People of the Book - Christianity Today

Ever notice, when you're preaching, how few Philistines drop by the church anymore? Or how rarely Moabites get converted and lead a small group? Or how no one has a cousin married to an Amalekite?

Pretty much all the nations and tribes from Bible times that were of Israel's size are gone. So why did Israel survive? Not just survive; in the words of Thomas Cahill, how did a tribe of desert nomads change the way the world thought and felt? What distinguished Israel from everyone else?

It wasn't power. Most of its history Israel was a vassal nation.

It wasn't wealth. Israel was never a major economic player.

It wasn't size. Israel was dwarfed by Greece, Egypt, Babylon, and Rome.

What did Israel have?

A book. Scrolls really, with books like Genesis or Isaiah written over the centuries, that most people, being illiterate, had to hear being read. They had a book like no other.

Their book said that instead of little tribal gods locally, there was one God who created all things and planned on redeeming all things.

It said life was not an endless cycle of repetition. It said history was a story—God's story, with a beginning, a crisis, and in a day to come, a climax.

Fewer than half of all Americans can name the first book of the Bible.

It said that human beings made by and accountable to this God can now know how to live.

This book so defined them they were called "people of the book." To help their children learn the book was the greatest task of every parent.

To be able to teach this book—to be a rabbi—was their greatest ambition.

The historian Josephus wrote: Time and again we have given practical proof of our reverence for our own scriptures … it is an instinct with every Jew, from the day of their birth, to regard them as the decrees of God, to abide by them, and if need be, cheerfully to die for them. Time and again the sight has been witnessed of prisoners enduring torture and death rather than utter a single word against them. What Greek would endure as much for the same cause?

Humanly speaking, the book is what they had to offer the world. The book is what shaped them and held them together. The book started every morning: "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One"). The book didn't say, "O Israel, think for yourselves. Follow your bliss. Go with your gut." It just said, Hear. It was the source of all wisdom, the guidance for all problems, the authoritative appeal in every debate. The rabbis often disagreed over what it meant. But everybody understood its status. It was the last word. They never got over this awe that in this book God has spoken—"What advantage is there, then, of being a Jew? Much in every way! First of all, they have been entrusted with the very words of God" (Rom. 3:1).

They had the book. And now this book, with some significant additions, has become our book. Now we are its stewards.

But we have cable.

We have Oprah and Dr. Phil and Forbes and Suze Orman and Jack Welch and Dear Abby. We are free to pick and choose. No one is in a culturally-assigned position to say, "Hear O San Francisco …"

As a preacher, my charge is to proclaim the message of the Scriptures. To help the people in my congregation become a people of the book. I love getting to do this. But it isn't getting easier. Over the past decades, the Scriptures have not changed.

But the people we preach to have. There was a time when many if not most people in our culture accorded some sense of authority to the Scriptures, even if they were not churchgoers. A postmodern generation is more skeptical. David Kinnaman notes that only three in ten people in America think that the Bible "is accurate in all the principles it teaches."

Even inside the church, attention spans are getting shorter. The rate of biblical illiteracy is growing. The questioning of authority—the "hermeneutic of suspicion"—is stronger. Information overload—about biblical scholarship along with everything else—keeps growing.

Congregations shaped by the Scriptures have preachers shaped by the Scriptures.

It's a strange thing: the book has never been so accessible. According to The Guinness Book of Records, L. Ron Hubbard's writings of scientology have been translated into 65 languages; the Koran is supposed to be read in Arabic so it hasn't been translated as much; the Book of Mormon is in about 100 languages. But 2,656 languages have all or some of the Bible.

Some 65 million copies of the Bible are bought or distributed in the U.S. every year—nothing else is a close second. The average house has at least three. People cheer the Bible, buy the Bible, give the Bible, own the Bible—they just don't actually read the Bible.

According to George Gallup:

One third of those surveyed know who delivered the Sermon on the Mount.
Fewer than half can name the first book of the Bible;
80 percent of born-again Christians believe the phrase God helps those who help themselves is in the Bible (it's actually Ben Franklin).

So I'm thinking a lot these days about how to help the people that God brings my way to know and love the book. How do I proclaim the Scriptures in a way that honors their authority, and at the same time recognizes where my hearers are (as opposed to where I wish they were)?

Here are some of the assumptions that help me to teach Scripture in a culture that isn't always big on hearing.

The Unavoidable Starting Point

The first assumption involves the life of the teacher. I cannot give what I do not have.

I was at a conference recently on generosity, and I asked a man who works full time with churches in the area of stewardship what typifies generous churches. His immediate response: "They have generous senior pastors."

Whoops.

It was a reminder that, for those of us who work at churches, we never get to start with our congregations, only with ourselves. Before I can think about how I present the Scriptures to my congregation, I have to start with me. Do I regularly let it wash over me? Do I enjoy reading it? Am I learning it in fresh ways? Do I ever experiment with trying to do what it says?

Congregations shaped by the Scriptures generally have preachers who are shaped by the Scriptures.

I know of no substitute, if I want to preach the Scriptures with power, for carving out chunks of time to read the Bible, so I can fall in love once again with the only words that bring hope to the world.

When You're Given a Hearing

A second assumption involves those being taught.

I was talking recently to a guy in his twenties whom I'll call Mike. I like him a lot. His parents were divorced when he was two. He grew up in Connecticut, in a family that was post-Christian. He went to church a few times in grade school on a holiday.

We who preach have one tool. We are people of the book.

He is happy in some respects, and troubled in others. He gets anxious sometimes. He has never had a romantic relationship.

Mike does not consider Christianity to be a live option. It's not that he has studied it and rejected it. He just assumes that it's just not something an educated person would take seriously. Might as well ask him if he's considered becoming a Druid. When I talked to him about my faith, he listened with more politeness than curiosity.

However, at one point in our conversation I told him: "I don't think you are alive by accident. I think you were planned. I think someone created you. I think you have a purpose." He got very quiet, and tears filled his eyes for a few moments. There is a hunger for God in him. He has no good alternatives.

He ended up going to church for only one reason. He has a friend, a classmate who listened to him and invited him along as part of an inner-city AIDS ministry. The only starting place for his journey with God was relational.

There was a time when Christianity was more or less our society's civil religion. That may still be true in certain regions. But not where I live. Gather a few hundred people together at random here, and if you use "The Bible says …" to start a sentence, people are not likely to swallow it without hesitation.

In many ways our situation is increasingly like that of the early church. The gospel had to compete in a multi-religious, pluralistic environment where, as Edward Gibbon put it, "the masses considered all religions equally true, the philosophers considered them equally false, and the politicians considered them equally useful." Historians like Rodney Stark say that the reason the church exploded across the ancient world was, to a large extent it was because the church incarnated the word—cared for the poor, fed the hungry, embraced the orphan, risked sheltering the sick.

The gospel had to win a hearing by being incarnated along with being proclaimed. Those of us who preach the Scriptures, along with being nourished by it ourselves, have to figure out along with our congregations how we can incarnate the gospel in our community, or we will preach to a religious ghetto.

Opportune Suffering

I assume that everyone I talk to knows about suffering. They are suffering now, or know someone who is, or will be suffering in the near future. And it will break them wide open. I assume that brokenness—from addiction, divorce, depression, isolation—is more widespread and closer to the surface than ever.

I was talking to a friend recently, a wise man who has suffered deeply, and he said that he has grown so much through his pain that he thinks that when he enters into eternity, he will ask why he did not suffer more. I'm not sure I have that much maturity. But I do know this: suffering causes people to ask questions like no other force in the world. It snaps the threads of our illusions of control and sufficiency.

And no book addresses suffering like the Bible does. So I come back on a regular basis to books like Ecclesiastes, or the psalms of lament, or the story of Job, the books of "wintry" spirituality to use Martin Marty's term.

One practice that has changed for me over the years helped me in preaching on Job. The practice: to identify a text or teaching in Scripture you don't understand, and study it until you understand how it made sense to the author.

In Job it took this form: I never liked the epilogue in chapter 42 where Job gets new kids. It seemed callous—how can you replace children?

Then I read a wonderful treatment of Job by Ellen Davis. She noted that:

The questions God asks Job toward the end of the book have a trajectory; they point to how God is "irrationally loving and extravagantly generous to his least 'strategic creatures' ";
In chapter 42, the text lists the names of Job's daughters but not his sons (unheard of in Hebrew genealogies);
They are oddly extravagant names—one meant dove, one was a spice like you might smell when you go into Cinnabon and know there's a God, one name was a kind of make-up, like naming your daughter Maybelline;
Job gives his daughters an inheritance; never done in the ancient world because that money would support their fathers-in-law and not him.

That epilogue that I had never liked was a teaching of enormous beauty: that when Job saw who God was, he became like him—irrationally loving and extravagantly generous. It was pursuing the part of the text I least understood and least liked that yielded the deepest meaning.

In a simpler vein, I saw a sermon recently where the preacher showed pictures of three people in the congregation who had died recently, and talked about their lives. It was impossible to look at those faces without opening up to the reality of death and what's beyond in a way not usually done in everyday life.

An Edge Driven by Urgency

I assume that the people who most need to be reached will not be reached by a sermon that is an abstract reflection, a few interesting ideas, or the saccharine telling of a few stories from Chicken Soup for the Soul. I assume that if preaching the Scriptures is going to get under the skin of people I speak to, things will have to get a little edgy.

We get so used to the Bible, we miss its edginess. The prophets were the original performance artists. What they did was much more like radical street theater than it was like a church service. Ezekiel spent over a year laying on his left side just to make a point. He ate food that he publicly baked over cow manure. (And it took some bargaining between him and God to avoid even worse fuel.) Jeremiah buried an undergarment till it was putrid and then wore it around to show people what judgment looked like. Hosea married a prostitute to show people how much forgiveness costs a breaking heart. Jesus cursed fig trees and threw tables over in the Temple and took a whip to religious leaders.

I use a flip chart sometimes.

I think, if I'm honest about it, what holds me back is not lack of creativity. It's lack of urgency. I don't think the main force that drove the prophets was creativity for creativity's sake. I think it was spiritual reality. There was such a desperate awareness of the need for God to come fix things up that it drove them to do anything to make space in peoples' awareness for God.

I'm not a performance artist. I know that I work within a "jar of clay," as we all do. I don't want to be creative in a way that draws more attention to the creativity than to the message.

But I also don't just want to drone on while everybody goes to sleep. And I find the teachers I most learn from often find non-verbal ways to drive home what they are teaching: having a potter throwing pots while they are teaching about Jeremiah and the potter's wheel; Nancy Beach bringing an autumn leaf to teach on the beauty of the Creator; Bill Hybels having a bent reed and a snuffed candle and a jar that was used in the ancient world to capture tears while teaching on these images of the comfort of God. I think of Rob Bell with a goat to teach on the freedom of forgiveness.

Essential Belief

I assume God uses the Bible to change lives.

Jerome Frank wrote that the most powerful variable in healing is this: the agent doing the healing believes it will actually happen. And I believe there is a similar dynamic with the Scriptures. The Scriptures really are used by God in a unique way to change lives. But those of us who teach them must be gripped by this conviction. It cannot be faked or forced. It comes as a gift.

Max DePree had a young grandson who once locked himself in the bathroom. Nothing his mother did could get him out. She called the police, and they too were helpless. Next she tried the fire department, who came in full force with several trucks. They broke down the bathroom door with their axes.

The boy's father got home when things were in an uproar. He could not figure out why, when there was no smoke or fire, his door and frame were in shambles. He was still grousing about it the next day to a friend, who passed on a sage observation. A fireman has two tools: an axe, and a hose. If you want someone to pick a lock with a paper clip, try a locksmith or a cat burglar. If you call a fireman, you're either going to get the axe or the hose.

Those of us who preach have one tool. We are a people of the book. Other people will be more expert in social sciences and philosophy and literature. Other people will be more expert in communications theory. Other people will be better at story-telling and motivational speaking.

I want to learn what I can from all those practices, because they can help me do what I do better.

But they are not my axe.

A doctor has a little black bag. A CPA has a calculator. Wolfgang Puck has an oven.

Those of us who preach have lots of other helps: commentaries and dictionaries and small children we pay to say cute things, but in the end only one thing is indispensable.

Someone told me about a preacher who would often say, "People don't care what I know. They care about what I'm learning." And I do want to be open about the life lessons I am picking up along the way. But the main thing I have to offer my congregation does not fit under the category of personal wisdom.

We are people of the book.

John Ortberg will answer questions about this topic at the National Pastors Convention. For info, visitwww.nationalpastorsconvention.com

John Ortberg is editor at large of Leadership and pastor of Menlo Park (California) Presbyterian Church.