Sermon preached for Falls Church Presbyterian, Falls Church, VA

On February 5th, I preached at Falls Church Presbyterian Church.  Following that worship service, the congregation voted to call me as their next pastor, and I will begin there on April 10, 2012.  Below is the text of the sermon.

Mark 1:29-39

Called To Serve

James Sledge                                                       February 5, 2012

Twenty years ago, I lived in Charlotte, NC, working as a corporate pilot.  Shawn and I had two young girls and had been thinking about selling our starter home and upgrading to something bigger and nicer.  But, at the same time, I had become more and more active at our church and had begun to experience the first stirrings of a call to become a pastor.

I flew to Atlanta a lot, and one day I took the opportunity to visit Columbia Seminary and discuss my developing sense call I with the folks there.  They suggested that I attend a weekend event that was coming up soon, an event tailor made for folks like me, an event designed to help people explore a call to attend seminary.

That sounded perfect; so I signed up.  Then it dawned on me that I should probably say something to Shawn before a big packet of materials emblazoned with the Columbia Theological Seminary’s logo arrived in the mail.  I had not yet mentioned anything to her about a call or seminary, and so I started to look for a good opportunity to bring it up. As luck would have it, we had planned a trip to the homecoming football game at Clemson, Shawn’s alma mater, and the two of us would be alone in the car for drive down.

Now you don’t just blindside your wife with, “Hey I’m thinking about going to seminary.”  So I decided to steer the conversation onto the general topic of religion and call. And I actually managed to pull it off.  We were headed down Interstate 85, having a nice conversation about call, and I was feeling quite proud of myself.

In the course of this conversation, Shawn shared a story of someone from her hometown of Gaffney, SC, a man widely admired for the work he had done as educator and head of the school system there.  Shawn told me how he had originally planned to become a pastor, but his fiancée had been so opposed to the idea—threatening not to marry him—that he ended up discovering a true calling in education as a teacher, a principal, and a school superintendent.

The conversation wasn’t going exactly as I had hoped, but it was still okay.  At least it was until Shawn finished her story by saying, “And I understand how his fiancée felt.  I know I could never be a minister’s wife.”

All that work, and that’s what I got.  At that point I saw no option other than to blurt it out.  “I’m thinking about going to seminary.”  Let’s just say it was a long weekend.

Now in fact, Shawn has been a wonderful partner in my work as a pastor, but it is easy to appreciate her not wanting to be a pastor’s wife.  Old notions of the pastor’s wife have changed a great deal thanks to the ordination of women and the large number of women in the workforce.  But many of us still remember those old role expectations, and they’ve not completely disappeared.  I had a seminary classmate who interviewed with a small congregation in western Virginia.  When the nominating committee showed him and his wife around the sanctuary, one of them pointed to the piano, looked straight at his wife and said, “And this is where you’ll play.”  She didn’t play the piano.

The persistence of stereotyped gender roles, such as  “the pastor’s wife,” bothers me.  I think that is why I cringed just a bit when I first read the gospel lesson for today.  Perhaps you heard it, too.  Jesus goes to Simon and Andrew’s house where Simon’s mother-in-law is sick in bed.  (Jesus) came and took her by the hand and lifted her up.  Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.  So, the men show up, but Mom’s under the weather.  No worry.  Jesus cures her so she can wait on the guys. 

After reading this, I almost preached on the Isaiah passage.  But I have discovered over the years that my first reaction often misleads me.  And while at first glance Simon’s mother-in-law may seem to have been slotted into menial women’s work, on closer examination I think she may just be the one person in the story who “gets it.”

Not counting the crowds that flock to Jesus for healing, the main characters in our reading are Jesus of course, then Simon, Andrew, James, and John, and finally Simon’s mother-in-law.  We’re told that she serves them.  But we also hear what the four disciples do.  When they realize that Jesus has gone off somewhere early the next morning, they hunted for him.  That may sound like they just went looking for him, but that’s not what the Greek word means.  It means to pursue, usually with hostile intent.  It’s what your army does to the opposing forces.  So it’s a bit strange that Mark describes the disciples pursuing Jesus in this manner.

It may help to remember that in Mark’s gospel, the disciples don’t come off all that well.  They are repeatedly described as having “no faith,” and their failure to comprehend will later be epitomized by James and John’s audacious request to sit at Jesus’ side in his glory, a request that prompts Jesus to say, “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant… For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  To serve; like Simon’s mother-in-law did.  And when Jesus does give his life on the cross, Mark tells us that all the disciples flee.  But there are a few women there when he’s crucified, women who used to follow him and serve him when he was in Galilee.  Serve; there it is again.

I read a piece in Huffington Post the other day entitled, “Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus.”[1]  The author admitted that the title is more provocative than true.  In fact, he says, evangelicals love Jesus a great deal for what he does for them, namely saving them from hell.  But, he says, they aren’t very interested in the manner of life he recommends. 

Neither, it seems, are Jesus’ disciples.  They pursue Jesus when he isn’t at the store handing out miracles.  They want him to come back and set up shop.  They have a template they expect Jesus to fit into.  But Jesus moves on, headed to the next town.

On some level, I think many of us relate to Jesus in a manner similar to evangelicals who “hate” Jesus.  We like Jesus just fine, but we’re less thrilled about what he tells us to do: loving enemies, forgiving folks over and over and over, losing ourselves for the sake of the gospel, becoming a servant to all.  A lot of us had much rather be served than serve.

But when Jesus reaches out and touches Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, she begins to serve.  She seems to get it.  Now perhaps I’m making too much of something that looks pretty mundane, even menial.  But then again, serving is often mundane and menial.  Ministry is often mundane and menial.  By ministry, I’m not really talking about pastors.  I’m talking about the ministry of loving others, caring for others, doing small things that no one else may notice but that bring God’s love, acceptance, and touch to someone who needs it. 

Andrew, a University of Chicago Divinity School student, was spending a summer in Bosnia, studying religion and reconciliation in the Balkans.  While there he was invited by a Sarajevo based interfaith choir made up of Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, and atheists to travel with them to the Serbian capital and witness firsthand the reconciling potential of religious music.  One of the places they sang was for Mass at a Catholic church.  The choir filled the sanctuary with beautiful harmonies, singing Orthodox chants and Catholic hymns.  But for Andrew, the unity from the music was quickly shattered as the singing stopped and the Eucharist began.  As people began to go forward for communion, the sanctuary was divided between Catholics, who could receive communion, and others.

Andrew twisted in the pew to let Catholic worshippers go forward as he bowed for what he called “a little prayer of Protestant protest.”  But, Andrew writes,  “When I lifted my eyes, I saw a portly man in a white robe scurrying down the side aisle.  His eyes sought me out with a quizzical look, like a little boy searching for his parents in a crowd.  His glasses bobbled down his short, round nose as he raced down the aisle – too quickly for a priest, too quickly for a 60-year-old man.

“The whole scene was awkward.  With 20 or so people still in line to receive the Eucharist, this Bosnian Franciscan took a handful of the host and sought me out of the crowd.  Nearly out of breath, he lifted the small plate toward me.  I stood up from my pew.”

“Will you have communion?” the priest asked.

“Yes I will,” muttered Andrew.

“Christ’s body, broken for you,” the priest said as he placed the bread in Andrew’s hand.[2]

Catholic priests generally don’t run down church aisles during Mass, and they certainly don’t do so to serve communion to non-Catholics.  But this one did, looking quite foolish, as well as breaking Catholic rules in the process.  I can only imagine that he had experienced Christ’s healing, transforming touch, and he felt compelled to serve, no matter how it looked.

You and I have experienced Christ’s touch, too, haven’t we?  So where are you called to serve?  Where are we called to serve together?

---

[1] Phil Zuckerman, The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-zuckerman/why-evangelicals-hate-jes_b_830237.html

[2] Andrew Packman, “Table Manners,” The Christian Century Vol. 129, No. 1 (January 11, 2012) p. 10

Spiritual Hiccups - Fast-Fowarding the Bible

All deacons, ruling elders, and teaching elders (our term for pastors) in the Presbyterian Church (USA) answer a number of questions as part of their ordination.  The second of those questions asks, "Do you accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and God’s Word to you?"

There is some wonderfully nuanced theology in that question, but it still speaks to the "unique and authoritative witness" of the Bible.  It is where we go to discover who God is and what God wishes for us.  Yet for all this status we accord Scripture, we find it easy to live in ways that undermine our claim that it is "unique and authoritative."  For that matter even biblical literalists, with much less nuanced theology, still find it easy to skirt the authority of Scripture.

The first paragraph of today's reading from Hebrews is an easy case in point.  When I read these words I am tempted to fling some of them at those who seem to hate immigrants or condone the torture of other human beings in order to protect us.  "See, it says right there in the Bible to show hospitality to strangers and to remember those being tortured as though you yourselves were being tortured."

But many like myself with  more "progressive" leanings hit the fast-forward button when we get to words about adultery and fornication, in a hurry to get past them.  A lot of us on the left and the right find money very enticing, and we rarely are content with what we have.  So we rush past these words but linger with those that challenge us less.

Now I'm not suggesting that we could solve this problem if we all just took every single Bible verse literally.  The Bible is a remarkably complex work that resists most simplistic attempts to embrace or apply it.  But it seems to me that all Christians, regardless of the theological or political camps we inhabit, need to ask ourselves whether or not the Bible can change how we view things.  Does the Bible have any capacity to transform us, or do we hear it in such a way that it always agrees with our current stances on everything?  I'm reasonably certain that if we think all our beliefs, priorities, political positions, social norms, measures of good or bad, etc. are in line with God and the Bible, we've fallen into John Calvin's grand-prize-winner in the hit parade of sins, idolatry.

Author Anne Lamott says much the same thing in oft repeated quote.  “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Most all of us enjoy those passages of Scripture that resonate with who we are and what's important to us.  But even the most faithful of Christians surely need occasionally to slow down and spend some quality time with those passages we prefer to fast-forward.

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Spiritual Hiccups - We're All in This Together

Today's verses from Hebrews contain some of my favorite lines in Scripture. The writer has been speaking at length about faith, how a long litany of Old Testament heroes and heroines did what they did by faith.  But then the writer shifts gears.

Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us...

The writer here insists on something that sounds very odd to the modern ear.  Our faith and our "salvation" is connected to the faithful of the past.  In fact, our faith reaches back and includes them in God's saving activity.  Salvation history has an arc, a movement that requires our faith to be joined to the faith of others, even to those long dead.

This is largely at odds with many current notions of faith.  In American Christianity, faith tends to be a private thing.  I believe and so I get saved.  But the Apostle Paul speaks of the body of Christ with each person having their distinct and essential role, and the ancient creed speaks of a "communion of saints."

When I grew up in the Presbyterian Church, I heard the Lord's Supper referred to almost exclusively as "communion."  But what I saw didn't seem to have much communing.  Perhaps there was communing with God that I couldn't see, but there surely wasn't much communing between worshipers.

We did communion by passing trays containing cubes of bread and little cups of juice down the pews from person to person.  But there was very little feel of  family or friends gathered at a meal together.  This was a solemn event, and people often avoided eye contact as they passed the elements.  They didn't even serve one another as you might expect.  Instead they handed the tray off, that person held the plate and took a piece of bread, then passed it to the next person who did the same.

When I first became a pastor, I tried to get the congregation to say "The bread of life," to their neighbor as they passed the plate, but most people wouldn't do it.  It broke the very private moment.  Funny how we can be in worship with a crowd of people and remain by ourselves.  Worship sometimes looks less like community and more like going to the movies.

Perhaps this is the dark/shadow side of American individualism.  While individualism has encouraged people to do great things and allowed people to break free rigid class distinctions, without something to bind us all together, it becomes "everyone for his or herself chaos."  Certainly American politics seems to have lost some of its sense of a covenant community whose fates are intertwined.  We have become less a communion of citizens and more a collection of like thinking interest groups.

In his first letter to the church at Corinth, the Apostle Paul chastises the Corinthians for pursuing their own spiritual gratification without thought of their fellow believers.  And the writer of Hebrews goes further, saying that our faith binds us to saints past, present, and future.  Our perseverance in the race set before us draws others along.  It seems we're all in this together.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Something to Eat

So we need something more than bread.  Even manna won't do, at least according to Jesus in the gospel of John.  One thing I've learned about reading John's gospel is that taking him literally usually leads you astray.  That's what happens with Nicodemus in the famous "born again" passage.  Nick hears "born again," the literal meaning of Jesus' words, which is why he asks about getting back in the womb.  But Jesus is talking about a spiritual rebirth, a birth "from above."  (Bible translators have to decide whether to put "born again" or "born from above" in this passage, but either call makes the conversation somewhat difficult to understand.)

And so when Jesus speaks of "eating his flesh and drinking his blood," it's a good bet that hearing him literally will lead us astray.  That his opponents do understand him literally is also a clear sign that we should not.  Allusions to the Lord's Supper are surely intended here, even though John's gospel does not include Jesus establishing this sacrament.  The fact that Jesus is "the Word made flesh" may also play into this.  God's wisdom, God's creative Word, is available to us in Jesus, who will "abide" in us.  And abiding is the same language Jesus uses to speak of the gift of the Spirit.

His flesh may also refer to the life he gives up on the cross, his saving death.  Here John Calvin makes the interesting observation that flesh, which is normally destined to die and decay, becomes, in Jesus, the source of eternal life. Jesus' fleshy human body, the very body that eventually fails each of us, becomes the way in which God becomes present to and in us.

I don't think I've begun to exhaust the many ways to hear Jesus' words on eating his flesh, words that are rather jarring at first glance.  And perhaps there is a good lesson here on sitting with Jesus' words a while rather than rushing to decide what they mean or what they report.  Literalist readings of Scripture fail us here just as Jesus Seminar type attempts to recover what the historical Jesus actually said.  New life in Jesus will not come from believing the Bible word for word or from distilling an accurate historical picture.  It will come from an encounter with the Word, the vital, living, creative, logos of God.  And this Word will never quite fit in the boxes we create for it.

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Spiritual Hiccups - No Heaven When We Die?

It is interesting how Christian thought on life after death gradually diverged from the thinking of biblical writers.  Many, if not most, Christians think in terms of going to heaven when they die.  In fact, this has become the normative understanding of resurrection for many.  But that is not the thinking of the Apostle Paul, nor does it fit well with what Jesus speaks in today's gospel when he says that "the hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and will come out — those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation."

Jesus here follows typical Jewish thinking on the resurrection.  It was something that happened at the end of the age when all the dead would be raised.  Paul speaks in the same manner when he talks about what happens at "the coming of the Lord."  When that day arrives Christ will come from heaven "and the dead in Christ will rise first."  Presumably they have simply been dead until this point.

Jesus' own resurrection was understood as a sign that the new age was arriving.  What had happened to him was a foreshadowing of what would happen to those who had died.  His was the pattern: dead and in the grave, then resurrection.  Jesus' soul did not float off to heaven when he died.  (A wonderful discussion on resurrection and heaven can be found in N. T. Wright's book, Surprised by Hope.)

But as I think about the gospel lesson this morning, I'm less concerned at the moment with getting a doctrine of resurrection correctly formulated and more interested in how beliefs with scant biblical evidence can become so central, so beloved, and so impervious to any challenge.  Indeed suggesting that people don't go to heaven when they die will get you labeled a heretic by many.

Where do our most cherished articles of faith come from?  How did we acquire them and what is it that confirms them for us?  If we somehow experience Jesus in our life, does that mean everything we think about Jesus and faith is true?  In 1 John it says, "We know that (Jesus) abides in us by the spirit that he has given us."  But the letter immediately adds, "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see which are from God."  It seems that experiencing a spiritual presence is no guarantee.

One need only look at the incredible number of Christian denominations, most of them the product of disagreements over belief and practice, to recognize that people of deep faith can't seem to agree on lots of important issues.  How to use the Bible, how salvation works, the role of women, when and how to baptize, who gets "saved," works versus faith, and what happens during the Lord's Supper; these are but a fraction of the issues that divide us.  And either one of the many denominations has gotten it figured out just right (meaning the rest of us are all wrong), or all of us are wrong about some things.

I want to suggest two seemingly contradictory things.  What we believe is important, and we should work very hard to understand and refine our beliefs and theology.  This is our guard against beliefs and practices that are little more than habits that suit us and feel comfortable.  I'm not sure there is any such thing as a generic Christian, at least not one of much substance.  But at the same time, we must recognize that our very best efforts at theology and practice fall short.  Any arrogance that too quickly dismisses others because they don't agree with us has forgotten how we see "dimly" and "know only in part," to borrow from Paul.

Are you planning on heaven when you die?  Is that a primary concern of Christian faith, or a secondary one?  Where did you get your answers to such questions?  And would you consider rethinking such answers if doing so drew you deeper into life with Christ? 

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Spiritual Hiccups - Don't Worry, Be Happy

Happy are those whose help 
    is the God of Jacob,
  whose hope is in the LORD their God,
who made heaven and earth,
  the sea, and all that is in them; 
who keeps faith forever;  
    who executes justice for the oppressed;
  who gives food to the hungry.

Psalm 146:5-7

If I'm not as happy as I'd wish, I may have just found the problem.  I like to think that I'm in good with God, that I'm attuned to Jesus' call, but the fact is that my help and my hope are often elsewhere.  I may not put my "trust in princes" as Psalm 146 warns against, but I have a laundry list of things that get in line ahead of God.

I have to admit that I've bought into the consumerist gospel and think I'll be happy if I have a few more nice things.  But "enough" is always just a bit beyond my reach which leads to typical "If only..." statements about winning the lottery or experiencing some other sort of financial windfall.

And like a lot of Americans, I long for political leadership that will fix things and make them better. Maybe this is our version of "trust in princes."  We imagine there is someone who will do the trick.  But things rarely work out as well as we hope, and so the political pendulum can swing quickly.  We're often ready to fire our princes in the manner of football coaches who don't turn a losing team around fast enough.

Speaking of football coaches, Urban Meyer, the new coach here in Columbus, has sparked a few letters to the editor around his plans to offer optional Bible studies and chapel services for his players.  I'm not really interested in the actual debate over this.  I'm more interested in an understanding of Christian faith that I saw in one of those letters to the editor.  The writer defended Myer's classes by saying, in part, "What's wrong with teaching young men not to steal, covet or lie, and to treat others as you would want to be treated?... Again, I ask, what is the progressives' problem with a dynamic role model, a coach, teaching moral principles based on the Bible?"

I know nothing about this fellow's religious beliefs, but I feel comfortable saying that many "Christians"understand faith along the lines of his letter.  Faith means believing in God/Jesus and being more or less moral.  And it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with totally trusting your life to God/Jesus.  Believing and being good is not at all what the psalm says leads to happiness or what Jesus says it means to follow him (self denial and taking up the cross for instance).

But while I go in for a little more serious version of faith than "believe and be good," we're talking a matter of degrees here.  And when I find myself worrying about happiness, or success, or why a new initiative at the church hasn't turned out like we hoped, Jesus often isn't really involved in the conversation.  It's all a matter of plans, strategy, abilities, technique, leadership, etc.  Things work when such things are good, but fail when they are poor.  And God doesn't seem to have a big role one way or another.

Jesus calls us to the difficult work of discipleship.  He commands us to teach people to do all that he has commanded, so obviously it matters what we do.  But he also promises to be with us, and to send the Spirit to strengthen and guide us.  So why are a great many of us working and trying so hard yet feeling so anxious?

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Sermon video - Leaving Where We Are

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Spiritual Hiccups - Not Convinced

Sometimes when I'm reading the passages from the Daily Lectionary, I find my mind wandering and I feel a bit zoned out.  This can be especially the case when a passage is very familiar to me, such as the passage from John this morning.  With passages such as this one, I can finish the reading and feel a bit like I sometimes do when I make the coffee in the morning.  I'll be sitting at the table reading the paper and have to get up to see if I turned the coffee pot on.  I usually have, but I don't remember doing it.

I'm suspicious that reading the Bible and not remembering what I just read is rooted partly in how I read it.  Thanks to my training as a pastor, it's difficult to read Scripture without at least thinking about how to preach it.  Is there an unusual twist or some theme that speaks to the congregation I serve?  Does something jump out at me I can use to motivate, call, or inspire the congregation?

Preaching is often used in an attempt to convince, and herein lies one of its great limitations.  Not that preaching shouldn't try to teach or convince, but I'm not sure anyone was ever convinced into faith.  Most of us would find it foolish for someone to marshal a good, convincing argument about why another person should fall in love with him. Love isn't necessarily irrational, but it is surely something other than rational... perhaps transrational?

Stories that lovers remember and tell, are not usually about convincing, though they may be helpful at times in evoking feelings that seem to have gone dormant.  Such stories often seem foolish or boring to others, and they may groan "Not again!" if one of these lovers starts to tell the story once more.  But that same story may be the two lovers' most prized possession.

Scripture is many things, but I think it works much better as lovers' cherished possession than it does as evidence for an argument.  Now how to get that in a sermon.

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Sermon - Leaving Where We Are

Mark 1:14-20 (Jonah 3:1-5, 10)

Leaving Where We Are

James Sledge                                                               January 22, 2012

How many of you here have ever gone fishing?  How many of you enjoy fishing, at least on occasion?  Fishing is like a lot of other things.  Some people like it, and some others don’t, but as a general rule, most people don’t think of fishing as something inherently evil.  I’m not aware of any Christian denomination that forbids its members from fishing.  I know that I’ve never written a prayer of confession for a worship service that said, “Lord forgive us for catching fish.” 

I raise this because, if I understand today’s gospel reading correctly, Simon, Andrew, James, and John all repent of fishing.  Now granted they were fishing for a living rather than as a hobby, but I’m not sure that makes much difference.  I don’t think that makes them any more sinful than a recreational fisherman.

And yet our gospel this morning depicts Jesus telling people, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.”  And the very first action associated with this call to repent and believe is his calling some fisherman to follow him.  And immediately they repented and followed him.  It doesn’t actually say they repented, but that’s what happened.  They turned away from what they had been doing – fishing – left their nets, their boat, their father, and went with Jesus.  There might not be anything evil or sinful about fishing, but they walked away from it, something that may well have been the only way of life they had ever known.

Sermon audio - Leaving Where We Are

Leaving Where We Are - 1-22-12.mp3

Spiritual Hiccups - Banned in the Bible

Today's psalm asks who may come into God's presence, and the answer contains things we might expect, people who do what is right, who fear the LORD, who keep their word, who hate evil, and so on.  But the final attributes may surprise some.  They are those "who do not lend money at interest, and do not take a bribe against the innocent."

In Hebrew poetry, ideas are rhymed rather than words, and so in the Psalms you see verses that describe pairs, parallelisms.  And so the 23rd Psalm ends, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD my whole life long." 

In this morning's psalm, the final pair links lending money at interest with taking bribes against the innocent.  Bankers have certainly taken a big public relations hit in recent years, but I don't think many of us associate making loans with bribery.  We may distrust big banks, but many of us know local bankers we consider pillars of the community.  But our psalm says those who lend money at interest may not enter God's presence, and it pairs them with those who take bribes to pervert justice.

If I were to employ Scripture the way people so often do, I would need to start a campaign to stamp out lending as we know it.  Perhaps I and any followers I could garner would make signs and protest outside of banks the way people protest against same-sex marriage.  After all, my group would be able to quote the Bible in the same fashion.

The fact is that Christians were generally forbidden to engage in banking for the first 1500 years of the faith.  (Jewish stereotypes related to finance and banking grew, in part, out of their doing this "despised" work that Christians could not.)  But 500 years ago, John Calvin argue persuasively for lending money at interest despite a biblical prohibition.  In a creative, innovative move that many may have trouble associating with their image of Calvin, he argued that borrowed money used to build factories that employed people and improved their lives was in keeping with the intent of the prohibition on lending.  That prohibition, he said, was there to protect the poor from being trapped by debt.  But if lending actually ended up helping the poor, then it produced the good that the ban on lending intended.

Just as an aside, it should be clear that lending which did trap people in poverty, or which did not seem to produce the sort of "good" the ban on lending intended, would not fit within Calvin's exception to the biblical ban.  But of course, once Calvin opened the door to lending, people soon forgot that it was an exception that had conditions.  And then they, and we, forgot that the Bible banned the practice in the first place.

All this is a long way of getting at how often we use the Bible to get the results we wish.  We find those verses that give ammunition to our causes, often employing them in a context totally different from the one is Scripture.  Much more rarely, if at all, do we read the Bible as a whole, listening to its overall witness.  That was what Calvin was trying to do when who came up with his exception to the ban on lending, but he was also influenced by the growing business need for capital in Geneva at that time.

I think that every Christian occasionally needs to assess his or her relationship with the Bible.  Is it a witness that points us to Jesus, revealing to us things we could never know otherwise?  Or do we simply believe what we believe - wherever that may have come from - and then cling to those Bible passages that fit with what we already hold dear? 

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Sermon video - When God Speaks

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