Daniel Semelsberger: Reading Scripture for All Its Worth

Sermon delivered on Trinity 17C, Sunday, September 11, 2016, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

Daniel is our guest preacher today. It is really a pleasure to showcase young, faithful talent.

Lectionary texts: Jeremiah 4:11–12, 22–28; Psalm 14.1-7; 1 Timothy 1.12-17; Luke 15.1-10.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Good morning, everyone!

It is a pleasure to see you all.

As you may infer from my presence (again!) here in this pulpit, our good rector still suffers from temporary bouts of insanity whilst in my company, and, in a fit of lunacy, asked me to preach. I can only hope that being this close to me has triggered an episode, and that I will manage to tidy off this sermon before Kevin recovers sufficiently to have any memory of this…

So, without further ado, let us crack on.

A word of introduction: I make no pretense to being an expert theologian or exegetical scholar. I am, just as the last time I stood here, approaching our texts this morning as an apologist for the faith, sensitive to the questions and doubts that many non-Christians—and, for that matter, many Christians, too—carry with them, and, when they feeling either brash or brave, ask aloud.

So, I want to talk briefly to you this morning about story, and imagination, and the power that narrative has to create meaning for the hearer. To be sure, I am not tilling any new ground here. A revolutionary, I am not. However, I have found that it is quite frequently the job of the apologist to offer a gentle reminder of how the fundamental, essential things—basic assumptions about core realities—that we hold to be true inform the way that we see everything else, and how we live our lives. And that, to give the game away up front and use terrible grammar, is what I am up to.

The narrative of scripture is captivating—even thrilling, if we will only let ourselves be thrilled by it. This is something that many of us here in the post-Enlightenment West seem to find rather difficult. With our modern sensibilities and hyper-reliance on rational thinking, we prefer to talk of concrete realities when at all possible (my cat is fluffy), and abstract conceptual realities when we have to (my cat is a simultaneously a diva and a dunderhead), but certainly not about imagination and silly stories, as if they have anything useful or truthful to tell us. So who wants to hear the tale of Josey and the Catnip Mouse? Anyone?

Cat analogies aside, however, the point remains. We place great emphasis on reason to tell us the truth, and imagination only to entertain us, and this informs how we interact with scripture. Indeed, I find that we are constantly under temptation—whether in defending the faith against an attack, or in an effort to prove that one’s way of think about God is “clearly best, you dunderhead”—to crack open the scriptures solely to mine them for concrete particularities of theology and doctrine. But, in so doing, the narrative thrust of scripture is often overlooked, which is problematic for reasons I shall touch in just a moment.

Before I do that, however, lest anyone mishear me (or Kevin snap back to sanity prematurely, overhear only this bit of the sermon, and heave me bodily out the front door), I must offer this disclaimer: reading scripture for theological and doctrinal particularities is a good and proper thing. I am not, in any way, attempting to mythologize away the historicity of scripture as if it is somehow just a story, in the sense that something which is just a story is fabricated or made up. It is emphatically not just a story. But the Christian faith revealed in scripture does tell a story—one that that appeals to and exercises both our rational and imaginative faculties.

But why is this important, you ask? Why is this impertinent little whippersnapper so insistent that we not overlook the narrative of scripture?

Because the stories that we tell ourselves and believe about ourselves end up informing the way that we see reality. And that being the case, it is critically important that we tell ourselves the True Story (capital ‘T’, capital ‘S’). And not only that, but it is likewise important that we tell others the True Story, and learn to recognize, and push against, counterfeit stories when we see them.

Our Old Testament texts this morning offer a tense bit of narrative, brimming with conflict, and depicting the imago dei at its most shattered. Human brokenness is front and center in our readings. Be attentive to the starkly unflattering depictions of human sinfulness offered by David and Jeremiah. The judgment rendered—by the psalmist, by the prophet, and, within the voice of Jeremiah, by God himself—is both unflinching and, to borrow directly from the prophetic text, unrelenting. In both passages, humanity is charged with having devoted all of its ingenuity to devising and committing evil.

The psalmist weeps, both angry and despairing, that the children of man “have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good.” Through the prophet, God declares of the kingdom of Judah that “they know me not; they are stupid children; they have no understanding; They are wise—in doing evil! But how to do good they know not.”

In response to this faithlessness, both the psalmist and prophet point to God’s judgment against the wicked as a restorative force, bringing justice, refuge, and salvation, for “God is with the righteous”.

Is this a happy picture? I doubt that most of us moderns would describe it thus. However, it is quite difficult to describe it as inaccurate. That humanity has a propensity for turning away from God and either in on itself or toward something darker is a central theme of scripture. It is a part of the True Story, as any cursory glance at recorded history will quickly convince you. Likewise, divine judgment of sin and wickedness is an inescapable part of the scriptural narrative, even if it does not jive with our somewhat misplaced contemporary sensibilities.

But. These are only parts. On their own, or even put together, they are woefully incomplete. Stop here and we risk making too much of human sinfulness and divine judgment—and, moreover, risk coming close to distorting the story of scripture, making it only about ourselves (i.e. humanity) and our problems. Scripture is a story about God and his purpose. We matter greatly, but this is not chiefly about us, and we risk missing the point if we put ourselves at the center of the narrative.

So, let us not do that.

Let us instead turn our attention to the Gospel parables found in Luke 15.

What ought to strike us, immediately, is that Luke tells us that the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to Jesus. Here we have a crowd of persons “wise in doing evil” who, rather than running away in fear of the “hot wind… of judgment” spoken of in Jeremiah, found the presence of the incarnate Son of God irresistible and flocked to him. And the Pharisees and scribes, no doubt wise to sea of human depravity enveloping the rabbi Yeshua—and perhaps taking their spots in his company—register complaint: “How can this man be righteous when he welcomes such obvious sinners into his presence and break bread with them? Surely he knows how God feels about sinners like these?!?”

In response, Jesus tells…. stories(!) as a means to communicate truth and meaning.

The two parables in today’s readings, of the lost sheep and the lost coin, present roughly the same pattern: a worthwhile possession—one of a hundred sheep or one of ten coins—becomes lost. In each case, the shepherd and the woman, respectively, are unconcerned about those things that remain found and in their possession, and devote their energies to discovering and recovering the single lost possession. Upon recovery, each is so overjoyed that they must share their news with their friends and loved ones.

Lest the point be lost on the hearers, Jesus concludes each parable by telling his audience that the angels in heaven rejoice all the more when a single lost sinner “is found” and repents. Because the allegory is so straightforward to our modern sensibilities, I wonder if we have lost some of the beauty of these stories as they must have sounded to the crowd of sinners—outcasts of both Jewish and Roman societies—sitting, listening to Jesus as he described for them the love and redemptive purpose of God. How must they have felt? Did they understand for the first time?

Here, then, we have another, indispensable part of the story of Scripture: God’s purpose of recovery, reconciliation, and restoration, even at great cost. It is difficult, seeing as we are not first-century Jews, to appreciate Jesus’ choices of imagery in all their fullness. Even the story of the prodigal son, which accompanies these two in Luke’s account, suffers from the separation of cultures and two millennia. And, yet, we are given something other than the abstract concepts I supplied just a moment ago. I can talk of “restoration” until I am blue in the face, but letting one’s imagination entertain the image of a shepherd forsaking his flock of ninety-nine perfectly safe, non-wayward sheep to head off into the wilderness to find a single lost sheep, which, when he finds, he then carries back to his flock on his own shoulders—rejoicing the whole while—is far richer and more compelling,

A few thoughts, by way of closing:

The core realities offered to us in scripture—that humanity was created by God, is separated from God, but is loved by God such that He came and sought us, to restore us to Himself, even at great cost to Himself, and now rejoices over us—are thrilling and wonderful. They offer a radically different story than modern man’s program of moral and ethical self-improvement and progress. They offer hope in a world troubled by those that have set themselves to doing evil. And they are beautiful.

When is the last time that you stopped and marveled at them? At the Being who set them into motion?

I hope, for your sake, that it has been recently. Wonder is good for the soul. Engaging with the story of Christianity, with both one’s reason and one’s imagination appeals to our whole being, rather than just one part of it.

This is, in fact, I would argue, one of our central purposes in gathering here this morning, in this building, together, and participating in this liturgy. We are here to be reminded, because we are frail creatures, easily forgetting the most important truths and telling ourselves the wrong stories. To engage with mystery in the Eucharist, even as we recite the fundamental tenets of our faith found in the Nicene Creed. We are here to marvel and to think. To wonder and to ponder. To imagine and to reason. To experience awe.

And for the sake of God’s overwhelming purpose of redemption and reconciliation revealed to us in scripture, Christ’s people (that’s us) must be people marked by this story, the True Story. We must also be marked, among many other things, by wonder. Let the purpose of God—namely to see the lost, to find them, and to rejoice over them when they are found; that they who were formerly lost have been restored and reconciled to God—let this purpose fire your imagine, so that you find it possible to love your brothers and sisters in Christ, and, indeed, love your enemies. Imagination is, in fact, necessary to loving one’s enemies, for it is often impossible to treat your enemies with love, to pray for them, unless one can first imagine oneself doing it. If you can imagine loving another it becomes all the easier to act practice it.

I mean to encourage you, of course, not toward cheap emotionalism, or to a patronizing sort of tolerance, but toward consuming, purposeful love, fueled by imagination and wonder. We live in a world that is starved for these things, for the transcendent. If we will not be witnessed to it, to God’s purposes, as God’s people, then who will?