Sermon for Sixth Sunday After Epiphany - the Ven. Pat Zifcak - February 13, 2022
Recently during an adult formation class, Jeff asked me to find a Bible so he could read a particular passage of scripture. I said “sure” and then realized I wasn’t sure where to find a Bible. I remembered seeing one in the office and one in a closet in the Lichtenberger Room. It stayed with me that finding a Bible at St. Paul’s wasn’t easy. I know now that we have bibles for the Church School and for our use in education programs. They are not here in the Sanctuary. Of course, right now, none of our worship books are in the Sanctuary.
The scripture today made me grateful for my own Bible and made me wonder how many of us have bibles at home. How many of us have a family bible kept in a place of honor? I saw my mom’s recently as my sisters and I were making decisions about her large and broad collection of books. One of my brothers guarded his age as a secret and so did my mom for many years until she became proud of reaching 100. There in the family Bible were their birth dates! No more secrets.
I think for many of us, reading the Bible makes us say, “I have no idea what this is about!” At St. Paul’s, we help each other to make sense of scripture with the guidance of our clergy and lay leaders. That is such a gift. Last month our deacons in formation were studying scripture with a biblical scholar who has written a book titled ”Why I Love the Bible”. He is not an Episcopalian and he worries that so many Christians are unable or unwilling to talk about scripture, to read and puzzle over all that doesn’t make sense, or to speak what we believe even if we can’t find the right text to support it. Scripture is our faith story; it is the story of God’s sacrificial love for us and God’s unfailing relationship with us. That is enough for us to know. That is enough for us to say.
I have started with the Bible and not our specific texts this morning because I think when we read scripture and it doesn’t make sense, we assume it is because we can’t understand. Couldn’t it be that there are contradictions, there are many versions of the same event, there are many writers, and different contexts? If we want to study, there are people to ask, there are classes to take. It is enough, though, to say, “I know that God loves me in every moment of my life” and I know it because I know the stories of Jesus’ life and death. That is the center of our faith story. He is the center. Even when we hear that the God of the Old Testament is an angry God, the stories remind us that God’s temper burns hot and then ebbs and God hears the voice of the psalmist, accepts our instability and insecurity, our lack of character and selfishness, our pleas for forgiveness and God gathers us again in love and faithfulness.
The epistle and the Gospel this morning are examples both of why we find scripture confusing and, at the same time, how we know without a doubt what God requires of us. Although it is not the familiar text on the Beatitudes that we find in Matthew, Luke gives us a shortened version of the same text. Blessings and woes. Jesus is teaching the apostles within the hearing of the crowds to bring God’s word to them and to every generation in which God is known. Does it matter that in one Jesus goes up the mountain and sits down and in the other he is standing on a level place? We could stop there and say, “I don’t get it” or we could look for the similarities to help us to know what the Kingdom of God is like and what we must do to bring it into being. God reaches us through our hearts and if this text lead us to care for the poor, feed the hungry, comfort the lonely and oppressed, it is enough.
In Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, there is a lot at stake for Paul. His faith is centered in the resurrection of Christ. His experience of the Divine on the Damascus Road is the pivotal moment of his conversion. He preaches and teaches “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” As we have been buried with Christ in our baptism so we will be raised with Christ on the last day. Now there is doubt. Christ has not returned, people are dying, and the faith of the people is shaken. Paul argues for what he knows from his own experience and in defense of his own integrity that, in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead,…”. This is the heart of Paul’s message of good news: our destiny is linked to Christ’s destiny.
Can you guess how many accounts of the resurrection there are in the Bible? How many ways it is foreshadowed, explained, described, witnessed, questioned? Should knowing this make us question this most central belief in our lives of faith? Think only of the Gospel accounts. Should it matter to our faith whether the stone is in place or rolled away or who went first to look for Jesus, or whether those who went were met there? Does it matter to whom, how, or where the risen Christ appears? These questions are exactly the work of scholars and the ancient and continuing work of rabbis. And it can be our work. As the author of “Why I Love the Bible” suggests: the gift of the Bible is that it shows us what we need to think about but not how to think. The texts are messy and contradictory. They are not inclusive or kind. They are stories of people who struggled; they are stories of generations and genealogies; they are stories of community life. They are stories of hope and trust. They are stories that translate to our lives and we can find our own lives of story in them. And more than anything they are stories of God’s plan for us, God’s beloved community. And, thanks be to God, no action on our part can change that.