Year B, Lectionary 10 – 7 June 2015
Marks of Discipleship: Bible Study
Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, Grand Prairie, Texas
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If we were to conduct a poll of
Christians, especially in this part of the country, and ask them this question:
“Why do we study the Bible?” – what do you think some of the answers would be?
I’m guessing one of the answers
would be something along the lines of “To learn how to live a good life” or
something like that. The Bible has, for America, anyway, become the ultimate
rule book. The Bible does have many rules in it, but the danger of thinking of
it simply as a rule book is that we begin to believe that somehow we must
follow all of those rules – or that we can follow all of those rules – in order
to somehow gain God’s favor and work our way into heaven.
The problem is, of course, that we
can’t follow every rule in the Bible, and in fact, lots of the rules we have
thrown out altogether because they don’t apply to our religious practice anymore.
We don’t sacrifice pigeons or goats, and when was the last time any of you
brought an ox for sacrifice?
Of course, there are rules we do
still try to uphold, for instance, the Ten Commandments. And also what Jesus
calls the Greatest Commandment: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. ’ This is the
greatest and first commandment,” Jesus says, “And a second is like it: ‘You
shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the
law and the prophets.”[1]
And it makes me wonder, if we
polled Christian people and asked them about why we study the Bible, I wonder how
many of them would answer, “So I can learn how to love God and to love my
neighbor in the very best way.”
Because that should be the main
goal of Bible study: to learn how to love God and to love our neighbors in the
very best way. Bible study is not to be something we just do, out of a sense of
religious obligation or moral piety. We are meant to learn something about loving God and loving our neighbor when we
study the Bible.
Jesus said as much: Love God, love
neighbor – “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” – that’s
Scripture he’s talking about when he says the law and the prophets. Which means
that woven into the stories of the people of God contained in the Bible, and
woven into the rules and the thou shalts and thou shalt nots, and woven into
the letters of Paul and the revelation to John is the idea that God loves us,
and we are, in turn, to love God, and to love our neighbor.
So, today we have one of the most
famous passages about love in the whole Bible, from 1 Corinthians 13. How many
of you have heard this read at a wedding? How many of you used this at your own
wedding?
Here is something crazy about this
passage: Paul didn’t write it for a wedding.
He didn’t even write it for couples
in love. Paul wrote this chapter in 1 Corinthians as part of a huge letter to
the church there – a church that was steeped in conflict and riddled with
divisions based upon socio-economic differences, and differences in culture,
and differences in religious practice, all of which made up the city of
Corinth. (We’ll learn more about Corinth next week.)
Paul was one of several people who
brought the gospel of Jesus Christ to Corinth and then, as was his practice, he
moved on, leaving a fledgling church there. After he leaves, he begins hearing
about the division and conflict in the Corinthian church, and so he writes 1
Corinthians in response to these reports, trying desperately to help the
Corinthians understand that, in Christ, all those divisions are ended. In
Christ, they are all members of one body, together.
And then he gives them this
beautiful section about love.
Because this passage has been
co-opted so much for romantic love, our minds may go there first. But Paul is
writing this to a group of Christians, and so it might as well say the
following:
“The love of Christians is patient.
The love of Christians is kind. The love of Christians is not envious or
boastful or arrogant or rude. The love of Christians does not insist on its own
way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices
with the truth. The love of Christians bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.
The love of Christians never
ends…And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of
these is the love of Christians.”
What a world we would live in if
that were actually true. What a world we would live in if the love of
Christians – both for each other and for everyone – would be the greatest
thing. If that is what we were known for. What a world we would live in if,
instead of studying the Bible to learn simply how to follow rules – or try to
impose those rules on others – we studied the Bible so that we could hear about
God’s love for us, certainly, but also so we could learn how to love God and
love our neighbor in the very best way because God loves them.
Bible study is not meant to be just
another thing we do. When we study the Bible, we connect ourselves with the
ancient stories of the people of God. We read how they messed up, and we hear
how they forgave one another, and how they dwelled together in community. We
read how they loved God and loved one another. And, as we study the Bible, we
begin to see ourselves in their stories, and we begin to see how God calls us
into loving relationships – with each other, and with God. When we see how God
calls us into these loving relationships, our hearts are changed by that love,
so that loving God and loving neighbor become part of who we are at our very
core.
And so, as we proceed through June,
we’re going to focus on this section of 1 Corinthians over the next few weeks.
Later this month, we will begin a Bible Study series based on 1 Corinthians
called “Being the Body of Christ.” I hope you will join us in our study time as
together, we learn about the great love of God, and together, we learn how to
live that out.
Amen.
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