Hilton Head Island, SC – August 12, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 8:4-8; 9-15
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Now the parable is this: the seed is the word of God.” – Luke 8:11
In biblical times, there was no Bible. That may sound peculiar, but it is a fact. The books of what Christians call the Old Testament had been semi-approved by official Judaism by the time of Jesus, but each book of the Jewish Bible was a separate sheepskin parchment scroll. It would never have occurred to anyone to try to fasten all the scrolls together into one huge scroll, because it would be so large and cumbersome it would be totally unmanageable for anyone to carry it anywhere, or even safely to open it to read it.
As for the New Testament, its various books were not officially adopted by the early Church until the fifth century of the Common Era. Thus even in New Testament times there was no “Bible.” Something which scholars call “the oral tradition” made scripture available to people, but it was transmitted in spoken rather than written words. Jesus was probably familiar with the Hebrew Bible via the oral tradition, and not very much in written form.
From the outset, you need to understand that this sermon is going to be largely educational, and not inspirational. If there is any inspiration at all, it will come toward the end of the sermon. This morning I shall be much more of a rabbi, a teacher, than a pastor or preacher. Having forewarned you, however, I hope you will listen attentively anyway. It can’t hurt you, and it might even deepen your understanding of what the Bible is - - - and isn’t.
In the late fifteenth century, Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press. Until that time, the Bible was regularly read by very few people: a few of the monks in monasteries, a few priests, and some scholars, virtually all of whom were associated with the Church. Most people could not read, and even if they could, there were no complete Bibles anywhere except in a few libraries that were scattered throughout Europe, western Asia, and North Africa. There might be isolated individual biblical parchment books here and there, but there were very few Bibles as such.
In its entire history, the Catholic Church has never emphasized that average church members should read the Bible. Because there were no Bibles widely available until the fifteenth century, ordinary Catholics could not be expected to know much about biblical content or meaning. The teachings of the Church were considered equal to or superior to the Bible, if only because hand-written copies of the Bible were few and far between. Even after Gutenberg and the printing press came along, the Bible was never the center of either Catholic worship or daily life. A few of you were raised in the Catholic Church, and I’m sure you will corroborate that observation from your own personal experience. Catholic children do not attend what Protestants call Sunday School.
However, by the seventeenth century, printed Bibles became both common and relatively inexpensive. When that happened, Protestants began to take the Bible very seriously. Every church had one, and within a hundred years of Luther translating the Bible into German, Bibles were available in many languages. Doctrines had to be based on words printed in the Bible. The Protestant Reformers loudly proclaimed “Sola Scriptura”: By Scripture Alone. Nothing could be taught in the Church which could not be supported in the Bible, they declared.
The word “Bible” is a Greek word which essentially means “Library.” The Bible is a compendium of all the books Judaism and Christianity agreed were officially part of the “canon,” c-a-n-o-n. That word means the particular scriptures accepted as “canonical” (we might say “religiously approved”) by the leaders of Judaism and Christianity at a certain point in history.
Nowhere in the Bible is the phrase “the word of God” used to describe the Bible, because in biblical times there was as yet no concept of “the Bible.” That idea only came into vogue after both Judaism and Christianity had existed as identifiable religions for several centuries.
Nonetheless, the term “word of God” is used in the Bible, five times in the Old Testament, and forty-two times in the New Testament, according to my worn and ragged Cruden’s Complete Concordance. A concordance is a reference book which gives biblical references for thousands of different words found in the Bible. Never once in the forty-seven usages of the phrase “word of God” does the context of the usage imply that it is “the Bible” to which reference is being made.
Then where does the notion come from that “the Bible is the word of God”? I cannot academically verify this, but I think the idea probably did not become common among any large number of Christians until the early nineteenth century. It gained popularity in those churches and denominations which eventually described themselves as being either “evangelical” or “fundamentalist” --- or both. These two words also were phenomena which became popular in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Protestants who came to call themselves “mainliners,” such as we are, also call the Bible the word of God, but we do not have the same sort of reverence for the Bible as do fundamentalists and evangelicals. After biblical passages are read in Catholic churches or those mainline Protestant churches which follow liturgical traditions, the clergy or lay reader will say, “This is the word of the Lord,” and the congregation will respond, “Thanks be to God.” But for many who hear those words and respond to them with that oft-used liturgical response, it does not have the profound significance it has for those in the evangelical or fundamentalist churches.
The reason the term “the word of God” by now is almost exclusively copyrighted by the conservative churches is that they are the only ones who tend to insist that the Bible is a collection of literal, infallible, inerrant truths which were dictated to various biblical writers by God Himself. He told everyone what to write, and they wrote it --- verbatim; word for word.
Catholics never believed that. The Orthodox didn’t believe it. Nor did the Protestant Reformers or their descendants. In the nineteenth century, some Protestants came not only to believe that, but to insist on it. The Bible IS the Word of God, they said.
So - - - Is the Bible the word of God to you? Have you ever thought about that? I presume everyone here has heard the term many times throughout our relatively long lives, but do we actually perceive the Bible as God’s word? And if we don’t see the Bible in that way, then what is the word of God?
From the time of Gutenberg on, books became relatively less and less expensive. Authors became more numerous; publishers became more common. Up until one or two centuries ago, the only book in many homes, if there were any at all, was the Bible. But now every home of well-educated families has many books on their shelves, but many do not possess a Bible. Furthermore, now you don’t even need shelves. All you need is the Internet and your trusty Kindle or Nook, and you have thousands of books available by the mere push of a few keys on your trusty I-phone or I-pad.
These advancements are most fortunate --- and unfortunate. When the Bible was the only book in the household, the household read and studied and talked about The Book, The Divine Library, the Word of God. But as books became more numerous, the Bible slipped out of common usage and memory for many contemporary Christians, but especially for Catholics, Orthodox, and mainline Protestants.
It is not impossible to be a committed Christian without being familiar with the Bible, but it is very difficult. If you have never read the Bible, it is never too late to start. It wouldn’t take any longer to finish than The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, or The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, or Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. As in those books, there are parts you might want to skim fairly quickly rather than to read carefully. The “begat” sections of the Old Testament are not too captivating, for example, and you may wonder how anyone could have the nerve to thrust some of those monikers onto poor innocent children. The blood and gore in Joshua, Judges, Kings, and Chronicles are hard to take, but it worth contemplating why the biblical writers felt impelled to include the accounts of those massacres --- if indeed they actually happened as recorded. But even in the most suspect of biblical books there are nuggets of wisdom and truth and inspiration to be found.
In the past two millennia, however, I would venture to postulate that only a very small percentage of people ever became card-carrying Jews or Christians by reading the Bible all by themselves. In fact, Jews are Jews simply by being born Jews, whether or not they are familiar with the Bible or the God of the Bible. Not so with Christians. No one is truly “born” as a Christian. Most of us were born into Christian families and of Christian parents, but we became Christians through a community, the community of our family and church and possibly even our nation. Thus, for nearly everyone, Christianity is taught before it is caught. We learn about what Christianity teaches, and much of that comes through the Bible, but until we “catch” it, until we adopt it as our own, Christianity and faith and the Bible are mere abstractions to us.
Traditionally, a “liberal education” meant one in which a wide variety of academic disciplines were studied, always including the Bible. By the twentieth century, technical education became widespread, and by the end of the last century, the “STEM” subjects - Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math – were emphasized. For at least a hundred years, therefore, courses on the Bible have been electives in most colleges and universities, and were not required, except in evangelical church colleges.
Thus biblical allusions, especially from the Authorized or King James Version of the Bible, are lost on most people. Who knows where such phrases as these come from: stiff-necked, hard-hearted, loose woman, lick the dust, sharper than a serpent’s tooth, the way of a fool is right in his own eyes, the way of the wicked shall perish, pride goeth before a fall, beware of practicing your piety before men.
Earlier you heard two readings from the eighth chapter of Luke’s Gospel. The first section (4-8) was the parable of the sower and the seed, as told by Jesus. It is found in all three Synoptic Gospels, but this is the shortest version, and I have never preached from the Lukan version before. However, I chose it because of four words in the sermon text, “the word of God.” A farmer threw seeds of grain across his small field, said Jesus. Some fell on the path beside the field, and it was crushed by those who walked along the path. Some fell on rocks, some among the weeds and thorns, and some fell on good soil, which had been properly plowed to receive the seed. That seed bed brought forth bountifully. Finishing the parable, Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
The disciples heard it, but, as was so often the case, they didn’t get it. So Jesus had to explain the parable to them. “Now the seed is the word of God,” Jesus said. (That’s the phrase I wanted, and by it Jesus clearly did not mean the Bible.) Then he explained the metaphor. The devil comes and takes away God’s word for those who hear God’s word only in the hustle and bustle of life. Therefore they lose its transforming force because they are committed to the world and not to God’s kingdom. Some people receive God’s word joyfully, but the impenetrable rock upon which they live prevents them from taking root. They quickly fall away spiritually, and wither. The seed in the thorns represents those who are choked by the world’s pleasures and riches, and they never fully respond to God’s word in their lives. But the seed which is planted in the carefully prepared soil does take root, and it brings forth a bumper crop.
In the long history of Christianity, I suspect very few people have ever become Christians simply reading the Bible all by themselves. The Bible is best grasped within a community, meaning either The Church, a church, or a group of like-mined people who lead one another, together, into the essence of the word of God, whether that phrase means the Bible or it means the divine-human encounter of God with us on a personal and permanent basis.
Nothing that Jesus said or explained in this parable of the sower and the seed even hints that the Bible is the word of God. Nevertheless, the Bible is the word of God, it becomes the word of God, when the truths it proclaims and the claims it makes take root in our minds and hearts. The Bible is not God, and to see it as God mechanically speaking to us is to make it into an idol, a false god. The Bible is not infallible or inerrant, but it does speak to us as God’s word when it becomes real to us. The problem with most contemporary Christians, particularly mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox, is that we are so unfamiliar with the broad themes of the Bible that they do not penetrate our busy lives to transform us into the people God wants us to be. The word of God is nothing to us unless it is transformative. When God breaks through our dalliances and our defenses, our existence-absorbing business and our busy-ness, God’s word, expressed to us most convincingly and completely in the Bible, becomes God’s Word to our hungry, thirsty souls. Then we can flourish as God has always intended for all of us.
Today we are singing two hymns from the section of the Pilgrim Hymnal from the section on “The Bible.” Believe it or not, sometimes it takes me longer to choose three hymns than to figure out what all will go into the rest of the order of service and the announcements for the bulletin. I hesitate to select either hymn texts or tunes you might not know, because I well realize there is resistance to anything new in an institution which has lasted for two thousand years. We like to sing what we have always sung, which for many of us is about fifteen to twenty hymns.
The middle hymn has a tune many of you know, Nun Danket All’, “Now Thank We All,” but the poetic text was unfamiliar to me, and probably to all of you as well. Besides, it sounds very early-nineteenth-century, which it is, and therefore at a minimum a bit dated. However, it is about the Bible, which is what this sermon is about. Therefore, reluctantly, I chose it. The last hymn and tune most of you know, and thus you surely have sung it. Though I disagree with some of its theology, I went ahead and chose it anyway, based on familiarity, and so we shall sing it.
The phrase, “Word of God Incarnate” to me suggests Jesus, not the Bible, even though this hymn is in “The Bible” section of every hymnal with which I am familiar. The rest of the poem implies that it is the Bible that is being addressed. By the spirit of God within us, the Bible becomes the word of God. Praise be to God for His word, however it is that it enters our minds and hearts.