March 18, 2001
Third Sunday of Lent
Year C
Title: So, Who Do You Really Trust?
Theme: The toxin of idolatry infects our understanding of Scripture—and
so, ironically, we trust Scripture more than God. Jesus confronts that
idolatry during his forty days in the desert—and challenges us to trust
God above all else.
I have some friends who grew up in very religious homes—I did not, to be
honest, grow up in an especially religious home—but some of my friends
have shared those experiences with me. And one of things that has
always fascinated me was the reverence that people grow up with in
relationship to the Bibles in their homes. Now, I’m not talking about the
text itself, the words on the page, but quite literally, the book itself, the
book that it is the Bible. I had friends who told me that they were
explicitly forbidden to lay things on their Bibles, things like a drink, or any
object like a pencil or pen. Sometimes they told me that they were
forbidden to put even other books on top of the Bible. And God forbid
that the Bible should somehow find itself on the ground! For others,
there was some sort of sacred corner with the large family Bible laid out
for the world to see, its pages lined with gold and within it, a listing of the
family tree. Even though my family wasn’t religious, we always had a
Bible in the house and it was a different kind of book—I think I always
knew that—because it was treated differently. Maybe it was because,
unlike all the other books in our house, the Bible was never actually
read—it was also just hanging around! But still, I have this personal
fascination with books, the physicalness of books, and I still love to
browse bookstores for hours. I love the smell of new books—and there
was a running joke amongst my friends about me going into bookstores
and sniffing the books! Recently, I bought a new Bible—one to had to
add to my collection of dozens. Something about the new leather
binding, and the gold lined pages, and the oh-so-thin paper—I just love
getting a new Bible!
But sometimes, I think, my fascination with the Bible has wound up being
different than it should be—sometimes I think that my relationship with
the Bible has reflected our own sometimes complicated, difficult, and
challenging history with our Bibles, especially with the words and texts in
our Bibles—for many of us, it used to be a friend of ours, and then it
became an enemy—or at least, our Bibles became the thing people were
using to beat us up—and now some of us don’t quite know what to do
with this book, this book that we have been taught to revere, to almost
worship, and yet at other times we feel very estranged from it, very
distant from it, because its been so often used against us as lesbian and
gay people. For many of us, Scripture has been thrown into our face
one too many times and now we face this dilemma of what to think about
the role of Scripture in our own lives.
But you know, this is the same dilemma that Jesus had to confront in the
desert some two thousand years ago—how to be in relationship with
Scripture and yet not mistake Scripture for the God whom the Scriptures
speak of, how to pay attention to the sacred texts that helped to give
birth to his faith, and yet be careful that he didn’t make Scripture yet
another idol in a world full of things that promise what only God can give
us. I think the toxin of idolatry, of thinking that something is God when it
is not God, has infected so much of our understanding of Scripture that
its easy to forget that Scripture, the sacred texts we as Christians hold to
be incredibly important in our faith, we forget that Scripture is not God. A
lot of Christians, especially in the last 200 years, have made the
incredible mistake of worshipping the Bible rather than worshipping the
one about whom the Bible speaks of. “The Bible said it, I believe it, that
settles it.” Sound familiar for some of us? Jesus, in his forty days of the
desert, when evil itself throws Scripture in his face, Jesus confronted that
idol and reminded us that we are called to trust God above all else,
even, dare I say this, even above Scripture.
Now, before I even begin looking at what Jesus does here when
confronted with Scripture, I want remind us right now about one of the
most fundamental tenets of the Jewish and Christian faiths—and that is
this: God alone is the one whom we are called to worship. All other things
that we worship, whether they are our cars, our houses, our spouses,
our families, our jobs, our churches, our pastors, and our traditions,
even Scripture—are idols. Idols, by definition, promise everything and
deliver nothing. They cannot give us what we want from them—because
what we want from them—hope, joy, peace, comfort, eternity—can only
come from God. Most of our lives should be spent wrestling with our
idols, those things we worship, those things we believe will give us what
we want but which we find out they cannot give us, those things we
worship because we believe that they can give us those things we
desperately hunger for. And it so much easier to worship the idols in our
lives—they never confront us, they never wrestle with us, they never tell
us the truth about ourselves, they never demand that much out of us,
they seem so solid, so sure—they’re made of stone and steel, skin and
bones, stain glass and saints, words and texts—because we can touch
them, we can touch our idols…and God, God is not so easily touched, so
easily grasped. God is like any other person we have a meaningful
relationship with in our own lives—complicated and yet simple, knowable
and yet a mystery, kind and yet sometimes stern, loving and yet so
truthful, sometimes painfully so. The idols are easier to be in
relationship with, the idols don’t challenge us or question us, and they
always welcome our worship. Sometimes they even cause us
tremendous pain, but still, they are easier to be in relationship with God,
because they are predictable, they are the poison we know, and so like
abused partners, we go back to worship them, we go back to what we
know. But you know what? The problem is that the idols, the jobs, the
partners, the churches, the Scriptures, whatever it is that we mistake for
God, they always disappoint, they always promise what they cannot give,
and when we eventually unmasked them and we see what they were in
the first place—the creation, rather than the creator—we find ourselves
shocked that we could have done it again—that we could have mistaken
the goodness that God has created, for God. Nothing is God except
God and nothing else is to be worshipped other than God.
And Jesus knows that truth when he is confronted with the devil during
his forty days in the desert. The devil comes up to him and throws
Scripture in his face—sound familiar? “Jesus, if you throw yourself off
the highest point in the temple, the Scriptures say that God will break
your fall—that you’ll be alright. Don’t you trust the Scriptures, Jesus?
Don’t you believe in Scripture, Jesus? See, its right there in black and
white?!” And you know what? The Devil is right. Its right there…he
quotes Psalm 91—he got his Scriptures right! Surely God is up for this
sort of test, especially for the Messiah! Surely God can break Jesus’ fall
and bring him safely to the ground, once and for all proving that God is
truly on his side. But Jesus knows what he is doing here…the devil is
tempting him to fall for yet another idol, to trust Scripture, to worship
Scripture rather than God. Jesus’ personal relationship with God told
him that this was not the moment for him to trust Scripture, that the way
he would prove he was the Messiah was not escaping death by being
brought safely to the ground, but, ironically, by embracing death on a
cross and transforming the meaning of death forever. He had to trust
the God who had given him this mission to go towards death, rather than
to taking up the devil’s Scriptural challenge—yes, Scriptural challenge—
to escape death and thus prove to the world that he was truly the
messiah.
In the end, Jesus chose to trust God rather than Scripture—he knew the
Scriptures as well as the Devil, and so he said to the devil—“I will not
tempt God, so say the same Scriptures you just quoted to me, and, in
the end, it is not the Scriptures that I will have to answer to—it is God.”
It would be easier to escape death, rather than embrace it, I think Jesus
must have been thinking to himself, it would be easier to put God to the
test, it would be easier to be in relationship with Scripture rather than
God, than have a relationship with the God who is challenging me to go
beyond the Scriptures and choose the scariest route rather than the
safest route. Jesus trusted that the truth he knew in his relationship with
God superseded all else, even the Scriptures that he grew up with, the
Scripture that he loved and that he respected deeply. He chose to have
a relationship with God rather than the idol that was offered, even that
idol that he knew was good in and of itself, but which was not God and
had never had been God nor never would be God.
And I wish sometimes we would take Jesus’ example as our own, that we
would pay attention to how he chose, at times, to trust his experience
with God rather than the Scriptures that he so loved, the same
Scriptures that tempted him to go another route than the one he knew
was true for him. Jesus was faced with a choice in that desert—to trust
God or trust the Scriptures. He knew what his relationship with God told
him to do—that he must go a route that sometimes conflicted with
Scripture—that he would NOT be a Messiah that conquered death by
escaping it; rather he would conquer death by embracing it and bringing
life
out of death, hope from a grave, new life out of a tattered and bruised
life. People often point out that people in Jesus’ day expected a messiah
who would be a military messiah, one who would set the people of Israel
free from their captors the Romans by brute force and armed means.
And there are passages in the Scriptures that would have backed up
that belief, just as their passages in the Scriptures that point to the
Messiah Jesus eventually became. But God didn’t send the Scriptures to
save the world—God sent God’s own very self in Jesus Christ to save
the world. Jesus is the true word, as the paraphrase of the first chapter
of the Gospel of John that we heard today reminds us. God sends Jesus
to dismantle all the idols, all the false patterns by giving us a new pattern
in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is the truly the word of God, the one who
writes a new word, a new sacred story, not written on paper, but in the
life he lived some two thousand years ago, a life being lived out in our
changed lives in this day and age, a life we are privileged to witness in
the stories we read in the Scriptures about him. The Scriptures are a gift
from God that point us to God in Jesus Christ, but they are not God.
So many of us have treated the Bible as an idol, as if it was God, and we
have crucified ourselves upon Scriptures, especially as gay and lesbian
people—have you ever noticed that some of us use the same words to
describe the Bible as we do God? Holy, infallible, eternal, sacred, the
light, life. Some of us even believe that line that you see on some
church marquees, that I mentioned earlier—The Bible says it, I believe it,
that settles it. The irony is that the church has never believed such a
thing—if it did, we would not have women ministers, and women would
not be able to speak in church and women would be wearing coverings
on their heads, and men could not have long hair, and we would be
kicking divorced people out of our churches—and slavery would still be
commonplace. The church has always believed, despite what
fundamentalists say, the church has always believed that Scripture is the
beginning point of any conversation we have around any issue, but it
has never believed it was the ending point of that conversation. If we
actually believed that, we really would talk as if divorced people couldn’t
be followers of Jesus and slavery was morally OK. Really, the better line
describing what the church has always believed is: The Bible says this;
what has our experience with God taught us? Let’s talk about it. But the
problem is that because we have made Scripture into an idol, we don’t
seem to be able to talk to each other about the meaning of Scripture
without declaring each other as heretics when we disagree about that
meaning we find in Scripture. Some Christians have made the test of
whether or not we are Christians based on what we believe about the
idol of Scripture, rather than our relationship with Jesus Christ.
But we must not fall for yet another idol, another false thing that
promises life when only God can give new life. I hope that we can chose
what Jesus chooses here—a relationship with God above all else, a
relationship that sometimes put him in conflict with Scriptures. It’s the
same path that women who fought for fully equality in the church during
the last 200 years had to take when some of the Scriptures that Paul
wrote seem to have dismissed their God-given call to equality. It’s the
same path that slaves in the early 1800’s had to take when the
Scriptures clearly said that owning another human being was morally
justifiable. They didn’t make Scripture into an idol, even though they
loved Scripture dearly. They listened and trusted the God of their
experience—the God who said to them and to the entire world that
owning and enslaving another human being is not in the divine will. We
too, as lesbian and gay Christians, we too have to choose not to worship
yet another idol, and to listen to our experience with God, as other
Christians have had to do, and, most importantly, what Christ had to do
in the desert. God is worth trusting—you only have to ask all those who
trusted God above all, even above the idol that Scripture has become for
some, like those incredible women and those faithful African American
slaves—and you only have to ask Christ. I say this: let’s choose to
worship God above all, and nothing else. And like Jesus, we are
assured that we won’t make the mistake of worshipping what is not God.
Is it harder? Yes, and, in all honesty, I think the fundamentalists have it
easier. It’s much easier to be in relationship with a book than to be in
relationship with God. Some of us here have that same idol—and, let me
be perfectly honest, I have struggled with this idol with you. It is much
easier to worship the Scriptures than it is to worship God—because God
wants a relationship with us, whereas the Scriptures want nothing but our
worship, like all idols do. Let’s not do that—let’s follow Christ and
worship the God who is NO idol and who makes promises that are kept—
a God who challenges us, who loves us, who struggles with us, who will
not let us get away with the easy answers, the easy idols, the God who
says to us, “Trust me, trust what you know of me, and begin this dance
with me.” Christ heard that call in the desert himself, when the devil was
flinging up another idol in his face, and the Christ now calls us to that
same life, to God. The idols, all of them, even scripture when it becomes
another substitute for the living God, calls us to death. I say we listen to
the example of Christ, the pattern of Christ, whose life reminds us that
God is worth trusting even when the idols try to trip us up, when they call
us to look away from the God who wants relationship with us, who wants
to dance with us, who wants to write in our own lives a story of trust and
a story of true faithfulness to God alone. Amen and amen.
