June 17, 2018 II Corinthians 4:13-5:20 WONDER OF WONDERS A few weeks ago The New Church had its seventh birthday. On May 15th seven years ago, we began our official efforts to stream services from the third-floor setting on Madison Street in Port Townsend, Washington. Now here we are again. Not much progress, we might say. On the other hand, we have covered quite a bit of territory: from here to Omaha, then to Corona del Mar, and now back again. But what really matters is where you are, and I do not just mean physically. I suspect that all of us have had to make adjustments each time TNC moved. Community Church has a lovely sanctuary, and we had some very nice collaboration between our church and their church for a while. I will especially miss Rodger and the choir. (Will miss some other people too, of course.) No way to replace some things. But we do live in a temporal world, and nothing lasts here nothing stays the same here for very long. So here we are on the edge of a new phase of life for The New Church. We are no longer in collaboration with Community Church, Congregational at least not for a while. Officially I resigned, but in reality I was fired. A wise man once said: A leader who does not have the support or respect of the people he is leading is not going to accomplish very much. In any case, most of the members of Community Church were willing to lose me and the purpose of the church as I teach and preach it. I concluded that I should not give any more of my tithe, my time, or my life to an organization that no longer wanted to be a church. Of course, they would reply that they had a clearer vision of the true church than I did and so they stopped supporting me in order to be more faithful. We shall see how that plays out. Do I mind finishing fifty-nine years of ministry in failure and disgrace? Sometimes in this world it is difficult to know what is a compliment and what is true failure. Anyway, The New Church is on its own again as a tiny church, and that gives us some new opportunities as well as some loss and loneliness. Hopefully it will remind us in fresh new ways how dependent we are on Jesus the Christ. And it may also refresh our gratitude and our desire to be faithful followers, perhaps even more than ever before. We shall see. BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 1 OF 9
It does make me want to go over a few of our assumptions and approaches with fresh new eyes. I hope it will not annoy you if I write articles to you and preach some practical, down-to-earth sermons for a while. One of the advantages of being The New Church is that time, distance, and vacations do not need to interrupt us like they would a normal church. You can track everything we do in The New Church. You can catch up with everything we stream in The New Church. All the things I am hoping to remind you of and talk to you about will be easily accessible. So we will go on through the summer as if it were normal for us to be together and to worship together from wherever we are. And perhaps somewhere along the way we will discover new clarity and purpose and new opportunities to belong with Jesus even more than before. Next week I want to talk about The Remnant a big, scary, very exciting subject. But today I want to review how we approach the Scriptures. This is basic to how any church proceeds with its life and purpose. Whether seen or admitted or not, there is mystery and mayhem in how we read, understand, and talk together about what we find in the Bible. Whether we neglect the Bible or study it every day, this has a huge impact on our approaches to the Christian Message and the Life we are each trying to lead the whole thing. And there is nobody among us who does not have assumptions, prejudices, and even unconscious convictions about appropriate ways to read the Bible. There is no unanimity about such things, not even in a tiny congregation like ours. Some of us have more reverence; some of us carry more superstition; some of us are faster to ignore or write off passages we do not like or that do not make sense to us yet. It is, or should be, quickly obvious that our approaches to the Bible have a huge impact on how we try to be obedient to the Holy Spirit. If not on the surface, certainly under the surface we are at peace if we feel like we are pleasing God, and we are far from peaceful on the inside if we feel that we are doing things or living in ways that are displeasing to God. Am I losing anybody yet? Not likely. The purpose of this sermon is not to get all of us to agree about any of this. But if we are to be an effective church and if the bonds between us are to be strong and growing, then at least we each need to have awareness of such things. We need to be able to talk to each other about such things. We need to be able to understand each other, and to realize that many of our different beliefs and approaches come from the ways we each read the Bible. BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 2 OF 9
Do you ignore the Bible, or do you swallow it whole? Two sides of the same coin, actually. And this is the actual approach of a high percentage of people in our time. Whether you ignore the Bible or swallow everything whole, you do not have to pay much attention to anything the Bible is saying. If you were raised in a religious home, you may realize that it still makes you uncomfortable to question or doubt whatever you read in the Bible. Some voice on the inside still says that you are bad if you question or doubt and that you are good if you believe what you are told even if it is some other human being telling you what to believe. And the faster you accept whatever you are reading, the more points you get in Heaven. You already know that such approaches do not work in The New Church. We doubt our doubts and we question our questions. But that does not mean we escape the backgrounds from which we came or the emotional impact of how we were raised. Most of us have had to reprogram our ways of approaching the Bible in order to grow and move on in our Faith. Yet that takes us into many uncertainties, and when we get tired of our struggles to be more consciously faithful, we sometimes long to revert to former ways where everything was easier and clearer. All cut-and-dried, we used to say. You already know, I suspect, that I will try to persuade everybody in TNC to be part of a Disciple Band. We have a very good Disciple Band on Monday mornings at 7am Pacific time. Hopefully another will start soon. Maybe by the end of this year we will have three. It is necessary for us as Christians... to study some portion of the Scriptures each day, and if once a week that study is in a Disciple Band, then there are even greater benefits, both for us as individuals and for our church. You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all of your heart. (Jeremiah 29:13) Do you find that comforting? Comfortes = to strengthen. The Christian Life is more rigorous and demanding than most people know more rigorous and demanding than any of us want it to be. It is also far more exciting and rewarding than most people know. I want to suggest four pillars to our ways of approaching the Bible. That is, when we get serious and intentional and are no longer content to simply do what comes naturally, then we need a conscious and deliberate method to our madness. BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 3 OF 9
The four pillars are: REASON, EXPERIENCE, RECORDS, and JESUS. Each of these pillars can be flawed, misused, misleading. We are not moving into absolute certainty. But the more we use these pillars and let them talk to each other, the more we will know where we have been, why we have concluded what we have concluded thus far, where our confidence feels solid, and where our growing edge is still beckoning us onward. REASON Humans are intelligent beings (within reason). This does not mean that reason helps us to understand mystery or miracles or all the spiritual dimension of this life. Can a virgin woman conceive and bear a child without being with a man? This seems unlikely to our reason. But many unlikely things happen in our realm. I do not doubt the virgin birth because of human logic alone. I doubt the virgin birth because the New Testament records make it clear that the virgin birth stories were overlaid tacked on long after the Gospels were first written. You notice that I have skipped from REASON to RECORDS. There are four pillars, so we never depend on one alone. REASON still guides our search if we let it. For instance: Jesus was crucified. Paul was executed. All but one of the twelve disciples died because of loyalty to Jesus. Is it reasonable to assume that God will always protect the faithful in this world make us rich and successful and healthy? An obvious conundrum. Yet scores and scads of believers try to believe it. And if they do, they are suddenly in a deep faith crisis if they run into any of life s heavy storms themselves. One of Paul s blunders was that he trusted the Roman Empire to essentially be just that is, to live by its own laws. Rulers are not a terror to good conduct, he wrote. (Romans 13:3) Paul knew the Roman Empire as it was under Augustus and Tiberius; he had not adjusted his views to some of the more corrupt Emperors. He appealed his case to Caesar, but Nero had come to power. Is it reasonable to assume that the Christian case received a fair hearing from an Emperor who had little regard for justice and who used Christians as scapegoats? And is it reasonable for us to trust what Paul said about human governments before he himself was betrayed by them? Sometimes Paul is just plain wrong, and rulers like Hitler and Stalin and others each of us could name are indeed a terror to good conduct, and more a terror to good conduct than to bad. So if you BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 4 OF 9
believe Paul simply because his writings made it into the New Testament and you do not use reason as a checkpoint, then Scripture will lead you astray. If we understand the laws that govern our solar system, is it reasonable to assume that the sun can stand still? (Joshua 10:13) If truth contradicts truth if spiritual truth contradicts scientific truth we do not accept that. We go looking for the flaw in one claim or the other. Paul and Luke died around 65 A.D. (my best guess). The Jewish revolt began in 66 A.D. and ended with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. A million Jews were slaughtered and seven hundred thousand were sold into slavery. Is it reasonable to assume that this had little impact on the first-century history of Judaism or Christianity? What does this mean to the dating of New Testament writings, for instance? What is a Samaritan, and how can we understand unless we know something of the history of the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom in 722 B.C.? (II Kings 17:24) The more we know about biblical times and the more we keep track of the interaction between the events we do know about, the more REASONable our understanding of what was going on. Knowledge is a good thing, and while it is reasonable to keep asking how certain we are about what we think we know, knowledge and reason are wonderful tools, and no Christian should be without them. EXPERIENCE Our personal experience is of course limited to a tiny taste a tiny cross-section of life. Nevertheless, if somebody tells me I will be happier if I stop caring about everybody around me and just grab anything I can for myself, shall I believe them? However much they may insist, that does not match my personal experience. If somebody tells me that the more time I spend in quietness, the more likely I am to become aware of the spiritual realities all around me, will I believe that? Yes, that matches my own personal experience. There is no promise or claim about life from any source that we should not check against our personal EXPERIENCE. It is hardly a flawless test, but it is one of the most important tests we can use to understand anything we are being told. And yes, a lot of our experience BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 5 OF 9
is too short-range to be given much credibility. Fifty years of experience will give us more certainty than five days. The point is, we should not neglect to weigh what we know or think we know against our own personal experience. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I know quite a few people who are certain that living by the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount is the secret to how to live the Christian Life. But have they ever actually tried to do this in real life? Experience would change their assumptions dramatically. RECORDS By RECORDS I mean essentially the records we have in the Bible. They are always partial incomplete. What happened to Barnabas, or Andrew? Why don t we know more about Lydia, or Mary of Magdala? And scholars debate (and should) the accuracy of the biblical records. Did Paul write the letter to the Colossians? (I say yes; many say no.) Did the Apostle John write the Gospel of John? (I say no; many say yes.) None of the New Testament records are without error, contradiction, disagreement even between themselves. They are still the most reliable sources of information we have about the experiences and convictions of those who have tried to be faithful before we came along. Studying the biblical records is a lifelong quest, and anybody who does it (especially if they use the four pillars we are discussing) will be increasingly blessed, puzzled, and inspired by doing so. Without the New Testament records, we would know nothing about Jesus or Peter or Paul. Obviously there are other records too. Josephus wrote The Jewish War, an account of the Jewish uprising against Rome in 66-74 A.D. He also wrote Antiquities of the Jews, his version of Jewish history prior to the revolt. As always, we discover that records outside the Bible are less accurate and less reliable than the biblical records; precision and plagiarism were not seen in the same way in the ancient world as they are today. Some people love to find fault with the biblical records, but I appreciate them more and more when I consider the context and the ages out of which they have come. In any case, the biblical records are one of the best treasures we have from the past. To claim they are inerrant or flawless is ridiculous, and it ruins most of their value. Among other things, that BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 6 OF 9
is not REASONable. Nowhere else in life do we find truth unmixed with error. It is part of finding ourselves in a temporal, imperfect world. The Bible and its authors do not find themselves immune from the world in which they live. JESUS The Fourth Pillar Do not get careless on me. The records give us external accounts of the story of Jesus among us on earth. These have great influence on our impressions of who Jesus was, what He was like, how He thought, and what He cared about. And certainly they give us the only information we have about what Jesus did and what happened to Him here on earth. All of that has a lot of impact on what we think of Him. It does a lot to shape and form our beliefs about Him, and that in turn has a lot to do with the relationship which forms between us. It is important to remember that these impressions are not exactly the same for any of us. My picture of who Jesus really is is not the same as your picture of Him. Some of the richness of our bonds within a church comes from sharing our images and pictures of who He is. And some of the controversy in the church also comes because our images and pictures of Him are not the same. But the records we have about Him are not the end of it. He is our Resurrected Lord, and each of us especially those of us who are followers has a relationship with JESUS that is far beyond and more important than what we get from the records. We each have spiritual experiences and encounters with Him that end up being more important in our lives than anything we have read in The Book. The two connect with each other and impact each other, but if we love Jesus, that goes far beyond any book learning we will ever have. So, for instance, we remind ourselves that Paul and Luke wrote more of the New Testament than any other single author contributed. The impact is beyond measure. But neither Paul nor Luke were followers of the physical Jesus. Neither one knew Him in the flesh, as we say. They were both converted after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. They knew Him as the Holy Spirit. In short, they had no advantage over any one of you when it comes to knowing Jesus. It is important to remember that the movement we call the Christian church did not come from contact with the physical Jesus. It did not come from the miracles that Jesus performed, though they are well-attested. Christianity comes from contact with BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 7 OF 9
the Holy Spirit of our Risen Lord: from Pentecost and Pentecost-type experiences. How many of the authors of the New Testament knew Jesus in the flesh? I repeat: neither Paul nor Luke met Jesus until after His resurrection. But what would the New Testament be like without the letters of Paul or without Luke s Gospel and the Book of Acts? I am convinced that Matthew, John, Hebrews, Revelation, and the pastoral epistles were also written by men who never knew Jesus in the flesh. Who does that leave? Peter is wonderful, but he did not catch on to what it was really all about until after the resurrection. The First Breakfast (John 21:1-19) in the new era in the New Covenant was in many ways as powerful as the Last Supper: one closing out the time we had with Jesus of Nazareth, and the other opening up the new era with the Jesus of the Holy Spirit. Do we say to people, Never go out to see the real birds just look at the pictures in the field guides? Do we say to people, Never fall in love with real people, get married, have children, shape and form real families just look at the pictures in Playboy magazine? So why would we ever say, Just read the Bible don t pray or obey the Holy Spirit yourself in real life? So knowing and studying the RECORDS are important, but knowing JESUS personally is far more important. Then we also have personal loyalty, and we have current and continuing conversations with Jesus that are part of our own EXPERIENCE. Jesus was Himself a man of prayer more so, we suspect, than any other man who ever lived. Interesting that this is still the most profound and important way of connecting with Him. And Paul was an incredible follower because he became a man of prayer also. And guess what? If we want to be true and authentic followers, we become people of prayer ourselves. Not people who recite nice, canned, and pretty recipes of holy-sounding platitudes; not people who open or close meetings with impressive-sounding phrases of eloquence. Jesus had some complaints about people who prayed well on the outside but who did not know God on the inside. People who spend hours getting aligned with the living presence of Jesus the Christ and who shape their lives and their daily decisions by what they think the Holy Spirit really wants of them and from them that is what we mean by claiming that JESUS is the fourth pillar of our approach to the Bible, and indeed to the Christian Life itself. BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 8 OF 9
So we approach the Bible by paying attention to REASON, by checking everything against the EXPERIENCE we ourselves have had in life thus far, by comparing what we are dealing with in the present with the RECORDS we have of the faithful leaders and followers of the past, and by constantly and continually checking in with the JESUS we know as the Holy Spirit, who is still very much alive among us and with us. All of the four pillars are flawed, partial infected by human perspectives, tampering, and intended or unintended self-interest. But if we keep paying attention to all four and allow each of the four to keep giving us perspective about the other three, then when we remember that it is necessary for us to study some portion of the Scriptures each day, it will keep leading us into new awakenings and into new awareness of the incredible LIFE we are being invited into. Wonder of wonders, it is a whole new dimension that opens up before us. And yes, others were getting surprised by it and stumbling into it for as far back as Abraham. Is that not what we would expect if the God that Jesus was revealing to us was trying to make such things known to us? Is that not REASONable? We start to see everything even ourselves and each other as if through different lenses. And the distortions of what this world calls reality leave us gasping. The problem is, once we start to see through new eyes, we cannot go back to unseeing again. Even religion as usually known in our world is part of the distortion. Jesus Himself can be seen through old eyes and former assumptions. But we see him thus no longer. (II Corinthians 5:16) So welcome to a new day, a new time, a new phase of our life together in The New Church. BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2018 All rights reserved. PAGE 9 OF 9