It can be tough to make sense of the Bible. Somebody from our church asked me this past week for guidance in approaching the Bible.  Occasionally, she listened to the radio and heard preachers going in different directions from that which she was accustomed to hearing me go, and she was confused. I don’t blame her. The Bible is a big, bewildering book, with all kinds of points of view in it. How do we make sense of it all? How do we make our way through it?

Well, it seems to me the first thing is to acknowledge up front is that everybody who interprets the Bible makes certain choices at the outset.  We judge particular passages, themes, points of view to be more central -- more at the heart of the matter than others, and we lift these passages and points of view up and use them to interpret other passages and points of view.   We all do this. There are some people who like to think they don’t do this. But even the person who claims to view the Bible as "the inerrant Word of God" where every word is precisely as God intended it -- even people such as this make choices about which verses are more "inspired" than others, which passages are closer to the heart of the matter than others.

So, it seems to me, it is important to be honest and up front about this, and talk directly about how is it we came to the underlying choices we make in regard to interpreting Scripture, and go from there.

For me personally I view Jesus as the key. If you look at the overall account of his teachings and his actions, it seems to me that a consistent set of values comes through. Jesus was about love, a really big kind of love that encompassed enemies and strangers as well as our family and friends. He was about overcoming the barriers that separated people and inviting everybody to share in the joy of God’s great kingdom party. He was about mercy and forgiveness and care for the poor and destitute folk of the world. He loved people and used things; not the other way around.

For me, being a Christian means believing that the things Jesus was concerned about in his life are the very things God is concerned about, and that I should aspire to be about the same things as a follower of Jesus.

My underlying assumption is the apostle Paul had it right -- that he was in tune with Jesus -- when he wrote that in the end love is the only thing that truly matters, the only thing that never ends, and that without it, we are essentially nothing. (See 1Corinthians 13).

So these are these are the assumptions -- the choices, if you will, with which I approach the Bible. (This is also the general focus of the Methodist tradition, as I understand it, in which I find myself more or less at home.)

We have before us this morning a couple of provocative Bible stories to interpret. From my particular point of view -- the underlying choices I have made -- I find a mixture of profound spiritual truth as well as concepts I find repulsive and feel compelled to reject.

Let’s look briefly at the story from Exodus. The Hebrew people are in the wilderness having been delivered from their bondage to Pharaoh in Egypt.  Moses, their leader, has gone up on Mount Sinai for an extended time alone with God, during which God gives him the ten commandments. While Moses is gone, the people grow impatient. Feeling abandoned they pressure Åaron (Moses’ brother) to make for them a golden calf to worship, which he does. Meanwhile up on the mountaintop, God tells Moses about the peoples’ idolatry, and enraged, determines he will wipe the people out.  Moses persuades God not to.

There is much here that I can’t embrace in my understanding of God as I know God through Jesus. The image of God portrayed here as fickle, vengeful, meanspirited, and vain isn’t one I can accept. In the passage beyond that which is included in the lectionary, (the schedule of Scripture readings in worship which in itself reflects the picking and choosing that the church does in regard to which Scriptures we will attend to and which we won’t), Moses, apparently on orders from God, slaughters all the Israelites who have just participated in the revelry of worshipping the golden calf. Now the curious thing here is that God had just given Moses the ten great commandments which includes the
commandment: "Thou shall not kill." In other words, God, unable to contain his temper, immediately directs Moses to break the sacred commandment. This is bizarre stuff, and I am compelled to reject it.

What I do find instructive in this whole story is the insight it provides in regard to human nature and our endless capacity for generating idols that block our relationship with God. The people grow impatient waiting for Moses to come down from the mountaintop. This great and mysterious God isn’t easy to wait upon; better, it seems, to have gods they can hold in their hands. I think we all can recognize ourselves in this. We overvalue particular parts of our life, particular gifts from God, so they begin to take on a meaning that in the short term may help get us up out of bed in the morning but ultimately wreak destruction in our lives.
 

These "gods" who we can see and touch can seem preferable to trusting the great, invisible true God who refuses to perform tricks for us. Our capacity to turn gifts from God into idols (gods) are endless: we do it with our work, our reputation, our money, our lover, our child, our projects, our children’s sports careers. We create these gods and then deceive ourselves regarding what we have done: In the story, when confronted by Moses, Aaron can’t seem to own up to the fact that he created the golden calf. Says Aaron, it just sort of jumped out of the fire.
 

In this morning’s Gospel story we have a story that is attributed by Matthew to Jesus. I say "attributed" because that’s part of the difficulty we’re up against. In the course of his lifetime Jesus said and did certain things, and in the first decades of the church’s life these stories were told and retold and amended for the particular purposes of the particular writers and their communities, the situations they faced, their particular concerns and biases.

The wedding feast is an image used in several stories attributed to Jesus including the one before us in Matthew’s Gospel, and we can be confident that it was a favorite image used by Jesus. A wedding feast, when it is a good one, when people don’t worry it to death and simply enjoy it, is as good an image as you can get for joy -- the joy of what Jesus called the "kingdom of God" or "Kingdom of heaven." When Jesus spoke of this mysterious kingdom he implied that it was something that could be experienced now as well as beyond death. Part of what I hear God saying in this image is that this life we are being called into is inherently joyful -- not a boring, or tedious thing.

I also hear God saying that God wants everybody to enter into the joy -- everyone is invited to receive the gift. It is God’s intention that no one be excluded. And so in the story the King sends his servants out into the streets to invite everybody they can find.

This is a specifically Methodist notion, another reason I am happy to find myself in this tradition. In contrast to those Presbyterian folk who hold to that peculiar notion of "predestination" which asserts that from the very beginning God chose certain people to be saved and others to be damned (which you WILL find passages in the Bible that support this notion), John Wesley said that the invitation is extended to everyone.  The early Methodists went outside the church walls into the streets to preach the good news of Christ to the destitute poor who had been largely abandoned by the church. God wants us everybody in the kingdom.

There is, however, the little matter of free will. The invitation is extended, but in our freedom, we can choose to ignore it. In Matthew’s story, people turn down the invitation to enter into the wedding feast because they are preoccupied with things like their farms or their business, and that sure rings true. We become so attached to concerns of this world that they become idols (golden calves) which block us from giving ourselves over to the gift of God’s joy. Things take on an importance that they don’t really have in the ultimate scheme of things.  We miss what really is important -- what really gives life meaning and real significance.

Now the part of the story that I find myself compelled to reject is the way the King, who clearly represents God, becomes so vengeful, indeed sadistic. First, he sends out his soldiers to slaughter the folk who didn’t accept his invitation, and then with the whole business at the end where the guy who shows up to the feast not wearing a wedding garment gets thrown into the outer darkness to gnash his teeth for eternity.

This simply doesn’t jive with what we get elsewhere regarding how Jesus viewed God, and I think there is good reason to see this as Matthew’s particular addition to the story. The versions of this story that show up in the other Gospels don’t include the violent retribution and punishment. Matthew seems especially fond of the whole nasty stuff of binding and casting out into the outer darkness to weep and gnash teeth.

What’s the deal here? It’s begins to make sense when we take into account that of the four Gospel writers, Matthew is the one who is most concerned with life in the Church (he is, for instance, the only one who refers to "the Church".) It seems to me that what we have hear is Matthew’s inability to resist the temptation to throw in the threat of a little eternal damnation and torment to get those unruly church members in line who won’t "get with the program" -- the old notion that people are more likely to fall in line if fear enters the picture as a motivator.

On the other hand, there is a point being made here in the wedding garment incident that seems important to ponder. God takes us where we are, loves us where we are, even if our life is a mess, covered with the stench of the pig sty. But God does not intend to leave us where we are.  We are called onto a journey of transformation -- traditionally called "sanctification", whereby God leads us on a total makeover -- both inwardly in our heart and mind and outwardly in our actions in this world -- so we come to bear the image of Christ.

Once again, however, the journey requires cooperation on our part. It takes work on our part to learn how to live more lovingly. Showing up at the wedding feast with our wedding garment on symbolizes our willingness to be a partner on this journey and do our part to clean up our mess.

Because of what I know of God through Jesus, I believe that when we come to the end of this life we will stand before God’s great love/light -- the open door of the wedding feast -- and Jesus will say come on in. If, however, we are still wearing what is symbolized by our old, dirty garments -- our old hard-heartedness, our old resentments, bitterness, grudges, etc. we won’t be able to enter. Strangely, we won’t WANT to enter into God’s joy and love, because this old stuff will seem too important to us to let go of, having become for us idols/golden calves.
 

In another parable Jesus told he spoke of a shepherd who goes in search for one lost sheep, and when he finds the lost sheep takes him to a great big party. The thing that caught my attention in this parable is that Jesus doesn’t say, "IF the shepherd finds the lost sheep". He says instead, "WHEN the shepherd finds the lost sheep." The suggestion here is that eventually God will have God’s way with us. What exactly this means, I have no idea. But it doesn’t make sense to me that the God who created us out of love -- the God who IS LOVE -- would sentence us to eternal damnation. I believe that if we are not ready to say YES to God at the moment of our death, the journey continues. The Good Shepherd continues to search for us. As in this life, we will continue to be presented with choices to make -- choices to cooperate with God or to insist on going our own way -- choices to cling to our idols or to let them go.

In the kindness of Jesus,

Pastor Jeff