The Word of God is Not Chained

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 45.22-25, Romans 15:1-6, Luke 4:16-24

In his second letter to Timothy, Paul, imprisoned, in chains, writes: ‘Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, that is my gospel, for which I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained.’

Today is Bible Sunday. I haven’t looked up where this tradition came from but I suspect it’s because of the collect, our little faith poem for this week – as discussed last Sunday –  with those famous lines, that we should ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest’ all Scripture. I have spent some time with the Bible – in its original languages (of which there are 3 – answers on a postcard to win a prize).  But I want you to understand this morning, that the Word of God is not chained.

At the end of the readings, Roger and Sally dutiful said ‘This is the Word of the Lord’  to which we all smartly replied ‘thanks be to God’;  trapping it if you like with our little collaboration. This is the Word of the Lord, but ‘the Word of God is not chained’.

One of my present troubles is Putney Park Lane, also known as Putney Park Swamp. I was upset some weeks back when I met a couple who had been walking for 25 minutes from Hawkesbury Road. It’s not far but they were not terribly mobile and the signs on the gates at the bottom of the lane had put them off. We’ve spoken to the council but they’re not as interested as me in access. Our plan is to keep the gates open for services. There may be resistance. This is how the Word of God sometimes feels; like a jobsworth hanging around unnoticed and then closing the gate every time someone drives up, because the sign says to; but actually ‘the Word of God is not chained’.

This approach to the Bible is much older than Christianity. The Jewish practice of how to interpret Scripture is called Midrash - coming from the Hebrew word Darash, meaning ‘to seek out’ or ‘explore’.  Like our Old Testament reading put it: ‘from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return.’ For millennia Rabbis have argued over texts, speculated and invented subtexts and stories that bridge and fill out the Scriptures, in a continuous attempt to get at what God is really saying. If you just imagine for a moment how much has been written on Scripture in the last three thousand years of Judaism and Christianity, the vast libraries of commentaries, sermons, stories and fables, the biblical scholarship and theological interpretations, and compare it to the relatively slim sixty-six books of the Bible, you cannot but fail to grasp that the Word of God is very far from chained.

And Midrash continues today in all media. Perhaps you have seen Cecille B. de Mille’s 1956 film The Ten Commandments. Being visual, film has to interpret, and dramatically. Who knew Moses, played by Charlton Heston, and the Hebrews all looked and sounded like White American Southern Protestants? Is it surprising that bad-man Pharaoh was played by Russian Yul Brynner as the Cold War stepped up? Or, given that the Exodus story was the template for the pilgrim fathers finding the Promised Land in the New World, that Pharaoh had an English accent? Or perhaps you have seen Dreamworks’ 1998 movie, The Prince of Egypt. Multiculturalism is now evident, feminism has given us some strong female characters, the boys are all a bit metro and there’s even a nod to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Word of God is not chained.

When Nelson Mandela was in prison, the inmates passed around a copy of the Robben Island Bible —with the works of Shakespeare disguised in the covers of a Hindu religious text. It was the most excellent play Julius Caesarthat spoke to him, a 17th century Englishman telling a 2000 year old story, but he underlined and signed the lines:

         Cowards die many times before their deaths
         The valiant never taste of death but once.

Inspirational to him and his movement. And yet people still think that Scripture is written on stone.

So there are Christians who will tell you that the Word of God is chained in Scripture. Others will tell you that the Word of God is chained in unchangeable liturgy, others who will tell you the Word of God is chained in the edicts of popes, bishops or councils. 

The Word of God is free and yet in all the church it is in chains. Chains for St Paul are a humiliation.  Why then do we let the Word of God suffer this?

When I was at university there was a Christian Union which had a rabble-rousing campaign offering postcards with the single word “certainty” on it; trying to draw in insecure and uncertain teenagers with a reassuring faith that could define everything from how to live to who your friends should be. Nigel Lawson once said that the time to be most fearful in politics is when a consensus emerges. That is when the argument ceases to be tested and a fashionable cause pushes out rigour.  Not a problem we suffer at present.

Well, Christianity does not want you to have certainty. This is not because God is playing some will-you-won’t-you game in the celestial bookies. It’s because trying to understand who or what God is is a lifetime’s work. If your God still has a beard and a white robe; if your idea of Christianity has not progressed since Sunday school; if you think you cannot be gay and Christian; your God is chained. Working out how to be good and swapping your bad habits for good ones is a lifetime’s work. Finding God is an unfinished task. We are all works in progress, in thought and in deed.

So I don’t blame Dawkins for not believing in god, I don’t believe in his god either. Just as I don’t believe in the god that the Spanish Inquisition believed in. I have grave doubts about the god architect of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith Henry VIII believed in, because all of these gods seem terribly flawed.  Consider how the rationalist Dawkins and murderous Henry VIII would describe god and ask yourself, do you believe in that? Perhaps we can blame their imagination. Actually for the most part their gods are far too strongly outlined and coloured in, and like many gods often a cause of violence and guilt. The God we believe in is a little less bloodthirsty than that I hope, but don’t fall into the trap that you think you’ve got the right definition, that in spite of all odds you’ve finally got God nailed down. 

It has happened before. 

The Word of God is not written on a postcard. It is not chiselled in a creed.  It is not contained in all the shelves of the British Library.  The Word of God is not chained. 

But do you worry? If you can’t trust the formulas, the absolute truth of Scripture, the soul-saving affirmation of the creed, the definitive YES I’M IN of the sacraments, then how can you be sure you’ve got it right? That you’ve convinced God you’re good enough, Christian enough, to get wings and not horns? Perhaps there’s something in what the poet and priest John Keble said: ‘God never lets us know the result of our actions, and in one way that keeps us humble, and in another it keeps us hopeful.’

But there’s more to it than that. The separation of the in and the out, the strict boundaries of doctrine interrogated by the Inquisition, the anathemas of the creed, the winnowing of the good enough, are human inventions and not divine. Because the Word of God is not chained. 

My favourite verse in Scripture is from the psalms:

Whither shall I go then from thy presence? 
If I climb up into heaven, thou art there. 
If I go down to hell, thou art there also.

God is not impressed by our tribal boundaries. He is certainly not chained by them.

The Word of God is not chained and neither are the people of God.

A huge part of Jesus’ ministry in the Gospel is to show that the Word of God is not chained. In the Gospel we just heard Jesus starts his ministry, preaching Good News for the poor, for the captive, for the blind, for the oppressed. At our 8am we have the readings in the old words where, he comes ‘to heal the brokenhearted… and to set at liberty them that are bruised’. Sometimes the new translations fail to capture the beauty of the old. For Jesus, the people don’t want to hear that the Bible is speaking to them today. They felt perhaps that the Gospel is for them, not the poor, the bruised, the brokenhearted. And yes he speaks well, but he’s just Joseph’s boy. Later they’ll chase him out of town. Later he’ll be in chains.

But there is of course much more to Christianity than celebrating inclusion. My point with the Bible is that we need to read it freely. But with this we also need to get to know the Bible better. It’s still true that as our New Testament reading put it: ‘by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we may have hope.’

But it’s when verses are taken out of context and when a little is known about the Bible that we hit the most troublesome waters. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. There’s a reason why the pre-Reformation church didn’t allow people to read the Bible.

So the Bible will always be the primary textbook of the Christian faith, but you have to cross at least 2000 years to get to it and 2000 years back to speak it afresh. You have to inwardly digest it.

This can only be done if the Word of God is unchained. 

The Bible tries to explain the relationship of God to the world and how we should live. Both of these are enormous tasks with many answers for all times and places. Judaism was most remarkable because for the first time it asserted that there is only one God, that is to say that there is one God for all people. This core understanding of our faith reminds us that for all our claims on the knowledge of God and goodness, God is not chained. We cannot escape his presence but also we cannot claim to stake out his territory or define who are his people. 

We must not, as they did with St Paul, as they did with Jesus, as they still do today, we must not put the Word of God in chains. Amen.