"Detoxing Our Souls"
Confronting The Idol of Scripture
Luke 4:1-13 (Part 2 in series on Detoxing our Souls)
March 4, 2007

Now Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wild.
For forty wilderness days and nights he was tested by the Devil. He ate nothing during
those days, and when the time was up he was hungry.
The Devil, playing on his hunger, gave the first test: "Since you're God's Son, command
this stone to turn into a loaf of bread."
Jesus answered by quoting Deuteronomy: "It takes more than bread to really live."
For the second test he led him up and spread out all the kingdoms of the earth on
display at once. Then the Devil said, "They're yours in all their splendor to serve your
pleasure. I'm in charge of them all and can turn them over to whomever I wish. Worship
me and they're yours, the whole works."
Jesus refused, again backing his refusal with Deuteronomy: "Worship the Lord your
God and only the Lord your God. Serve him with absolute single-heartedness."
For the third test the Devil took him to Jerusalem and put him on top of the Temple. He
said, "If you are God's Son, jump. It's written, isn't it, that 'he has placed you in the care
of angels to protect you; they will catch you; you won't so much as stub your toe on a
stone'?"
"Yes," said Jesus, "and it's also written, 'Don't you dare tempt the Lord your God.'"
That completed the testing. The Devil retreated temporarily, lying in wait for another
opportunity.   Translation: The Message

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.  For
my friends, though, the Bible as a book itself had literally a presence of its own, an awe
that had been attached to it by family and church and even the larger culture in which
they lived, which for most of them was Southern culture.  The Bible was almost treated
as if it was the very God that the words on the page spoke of…a very interesting
tension, for many, many of my friends.  

But you know, this is the same tension that Jesus had to confront in the desert some
two thousand years ago, which was how to be in relationship with Scripture and yet not
mistake Scripture for the God whom the Scriptures speak of, 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 are not God.  Jesus, in his forty days of the desert, when evil
itself throws Scripture into 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 our
Scriptures—they are idols.  Idols, by definition, promise everything and deliver nothing.  
The problem is that the idols, the jobs, the families, the churches, the spouses, 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 those idols in our
lives 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 himself.  

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—some call it
“proof-texting”, this exchange of Scripture in arguments about what is truth and what is
not:  The devil says: “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, right there on the page?”  And you know what?  The Devil is right.  It is right
there…he actually 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 Jesus’ side.  
Jesus’ personal relationship with God told him that this was not the moment for him to
trust these particular words from Scripture, that the way he would prove he was the
Messiah was not by escaping death, but, ironically, by embracing death on a cross and
transforming the meaning of death—and life—forever.  

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 difficult 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 into the world 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.    

And yet so many of us have used Scripture to exclude others, to make the circle of
welcome smaller and smaller, to label others whose interpretations are different from
ours, as heretics or unfaithful.  Some 150 years ago, the Christian abolitionists who
fought against human slavery in this country were confronted with a most difficult
situation, because it was clear that the words of Scripture affirmed the morality of
human slavery—nowhere is human slavery condemned, and, in fact, the Scriptures
encouraged slaves in the first century to be good slaves.  In fact, in the book of
Philemon sent back a runaway slave to his master, asking him, of course, to be merciful
to this Christian slave that no longer wanted to be slave, even the slave of a Christian
master.  What impassioned those Christian abolitionist was something that came out of
the Enlightenment, out of this idea that all human beings have inherent human worth,
and should never be enslaved, even if the Holy Bible implies that God found no wrong
in such a practice.  Dr. Mark Knoll in his book The Civil War As Theological Crisis
shares this story, about Thomas Thompson, who was a Southerner who made a strong
biblical case for slavery.

The power of the proslavery scriptural position…lay in its simplicity. Thompson’s
defense could not have been more direct.  In effect: open the Bible, read it, believe it.  
After conceding that in ancient times God had set strict limits to Hebrew enslavement of
other Hebrews, he then quoted Leviticus 25:45-46a: “Moreover the children of the
strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall you buy, and of their families that
are with you, which they begat in your land, and they shall be your possession. And ye
shall take them as an inheritance…” Then after acknowledging New Testament
injunctions to piety, charity and respect for others, Thompson turned to the book of
Philemon, the brief letter of St. Paul in which the apostle instructed an escaped slave,
Onesimus, to return to his master.  Thompson’s message was straightforward: if God
through divine revelation so clearly sanctioned slavery, and even the trade in
“strangers,” how could genuine Christians attack modern slavery, or even the slave
trade, as an evil.  (33)

But of course, the slaves, when the masters finally allowed the faith to be spread
among them, the slaves read the message of the Bible very differently.  Instead of
paying attention to those “obey your master” texts sprinkled through both Old and New
Testaments, they latched onto the story of Exodus, of God delivering the Jews from
their slavery in Egypt.  They connected their living experience to the parts of the Bible
that mattered most to them and rejected passages that didn’t reflect their own
experience of the Christian God—they could not imagine that the God who set the
Israelis free from Egypt would then affirm slavery. Listen to the words of Howard
Thurman, the African-American minister and mystic, telling of his grandmother’s
experience of Scripture:  

Two or three times a week I read the Bible aloud to her.  I was deeply impressed by the
fact that she was most particular about the choice of Scripture.  For instance, I might
read many of the more devotional Psalms, some of Isaiah, the Gospels again, and
again; but the Pauline epistles, never—except, at long intervals, the thirteenth chapter
of First Corinthians…With a feeling of great temerity I asked her one day why it was
she would not let me read any of the Pauline letters.  What she told me I shall never
forget. “During the days of slavery,” she said, “the master’s minister would occasionally
hold services for the slaves.  Old man McGhee was so mean that he would not let a
Negro minister preach to his slaves.  Always the white minister used as his text
something from Paul.  At least three or four times a year he used as a text: ‘Slaves, be
obedient to them that are your master….as unto Christ.’  Then he would go on to show
how it was God’s will that we were slaves and how, if we were good and happy slaves,
God would bless us.  I promised my Maker that if I ever learned to read and if freedom
ever came, I would never read that part of the Bible” (Stony the Road We Trod: African
American Biblical Interpretation., page 62)

And of course, if you were on the other side of that divide, of that experience, you might
get the reaction of the white Presbyterian minister who did some of that preaching to
the slaves, as recounted out of his diary.  He writes:

Allow me to relate a fact which occurred in the Spring of this year, illustrating the
character and knowledge of the Negroes at this time.  I was preaching to a large
congregation on the Epistle to Philemon; and when I insisted upon fidelity and
obedience as Christian virtues in servants, and upon the authority of Paul, condemned
the practice of running away, one-half of my audience deliberately walked off with
themselves, and those that remained looked anything but satisfied, either with the
preacher or his doctrine.  After discussion, there was no small stir among them; some
solemnly declared “that there was no such epistle in the Bible,” others “that it was not
the gospel,” others “that I preached to please masters,” others “that they did not care if
they ever heard me preach again.”  

In the end, these slaves did the same thing Jesus did on that mountain—he trusted the
God he had experienced, the one who said that God had a different use for Jesus’
powers other than Jesus just saving himself, even though it was clear in Scripture that
he could have used his power as Messiah to do so.  All that Jesus and those slaves
knew was that the God of whom the Bible speaks could not condone actions that were
so death-dealing, so damaging to the human spirit—for Jesus that meant not using
power simply for himself, and for those early abolitionists, it meant not believing that
Scripture would relegate fellow human beings to the status of cattle.   

And yet, how did those early slaves deal with those texts of terror, the ones that
negated and dehumanized them as slaves—or for that matter, how did some of the
church come to believe that women should be ordained as minister, despite the
seeming lack of approval for this action in the Bible?  Or how can we as a congregation
approve of welcoming gay and lesbian people, when the few passages that seem to
say something about the issue, only seem to say something negative about it?   
Perhaps we can learn something from our African- American brothers and sisters in the
faith who had to deal with these texts themselves, the slaves who had to deal with the
clear words of Scripture on slavery.  James Evans, an African American Scholar has
pointed out that there were three approaches used by African slaves that guided the
interpretation of those painful “obey your masters” parts of the New Testament. (pg.
217 in Stony…)

•        “First, it was believed that the slave regulation neither exemplified the whole
Gospel nor manifested its central thrust.”

•        “Second, the relation of human bondage and the Gospel was not considered to
be the primary focus of the epistles in which the slave regulations are found.”

•        “Third, Paul himself was not Christ, but a ‘dedicated, fully human servant of the
Lord.’  Therefore, the apostle cannot be presumed to have possessed the ‘fullness’ of
the Gospel, through he strove to attain it”

And I think we can use those words of wisdom for understanding how the church could
make decisions that went against the letter of law, against the clear words of the Bible,
with all matters that seem to disconnect from our lived experience of the Gospel, a
Gospel that includes all of us, blacks, women, and gays and lesbians.  

You know, Jesus was constantly challenging the clear meaning of Jewish law, the holy
law believed to be given by God to Moses, when he told the people that no one should
get divorced for reasons other than adultery, or that one can work on the Sabbath if it
was to do good in this world, to help out another person.  In the case of divorce, he
taught what he taught because he probably wanted to protect women in the first
century, who were especially vulnerable to husbands who were moving onto the new
best thing, some other woman.  These disgraced divorced women could not go back to
the parent’s home and essentially they became beggars in the streets.  Jesus had no
problem embracing the spirit of Gospel, the spirit of welcome and inclusion, and in the
case of women, taking care of the least of these.  The historic church has always
believed, despite what fundamentalists and conservatives often say, that Scripture is
the beginning point of any conversation we have around any issue of faith, but it has
never believed that 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.  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 or
sometimes lack of meaning that we sometimes find in Scripture.  Some Christians have
even made the test of whether or not we or others 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 choose what Jesus chooses here—a
relationship with God above all else, a relationship that sometimes put him in conflict
with the very Scriptures he loved.  God is worth trusting—that is what experiences
teaches, like it did those first women ministers, or the slaves who disputed Scriptures,
that this God is worth trusting.  It is much easier to worship the Bible than it is to worship
God—because God wants a relationship with us, whereas even the Scriptures want
nothing from us but our worship, like all those things can be twisted into becoming idols,
those things that are not God.  Let us 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 a relationship with us, who
wants to dance with us, who wants to write in our own lives a divine story of trust and of
faithfulness to this God alone, the one who meets us always, even in the wilderness of
Lent.  Amen and amen.