Trying to plan a service with a colleague for a somewhat
unusual occasion has made me ask some difficult questions about the place of
the Bible in Christian worship.
In thinking about the sermon, we knew what we wanted to say,
and we had no doubt that it was close to the heart of the Christian message.
The problem came when we started looking for a New Testament reading. Every
passage we thought of seemed to be a poor fit. It contained an inspiring phrase
or sentence that was right on message, but when we came to read the surrounding
verses we thought, ‘No, that’s not quite suitable’. In its context it was not
quite saying the kind of thing we wanted to say. In some cases there was a bit
of doctrinal baggage or a bit of historical background that would have to be
unpacked and possibly explained to people in the kind of congregation we were
expecting, and this would be a distraction from the main point of the service.
This of course prompts the question: if we can’t find a
place in the Bible that plainly declares this message, is it because the
message is not actually biblical at all? Are we trying to make the Bible say
something it doesn’t say, or trying desperately to convince ourselves that our
message is the Bible’s message?
This is of course not necessarily so. If we really believe that our message is true to the
spirit of the Bible, or, more important, to the spirit of Christ who is the
true Word, does it matter that there is no place in the Bible that spells it out
in exactly the same way as we would?
We surely have a good precedent in the way the New Testament
writers treated the Hebrew Scriptures. They quoted them frequently, and usually
way out of context. The most extreme example of this is the way they sometimes
took the Septuagint’s expression ‘the Lord’ (a translation of the divine Name
itself) as referring to ‘the Lord’ Jesus. Because they saw Jesus as the
fulfilment and the real meaning of all the Scriptures they had no hesitation in
assuming that, whatever the context and whatever the original writer’s
intention, they could draw on any passage in the Bible to back up what they
believed about Jesus.
But perhaps there is a difference. In the Christian Church
today, and for many centuries past, there is a tradition of reading a passage
of Scripture as the ‘lesson’ for the day and then preaching on it. The sermon
is meant to be an exposition of the Bible passage, and, as the old saying goes,
‘a text without its context is a pretext’. Honesty demands that we take
seriously what the text means before we start asking what its relevance may be
for us today.
However, when we look at the preaching of the early
disciples, especially as we see it in the book of Acts, this was not the style
at all. In most of their public proclamation of the gospel, they did not read a
Bible passage and then expound it. They preached their message and backed it up
with any snippets of Scripture that occurred to them. It is our tradition of
formal worship that demands that there should be a ‘reading’ as well as a
‘sermon’ in every service, and that the two should be closely related.
Perhaps we should recognise more clearly that there are two
kinds of sermon, and be more honest about both of them. There is the expository sermon, when we take careful
note of what the Bible actually says and wrestle with its meaning for us today.
Then there is the topical or situational sermon, when it is a current
situation or concern that sets the agenda. In this kind of sermon we still try to
be true to the Christian message in spirit, but are free to use any part of the
Bible, even if only a striking phrase here and there, as back-up and
illustration. With this kind of sermon there really doesn’t need to be a
‘reading’ as such. And even if there is one it need not necessarily be from the
Bible.
No comments:
Post a Comment