Fearing God

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 1:5-20:

After I had moved to New Mexico, I went back to visit my parents and Phoenix and went to the local Christian bookstore that I used to frequent, and in their best seller section was a book entitled The Joy of Fearing God. An interesting title. And so when I got back to Santa Fe, I went to a Christian bookstore there, and not only was it not in their bestseller section, they didn’t even have it in stock, which confirmed for me that Santa Fe was a little more enlightened than Phoenix. But they did order it for me. Now in the book of proverbs, which is part of the wisdom literature and we will be looking at that after the new year, in the 9th chapter we hear a famous phrase that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That was the passage that the author was basing his book on and using our understanding of fear as being afraid that “someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.” But is that the understanding of God that we are to have, or the way that we are to approach a relationship with God thinking that God is dangerous, a threat or likely to hurt us? There is certainly some scriptural witness to that, at least on the part of humanity.

In Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, although they don’t eat an apple nor are they tempted by the devil, they hide. After God finds them and asks them what they are doing, which is actually the first real interchange we have between God and humanity, we also get the introduction of the idea of fear because Adam tells God that he heard God walking in the garden and he was afraid. And why? Because he was afraid of being punished for doing what he was told not to do. That matches that definition of fear, and what also comes out of this interchange in the idea of blame and scapegoating. But that becomes the way that some people begin to view God, that is through a sense of fear of punishment or danger. And yet we also continue to see God try and counteract that.

In the Beginning... Again

Here is my sermon from yesterday. The text was Genesis 2:4b-25:

When we were last together, we heard the first creation story, starting with the familiar line “In the beginning,” and then continuing with God speaking things into existence. It is the story of creation in six days, and then God resting on the seventh. It has the form with which most of us are familiar, and yet in its telling, we were missing many of the pieces which we also expect to find in the creation story, like God forming adam out of the ground, and then forming Eve using a rib from Adam, and the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And those are missing from that first creation story, because they are obviously not a part of it, because they are a part of the second creation story. Many people are surprised to discover not just that we have two creation stories, but they are so different from each other. But, what they show us was also very common in the ancient near-east. Egypt, for example, had several different creation stories, as did the Babylonians. They had different stories, because they had different purposes and reasons for telling the story, and each of them contains a fundamental truth that might not be about how creation was made, but the why and the who of creation. But before we dig into that, let’s clear up one piece of information.

If you notice, and hopefully you did, or you heard me point it out in the worship video we send out on Friday’s. Today’s passage does not begin at the beginning of chapter two, as we might expect it to, but instead it begins at verse four, and then not even at the start, but what is called verse 4b, because it’s the second line of the verse. In the original manuscripts of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, there are no chapter and verse markings. Occasionally there would be a larger space of white in the text marking a transition, but that was the only breaks in the text. You could not cite chapter and verse, you would just read or say the passage out loud so that people would not what you were talking about. Chapters were not added until the 13th century when Robert Langston, who was the arch bishop of Canterbury, added them to the text. We have no idea why he made the decisions he did, and you will sometimes see, as we do here, that there were some very strange decisions made, and, quite frankly, he made some mistakes. But, Langston did not do verses, that didn’t come until the mid-16th century, when Robert Estienne, sometimes also called Robert Stephens, added verses, which also occasionally have some strange placement. There have been attempts to correct some of these problems, but they have failed.