I hope to see some of you on Tuesday at 7 pm for the 10th week of our Faith Study, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. Some of us will gather in-person in the MacKinnon Chapel and others will join us via the ZOOM platform https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88522517327 Meeting ID: 885 2251 7327. This week, we are focused on the June chapter. You don’t need to read the book or attend any other session to join. Everyone is welcome to join us.
In the United Church, we centre our worship service around the Spirit of Christ and the scriptures. You may have heard the Bible is the Word of God, but the Bible never calls itself that. In fact, it calls Jesus the Word of God. The Bible is a crucially important book. As 2 Timothy 3:16 states, “All scripture is inspired by God”. Another way to translate this verse is, “All scripture is God breathed”. Do you know what else was inspired by God and God breathed? The first human. And we know that despite Adam being inspired with the breath of God, he didn’t always get God right.
The Bible is like a finger pointing to the moon. Christians sometimes make the mistake of thinking that being a Christian is about believing in the finger rather than seeing the Christian life as a relationship to that which the finger points. The key to Christianity is Christ. After all, we are not Biblians. We are Christians.
The point is Christ. We try to see everything, including the Bible, through the eyes of Christ. In Luke 24, the resurrected Jesus walks with two disciples on the road to Emmaus. The disciples didn’t recognize him, but Jesus talked with them and “interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.” Jesus had to interpret the scriptures to his disciples so they could see Jesus in the scriptures. We see Jesus in the scriptures as the one who suffers from at the hands of religious people.
This changes our whole understanding of the Bible. So often we interpret God as with the conquerors, the winners, the rich, and the powerful. But Jesus reveals a different way of interpreting the Bible – God is with the victims in the Bible, not with the persecutors. As Jesus says in Matthew 25, what you do for the least of these, you do for him.