Matthew 22:34-40
34 Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. 35 One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: 36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[a] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (TNIV)
“From Sunlight to Ashes: The Phoenix Affirmations” Sermon Series, Week One
The thirtysomething preacher had just left his previous ministry in the Foursquare tradition to take the reins at a small, struggling church in Costa Mesa, California. He was already pastoring a moderately sized and successful congregation elsewhere, and on paper, it might not make sense to take that sort of a call, but he did so anyways. That pastor, Chuck Smith, went on to found from that Costa Mesa church the nationwide Calvary Chapel association of nondenominational evangelical churches. And when asked later about the defining features of his teaching and preaching style in creating this association out of a single, tiny, church, Pastor Smith said, simply, he wanted the best fed sheep of any church. The best fed sheep!
Now, I’m hoping that we can give good ol’ Pastor Smith a run for his money, and this hope of mine is one of several that I hope to share with you over the next several weeks. Today marks the beginning of my first sermon series with all of you, entitled, as you can see, “From Ashes to Sunlight: The Phoenix Affirmations.” It is based on a book written by a United Church of Christ pastor, Rev. Eric Elnes, who has pastored a very successful church in Scottsdale, Arizona, where they have made amazing use of a diverse array of tools and talents available to them in doing ministry. Eric then wrote this short book called The Phoenix Affirmations, after the town in which it was composed, but also because the image of the phoenix, being reborn out of the ashes, is a hope he has for the vital congregations of mainline American Christianity. Congregations just like us. And so I’ll be using this book as a template for offering to you this sermon series as way of you getting to know me as a pastor and as a person, my style and my vision. A sort of break-the-ice kind of thing, but one that will take a couple of months rather than a couple of minutes, and one that thankfully doesn’t involve a name game.
The first affirmation from the Phoenix affirmations that we will be exploring as today’s theme in this series is, “Listening for God’s word in prayer and in Scripture.” Now, at Calvary, Pastor Smith wanted his flock to be the best-fed flock when it came to Scripture. So he taught Biblical inerrancy—that the Bible is completely and wholly without error in any capacity—a doctrine that offers certainty and simplicity, but that also offers a colossal burden for the believer—as Eric Elnes writes about what some of his more conservative friends told him, “if you question even one fact in the Bible, you’ll soon question another and then another until finally the bottom will fall out and you’ll throw the whole thing away as irrelevant.” It is one of the greatest challenges for us as 21st-century Americans reading a 1st-century or earlier document from the Middle East—how can we open the Bible to a page, almost any page, and not read at least one thing that invites more questions than answers? Or that invites more doubt than faith?
This predicament has been scripted and performed in a number of dramatic settings in film and television, movies like the Academy-award winning film Dead Man Walking, or TV shows like the hit series The West Wing, in which a learned, progressive Christian confronts a Biblically inerrant literalist Christian over whether they would, say, sell their child into slavery as mandated in Exodus, or whether they would condemn a person for eating shellfish because shellfish are referred to as an abomination in Leviticus? Both characters in this interaction are basically exaggerations of themselves—the liberal Christian is overly self-assured in their knowledge while the literalist Christian is a “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” type. It is neither—we’re both right. We’re both wrong. If anything, I think mainline Christians have a rap for being less knowledgeable when it comes to Biblical know-how than our evangelical brothers and sisters, and it is because of something that I have seen everywhere in church. It is the act of creating a Bible within a Bible, like the Russian Krishna dolls, of the things we like the most. The canon of the Bible was closed on paper some 1,700 years ago, but really, many, many of us continue to carve apart the Bible, looking only at what reassures us, or what we are used to reading. I have preacher friends who call those folks “Cafeteria Christians,” because they pick and choose like they were at a buffet, but I would take that metaphor even further—we not only pick our verses, we then Super Size them as well by giving them such powerful importance.
And at first glance, it would look like Jesus is doing just that in our passage in Matthew, Jesus, who is in his final public debates with the Pharisees and Sadduccees, bests them at every turn, but then turns around and says that essentially the entire Old Testament—which is divided into three parts, the law, the prophets, and the wisdom writings—He says that two of those parts, essentially two-thirds of his Scripture—hangs on two fundamental commandments—love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Not long after Jesus, the Rabbi Hillel would say something remarkably similar in the Talmud—that the scope and scale of the entire Torah can be summed up as “love your neighbor.” Everything else, he says, is simply commentary. Put differently, every law in the Bible, all 613 of them, should have a basis in love of God and a basis in love of one another. It all comes back to love.
There is a movement in the church that embodies this spirit, they call themselves Red Letter Christians. In many Bibles, the words of Christ are put into red letter type, while the rest of Scripture remains in black type, and so by their name, Red Letter Christians are saying that we should value first the teachings of Jesus, rather than take the route traveled in other churches by proof texting different parts of Scripture in order to make a point. And believe it or not, we had Red Letter Christians around two hundred years ago, too—a movement of people who created a motto of, “No Creed but Christ,” an attitude that liberated them to study all of Scripture, not just the McNuggets. Only back then, this movement was eventually called the Disciples of Christ.
And so while I would say this about any Disciples parish, in particular with us, I am incredibly, deeply hopeful that this Disciples church, that all of us can transcend the trend of limiting ourselves merely to our Biblical comfort zones. During my meeting with your search committee, and again in our Tuesday morning Bible study, I was asked about my desire to tackle books of the Bible that mainline Christians don’t often talk about—especially the book of Revelation. I’ll give my answer in a more elegant form—set aside the stew of Biblical inerrancy that Pastor Smith and other ministers feed to their churches—I want us to be among the best-fed Christians in America, in the world, when it comes to learning and studying Scripture—even when, especially when, it requires us to get past the black-and-white bumper sticker clichés of inerrancy or canons-within-canons, because beyond that is where all of the good stuff is, all of the stories and laws and prophesies that we get to make our own, read and learn from and wrestle with, the good stuff is in there. If we must have a canon within a canon, then red letters are a good place to start—but only as long as the red letters are our foundation, not our comfort zone. And if we need any reassurance that this is where we should go with our Scriptures, we can turn once more to Jesus in this passage—his use of the two laws comes from two different books of the Torah—Deuteronomy and Leviticus. As Jesus was unafraid to bring with him the entirety of the law in his faith, so too may we be unafraid to explore the entirety of the law and the Gospels, the letters and the prophets. May our faith never keep us from being satisfied with the belief that the Bible says it and that settles it. And may our faith lead us to where God is in these texts, for there we may find the guiding light in going forward together as a church. May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
October 2, 2011
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