Scripture: 2 Timothy 3:14-17; Luke 14:7-14; John 21:25; Genesis 32:24-30
The Bible is neither a dictated text to be read with a single unchallengeable interpretation nor a buffet to pick from at will, but a gift and a means of grace to be received humbly and interpreted together through love of God and neighbor.
Illustrations: bible-nursery-song, can-opener-toilet-brush, quran-dictation, jefferson-bible, wedding-banquet-host, charlie-proverbs-class, luther-swaddling-clothes, mary-vs-jacob-wrestling, augustine-love-rule, covenant-bible-window
September 7, 2025
The Bible
2 Timothy 3:14-17 Luke 14:7-14
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have known sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. - 2 Timothy 3:14-17
When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers and sisters or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” - Luke 14:7-14
There’s an old children’s nursery song that goes
the b i b l e. Yes. That’s the book for me. I stand alone on the word of God, the b i b l e. Bible.
Some of you may have learned this. Some of you may have not, but the kind of idea of the Bible here has shaped much of our imagination.
Fare warning, I am about to get word-nerdy on you, but I feel like Jesus affirms word nerds in that he is the word made flesh, but you have been warned.
Part of the challenge in talking about the Bible is that we are taught to see the word Bible as a title. Many of us take this for granted when it’s just not the case. Bible comes from Biblion which means book.
And saying scripture isn’t much better. Scripture is writing in Latin. Scripture follows a Latin etymology whereas Bible follows a Greek etymology.
We can get even more confusing when we think about this passage from second Timothy three where the author writes
all scripture is god breathed or inspired.
The scripture referred to here is entirely what we now call the Old Testament. The author of Timothy is not referring to what we call the Bible, the holy scripture. The list of canonical biblical books wasn’t finalized until the middle of the fourth century.
This doesn’t even get to the way the Bible has been used against itself. How do we see the Bible as the word of God in 2025?
Series Intro
My friends, we are continuing our series on the stained glass windows at covenant with the Bible. It’s the last in the first series of gifts of God to us. We even have this biblical quotation. From second Timothy
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
Scripture is inspired, it is also useful. In some ways, calling it useful feels a bit of a let down. A can opener is useful. A toilet brush, things of that nature.
Of what use is the Bible for us?
It is useful for teaching, for correction, for training in justice and equipping the people of God.
I think it’s important when we talk about the Christian scriptures, what we call the Bible, we understand it as a library of holy texts that have been passed down to us through secret tradition, which by faith we read as inspired by God. This library of texts that is filled with different genres, different eras, different languages. This library of holy writings is different from the holy texts of other religions in the world. Most especially here, the Quran of Islam. The claim of the Quran is that it was the words of the angel Gabriel to the prophet Mohammed without any changes. It is a transcription. It is not inspired by God. It is dictated by God.
There isn’t a great interpretative tradition to the Quran like there is for Judaism and Christianity, and even Buddhism, because there is far less ambiguity about the meaning of the text. The Quran says it. Muslims believe it. That settles it.
There are two great ways to misread the Bible. One is to read it as if it were the Quran, as if it were dictated by the angel Gibreel to the prophet over 23 years.
The other great error is to read the bible à la carte, or what I like to call the Bible Buffet; to find what we like, to discard what we don’t like. The principle example of this is the Thomas Jefferson Bible, where Jefferson cut out all the parts of the Gospels he didn’t like or want to deal with anymore.
Both of these errors are false, and both bring us away from who God is and who God is revealed to be in the holy scriptures.
This gets us to our gospel reading for today. Jesus gives the parable of the wedding feast.
When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
I want us to think about ourselves as the host. Who do we seat in the place of honor of biblical authority? One temptation is to seat at the place of honor the interpretation of the Bible we’re most comfortable with and to declare that inspired by God. When people talk about the literal meaning of the Bible, most of the time they’re not talking about the letters themselves, which is what literal means. Instead, it is a specific interpretation that cannot be challenged. It’s still interpretation, but the point of it is that you can’t challenge it. And there’s still metaphor. There’s still typology going on. It’s usually a much more metaphorical reading of the Sermon on the Mount and a much more direct reading of passages in Paul and Leviticus and instructions about the body. People who claim a literal interpretation don’t sell all their possessions to follow Jesus. But we don’t need to delve too much into that.
So this is one tempting reading. The other temptation is to read the bible à la carte. The one we put in the place of honor is ourselves. We put ourselves in the place of honor because we are the ones who choose. We’re the ones who pick. This is also an error and destructive.
So we have these two errors that function as the main errors of traditional and progressive Christianity, respectively. The traditionalist error has a fixation on one reading of scripture in contradiction to even the scriptural text itself. And the progressive error is an à la carte reading of Scripture that passes up uncomfortable passages.
I don’t compare these two temptations in order to claim that I have the true third way of reading the Bible without error. I also make errors in my reading of Scriptures. This is the principal reason to read Scripture together. On my own, I make a lot more errors. On your own, you make a lot more errors. One of the joys of reading the Bible together is that we don’t just read it with the people in the room, but with the whole history of interpretation.
For example, Charlie’s proverbs class is coming up. You all should know that Charlie does so much research on the Book of a Bible that he’s going to be teaching. So much of the background, and all these details. Charlie doesn’t have the final word on the biblical text. God bless him. Neither do I, neither to you. The Bible is a gift, beyond our capacity and control. But it is also a gift that is within our capacity to know, to connect. We read the Bible based on our own experiences in the past of the Bible. Based on how our parents talked about it or our first adult experiences in face. Sometimes it can feel like work and not very useful.
You may think to yourself, “Pastor Wilson, I don’t know if I really want to read the Bible. I just kind of want to do a devotional that tells me what I should think.”
Now, I understand that there are seasons of all of our lives where we are just done, and we’ve got no capacity to think. The Bible is not work. You are not being graded. The Bible is a gift. It’s a gift of life for us. Sometimes it is complicated. Martin Luther said, it is the swaddling clothes in which we find the baby Jesus. The swaddling clothes, I imagine, were pretty dirty, but they held the greatest of gifts.
Near the end of the Gospel of John, John says that if all the actions of Jesus were written down, it would fill up all the books in all the world. But these were written down so that we might have life abundant. They were written down for life.
You don’t have to go to seminary to lead a Bible class at Covenant. We could really use more opportunities to dig into the strange new world of the Bible where life is offered to us all. If that might a possibility for you, please let me know. Maybe on Sunday morning during spiritual formation, or another night during the week. The Bible is a gift to share. The more we read it together, the more we can embody God’s love found there.
I want to end today in a quick primer of how to read the Bible as the word of God, not as the Quran or the Bible Buffet.
The first thing to do is to admit that there are easy parts of the Bible to interpret and difficult parts of the Bible to interpret. Sections that are challenging. If we let the text speak to us, if we let the words speak to us, they challenge us. If we don’t let the text speak, if we use someone else’s reading, or if we ignore it, it’s not challenging. That’s why people fall into these traps, because it’s not a challenging way. They don’t want to be challenged.
Thing’s in this life worth doing are worth struggling for, and meeting God is worth struggling for. Sometimes reading the Bible feels like sitting at the feet of Jesus, like Mary. Other times it feels like Jacob wrestling with the angel, wrestling all night. And that is okay? It doesn’t have to be easy. The whole thing doesn’t have to be easy. But we should interpret the hard passages through the easy passages, stuff that makes the most sense to us. You use that as our foundation to read the other sections. Another rule comes from St. Augustine. He says that we should read the Bible with the love Commandments in mind: love of God and love of neighbor. We read a passage and ask ourselves, where is the love of God here? Where is the love of neighbor here?
When you come into this holy place and see this window, may you remember that the Bible is a gift but reading the Bible is a habit, a practice, a means of grace. The word of God is not limited by our preconceptions of it. Like in the parable, we should place ourselves at the end of the table and read the Bible with humility. Receive not order. Listen not dictate. Seek and we will find.
In the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.