(Inspiration and insight for this article came from Vítor Westhelle, “On the Authority of the Scriptures: More than Enough” in The Church Event: Call and Challenge of a Church Protestant, Fortress 2010.)

Let’s admit it, the Bible is really hard to read.  It comes from a different time and from another part of the world.  It is written in different genres that are unfamiliar to us.  And often we don’t really know what it is we’re reading.

Lutheran Christianity gives us a great starting place.  Our Lutheran tradition says the Bible points us to Christ.  (Martin Luther said the scriptures are the manger that holds the Christ child.)  Now, that doesn’t answer every question, but it does aim us in the right direction. 

It can be hard to see how some Bible texts point to Christ.  Martin Luther even pointed to some parts of Scripture that he felt did not convey Christ.  Yet still…   the broad sweep of Scripture reveals that:  God is God of life and new life; God rescues, restores, liberates, and sets free; God has regard for the lowly and the powerless; God wants a relationship with God’s people; and when we mess things up, God works to bring us back.  In all these ways, the Scriptures show that the way of God is indeed the way of Jesus Christ.  In other words…  the scriptures point to Christ.

The Scriptures show that Christ comes and restores us back to God (we call this salvation).  We don’t earn it, deserve it, or make ourselves more acceptable to God.  We are saved as a free gift of God’s grace.  We grasp ahold of God’s gift of grace only by trusting and believing that the gift is real.  This trust in God’s grace is called FAITH.  Having faith is not a statement about ourselves; it’s a statement about God.  God is worthy of faith because God is trustworthy and true.

Lutherans put these pieces together and say that:

• we are saved by grace alone,
• which we receive through faith alone,
• because of Christ alone,
• whom we know through the testimony of the word alone. 

Which means:  We are restored to God (and one another) by trusting and believing in the generous gift of God that comes in Jesus Christ, as told to us in the words of Scripture.

Those four little statements (grace alone; faith alone; Christ alone; word alone) are Luther’s great insight and were the basis of Luther’s argument with the Roman Catholic Church of the 1500s and the reason there was a Reformation.

At that time, the Church taught that “there is no salvation apart from the church.”  The Church had inserted itself between God and the people and claimed to have the authority to hand out salvation. 

Luther argued that the Church does not save us!  We are saved by Christ and Christ alone.  Salvation does not come through our works and efforts; nor by the rituals, prayers, religious relics, or buying of indulgences offered (or required) by the Roman Church.  Salvation is a gift from God by grace alone.  Grace gives the gift and calls us to trust that the gift is real, by faith alone.  And what is the basis and foundation of our faith?  The hope, and the promise, and the truth of Jesus Christ, revealed in the word alone.

Luther’s message was important then (and still is today), but we need to remember that his argument belonged to a specific time and a specific issue.  The issue was that the Church claimed it had the authority to hand out salvation and that religious activities and practices could help you “score points” with God and move closer to salvation.  Luther’s argument was against the Church overreaching its proper authority.  Instead, Luther pointed to Christ as the only way of salvation and the scriptures as the only reliable witness to Christ.

A lot has happened since the 1500s.  Around the 1700s something called “The Enlightenment” occurred and people developed different ideas about what is “truth”.  People came to think that only logic, reason, and hard observable facts counted as “truth”.  The Bible came into question because at times it contradicted itself, some details were historically incorrect, and some stories defied “reason” or “logic”.

A good “Lutheran” answer to these doubts would have been to say that the Bible is “truth” because it points to God’s promises that come in Jesus Christ.  To argue over every little dot and dash is meaningless compared to the much greater promise of the Good News of Jesus.  But not everyone wanted to take this route.

Instead, some people opted for “defending” the Bible.  They dug in, insisting every story was historically factual, every word correct, and the entire text was without error (inerrant).  Rather than trusting the Bible because it pointed to Jesus, for them the Bible itself became the object of their faith.  These “true believers” set themselves as the experts and made it their project to “prove” that the Bible is “true” (factual) in every detail; and to rebuff and reject those who dared to think differently.  This is referred to as fundamentalism.  For them, salvation is only for those who “believe in the Bible” and its “right interpretation”.  They stole Luther’s “word alone” phrase and twisted it to mean that they would ignore logic, reason, science, or historical fact, and believe only the Bible (their interpretation of it).  What gets lost is grace, and faith, and trust in Christ alone. 

Fundamentalism distorts the Bible and distorts Luther’s teaching.  It distorts Luther because “word alone” was never about rejecting logic and reason, but about challenging the authority of the Roman Church and returning authority to Jesus Christ and the witness of the Scriptures.  Fundamentalism distorts the Bible because it makes a book, a created thing, into the object of faith.

It is important to know what the Bible is, for knowing protects us from trying to turn the Bible into something it was never intended to be.  So then, what is the Bible?  It is a book.  To be sure, it is a holy book, but it is a book.  The book points beyond itself to the hope and promise that is Jesus Christ, God’s Son.  The book does not save us; God does.  The book is not the promise; Jesus is.  Jesus is light and life; Jesus is our hope and salvation; Jesus is God’s grace and truth made flesh.  We have faith in that promise.  We have faith because we trust that the witness of the Bible points us to Jesus Christ, our salvation. 

​I want to offer a couple of stories.

The first is about a family:  a mother, father, and four kids.  This family knew another girl in their community whose mother had died a few years earlier and whose father was unable to raise her.  So, the family decided that this girl would come to live with them.  They didn’t adopt her and there was no foster care arrangement.  It didn’t fit any of the “normal” categories.  She just became part of their family.

She stayed with them through high school; and they even helped with her college expenses.  When she got married, the whole family came together for the wedding.  When the family gathers for Christmas and Easter and all the big family events, all five of the children are together; the four born to that family and the one who came along a bit later.  They are one family.

The second story is about a father and a daughter.  The dad is an ordained Lutheran pastor in Pennsylvania, doing what pastors do—proclaiming the Good News of God in Jesus Christ.  The daughter grew up as a pastor’s kid in a Lutheran home, doing what church kids do—Sunday school, Confirmation, youth groups, and all the rest.  The daughter grew up, and then went to college, and she met a guy.

It turns out the guy was Jewish.  Of course, she ended up marrying him.  They lived in Brooklyn and she formed a close connection with her husband’s family and with their synagogue.  They had a “Jewish” home, but the daughter was quite convinced that she was “too Lutheran” to ever convert to Judaism.  Except…  she did!  She became Jewish.

But wait, there’s more.  The father, the Lutheran pastor, got elected to be a Bishop in Pennsylvania and the daughter started studying to become a rabbi.  At the dad’s installation as Bishop, his daughter was there, and she read from the Hebrew Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament); she read in English and in Hebrew.  The Bishop, her dad, said, “What went through my mind was intense pride and love for my daughter’s charismatic presence, her poise, and yes, her faith.”

One family.  One God.

It is interesting how the lines that divide us do not always stay so clear, even lines like family and religion.  In the encounters of real life, dividing lines get blurry.

I’m not saying it is easy when we bump up against those boundaries.  For the family that added the daughter, it cost them space in the home and cost them money.  Even more difficult, they had to figure out some new lines of relationship.  For the Bishop-dad and the Rabbi-daughter they had to reconsider religious claims about absolute truth.  More than that, they had to think about their sense of identity and belonging.  Those things are big demands.

And yet, out there at the edges…  where we meet those who are different, that’s where the growth happens; that’s where we learn and where we stretch ourselves.

Mary “Joy” Philip was born and lived in India, where she was a professor in zoology.  She then studied at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and is now a professor and theologian in Waterloo, Ontario.  In her scientific and theological studies and in her life, she knows what it is to be at the margins.  In her contribution to a 2010 book, in her chapter titled, “The Elusive Lure of the Lotus,” Philip writes, “Margins are spaces where there is movement, where there is constant dissembling and reassembling, where there is always a metamorphosis, the possibility of being and becoming.”

She points out that Jesus did not carry out His ministry hunkered down at the center, in Jerusalem.  “Jesus, the godman lived at the margins, in the Galilees, where from, in the eyes of others, no good could come” (a reference to John 1:46).  What Jesus did in his ministry was move outward…   He met people out at the margins.  Jesus went to the lepers, the beggars, the man living among the tombs, the woman at the well, tax collectors, sinners, and those despised Samaritans.

It’s not easy going out there; it’s not safe.  Many people were unhappy with Jesus; they said he was abandoning traditional values and even that he was immoral.  But it is good for us to remember, the Good News of Jesus Christ did not start with us, someone had to take it to us.  The reason we have the Good News is that Jesus and others were willing to move OUT, away from the center, and take this Good News out to the margins and into the world.

There are some loud, noisy, and angry voices in our world today.  People who want to define the “center” and they believe it’s their prerogative to do so.  They want to reject anything with a different skin color, a different language, a different nationality, or a different religion.  But pulling in to the “center” and rejecting those at the margins, that is NOT the Jesus message.

Jesus sees those other people, other groups, other “flocks” (John 10:16) and Jesus throws his arms wide open.  Jesus will bring them along as well; and there will be one flock, one shepherd.  

Jesus didn’t say that we will all look the same, or talk the same, or think the same, believe the same things, or all worship the same way.  And Jesus didn’t say it would be easy or affordable.  But the direction of Jesus, the movement of God in the world is to draw us together.

This Savior, this Good Shepherd (John 10:11) came for a world and for a time just like ours, now.  Jesus went out to margins for our health and healing and growth.  Jesus came for the well-being of all.  He came to draw us together.
​
One flock.  One shepherd.