“That We May Have Hope”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. David McMaster
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Text: Romans 15:4-13
A Christian author tells a story of a trip he took to the Soviet Union before it broke up. At the time, Bibles were strictly illegal in the Soviet Union, but he managed to get some Christian literature and Russian Bibles through customs. Each Sunday he was there, he attended church and, he said, “I looked for individuals who seemed to be genuine Christians. On one occasion, I followed a man who was probably in his 60s down the street after service. No one else was around so I went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder. I took out one of my Bibles and handed it to him. For a moment he had an expression of almost disbelief. Then he took from his pocket a NT, which seemed like it was a hundred years old. The pages were so threadbare they were virtually transparent. When he realized that he had received a whole Bible, he was elated. He didn't speak any English and I didn't speak any Russian. We hugged each other and he started to run down the street jumping for joy,” … for him that Bible was something incredibly precious.
Because I grew up in the church, I too have received a number of Bibles as gifts and because I went into ministry, I have probably received more than most. There are one or two, however, that I am especially fond of and one is certainly the Bible that I received as a gift when my family was leaving Ireland. The Bible is a “Boys' Brigade” Bible, with the Brigade insignia on the front and duly inscribed inside, “From the Officers and Boys of the 106th Belfast Company of the Boys' Brigade. Wishing you God's blessing for the future … 'In all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy paths.' Sunday, 1st Sept. 1974.” I have wonderful memories of the Brigade. I was in the junior section, called Lifeboys, for three years and the Brigade for five years. We learned a great deal during those years, had a lot of fun, and the Bible they gave is very precious to me.
The Bible is precious because it has a story but if I open to the next page, I come across something that tells me that this Bible has an even greater story. It is there that we find out that it is the “Authorized Version” or “The King James Version” of the Bible. Until, perhaps, the mid point of the last century, the KJV was the standard among English Bibles. Its presence was felt over the English language and English speaking world for centuries. The version itself was the culmination of years of blood, sweat, and toil to get the Bible out to the English people in their own tongue. John Wycliffe had been vilified for his attempts to translate the Latin Vulgate to the point that his bones were exumed from his grave and burned. William Tyndale was burned at the stake for his attempts to translate the original texts into English. But with the Reformation of the Church in England during and after King Henry VIII, the need for an English Bible, a bible for the people, began to take hold, and after some initial successes with The Geneva Bible and The Bishop's Bible, the version produced at the behest of King James became the Bible of the English peoples. The sacrifices made to give the word of God to the English people in their own language makes the KJV something precious indeed and as we enter 2011 in a few short weeks, it is interesting that 2011 marks the 400th anniversary of the first KJV coming off the presses. It is an incredible landmark. Indeed, this Bible has a story.
I would like to talk about the Bible and scripture this morning because in a little tangential comment of Paul's, in the midst of a passage advising us, for the sake of unity, to put up with the failings and misunderstandings of the weak, Paul utters these words, “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope (Rom.15:4, KJV).”
As we look at those words, we note first of all, that Paul's writings are part of what we call the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. He refers to, “whatsoever things were written aforetime.” I have a copy of the Hebrew Scriptures with me that I received on the day I became a Canadian citizen in 1982. The Jews call this book, the Tanakh, a word made up from the Hebrew letter taw for Torah or Law, a nun for Nebi'im or The Prophets, and a kaph for Kethubim or The Writings. The Hebrew Bible has three parts, the law, the prophets, and the writings. In Paul's day, however, one could not just go out to the local Chapters store and purchase a copy of the Tanakh like this. The scriptures were not in book form but were copied onto scrolls by scribes and with a few exceptions, they were individual writings. You could come across the scroll of Isaiah or one of the scrolls of Moses, or Jeremiah, of the type that have been found in the remarkable Dead Sea discoveries. When Paul says, “whatsoever things were written aforetime,” he is writing about these scrolls, the sacred scrolls that became our Old Testament (OT).
These scrolls were, we might say, “the holy books” or “The Bible” used by Paul and others. Thus, it never ceases to amaze me that on numerous occasions, I hear individuals put down these writings as old or passé. Fundamentalist and liberal church people alike seem to not know what to do with the “Old Testament” and in fact, calling it “old” or, calling the scriptures, “The Hebrew Bible” causes problems. Both the words “old” and “Hebrew” are suggestive terms. We tend to think that they mean those scriptures are not for us, that they have been superseded or that they are for Jews rather than Christians. And there have been movements, even within the church, to get rid of them. As early as the second century, Marcion and others sought to have them excluded from the list of sacred scriptures. Marcion wanted a canon (a rule or authorized readings) to include only Luke's Gospel and Paul's writings. He caused all sorts of issues for the church, and eventually was designated a heretic, because the church always recognized the fact that Jesus himself had used these sacred writings. As Philip Yancey says, within these writings, we find “The prayers that Jesus prayed, the poems he memorized, the songs he sang, the bedtime stories he heard as a child, the prophecies he pondered. Indeed, Jesus revered every “jot and tittle” of the …Scriptures.” And if they were good enough for Jesus, the church felt they were good enough for the rest of us. Indeed, it is upon these writings that the writings that became the New Testament (NT) stand. The NT was not written in a vacuum and we cannot fully understand the NT until we understand it in light of the OT. We cannot fully understand salvation until we see it in light of our separation from God. We cannot fully understand the love of God until we see it in the light of God's holiness. We cannot fully understand God's grace until we see it in the light of sin. And we cannot fully understand Jesus until we see him in terms of Israel's problems and issues and failures and the prophecies within the OT of a messiah. The Christian Scriptures, therefore, have always contained the OT and the NT, sacred writings from before the time of Christ and after the time of Christ.
Paul has in mind the older writings of the scriptures and he says about these that they were given “for our learning / instruction.” Part of the value of scriptures is in how they reveal God and give us direction and wisdom for understanding life. There is for instance, a beautifully created, artistic psalm, Psalm 119, that speaks time and time again about the value of the Torah. It is an acrostic with 22 sections, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Each section has eight lines and each line begins with that particular letter of the alphabet. In Hebrew, it is a beautiful psalm in form and content. “Thy word,” says the psalmist, “is a lamp onto my feet and a light unto my path (v.105).” “Happy are those who walk in the law of the Lord.” (Psalm 119:1). Within God's laws, wondrous things are found (Psalm 119:18). They are a source of counsel and guidance (Psalm 119:24). “God's laws give strength.” (Psalm 119:28). “God's laws give understanding.” (Psalm 119:109). “God's laws give great peace and keep us from stumbling.” (Psalm 119:165). The word of God is for our learning.
When I was serving my first church in Toronto, I remember chatting with Dennis. Dennis was from Jamaica and from time to time we would stand outside on a hot summer's day, after church, talking about cricket and the latest test matches. Back in those days the West Indies had the best team in the world and Dennis was always proud of their accomplishments. On one particular day, I changed the topic considerably and asked Dennis how he had become a Christian and he was quick to tell me about his church upbringing and how he had walked away from it as a teenager, no longer interested. “It was when my daughter was born,” he said, “I re-thought the whole thing. Having Helen caused me to do a lot of thinking. I wanted to raise her properly. I wanted her to have a solid foundation and so I came back to the church. I figured that in the church she would get the best guidelines for life and be exposed to better moral values than in much of society. In coming back for Helen, I found something for me too and, I suppose, it was then that I really became a Christian.” Dennis's words are a wonderful illustration of the value of the word of God, the scriptures given “for our learning or instruction.” They can give us a solid foundation for life.
It's incredible then, how fast knowledge of particularly the older Testament is fading from popular culture and even from the knowledge base of church people. In a comedy routine, Jay Leno tested his audience's knowledge of the Bible by asking them to name one of the Ten Commandments. A hand shot up: “God helps those who help themselves?” Everybody laughed, although I am not sure that many knew that the popular sentence is not a part of biblical literature at all. According to polls, 80 percent of Americans claim to believe in the Ten Commandments, but very few can name as many as four of them. Half of all adult Americans cannot identify the Bible's first book as Genesis. And fourteen percent identified Joan of Arc as Noah's wife. I suspect Canadian statistics would be even more glaring given that we are less churched than our American cousins. Knowledge of the scriptures is disappearing.
The question arises, “Why are we, especially Christian people, not paying more attention to the “things that were written aforetime which were written for our instruction” and can give us a solid foundation for life?” It is a particularly good question given that the founding fathers of the United Church were such men of “the book.” Both John Wesley and John Calvin were immersed in the word of God. They encouraged everyone to read them as often, as comprehensively, and as devotionally as we can. They saw the wisdom and the benefits and would speak frequently of “the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith (2 Tim. 3:15),” given for our instruction and, as Paul goes further, are given “that we might have hope.”
Hope ... it is an interesting concept in our day and age. It was not that long ago that Nihilists like Friedrich Nietzsche and champions of the Absurd like Albert Camus told us that there was no hope. Nietzsche was most pessimistic about meaning in life, Camus thought that in spite of having no hope, we should just enjoy everything we can. I don't like the logical consequences of hopelessness and meaninglessness. Human beings appear to need hope.
There's a story about Rabbi Hugo Grynn who was sent to Auschwitz as a little boy. In the midst of the concentration camp, in the midst of the death and horror all around them, many Jews held onto whatever shreds of their religious observance they could without drawing the ire of the guards. One cold winter's evening, Hugo's father gathered the family in the barracks. It was the first night of Hanukah, the Feast of Lights. The young child watched in horror as his father took the family's last pad of butter and made a makeshift candle using a string from his ragged clothes. He then took a match and lit the candle. “Father, no!” Hugo cried. “That butter is our last bit of food! How will we survive?”
“We can live for many days without food,” his father said. “We cannot live for a single minute without hope.”
At this time of year, many of us tend to read Charles Dickens' novel, A Christmas Carol, or perhaps view the old, black and white, Alistair Simms version on our televisions. There's a part in that old film when the ghost of Christmas yet to come visits Scrooge. He shows him what will happen if things remain unchanged and one of the scenes depicts the household of Scrooge's clerk, Bob Cratchett. The camera pans over to where the sickly and lame, young, Tiny Tim would usually sit by the fire. His place is empty. Only his old crutch remains. The family is evidently grieving and the room is silent but for the sound of Tim's elder brother, Peter, reading from the scriptures. “You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say, “My refuge and my fortress; my God in whom I trust.” …He will deliver you from the snare of the fowler, and … under his wings you will find refuge … For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands, they will bear you up. (from Ps.91).” In the midst of their grief, the Cratchett family is finding solace in the ancient word, a word that brings hope even in the midst of some of the worst situations life can throw at us.
I spoke about the Bible being precious because it has a story and because the KJV has a story beyond my Bible's story. Beyond these, there is an even greater story at work, the story of God. A story of hope, even in the older scriptures. It's the story of God bringing about the world. It's the story of human beings separating themselves from God and going their own way. It's the story of God trying time and again to draw them back, pointing to reconciliation, salvation, and a new kingdom. It's the story of God overcoming sin and promising something new, even new life and a new kingdom. Peppered throughout the story are messages of God's love, God's care, God's comfort for his people, no matter how difficult things get. The over-arching story, even in the older Testament, is a message of hope. What was written aforetime brings light into the world to give us hope.
Paul commends to his readers and to us, the old scriptures that we might have hope. As we continue to walk through the Advent season, Christians prepare to celebrate how God's grand narrative continued with the coming of Christ, God's overcoming of death in Christ and even greater promises of eternity. The NT writings also present us with words of hope. It is my hope, then, that we will use all of these writings as God intended us to use them, to comfort and encourage us throughout life. It is my hope that particularly as we approach, in 2011, the 400th anniversary of the culmination of attempts to get the word of God into the English tongue, we would look again at the Bible, take it down off the shelf and read. It is indeed a precious book, a book with a story, and I would like to challenge you to read the word that allowed Hugo Grynn's father to hope even in Auschwitz. I would like to challenge you to read the word that led reformers to give their lives that we would be able to read it in our own language. I would like to challenge you to read the word that gave Dennis the wisdom and guidance he wanted for his daughter, Helen as he sought to establish her in life. It would only take a few minutes a day, about three pages a day in most Bibles to get through the whole thing in a year. Some of it may be readily understood. Some of it may be tough going. But at the end of the year, if you will persevere, one thing I am sure of, is that wherever you go and whatever life throws at you, the message of this Book will buoy you in hope.