Weekly Message 8/13/2010

What Does It Mean To Be An Interfaith Christian Bridge Builder?

Part 3 – Building Bridges between Sacred Texts and the Here and Now

 

In Part 1 of this mini-series I talked about building bridges with God and with other faiths.  In Part 2, I talked about building bridges with the Holy Spirit.  In Part 3 I want to talk about building bridges from the scriptures and ancient texts of old to our own lives and the lives of those we minister to in the world we are in today.  Our job as ministers is to build a bridge between the ancient text and the contemporary audiences we work within today. On one side of the bridge is ‘then’. On the other side is ‘now’.

We will all naturally drift to one side of the bridge or the other.  Some of us drift to the ‘then’ side. We are scholars of the ancient texts, the lost or missing books, the ‘original tongue’ in Biblical Scripture, the Catholic Encyclopedia.  We know ancient Jerusalem better than our own city. We spend six days a week locked up in our study of verb tenses, historical background and every detail of text and can quote the Bibile verbatim.

Others of us drift more naturally to the ‘now’ side.   We don’t really care about the biblical word and ancient texts so much.  We don’t spend much time studying them. We are soldiers for the people.  We want to know what’s going on in the lives of those to whom we preach and serve. We think about the homeless we work with, the family whose husband/father just died, the woman in the pew whose husband has just left her, the man who has an addiction to pain medicine or the person who is dying of cancer. What can we do for them.  How can we help them.

On one side we have someone who goes on and on about every detail of the sacred writings but cannot see the people or their suffering.  On the other side we have the self-help ministers who are more interested in passing phases of life than the eternal Word of God. Both sides can seem quite admirable but both sides are completely wrong without the other.   Both sides of the bridge are important, have no doubt in that.  What we must understand is that we’ve been called to connect God’s Word of the ancient texts with the lives of the people living in the world today. We can’t fall off on either extreme but must build a bridge between the two.

It’s easy to be biblical if you don’t care about being relevant. It’s easy to be relevant if you don’t care about being biblical. But as pastors, we’re called to be both. The challenge of preaching is to declare eternal truth (what doesn’t change) in a culture that’s always changing. The message never changes. It’s the “faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” as Jude (v.3 NIV) calls it. But the methods have to change with every generation. Otherwise you’re not being faithful to the intent of the Bible.  “If you preach the gospel in all aspects with the exception of the issues which deal specifically with your time, you are not preaching the gospel at all.”  Martin Luther How do we go about building a bridge between the true teachings of Jesus Christ and our current situation in the world today?

We start with prayer.  We ask Jesus Christ to inspire us. We ask the Holy Spirit to intercede in our study, and to give us answers.  We ask God to lead us to the right sections of scripture to read for the subject we are searching.  We ask God to give us understanding and to solve any conflicts that might arise in the reading the scripture by leading us to the correct meaning of the original tongue. 

Then we study the scriptures.  Let us be observant.  One of the best methods to study the Bible is to look up every scripture on a particular topic.  There are a lot of Bible helps and indexes written that can help us with this.  When reading other sacred texts though we don’t have quite the helps we do with the Bible in order to look up topics so it may be better to do a verse-by-verse study of other sacred texts.

We should look for the timeless truths in the scriptures we are studying.  What does the Word we are reading say that spans across time.  Everything else will build on what that truth is.  Let us think about our own lives and our ministries we feel called to do.  Let us think about the people we are working with, what their particular needs are; what their hurts are; what their fears are; what their ‘sins’ are.  First we do a critical analysis of the words we’ve read and then we do a critical analysis of ourselves and the people we work with in our ministries.

What do we know to be true about all people?   We know every person wants to be loved.  We know everyone wants their life to count.  We personally know life is empty without Christ.  We can see that many people carry a load of guilt.  Many people are consumed with bitterness from past hurts.  I think we recognize there is a universal fear of death.  Also we know people fear what they don’t understand or don’t know and become biased and prejudiced because of it.  Those are some pretty universal truths about all people.  Now let’s take it further and get specific about our own needs and the needs of the people we minister to.

Once we’ve studied God’s Word, discovered the eternal truth for ourselves, and thought about the people we minister to, then we’ve got to apply the eternal truth we’ve learned to our own particular needs and to the needs of the people we serve within our ministries.   We should consider the age, culture, spiritual maturity, and other traits. Now we ask ourselves a few questions. What would it look like in our/their lives if we/they took that eternal truth seriously? What would we/they need to do to act on that truth? When we discover that, we’ve discovered how to apply the eternal truths from God’s word into our lives and the lives of those we serve.  In other words we personalize it for ourselves and for them.

Unless we are able to take ourselves, our ministries and the people we serve from the original point of observation to the ending point of personalization, we’re not building the bridge right and we’re not doing justice to God’s Word.Like I mentioned earlier, we have this tendency to focus on only one side of the bridge or the other.  We can often be really good at studying the scriptures and finding the timeless truths in them but totally ignore the other side of the bridge, the ‘now’ side and how to apply that truth.  Or we can be really good at knowing the needs of the people we serve and teach self help and pulling ourselves up by the ‘boot straps’ and totally ignore the scriptures and the lessons, eternal truths of Jesus Christ, found within them.  Another words we are leaving God out of the picture.

Truly, ‘life change’ occurs in our lives and others’ lives when we build the ‘whole’ bridge in this way letting God’s Word, or God, work the miracle and do the changing.  I love to see God change lives.   I know it’s not easy to be a bridge builder but I know it is what is needed and what we must do.

 

We will continue the topic of Bridge Building in the next message.

 

Blessings, Reverend Sharra