Gospel Reading Plan Day 6

Day 6 Readings - Side Thought
Matthew 6
Luke 6
John 6

Recently at an airport, I had the pleasure of sitting next to a very nice, very gregarious individual who discovered I was a pastor (I was reading a pastor-kind of book) and proceeded to tell me how I could grow my church into a "huge church."  Now understand this man was nice, genuine, and a delight to talk to so what I am about to say means absolutely no disrespect.  He said, "Jeff, I'm an agnostic.  I don't know what I believe.  But I do know this, that I like the values that Jesus teaches.  I really think that if you could just pull out the values, leave all the peculiarity of the stories in the book and just teach people the values, you will grow your church.  The reason why churches are dying is because they are holding on to Ancient stories when what people really want are the principles."

I listened.  I was respectively attentive.  I waited until I felt like he'd given me permission to respond and I said, "Friend, it is the peculiar and particular stories of the Scriptures that give meaning to those values and principles of Jesus.  Without the stories, we don't know what we are saying."

What my new airport friend was doing, without even realizing it, was entering into a modern debate that spans the last couple of centuries.  What's really important about the Scriptures? Is it the stories it tells or the principles that can be extracted from those stories?

What my friend didn't realize is that if we simply extract values and principles from the Bible, serve them up without any Jesus, we don't really have the principles or values of Jesus at all.  Besides, one might ask, which values would you care to serve up?  "Sell everything and give it to the poor," like he tells the rich young ruler.  "Forgive people 70 x 7 times," like he tells his followers.  The values and principles of Jesus' life only make sense in the stories that He embodies, the very same stories that he invites us into.

When we read the gospels, we are not looking for easy extraction.  There is no Cliff Notes version of the Bible.  No, when we are reading these stories, we are allowing our lives to be overcome by these stories, to lose ourselves in the pages.  In today's reading in John, Jesus talks about being the bread of life.  There is no easy principle there.  Jesus is claiming to be the very nourishment of God in our lives, and you know what many of the followers did who heard this claim?  Listen to this, "From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him." (John 6:66)  The values and principles of Jesus (whatever that may mean in a person's mind) don't gather large crowds, in fact, the deeper one enters into the stories, the more one finds oneself confronted by a call to follow the One who refuses to leave the cookies on the bottom shelf, offering us ready made moral principles.

Yesterday you started reading the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 and today you pick up a version of that same message in Luke 6.  These sayings of Jesus make NO SENSE outside the stories of Jesus that follow.  It is his life that gives meaning to the statements.  Only as we, followers of that Jesus, enter deeply into the call to abandon ourselves to Him and take on His stories as our own do those stories make sense for us.

Principled Christianity quickly degraded to arbitrary moralism.

The peculiar and particular stories of Jesus call us into a life of self-abandon and into the deeper life of radical obedience to the life of Jesus.