By the Book

How the Scripture is alive... in us, and for us.

SJF • Easter 7b • Tobias S Haller BSG

In those days Peter stood up among the believers and said, “Friends, the scripture had to be fulfilled...

A few weeks ago you heard a Scripture reading from the book of Acts about the role of the Bible in the Christian life. I’m don’t know if Fr Farrell preached on that text the Sunday I was away, but I’m sure you recall the story of that Ethiopian who was reading Isaiah on his way back home, but couldn’t, on his own, understand what the prophet meant. The Holy Spirit put Philip in the right place at the right time to open the scripture for him, and to achieve God’s goal for him: his baptism.

Through wise teachers guided by the Holy Spirit, the scripture performs this task, the task for which it is intended and sufficient: to bring us to Christ. We might call this the proactive side of scripture. It is a map that leads us to the goal we seek, a lamp that lights our way through the dark wood of this world, the cookbook with the recipe for the food that nourishes us unto life. The scripture is our guide, our map, and our recipe. But we need to be careful how we do things “by the book” — and the story of Philip and the Ethiopian reveals that this is best not a solitary task. To understand the scriptures best we need each other, just as the Ethiopian needed Philip.

Taking the scripture in one’s own hand without a guide can be dangerous. You may have heard of the man who, whenever he needed to make a decision, would take his floppy Bible off the shelf, close his eyes, let the book fall open and then plant his finger on a passage — which he would then take as God’s guidance for him in his life. One day he was feeling a little low, and so he went through this exercise to see what God wanted him to do. Well, he lighted on — appropriate given our reading from Acts — was, “Judas went and hanged himself.” Somewhat taken aback he decided to try again. This time he landed in the gospel of Luke: “Go and do likewise.”

Doing things by chance — as in casting lots for a new apostle — is best done as a group, not on your own. One of the many things for which I am grateful is Deacon Bill’s ministry here among us in the Bible Study group that continues to meet week by week. It is in that group that the Spirit speaks, and I know those who have taken part in it are as grateful for it as I am. This is the best way to engage with the Scripture, as the Spirit brings light to the group — through each other as the body of believers. God be praised!

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Today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles shows us another side of how the church makes use of the scripture, and this is what I’m calling the retroactive or reflective side. This is when we take up the scripture not so much to tell us what to do, but so as to tell us the true meaning of what we have done. In addition to being a map showing us where to go, it’s like one of those maps in a shopping mall, with that crucial highlighted spot, clearly marked, “You are here.” As well as a headlight down the road ahead of us, the Scripture is like a streetlight that illuminates where we are. More than a recipe to prepare a dish, it is also the cookbook we go to to find out what ingredient it was in that dish that someone else prepared for us, that we so enjoyed.

In the time prior to our reading from the passage from Acts, the Apostles have gone through a very difficult time. Their Lord was arrested and they were scattered; Peter denied he knew his Lord — and wept; they heard that Judas suffered a terrible fate; they received the good but hard to believe news that the Lord is risen, and finally they have seen him with their own eyes, and then watched as he was taken up into heaven. And for each of these things they have looked to the Scripture retroactively, reflectively — to understand that the things written there have been fulfilled. The Apostles have been, as our Lord himself gently chided them, slow of heart to believe all that had been promised in God’s word — until it happened. Once it happened, then, retroactively, they were able to take up the Scriptures and recognize those Scriptures that had been speaking to them all along but they didn’t understand. Suddenly the light goes on and they understand where they are.

So where do they go from here? They know where they are now: The number of the Apostles is short by one — yet Jesus had promised that the Apostles would sit on thrones to judge the Twelve Tribes of Israel on the last day. Suddenly Peter recognizes that this too has been addressed prophetically in the Psalms: Judas is the one whose homestead has been abandoned, and to which another will succeed as overseer. So the Apostles conduct the first episcopal election, illuminated by Scriptures that before that day none of them thought had a special meaning for them.

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So it is that the Scripture can not only tell us what to do, but show us the true meaning of what has been done: for us, for the world. It tells us where we are so that we can better be prepared to go where we are sent.

As part of my own discipline of Scripture reading, as part of the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, I have been reading the Scripture, especially the Psalms, every day for about forty years now. You may have noticed in the Book of Common Prayer how the Psalms are divided up with headings that begin with, “First Day: Morning Prayer” and so on through all 150 right up to “Thirtieth Day: Evening Prayer.” That was a way of reading the Psalms over the course of a month that goes back to the very first Book of Common Prayer. Archbishop Cranmer came up with it back in the 1540s. It is far easier way to follow than the complicated systems that the monks had used for many centuries, with the Psalms spread out all over the course of a week. (As Archbishop Cranmer observed, it would take you longer to find what page to use than to read what was there once you found it!) And so he came up with this idea of a monthly system of reading the Psalms, spread out over thirty days. On the first day of each month, and on each day (repeating the 30th in months with 31 days!)

I read the Psalms — together with tens of thousands of others, who have been reading the Psalms this way since 1549.

I commend you do the same, and I think you will find, as I do, that reading these ancient poems — three thousand years old — reading them through, day by day, through the course of a month will illuminate your life as they have illuminated my life. I know by this that the Scripture is a alive: it is constantly renewed in ways I might never understand until some situation or circumstance in my life is suddenly illuminated by one of those Psalms.

I will close with a personal example that happened in a particularly striking way. On 9/11, Saint Paul’s Chapel, the Episcopal church that’s just two blocks from the World Trade Center, survived the devastation with minimal damage. It became in the weeks and months following a refuge of hope and restoration. It was a place where food was distributed, and those doing the horrible work down in the pit of destruction would come up for rest and counseling — to help them deal with the horrors they handled literally day by day emerging from the dust and the rubble. The clergy of New York and New Jersey were called upon to assist as counselors.

My first shift at Saint Paul’s was on the morning on the 16th of October, and I decided to wait to read Morning Prayer until I got to the church. As I came up out of subway and headed down the street towards the St Paul’s Chapel, I was shocked. What I had seen on TV had not prepared me. The whole neighborhood was transformed. The smell of damp concrete was in the air, heavy and thick, masking the scent of corruption and chlorine. Everything was dusted with gray powder. There were piles of rubble swept off the sidewalk in the doorways

of still unopened shops. Then looking ahead down the street, just two short blocks away, just behind St Paul’s Chapel, was the twisted wreckage of one of those two proud towers. Only about two stories were left, a stump rising from the rubble at its base; no longer the gleaming silver columns side-by-side, but only a twisted, rusted remnant the color of dried blood. I passed through the gate in the Chapel’s wrought-iron fence, covered with the images of those still missing, still hoped for, though by that point with hope fading as fast as the photographs; the flowers, dying, were taped to the wrought iron of that fence and that gate, the candles flickering in the cool, damp breeze that carried the odor of the dust to which one day all of us will return.

Inside the church it was dark and quiet. People were sleeping in most of the pews, bundled in blankets. They sought a little rest before heading back into the pit for another shift looking for the bodies, and the parts of bodies, of the victims of this horror. I found a quiet spot, and sat down, and took a red prayer book from the rack and opened it to the Psalms appointed for Morning Prayer on the 16th day. And this is what I read:

O God, the heathen have come into your inheritance;
they have profaned your holy temple;
and have made Jerusalem a heap of rubble.

They have given the bodies of your servants
as food for the birds of the air,
and the flesh of your faithful ones
to the beasts of the field.

They have shed their blood like water
on every side of Jerusalem,
and there was no one to bury them.

Were those words written for me that day? Well, of course not; but yes, they were. God spoke to me that morning. These were words I needed to hear and see. Not to make a foolish equivalence of who the “heathen” might be, and who the servants, and what Jerusalem, but to bind me up in solidarity with all the suffering that has ever been suffered upon this warring earth, all the ancient world of wrong and anger and unrighteousness and injustice; the guilty rage and its innocent victims; and to let me know that I was not alone, either in my grief or in my service that I might do that day, or any other day, to comfort the seekers after the dead. The light went on for me to tell me where I was — words from the Psalmist of 3,000 years ago, resounding down the halls of time into my present through my past, to give me hope for the future.

This is what the Scripture can do for us, my friends. It tells us who, and whose we are; it will comfort us in our terrors, and encourage us in our fears, and strengthen us in our weakness — if we will open those pages and let them do their healing work, in the solitude of personal devotion, but even more when we gather in God’s name. The Scripture not only saves but helps us to make sense of a world gone senseless, to show us that love prevails when all else fails, and that God who created and redeemed us will also send us his Holy Spirit to comfort and to guide. Even so, Lord Jesus, send your Spirit to your people — by your word, and as you promised — that they may know you and themselves, and serve you in this life until they come to rest with you for ever in the new Jerusalem above.+

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Withholding the Water

The waters of baptism reach the Gentiles as Peter learns a lesson.

Easter 6b 2015 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”

One of the major issues facing the world today involves changes to weather patterns, known collectively as “climate change.” To a large extent this is about water — too much water in some places, where either the rains have increased or the sea level is rising; and too little water in other places, where the drought seems to be unending. So the problem isn’t with water itself, but with where the water is — or isn’t. There has been a good deal of discussion concerning water in the state of California. Much of that state is very dry even in the wettest of seasons, and when there are several years of drought — as has been true for the last four years — the amount of water available can fall far short of what is needed. The snow in the mountains that used to pile up many feet high — and feed the valleys below as it melted — has been measured in inches instead of feet. And so the valley thirsts.

Many in Los Angeles have been upset to have to withhold water from their lawns so that the people growing fruit and nuts in the central valley can water their orchards — and much is made of the fact that it takes a gallon of water to grow a single almond! The problem is that agriculture is a major contributor to the economic health of the whole state of California — and the produce from California is served in the salad bowls of much of the rest of the country — so the effect of this drought will be felt far and wide.

In short, this issue of water is something that touches everyone. Water is essential to life — not just drinking water, without which one cannot survive for more than a few days — but the water that grows the plants that nourish us: water which is with us literally from soup to nuts.

In our reading from Acts this morning, we hear of another life-giving aspect of water — the water of Baptism. And what might seem strange to our ears is the fact that Peter even suggests not baptizing the Gentiles to whom he has been sent in response to a vision from God. Isn’t baptizing the very thing the church is meant to do?

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Well, this is one of the many things about which the leaders of the early church had to be enlightened and instructed bit by bit. It was a lesson they had to learn. As I said a few weeks ago in one of my sermons, God informs and educates the church, through many means, bit by bit, story by story, in poetry and prose, by vision and revelation, and by the experience of the faithful. What we see in our reading from Acts is one step in that process of enlightenment — as baptism is extended to the Gentiles.

As I’ve reminded us in the past, all of us here are Gentiles by birth, and so the idea that there might have been a time when the water of baptism was withheld from us seems odd. This gives me an opportunity to remind us all once again of the essential Jewishness of Jesus and the earliest church. Jesus was a Jew, and so were all of the apostles. And baptism — a ritual by which water is used in a symbolic way as a cleansing from sin — was and is a particularly Jewish ritual. Now, of course, Jews are not the only people in the world who have given a symbolic meaning to washing with water as a way to cleanse from sin. We are reminded of this forcibly every year in Holy Week as the Gentile Pontius Pilate washes his hands as a way of cleansing himself of any responsibility in the death of Jesus. But for Jews of the time of Jesus, this ritual washing was a central part of the observance of the Law of Moses, which spells out numerous circumstances in which washing with water is required, as a means to restore them to the status of being ritually “clean.”

I remember a couple of years ago, there was a TV special about the Dead Sea community that lived outside of Jerusalem — a Jewish community of just before the time of Jesus. And their concern — being in the desert — was to have enough water so that they could carry out the rituals of what is called the mikvah: the cleansing tank where you would walk down steps into a pool of water and then up the steps on the opposite side. The archaeologists have excavated all of the water-works that were used in that ancient and now abandoned city. Water was central to the understanding of their rituals and their laws.

And for many Jews of the time of Jesus, there would be no point in a Gentile doing these exercises of washing — going down the steps into the pool and then up the other side would mean nothing for a Gentile — Gentiles are unclean by nature; you can wash and scrub and rinse and spin-dry, and from a Levitical standpoint a Gentile will be just as unclean after as before. What’s the old saying? “Beauty is skin deep, but ugly goes to the bone!” Well, from the standpoint of the Jews of Jesus’ time, Gentiles were sin, not just skin deep, but right to the bone. So washing them would make no difference. And this way of seeing things would have been as true of Peter as of any other Jewish man of his time.

Except that Jesus had given Peter some of that “information” I referred to — a lesson, — a revelation that came to him in a dream, also recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. Peter was taking a nap before lunch and in a vision saw

a great sheet lowered from the sky, full of all kinds of animals, clean and unclean, and a heavenly voice had commanded him to kill and eat the unclean with the clean. When he protested that he had always “kept kosher” a voice from heaven chided him by saying, “Don’t call unclean what God has cleansed!” And to strike the message home, this dream was repeated three times. Didn’t I remind us a few weeks ago that God is a patient teacher who will repeat the lesson as often as is needed? Well, Peter needed three “reps” to get the point of this one. And he finally realized it wasn’t about what he was going to have for lunch, but about the mission on which he would soon be sent, to visit a household of Gentiles who had found God’s favor.

Now, these Gentiles — the Roman Cornelius and his household — had also been alerted by a vision, and had been promised that salvation would be coming to their household. Yet they know, as Peter acknowledges, that Jews want to have nothing to do with Gentiles. But Peter also says that he has understood this vision from God to mean — not that he should feel free to eat a ham and cheese sandwich — but that he was no longer to consider any human being as unclean by nature. God is not concerned with food, but with people.

So the stage is set; and when the Holy Spirit ratifies God’s direction in all of this, descending on the gathered Gentiles even before Peter can finish his sermon, he knows that he is called to baptize them — not with the old baptism, the baptism that he had used for most of his life as a Jew, a washing from ritual uncleanness that would have to be repeated again and again the next time he became unclean by touching something he shouldn’t have touched, or doing something he shouldn’t have done. Not the old baptism, but the new baptism in the Name of Jesus, the baptism that Jesus had told them to do (as Matthew records in his Gospel), going to all nations (and the word we translate as “nations” is the word the Jews used for the Gentiles — the goyim — which means the all of us!) the commandment to go to all nations and to baptize them. Even though Jesus had told them this was their missionary task as apostles, it took that additional trio of lessons on the rooftop to get Peter to understand. It took the vision of the great sheet of animals let down from heaven — three times; it took the heavenly voice. Finally it took the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Gentiles as they listened to Peter preach — it took all these lessons to get Peter to understand God’s message that salvation is for all, for every human being who can become a child of God through this wonderful grace — flowing as freely as water itself; whether a tidal wave washing over a continent, or a bare trickle of life-giving water welling up from a spring in the middle of a desert.

This is the water that gives life, the water of baptism that doesn’t just cleanse from sin, but incorporates the believer into the Body of Christ. For it is not just the water alone — as John the Apostle attests — but the water and the blood. It is not the water alone, but the Spirit of truth who testifies to the power of God. God’s power and greatness are at work in unexpected places, among unexpected people, among those from whom the pious might be inclined to withhold their blessing, but among whom the Spirit has shown itself not only pleased to dwell, but to manifest the signs of God’s presence — so that, watered with the nourishing water of baptism, they may bear fruit, fruit that will last, to the everlasting glory of God, and in praise of God’s most holy Name.

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