TCC 4/2/06 - both services Jeremiah 31.31-34 & John 12.20-33

According to the Christian faith, is cloning right or wrong? How about genetic engineering, choosing the sex, eye color and hair color of your children? What about end of life decisions? Who decides when someone should die? How do they decide? When? My so-called "living will", alias advance directive, goes on and on and on covering this situation and that, yet my attorney says I will need to update it regularly to keep up with medical technology and the latest legislation.

For that matter, what values do we need to teach our children? What is the relationship between our faith and our politics? Does our faith have anything to say about what job or career we choose? Or how we invest our money?

There are some pastors and some streams of the Christian faith where you can show up in worship on Sunday morning and get very direct answers to such questions. I have direct answers to some of those questions, but you may note that I steer away from them in sermons.

That’s because our denomination’s tradition says it’s not my business to make important decisions for you. I see my job as trying to equip you to make those decisions, by pointing you in directions which hopefully will provide useful information and inspiration. I see my job in this regard as being a theologian, someone who raises the God-related questions, and being the congregation’s chief Bible person, someone who offers interpretations of scripture which, hopefully, are faithful to our Disciples of Christ and larger Christian tradition.

Today I want to take a broad look at how we decide things as Christians. I’m going to end up focusing on one particular area, because I think that’s where Jeremiah and John come down in the passages we heard. But I want to start with the big picture.

How do we go about making decisions as Christians? I suspect many of us would begin to answer that question by saying, we check to see what the Bible says. And that’s a good Protestant answer. There are three main branches of the Christian tree, Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant, and we are Protestants. Protestants include Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians and all those sorts of folks. And Protestants, following the lead of Martin Luther and others, generally say the Bible is our most important source of information about the Christian faith and Christian living. I suspect it just seems rather obvious and taken for granted that the Bible is where we start.

And one can make a good case for putting the Bible first. The Bible, says the church universal, is our authoritative record of God’s dealings with humankind, beginning with creation and running through the time of the early church, somewhere around the turn of the first century. We say there are other writings which are important, but none as important as what we have in scripture.

The Bible is what God has given us, somehow or other, as a way to know what God has in mind in terms of a relationship with us. That I think is the overarching story of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. So the Bible tells us the story of God’s relationship with human beings, and with all creation. It tells us what God has done and continues to do in order to promote a proper relationship between Creator and creature. It tells us as well what our part of this arrangement is supposed to look like, in other words what God wants and expects of us in return for the love and grace we are offered.

So we Protestants have pretty much always said that when it comes to Christian decision-making, the Bible is at the top of the heap.

But not many people say the Bible is all we need. On most lists there is also reason, the use of our minds. Reason comes into play in various ways. First, we don’t have to read very far in scripture before we begin to ask, what does this mean? We discover very quickly that the Bible is not like a cook book or an assembly manual with step by step directions for how to be God’s people. Rather, in scripture we encounter stories, lots of stories, but also poems, letters, history, something called gospels, prophecies, and all manner of other kinds of literature. And it takes some work on the part of our minds to sort through it.

Then it takes reason to apply what we discover in the Bible to our lives. For example, it takes a little effort to figure out how Paul’s instructions about eating meat offered to idols impacts our grocery shopping. Or how Jesus’ parables of the good Samaritan and the prodigal son speak to us.

And what about cloning and genetic engineering and all those questions the writers of the Bible had no way to envision two thousand and more years ago? Reason. We have to use our reason.

If you were to ask a member of an Orthodox or Catholic church how Christians go about making decisions, they would probably begin to answer you with neither scripture nor reason. For many millions of Christians, perhaps the majority, the number one answer would be tradition. Well, they would say, what has the church said about this issue or question in the past? What does current authoritative church teaching have to say? What has been normative church practice and belief over the last two thousand years?

If we think such questions sound strange, consider the issue of the Lord’s Supper. Why do we Disciples insist that we should have communion every time we gather for worship? Because that’s the tradition, going back to the New Testament, we say. Why do we normally practice baptism by immersion? Because that seems to be the ancient tradition. See, we use tradition as well as scripture and reason.

The prophet Jeremiah was alive and at work before and during the time that Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in 587 BCE. His sermons are a combination of warnings to the people that they need to straighten up and fly right, and words of hope for the future beyond the conquest. On God’s behalf he says things like, "Out of the north disaster shall break out on all the inhabitants of the land. I will utter my judgments against them, for all their wickedness in forsaking me." Nice stuff like that. He tells the people in no uncertain terms that they have strayed from the path God calls them to follow, and as a result, major trouble is headed their way.

But then we get to the verses we heard from chapter 31. "I will put my law within them," God says, "and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another...for they shall all know me." I think it’s really hard to find a more beautiful or more hopeful passage in all of scripture.

It is a passage about knowing God not from scripture, not from reason, and not from tradition. We will know God, God says, by our own experience. Ask people of faith where they see God, how they know God is alive and real, and many will say, just look around at our beautiful and wonderful world. Just look at the caring and loving people we encounter all the time. Just look at the many ways in which my own life has been blessed. We may also say, we know God from the testimony of scripture, but I believe that if scripture is the only way we know God, our faith is sorely lacking.

In the reading we heard from John I want to point to verse 26, "Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor." Jesus has come, John says, so that we can have a new relationship with God. This is not a relationship we will simply read about in scripture or think about with our reason or hear about through tradition. It is a relationship we will experience for ourselves. When we believe in Jesus as the Christ, and act on that belief by serving in the name of Jesus, John claims, we experience the presence of the risen Christ. When we believe we experience the nearness of God and the working of God in our lives and in our world.

And we use our experience, our experience of God and all the experiences of our lives, together with scripture, reason, and tradition, in making decisions as Christians.

I grew up in the 50s and 60s. In my early years I would occasionally see an African-American, but the first black person I ever knew was Vernon Brown. For some reason Vernon and a very few other black kids chose to come to the otherwise all white junior high school in Wilson, North Carolina. He and I shared one or two classes, and I remember various discussions we had.

In large measure it was Vernon who taught me that black people are not inherently lazy and stupid, contrary to what much of my culture tried to teach me - though not my parents, I must hasten to add. Vernon was motivated and smart. It was largely through him, through the experience of knowing him, that I learned that racial prejudice was wrong and was contrary to what God intended for us.

A faith based just on our experience can lead us in all sorts of strange directions. But a faith which omits our experience can shut out the work of the Holy Spirit, which is always leading us down new paths, through our understanding and appropriation of scripture, our use of reason, our appreciation of tradition, and through making good use of our life’s experience.