But he doesn’t. He tells Martha, “Mary has chosen what is better” (Luke 10:38-42). And for centuries, because of that, we’ve understood that sitting at the feet of Jesus is somehow more important than fixing dinner. Many, many sermons on this passage condemn Martha and praise Mary. But Jesus doesn’t condemn Martha. He points out how “worried and upset” she is, but he doesn’t condemn her. What Martha is doing is needed. And what Mary is doing is needed. Both actions, both responses to Jesus are important and vital. Mary and Martha need each other, just like we need each other across traditions, across expectations, across all the lines we draw in order to fully understand what Jesus is up to.

So, I promised I would ask you this question: which of these streams are you lacking? Where are you unbalanced in your reading, interaction with and understanding of Scripture? Whichever one is most needed in your life, seek to read the Bible this week through those eyes. Contemplative: seek to read prayerfully. Holiness: listen for where God is calling you to be more like him. Charismatic: seek the fruit of the Spirit. Compassionate: ask the text how God is calling you to serve others. Evangelical: find a place you can share what you read with someone. And incarnational: remember that every moment is meant for living out this faith. Allow the streams of Christian tradition to flow together in your life. And those differences that we get so hung up on? Oddly, when you step fully into the river, you come to realize that God is big enough and strong enough to be able to handle our little differences. So this week, step into the river and grab the hand of our strong God (cf. Foster, Life With God, pgs. 103-129).