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Not by Bread
Alone
by the Rev. Rich Smith
February 10, 2008
Matthew 4:1-11
This season of Lent that we begin today is modeled on
the forty days that the Gospels tell us Jesus spent in the
wilderness. He has just gone down to the River Jordan and been
baptized by John, where he heard a voice from heaven proclaiming, “This
is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased!” His
response was not to act on that immediately, but rather head up into
the hills, to fast, to pray, to have a kind of spiritual retreat so he
could figure out what it all meant. What does it mean to have God
give you that kind of identity? The Gospels tell us that at
the end of this forty days, he was famished, but before he could go
down the mountain, he met the devil, Satan, or the tempter, who lays
out some options. The idea here is not that the tempter is the
personification of evil, some creature with horns and pitchfork, simply
one who presents some tempting choices for how Jesus might live out his
role as God’s son, and in that actually performs a clarifying and
worthwhile service.
Satan says to Jesus: You’re hungry, so why not
simply command these stone to become bread? Then, You want to get
down from this mountain? Jump! God won’t let you get
hurt! And finally, Look at all the kingdoms of the world and
their splendor. You want to be Lord over them all? Just
worship me. We’ll make a little Faustian bargain. I’m sure
we could arrange it!
Jesus, of course, stands firm, in fact refuses every
one of the temptations by quoting scripture, sends the devil away and
is ministered to by angels. If we had time, we’d go through and
look at each of the temptations in detail, and I suspect that each of
us would find parallels to our own lives in the temptations we face to
use power for our own ends, or maybe cut a few corners in service of
what we perceive to be a greater good.
But today I am particularly interested in exploring
the first temptation, where Jesus answers the offer to turn stones into
bread, and refuses it by saying, “One does not live by bread alone, but
by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” It’s actually a
quote from Deuteronomy, the 8th chapter, from a time when the Hebrew
children are also wandering in the wilderness, not for forty days but
for forty years – having been through the waters, not of the Jordan but
of the Red Sea, and before they get to the Promised Land they also have
to face a number of temptations as a way of figuring out what it means
to be the chosen people. By the time they get to the 8th chapter
of Deuteronomy, things are actually pretty good, and their temptation
is to forget all that God did for them in bringing them thus far,
fooling themselves into thinking they had done it all by
themselves. But of course remember that if anyone tells you
he’s a self-made man, ask to see his belly button. And so they
are told, through Moses, “Remember the long way that God has led you
these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing
you to know what was in your heart.... God humbled you by letting you
hunger, then by feeding you with manna... in order to make you
understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word
that comes from the mouth of the Lord...” In other
words, you need food, you need material things, but even more do you
need to be aware of the source of all life, the grace which ultimately
feeds you. Yes, Jesus made it his mission to feed the
hungry. And centuries later, Gandhi would say that a hungry
person will first recognize God in the form of bread. And we make
casseroles, and support food banks, and in our extravagant hospitality
invite everyone to a lavish brunch following worship today. Food
is important, food is necessary, sharing it is vital. But there
is something more: a truly human life is nourished by the Word of God.
Today, we usually equate the Word of God with the
Bible. In Moses’ time, of course, there was no Bible. That
word came through Moses in his mountain-top meetings with Yahweh.
In Jesus’ day, they had the Law and the Prophets, what we now call the
Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament, although Jesus was never bound to
a literal interpretation of them. He honored them, and was
portrayed as the fulfillment of them, and then he went and broke
the Sabbath Law in order to feed hungry people. In the Sermon on
the Mount he proclaimed several times, “You have heard it said....but I
say unto you,” such as when he quoted the Old Testament Law of “an eye
for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” but said, “Do not resist an evil
doer. Turn the other cheek, go the second mile...”
So, how do we live “by every word that comes from
the mouth of God?”
The confluence of two events today focuses the
question even more. This is the day we have given Bibles to our
third-graders. We hope they will read them, of course, but even
more that they will seek to read them with understanding. We hope
they won’t get bogged down in Levitcus, and that when they come upon
things that sound harsh or contrary to their experience of God in their
families or this community of faith, such as capital punishment for
disobedient children, that they will ask questions. We hope that
when they read that God created the world in six days, and they already
know all about the “Big Bang” and evolution, they won’t throw the Bible
out as hopelessly outdated.
Which brings me to the second event – This is the
Sunday closest to Charles Darwin’s birthday, and for the third year now
some 800 churches have joined to celebrate it as “Evolution
Sunday.” We’re one of them - listed on the Evolution Sunday
website. Part of me wants to wonder why it is even necessary,
because I’ve never had a problem with a conflict between evolution and
the Bible. I’ve grown up with modern science. To me, it’s
like having “Gravity Sunday”, or Galileo Sunday, where we affirm that
earth is not the center of the universe; or Columbus Sunday, so we can
affirm that earth is not flat! Well, silly me – when several
presidential candidates state in a debate that they don’t believe in
evolution; and when a scary percentage of the American public agrees;
when a museum opens in Kentucky, dedicated to showing how the earth is
only six thousand years old, and that dinosaurs co-existed with Adam
and Eve in the Garden of Eden (but were drowned in the “Great
Flood”); and when school boards in Texas and Florida are right
now considering proposals for new science text books that treat
evolution as one option along side Intelligent Design and a literal
reading of Genesis, which could affect the teaching of science all over
the country (at a time when science education in the US is falling far
behind much of the world; and when Christians are generally perceived
as being anti-science --- then YES, we need to have “Evolution Sunday”
and proclaim loudly, we are Christians, we worship God the Creator of
all, and we believe in evolution as God’s way of doing it!
So the question, then, really boils down to this: Is
the Bible the “Word of God” for us in a scientific age? Given its
limitations, I sometimes feel like a professor by the name of Bernard
Loomer. The story goes that he was reading a scholarly paper at a
conference. At one point, after reading a particular
sentence, he stopped, looked out at the audience, and said, "As the
Bible plainly teaches." He looked down, paused, looked out again, and
said, "I don't know where, but it does." He looked back at his paper
another time, waited a moment, looked up once more, and concluded,
"Well, if it doesn't, it ought to!" There are a lot of
things we might wish the Bible teaches. Contrary to a former
President who said, “Within the covers of the Bible are all the answers
for all the problems men face,” it’s just not that simple.
And yet, our tradition still understands the Bible as the Word of
God. How can that be in the 21st century?
By way of answering, let me state three principles
that have guided me in my life as a student of the Bible, and as one
who does hear an inspired word through it.
First, I take the Bible seriously, but not
literally. I may hear in it the word of God, but I do not hear
literal words of God. God didn’t dictate it, word for word, to
waiting scribes. It’s authors are many and mostly unknown,
spanning many centuries. Parts of it ring more true than others,
may have more to say to us than others. Some of it is
embarrassing to modern sensibilities, some of it makes no sense at all;
and yet much of it is inspiring, a lot of it challenges our own ways of
living; it all calls us to grapple with what it means to be human and
to be God’s people. It demands we take it seriously, but not
literally. As Bishop Spong says, “The Bible is not, I repeat, is
not the Word of God in any literal sense. Repeat that line once or
twice a day until you no longer expect lightning to strike you dead
when you utter it. To kill an idol in whose service you have lived in
both bondage and fear is never easy. The real tragedy, however, is that
bondage to any idol, even the idol of the Bible, makes it
impossible.... to be fully human and that is clearly the final goal of
Christianity.”
Second, I do not read the Bible as a science
textbook; in other words, inerrant in all that it says. After
all, it was written over many centuries but its cannon was closed well
before anyone thought that the earth was not part of a three tiered
universe, the waters below, the heavens above, the sun revolving around
the earth, God taking personal control of the motion of stars.
The cosmology of the Bible is incredibly quaint. It is in no way
a credible source for scientific information. As a newly
issued UCC Pastoral Letter (from President John Thomas -
available in narthex or on web) on “Faith Engaging Science and
Technology” puts it: “Our faith is not in the world-views
of ancient theologians or the cosmologies of biblical texts, as
majestic as these might have been. Our faith is in the living God, who
always goes ahead of us, speaking, calling, and creating. Gone is the
old view of small, static universe, with fixed species dwelling on a
fixed earth. Gone is the old view of a small, static God. We
believe that God yearns for us to understand nature more fully and to
love it more deeply.” The Bible doesn’t tell us much about
science. But, by the same token, neither is the Bible
anti-science. For what I read on every page is something that is
also essential to good science, and that is the expression of awe and
wonder. To stand before the creation, whether gazing at the
stars in the night sky, or through an electron microscope at the
smallest known particles with a sense of awe and appreciation for the
Creator of it all is where faith and science come together. They
are not mutually exclusive.
Finally, I do read the Bible as the evolving record
of the divine-human encounter. I learn from how others
experienced God, related to God, understood God. I see an
evolution of consciousness within the biblical story, from God as a
kind of patriarchal tribal deity, meting out rewards and punishments,
choosing one people over another and one land as holier than others,
delighting in sending suffering on non-believers, to the God of
Jesus, who grows beyond all that and who cannot really be described as
anything other than Love. Seeing this evolving understanding
leads me to continue that exploration, with a sense of openness, of
awe, of wonder, believing in my heart of hearts that while the Bible
points me to God, the Bible is not God. It is to be studied, not
worshiped. Probed, not venerated. And it calls us to
imagine that there might be more, that maybe God might still be
speaking!
And I believe God is still speaking, in countless
way, if only we have ears to hear – through poets, composers, artists,
prophets, the poor, the homeless, the hungry – through the beauty of
nature and the plight of this planet. As a mentor of mine has
often said, the Bible really should have been a looseleaf notebook!
I conclude with the words of Kenneth Cauthen,
emeritus Professor of Theology at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity
School.....
“....we can claim to be Christians if what we believe is most conducive
to human fulfillment is identical with what we take to be most
excellent in the biblical witness. Moreover, the Bible is authoritative
only because it is unsurpassed by anything else we know from any
source... We confess Jesus as the Christ because he is and has
disclosed the Word that is nothing other than saving truth for us. We
are Christians because it is to that tradition we turn, are compelled
to turn, have no choice but to turn and return to, to argue with, to
revise, to doubt and to reject, to transform and reinterpret, to be
judged and transformed by. We read the Bible as Holy Scripture because
of its unexcelled power to provide wisdom and a way of living that
promises to make real the beauty and the goodness that life -- the gift
of that Ultimate Mystery -- offers.”
And then he concludes in high-minded academic language:
“TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE STAR,
ABIDING TRUTH, WHEREVER YOU ARE.
ABIDING TRUTH, FAR AWAY STAR,
COME OUT, COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE.”Copy text here
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Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
1
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