2 Peter 1: 16-21

For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, ?This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.' We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain. So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed. You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rides in your hearts. First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

2 Timothy 3: 14-17

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is 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.

Acts 8: 26-38

Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, ?Get up and go towards the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.' (This is a wilderness road.) So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. Then the Spirit said to Philip, ?Go over to this chariot and join it.' So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, ?Do you understand what you are reading?' He replied, ?How can I unless someone guides me?' And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. How the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: ?Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.' The eunuch asked Philip, ?About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?' Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. As they were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, ?Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized? He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.

Sermon Text

Here is my childhood Bible, a King James, red-letter edition. The heavy paper cover is brittle and crumbling. The pages are brown spotted with age. The flyleaf notes that this Bible was given to me by the Saint Stephens Lutheran Church School on November the eighteenth, 1951. I was six years old then. I hadn't started school yet and couldn't read, so when I received this Bible all I could do with it was study the pictures inside. But oh how I treasured this book! I used to daydream that if our house ever caught fire and I had time to rescue just one possession, this would surely be it. As the years passed, I came to cherish my Bible differently, though. I prized it not so much anymore as a holy object, but rather a stimulus to reflect. I began to write in it, underlining passages, writing comments and questions in the margins. I was beginning to understand that the word of God is not this book, but rather, the wisdom of the words of this book; and with those words I was pleased to wrestle.

In psalm 119 the psalmist prays to God: "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." What I wrote in the margins of my childhood Bible shows that I was looking for a lamp to my feet, a light to my path. I was seeking a true and good course that would lead to something worth living for. My marginal jottings also show that at least from time to time I didn't want to wrestle with God's word. I wanted comfort. I wanted order. It was all right that I brought agendas to my reading. We all do. No matter what we read, whether it be the Bible or the morning paper, we bring certain ideas and attitudes, certain presuppositions and dispositions, certain questions and longings. We do not read blankly. We bring a pre-text to the text. Were it not so, we could take nothing away. We would be like computers without software. We would have no way to absorb, interpret, or value what we have read. So, it's all right to have an agenda in approaching scripture. The agenda is what whets our appetite to read. But if our agenda always turns out to be the meal, then clearly we've missed something. We have performed a slight of hand, fooling ourselves into believing that the text agrees perfectly with us. We have not allowed the text to talk back. We have simply read into it what we wanted to hear. That's so easy to do, since we turn to scripture to satisfy certain needs, and we tend to filter out and disregard what doesn't fulfill those needs.

I picked the Acts passage this morning because it shows how powerfully scripture can speak to us when we bring our needs to the reading. As the story opens, the treasurer of the queen of Ethiopia is returning from Jerusalem, and he is reading a passage from the book of Isaiah. Two facts, that he is returning from Jerusalem and reading Jewish scripture, suggest that he is a God-fearer, that is, a non-Jewish admirer of the God of Israel. God fearers were welcome to pray in the outer court of the temple in Jerusalem, and they could, if they were willing to become circumcised, convert to Judaism. But this particular God fearer would never be allowed ever to enter the more sacred space of the temple, because he was a eunuch. He had been castrated to make him a trustworthy servant of the queen, and a Jewish law set forth in Leviticus 21:20 forbad men with damaged testicles to come near the altar. So, this Jewish wanna-be was shut out from the spiritual fellowship he was yearning to join. Can you feel his longing and hurt? If you had such longing and hurt yourself, wouldn't you read scripture to find a word of acceptance and comfort there? That's just what the Ethiopian was doing. So, a certain passage from Isaiah caught his attention, one that seemed to speak right to him. He read this:

Like a sheep that is led to the slaughter-house,

Like a lamb that is dumb in front of its shearers,

Like these he never opens his mouth.

He has been humiliated and has no one to defend him.

Who will ever talk about his descendants,

Since his life on earth has been cut short.

This passage must have hit the eunuch like a thunderbolt, because it described his very own suffering. Submitting to castration, he too had suffered humiliation, and he too had lost the ability to bear descendants. This other person had suffered just as he had. Who, pray tell, could this person be?

Then Phillip asked him whether he understood the passage he was reading, and the eunuch replied, "How can I, unless someone explains it to me?" So Phillip--a disciple with a Greek name, and thus, perhaps on the cultural fringe himself--did. He told the Ethiopian seeker the good news about Jesus, the person whom Isaiah was talking about. How that scripture spoke to the eunuch's longing! He heard that through this fellow sufferer even he could find welcome, for Jesus did not lock people out. In fact, his ministry was all about welcoming outcasts. Through Jesus, people excluded by Jewish law found access to the God of Israel. "Halleluiah!" thought the eunuch. Then what is to prevent me being from being initiated into this blessed company of God-fearers who follow the way of Jesus and do not lock people out? I can imagine Phillip smiling and saying to him: "There is absolutely nothing to prevent that, friend. Come, I am pleased to baptize you in the name of Jesus! Welcome!"

Scripture was used well here. The seeker longed for closeness with God. That longing led him to notice a portion of scripture that could prove helpful. But that scripture alone probably would not have sufficed to lead him to Christ. Scripture plus Phillip's clarification led him to Christ. This illustrates the importance of studying the Bible with other people. Certainly we can get some benefit studying the Bible by ourselves, but we will likely understand better, and be more deeply enriched, if we study with others. Having others respond to your interpretation often helps you avoid the problem of reading into scripture just what you want to hear. Also, if you are studying with people who are different than you, say, in terms of their age, or race, or ethnicity, or religious background, then their differing takes may challenge you to understand the text in a way you couldn't have imagined otherwise. Some people may be valuable to a Bible study because they have read a lot, and can bring valuable historical insights to the discussion. Others can be very helpful because of their rich life experience. They have seen much, endured much, and grown wiser by their journey. In the many years I've spent in small groups studying the Bible?(I did a lot of that when I was a campus minister)--I've noticed that sometimes the most amazing insights come from people you'd least expect, people without much book learning, and people who may not, as we say, "have it all together." I think that's because the Holy Spirit takes what's there, when two or three are gathered, and uses it for good. It's like the loaves and fishes story. What folk bring to the table may not seem like much, but when they share what they've got, somehow the Spirit makes a feast of it.

Feast is not too lavish a word. I've been studying scripture with several of you most Wednesdays for more than five years now. Time well spent! Scripture well used! We have found that when we dig into the Bible with no inhibitions, when we bring our doubts to the table, and our hurts to the table, and our longings to the table, and our curiosity, and our hopes?in short, when we bring ourselves to the table and open the Bible to be fed, well, sooner or later there comes a most gracious, wonderful feast. You get to know those folks across the table, and love them dearly, and you know yourself better than ever before, and you just want to say, thank you Jesus! Thanks for being here with us!

Now, I can't finish this sermon about Bible study without commenting on those two pastoral epistle readings we heard this morning: the first Peter reading which says that no prophecy ever came by human will; rather men and women, moved by the Spirit, speak from God; and the second Timothy reading that says that all scripture is inspired by God, and is useful for teaching, and reproof, and training in righteousness, and for equipping the saints for service. Well, if Peter and Paul were in Bible study with me, I'd bring myself to the table and say: Yes, but Paul I have a problem with what you've written. For surely the many people like you who wrote our scriptures brought something of themselves to the writing, didn't they? They saw things from where they sat, didn't they? The Spirit didn't move their hands on the page. Their minds and their hearts moved their hands; and their minds and their hearts were influenced by where they sat, as well as by the Holy Spirit. I'd tell Paul it sure seems to me that his words came partly from where he sat, as a man, and as a Jewish Pharisee. And I'd tell Peter that there are some parts of scripture that one has to bend way over backwards to get any good out of. I would tell him that when we let reverence for scripture override good reason, then we're doing a disservice to ourselves and the Lord we're trying to serve, because we're being dishonest. And I'd say to Peter that not all of scripture seems equally valuable for followers of Jesus, and that some can be downright harmful if you don't watch out, like the passage that says that women must shut up in church, and that slaves must always obey their masters. Now, some of you may be troubled by the way I argue with scripture. I can only say that it's an old Jewish tradition, which Jesus himself observed. Whenever he said, "You have heard it said?. but I say unto you" he was picking a bone with scripture. I don't believe Jesus would want us to swallow all of scripture like a divine, magical potion. To use scripture well we must do what rabbi Jesus and many rabbis before and after him have done. We must wrestle respectfully with the ideas and feelings about God that our forebears have handed down to us. And we must even be ready to wrestle with God if our seeking takes us there. As Jacob discovered, blessing comes from an honest battle, not from giving in too soon.

If there were anything left of me after Peter and Paul had their chance at rebuttal, the thing I'd like to say to them in deep and sincere gratitude is that without their words I would not have met Jesus on my road. We, who like Paul, were untimely born, too late arrived, too late to know Jesus in the flesh; we owe so much to the testimonies of those who did so know him. What a treasure those testimonies are! And what a treasure Paul's letters are to me, though I do not always see things his way, because they show me how he struggled to follow his Lord, who is my Lord too, and how he struggled as a Christian leader, which is my challenge too. "We have these treasures," wrote Paul, "in earthen vessels." He was referring to the treasures of the Gospel, which are always only imperfectly presented by individual Christians and the churches they form. But?and here Peter and Paul would probably disagree with me?I'd say that the scriptures are earthen vessels too. That doesn't prevent them from containing great treasure, though. And indeed, they do.