In her poem Mysteries, Yes!, Mary Oliver expresses the profound spiritual intersections between knowledge, understanding, and mystery. She ends the poem exclaiming, “Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say ‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.” Of course, this isn’t about two groups of people in which one knows stuff and the other remains ignorant. This is about a greater reality that how one comes to know things impacts the knowing itself. And I think that Oliver’s poem is a helpful lens to Paul’s acknowledgement in 2 Cor. 3:6 about such knowing in which the “letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
This sermon can’t be captured by one passage of Scripture. And yet it seeks to wrestle with how Scripture and the Spirit work together to bring life. It’s the belief of the early church that reading Scripture well, or “competently” using Paul’s language, demands a deep reliance upon the Holy Spirit to interpret it for us and transform us with it. It’s the difficult reality of naming and acknowledging ways of reading the Bible as life giving rather than soul killing, as Paul states. It’s the reality that anything can be misused and abused, even holy things, in the name of God. This won’t be exhaustive – we’ll talk more next week – but I would like to share three ways of reading competently which marry the word and the Spirit together. The Covenant Church states this reality this way:
“The Covenant Church believes that the effective power of the scriptural word is inseparably associated with the ministry of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit never works independently of the word, and the word is made effective through the Holy Spirit. The union of word and Spirit is a central theme in evangelical faith.” Let’s unpack that union with three statements.
To read Scripture competently is to read with the Spirit-filled recognition that we are the problem. If we ever read with a certain triumphalism that we have the Spirit and therefore all the answers or that we have clear and unfettered access to all of the mysteries of God, we are on dangerous ground that we will use Scripture to oppress and harm others. In such a scenario, we are the God who we read back into Scripture. We see the things, in other words, we want to see which make us holy and others not. So a Spirit-filled reading is always a Spirit driven project that decenters us. The Apostle will claim that his own competency doesn’t come from himself but from God (2 Cor. 3:5). A Spirit-filled reading is a gospel way of reading in which we read as sinners saved by grace. So we need the gifts of the Spirit like humility, gentleness, patience, spoken about last week, to position ourselves rightly with respect to the Word. We must be careful to acknowledge that the authority of Scripture and a view of inspiration, in and of themselves, haven’t been able to keep the church from engaging in soul killing behavior. In fact, those theories often made believers more self-assured and obstinate. A Spirit-filled reading is not one where I claim first and foremost that I have some special anointing to read it rightly but one in which I offer Spirit-filled words that “in my frailty and sin I stand in constant need of God’s mercy and help” (Words we say at every communion service from the Covenant Book of Worship). If we learn anything by reading the Bible with the Spirit it's that often the worse readers are the ones who imagine that they read it from some privileged place apart from frailty and sin. Reading without graciously acknowledging one’s own sin and frailty is not a Spirit-led reading, it’s always a soul killing one. This is not to say that sin is what’s most important about us but that we read with a Spirit-filled orientation toward grace, which IS the Spirit-filled orientation of dealing with sin. When we read that way, we won’t judge others, won’t condemn ourselves harshly, won’t badger the weak, won’t berate ourselves, but will look for the healing word, the gentle word, the patient word, the word that is love. If your reading of Scripture has people fleeing from God, that is a good indication that it is not Spirit led because the Spirit always leads sinners TO the Father who is good.
To read Scripture competently is to recognize it’s a Spirit-filled, God-breathed project. It’s true that Scripture is God-breathed and remains utterly necessary for recognizing the Spirit, being transformed, encouraging us, educating us, etc. (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Scripture is a primary tool of the Spirit to do those things. The Spirit and Scripture don’t work independently from one another. But it’s also true that we are God-breathed and remain utterly necessary for recognizing the Spirit and reading texts. We must listen to each other, Paul says. In fact, we ourselves are letters from Christ (2 Cor. 3:2-3) and our life-giving or soul-killing stories are critical for reading and discerning the Bible rightly and well. That’s why the Apostle Paul will call every believer to “discern” how the Spirit is at work in the lives of others and through Scripture. The church didn’t wake up one day and simply change its majority-led, oppressive position on slavery or women. Positions held by people who held to its unique authority, believed in Jesus, and studied the Bible with critical, technical tools of history, exegesis, theology, etc. And likewise, those historic changes which ended slavery and promoted women weren’t people simply utilizing new Bible study techniques or tools to draw a different conclusion. It was Bible study born out of listening to the stories of Spirit-breathed, Spirit-empowered individuals and groups of people who spoke of heart-wrenching, soul-killing realities while also offering evidence of fruit of the Spirit. As Paul suggests in 2 Corinthians 3, such people are evidence for the Spirit’s work and thus actual theological proof for a particular spiritual perspective.
Friends, let me be plain. I want you to read what the Bible says about divorce as Scripture that is inspired and God-breathed, profitable, important, and true. But I also want you to read it, humbly, prayerfully, hearing my story as a God-breathed person who has experienced the utterly painful and shaking reality of a divorce and the incredible peace of remarriage. Doing both is what it means to read the Bible as a God-breathed project. This is not an argument that all stories are equal. Nor is it an argument that all portions of Scripture speak with the same authority. Rather, it’s the deep principle, grounded and illustrated in the Bible itself, that God is actively working and shaping believers through the Scriptures by the power of the Holy Spirit. Scripture is a Spirit-driven project. It was the Spirit who creates the word, gives it power and interprets it is the same Spirit who works in and through us.
To read Scripture competently requires that we read with the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:6-16). Paul will provocatively refer to good, spiritual wisdom as having “the mind of Christ.” And that mind is the Spirit at work in our midst through us and Scripture. The mind of Christ refers to the trinitarian reality that Jesus is the Word and the centerpiece and center narrative of the Bible. So to read with the mind of Christ is to locate Jesus and the Gospel as the central story that the Bible wants to tell. A Spirit-filled reading understands the purpose of Scripture is to tell the story of Jesus. Jesus will charge the Pharisees, the Scripture scholars of the day, in John 5:37-40 saying, “You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, 38 nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. 39 You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”
But reading the Bible with the mind of Christ isn’t simply noting the purpose of Scripture as a gospel project. It’s also a recognition of HOW Jesus read it in a healing and liberating way. Jesus read the Bible always with the marginal in mind - with the hurting and the hungry. To see an actual incident of Jesus reading the Bible in a Spirit-filled way, a life-giving rather than soul-killing way, one need go no farther than Matthew 12 where the Pharisees oppose him and his disciples because they were plucking and eating grain on the Sabbath, which for them was unscriptural and to be condemned. Immediately after this confrontation over plucking the heads of grain, Jesus will encounter a man with a withered hand, and the Pharisees will watch him carefully to see what he will do — will Jesus break the Sabbath again!? Jesus responds with a question, “Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep!” I believe that Jesus’ argument clues us into the significant difference between how he reads the Scriptures versus how the Pharisees read them. See, the Pharisees’ theology works from the abstract: Is Sabbath work forbidden in Scripture? Yes. Is plucking grain work? Yes. Is healing work? Yes. Then we have our conclusion—plucking grain and healing on the Sabbath are forbidden. Jesus’ reading of the Bible, however, also involves the value of the person: Here is a hungry group or a hurting person in front of me. What do they need? How can I help? Ah, but it’s the Sabbath. Let me now take this person’s unique situation to the Scriptures—and when we do that, we can see even more clearly that the Scriptures themselves address real human faces. They accommodate and address human need. And Jesus will argue that the Sabbath itself aims to serve people and NOT the other way around (in Mark and Luke Jesus will say this strongly, “The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath)! Friends, the same should be said for Scripture as well.
If you’re Bible reading doesn’t leave people liberated, you aren’t reading it as a Spirit-filled project. In the next passage after these two Sabbath encounters Jesus reflects on this controversy over reading Scripture with his disciples and, funny enough, quotes again from the OT, Isaiah 42:1-4, which details the compassionate work of God’s anointed. It says, “He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick . . .” The Pharisees, because they see no human face when they read the Scriptures, are quite willing to break reeds and snuff out wicks. Is it any wonder then why they missed the word of God with a human face in their midst? If only they had said, “Look! Laughed in astonishment, and bowed their heads.”
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