conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form

"academic who ha!!"

...a sermon preached at North Shore Baptist Church, October 10, 2004.

Note: There were props to this sermon. I brought a bunch of the books I used to research this sermon as well as a red pen to edit as I went along. It played pretty well. I am a little silly and it comes to the fore in my preaching from time to time.

Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Luke 10:21-28

Study.

This is what I have been asked to preach about this morning. Study. Since this is one sermon in a series about the long life of this congregation, I thought I would take a moment to celebrate some moments of the past that demonstrate North Shore�s desire to be a place of study.

1927: Dr. J.R. Mantey, a professor of New Testament greek at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary and a member of North Shore Baptist Church served as �acting pastor� during Rev. Whiting�s trip to the Holy Land. Professor Mantey also authored the church covenant.

1932: Dr. Will H. Houghton, the President of the Moody Bible Institute and member of North Shore led evangelical revival services here.

1957: Dr. Harold bailey, the Dean of Liberal Arts at the University of Illinois (Navy Pier) led a discussion entitled �Should We Have Baptist Schools.�

1958: Dr. Don Norman, a member of North Shore and a world renowned expert on the Gutenburg Bible returned after a six-week lecture tour in Europe.

1959: Dr and Mrs Henry Halley are featured as the Bible Pocket Handbook. It is now in its 22nd edition totaling more than one million copies with translations in several languages.

1964, the church celebrated Dr. Halley�s 90th Birthday. You can find this book on amazon.com if you�d like your own copy.

1972: Dr Don Norman was awarded the Gutenberg Award by the Chicago Bible Society.

Thanks to John Dawson for all of this information. There was more, believe it or not. For those who do not know, Ralph Elliot, a former pastor here, has published several books. There have always been leaders in this congregation who clearly have made study the focal point of their ministry and life. There is a throughline of scholarship in North Shore�s history. It has had a significant impact.

I asked Wallace Bubar, one of North Shore�s own, and ordained here, who now serves as pastor at First Baptist Church in Iowa City, IA, how this aspect to North Shore�s community influenced him. Wallace said this: �The initial thing that attracted me [to North Shore] was knowing that Ralph Elliott had been the pastor. That was all I knew about the church when I first visited. I knew much of him and his career in the academy, and figured that a church that he served would value the life of the mind and the discipline of Christian scholarship, as I did.�

(I want that to let that sink in for a second.) This is a church which values the life of the mind.

In addition, let me share a bit from my own journey. For those who may not know, I was not raised in the Church. There were attempts. There was some interaction, but other stresses of life seemed to draw my family away from life in the Church and Christian community. In college, however, I was more free to explore life as a Christian on my own.

I have spoken before about the place of music in my life, how it speaks to my soul. I have spoken about how life in community and the grace of healing I received through it has shaped and healed my heart. I have to now confess that my experience of coming to God in the classroom had an equally profound impact upon my growing commitment to faith and life in the Body of Christ.

I was in college during much of the political strife in the Southern Baptist Convention. Since my grandfather was a Baptist preacher, I was deeply influenced by and found myself constantly aware of the division and anger that existed in the SBC because of differences in Biblical interpretation. From the outside looking into the Church, this appears to be insanity at work. Why all this fuss, this pain and suffering over a book? Come on, people. There are lots of ways to see the world. It just did not make any sense. Brothers and sisters, I must sadly report that to the rest of the world we look like little children fighting over a favorite toy. And the fallout that follows, people losing jobs, families being broken, missionaries being stranded in the field, only serves to confuse and even outrage others. Maybe this does not matter to you. Maybe I am the only one who is particularly effected by this, but I was, and I am.

So, I studied the Bible in college. I studied Greek. I studied history and even anthropology hoping to gain some wisdom and understanding about the Bible. I wanted to challenge the conservative judgmental God on his own turf. I wanted to redeem what I thought was only an historical document and establish it firmly in the realm of a global religious tradition.

Welcome to the Land of Pride and Arrogance. I was successful at neither task. It was not until much later, when I discovered the connection between heart soul and mind and life in community that I began to understand the place of scripture and study in Christian life.

In his ordination essay about the authority of the Bible, Jonathan Nambu said, �I believe the Bible is the living word of God. It is �living because it is dynamic, it imparts life, and it has continuity. It is the �word of God� in the sense that it contains messages, stories and revelations from and about God for people. It is, in fact, through this written word that we have found the living word � Jesus Christ � who is the complete revelation of God to people.�

This is the great mystery of study. This is the gift of meditation. We do not simply learn about Jesus in the scriptures. The mystery is that we encounter Christ as the Word of God, real and fully present in the written word. The love of God, who walked the earth and taught people young and old, educated and not, is revealed to us in the scriptures. Here we learn that God first love us and that all we do in this world is a response to that love.

In his ordination essay, Wallace Bubar reminds us that we are people of the Book. �Whenever the Church gathers around the Book, it gathers to hear, to encounter, and to obey the Word that comes through Scripture.�
The hearing of the word is not an empty thing. As God is made present for us through the hearing of Scripture, through our study of it, we are transformed, we are reconciled to one another. The grace of God is poured out upon us through scripture.

In my ordination essay, I wrote �At the most basic, the New Testament is a collection of stories and letters from the period when the church was first being formed. It is a document. It is an expression and catalogue of the desires, theologies and experiences of God in worship, prayer, ministry and the daily lives of people. At its most profound, the Bible is the living Word of God. It is God�s revelation to God�s people, providing a theological compass for the believer. It is the collected revealed wisdom of what it is to be Christian.�

The Gospel has shaped my soul, my heart and my mind. It tells me who I am. Jesus tells us who we are, the beloved Children of God. He tells us how we are to be. Love the Lord. Study. Teach your children. Live into the Word.

Again, when I spoke to Wallace he told me why he stayed at North Shore. Wallace continues: �I think I found [at North Shore] a healthy balance of mind and heart. It was refreshing to come to north shore and find pastors and people who embraced both.�

I want you to hear that again. �I think I found [at North Shore] a healthy balance of mind and heart. It was refreshing to come to north shore and find pastors and people who embraced both.�

Wallace�s statement brings us immediately into the heart of our scripture�the heart, mind and soul are all intertwined. What creates relationship in communities is this interaction where all we are is brought to the fore. We are not our whole selves unless we can engage the heart, the mind and the soul. We have not loved God until we have loved God with all that we are.

What Wallace was attracted to was the place of �study� in the life of the congregation. This is a virtue that North Shore possesses, but this is not all of what makes for Christian life and witness. What kept him in relationship with this congregation was witnessing the entire commandment lived out in his experience of North Shore Baptist Church. Heart, soul and mind are bought to the transforming word of God. All aspects of who we are as a people are brought to the word. This, brothers and sisters, is love revealed.

In Deuteronomy we are instructed to love God with every fiber of our being, our hearts, our souls and our very might are brought into loving God.

We are instructed to teach our children. Certainly our young people are to be guided in the faith. We are to exemplify for them what it is to love God and to be the beloved of God. It is also true that all of us are one another�s children. All of us bear the burden of God�s love for us. When we rise up, when we lie down, when we are at home, when we are away�our hands, our faces and even our homes are to be places where the Word is revealed.

In Luke, we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. This love does not begin and end on Sunday mornings, or on Wednesdays when we gather. Our whole being, our whole life, heart, soul and mind reflect the glory that from the very beginning God has loved us.

In Luke, Christ teaches us to love. We study love.

I keep having to remind myself that this sermon is supposed to be about study. I thought I would bring some translations from the Greek or the Hebrew. But isn�t that the fallacy? It is not academic rigor that saves us�not alone at least. It is God�s love for us revealed through academic work which saves us.

We must study. And, as much as study is important and as much as we have to celebrate here at North Shore, the reality is that all of the accomplishments listed at the beginning of the sermon are the tip of an iceberg. Those individuals studied because they loved God. They loved God because they studied. The study of scripture is not God�s homework assignment to us. The study of scripture is an inroad to the love of God. It is prayer, the encountering of Christ in the Word. It is meditation. The �academic who ha� is a glorious sign of that love. It is the result not just of academic skill and discipline, but it is the result of the discipline of praying the scriptures, meditating upon them and allowing them to transform us into what God wills us to be.

As we celebrate this centennial and as we remember and rediscover who we are, may God bless us in the hearing of God�s word bringing us to greater love of our children, of one another as neighbor and may we proclaim God�s love to the world.

Let us take time to pray the scriptures, to celebrate the love revealed to us through the Word so that we too may love the whole world.

Posted by tripp at October 11, 2004 10:38 AM | TrackBack