Sermon 8th January 2012

Today our Vicar, Cameron Barker, preaches based on the reading from Exodus 20, verses 1-17.

“It’s a big book, full of big stories with big characters. They have big ideas (not least about themselves) and make big mistakes. It’s about God, and greed, and grace; about life, lust, laughter and loneliness. It’s about birth, beginnings, and betrayal; about siblings, squabbles, and sex; about power and prayer and prison and passion. And that’s only Genesis”! Welcome to the Bible, then!

That’s a quote from Tom Wright’s book, Simply Christian. I haven’t done any more than dip into it so far, but can still recommend it as a companion to this series. The former Bishop of Durham wrote it quite recently, to describe what Christianity is about. His intent is to commend the faith to those outside it, and also to explain it those on the inside. That makes it, like the Bible itself, for every one of us. And of course Tom Wright put the Bible at the centre of this book. In the same way, we are putting the Bible at the centre of this new series. We are doing that in order to put Jesus more firmly at the centre of our life, as our parish Aim states that we try to do.

It’s always important to be clear about such things from the outset, I think – not least because God has been! That is what leaps out of this huge, sprawling book: God’s plan isn’t hidden or secret, but is plain for all to see in here, from the beginning. That’s why the 16^th Century Reformers made such a big deal of the Bible being freely available in everybody’s native language. We are meant to read it, explore it, know it for ourselves – and be radically changed by it in the process. This book doesn’t just change us; it also changes communities, and the world even. It has done that often before, and it can do the same afresh in every generation. But again it’s Tom Wright who likens how we so often use the Bible to the way that most of us use a computer: we only access a very limited amount of its vast capabilities!

Now, using the Bible isn’t anything new in this church. We have rightly been known as Evangelical (i.e. Bible-based) for a long time now. We may be at the Open, rather than at the Conservative, end of that spectrum. But we do treat, and teach, the Bible very seriously here. Even so, it struck the preachers’ group last year that we’ve been taking rather a lot for granted. To some extent we’ve made assumptions about what people know, or believe, about the Bible. The start of a new year seems like a good time to pause, then. We think that we need go back to key basics. Hopefully we’ll fill in gaps that likely exist for at least some people. So we’re sure that no-one will mind if we start with the very basic facts – which is part of my task in getting this series going today.

So, we are talking here about one book, split into 2 major, but unequal sections: the Old and the New. They are called Testaments, which is an old-fashioned alternative word for the legal term covenant. They are known as that because each section revolves around a covenant that God made with people. One key message of the Bible is that the new Covenant isn’t, in fact, a new one at all. Rather it’s a renewal of the first, or Old, covenant. It’s key to grasp that this was always God’s plan, from the beginning. It wasn’t that Plan A didn’t work, and so God came up with Plan B. What we know as the New covenant is the one that’s based on Jesus’ death on the cross. That was God’s intention since before He made the world, the Bible says. We can read all about that in the part of the Bible that tells the story of the Old covenant. The classic way of expressing it goes like this: the New is in the Old concealed; the Old is in the New revealed.

The major ways in which the Old Testament is revealed in the New are in the life and ministry of Jesus, as we might expect. There are 4 of those books that tell that part of the Bible story, and those are known as Gospels. There are many other Old Testament references to be read in the letters that make up almost the rest of New Testament. Those books were written to or about the early church that grew from Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. There are 27 New Testament books in total, compared to 39 books in the Old Testament. But there is much more content in the Old Testament – about 1 000 printed pages, where the New Testament has more like 300. The entire New Testament was written in a relatively very short time-frame – within about 70 years after Jesus’ death. It was written mostly in Greek, whereas the Old Testament was originally compiled in Hebrew, and done over hundreds of years. It’s worth knowing too that the whole of the Old Testament was translated into Greek in 4^th Century BC – and that (the Septuagint) is what the New Testament writers mostly had to refer to.

Don’t worry: there won’t be an exam on all this later in the series! If you do want to refresh your memory, this will be posted on our website, or you can ask for a printed copy. If Tom Wright isn’t for you, try this book by Vaughan Roberts: God’s Big Picture. However you best absorb it, this is the kind of background that we need to have in mind when we read any book, or part, of the Bible. It matters because it’s all part of God’s unfolding story that is still being written today – into which He is calling you! Yes, the canon of Scripture (as the Bible is also known) may be closed, in that there are no new books being added. But the story itself is far from over – again as the Bible makes clear time after time.

I’m sure that we’ll hear much more on that as this series progresses between now and the start of Lent. We’re trying to break the Bible down into more manageable sections in that time. The programme card shows how we’ll do that, by the different types of literature that we find in both the Old and New Testaments. The sharp-eyed will have noticed that there’s nothing planned on Gospels or Epistles though! That’s partly to do with the number of weeks available. But more importantly it reflects the nature of the Bible itself. Even though it is made up of 66 books that fall in 8 basic literary categories, it is one book, with one overarching story, trying to get that across, somehow! And that big story is personified in and through Jesus: he is God’s only Son, who became human so that we can become God’s children.

If you look back at most of our series over the years you’ll see they have overwhelmingly come from the Gospels, or Epistles. That’s quite right too, because to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is the focal point of the universe. We read all this in the Bible: that the universe was created through Jesus; it was made for him; he holds it together today; he’s waiting to bring it all together in the fullness of time; and he will bring all of humanity with it, on the Day of Judgment. That is when everyone who has ever lived will face Jesus, on his throne, for him alone to decide our eternal fate. How can any truly Bible-based series possibly ignore Jesus then? He IS the context of the whole Bible, and so everything in it points either on, or back, to him.

Again I’m sure that this is what will happen week by week: Jesus will be the context of our learning, and growing. So my other task today is to talk – briefly, now – about the 1^st type of Bible literature. It’s traditionally called Law, though that may not be the most helpful translation of the Hebrew word Torah. Certainly not many of our plethora of lawyers would recognise too much of it as law. It’s also known as the Pentateuch, because it’s the first 5 books of the Bible: Genesis; Exodus; Leviticus; Numbers; and Deuteronomy. To drop in another name, they are often known as the books of Moses as well. At one time people thought that Moses had written them all, but scholars now deem that very unlikely. That name has stuck though, because these 5 books pretty much tell the story of Moses, after the key scene-setting recorded in Genesis.

The scene-setting is crucial because it sets out the pattern that the rest of the Bible then follows. It’s the story of God constantly taking the initiative with the people He made, despite their doubt, antagonism and sin. It’s the story of God’s ever-more gracious forgiveness and promise-keeping, no matter how far people run from Him. The better translation of Torah is guidance, because this is essentially what this part of the Bible is. Much of it is in story form, telling the story of God’s dealings with humanity. They are written not to record history so much as to guide God’s people on the nature of the God they are being called into relationship with. Even when the particular stories seem to tell us how to behave, they are more about the reality and the person of God. He is the one who is always ahead of His people; working His purposes out in and through both people and circumstances, good and bad alike.

The highlight of Torah is God’s giving of His Law to His people here in Exodus. Of course it, like all passages, needs a full sermon (or a series, even) to explore it. But that’s not the point this time. Today we are being invited to see God showing Himself to His people, making them His people, by guiding them how to live as His people, based on who He is. “Be holy because I am holy”, God says. In summary, the 10 Commandments guide God’s people on how to relate to Him first and foremost, and then how to relate to others – based on who God is. It’s practical, sensible stuff – which we fail miserably at time after time!

In one sense the function of the Law is to show us who we are and what we are truly like. It reveals the nature and problem of sin: us wanting to live our own way, not God’s. So it points us on, to our need for a Saviour. He, Jesus, didn’t come to abolish the law but to fulfil it for us and then set us free from it – and on the cross paying the great cost of doing that. Here is the huge book that tells this story so far; and invites you to be part of rest of it. Are you ready to join in, and to be part of God’s on-going story? Let’s pray ...