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October 21, 2007
Breathed By God
2 Timothy 3:14 -- 4:5
I've spent much of the last week reading The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible . 1 As the title suggests, the author, A.J. Jacobs, decided to spend one year attempting to obey all the rules of the Bible.
Raised in a secular Jewish family in New York City, Jacobs really didn't know much at all about the Bible when he began the project. He had always considered himself an agnostic, but found himself fascinated by how the Bible has remained a “mighty force” in the world. This project became his way of exploring religion.
Jacobs began by reading straight through the Bible, cover to cover, Genesis to Revelation. As he read, he typed all the rules and guidelines he came across into his laptop. His plan is to “find the original intent of the biblical rule or teaching, and follow that to the letter. If the passage is unquestionably figurative,…I won't obey it literally. But if there's any doubt whatsoever—and most often there is—I will err on the side of being literal.” When he was done, he had 72 pages and more than 700 rules about everything from bathing to walking and talking.
The book chronicles his adventures in attempting to live these rules out. Naturally, many of the rules seem ridiculous or out-dated. He begins by growing a beard because Leviticus 19:27 says, “Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard . ” Next he went through his clothing to make sure that he was not wearing “a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff” (Leviticus 19:19). At some point, he begins wearing only white because Ecclesiastes (9:8) says, “Let your garments be always white.” And, in an amusing episode, he performs the biblically-mandated (Lev. 20:27) stoning of Sabbath breakers and adulterers in a local park, although he does it by using pebbles (since the Bible doesn't mandate the size of the stones).
Jacobs also gives a good effort at obeying the rules most of us know, but few follow— rules like keeping the Sabbath by not working for 24 hours and tithing 10 % of your income, and about not gossiping or coveting or lying.
Although part of his point is to prove that it is virtually impossible to follow the Bible literally, what he also finds is that outward behaviors do affect the inner person. Like on Day 263 when Jacobs writes about his experience with the directive to “give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18), and he becomes almost obsessed with gratefulness, unable to stop offering up thanks for elevators that work and arrive on time, that his wife left the door unlocked so he didn't have to dig out a key, and that his son is healthy and happy.
He reflects, “It's an odd way to live. But also kind of great and powerful. I've never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.” (p. 269) And when he's thanking God for these things, “it gives the act of thanking more weight.” (p. 269)
By the end of the project, Jacobs is still an agnostic, but he says he is “a reverent agnostic,” aware of the sacredness of things, and that there is something transcendent, beyond the everyday (p. 329).
It was an interesting read. I enjoyed learning along with Jacobs as he talked with rabbis and pastors and professors about the origins and possible “whys” of some of the laws. He also wrote about visits and conversations he had with literalist faith communities—Hasidic Jews, the Amish, the folks at the Creationism Museum in Kentucky, and snake handlers in Tennessee. To his credit, he treats these subjects with respect and kindness and almost admiration as he tries to find out why they believe what they do. And I admired him for submerging himself in religion so completely, admittedly with more discipline than I often live my own faith.
It was also interesting to spend the same week mulling over this passage from 2 Timothy 3:14-17:
“But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you have learned it, and how from childhood you have known the 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 everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.”
This passage says what we believe to be true: the Bible is important, the foundation of our life as believers. In it we can find instruction and guidance and wisdom that help us to grow in faith and understanding, and that equips us to live out this faith.
One of the most famous lines in this letter is verse 16, “All scripture is inspired by God…”
Now, the word “inspired” is one of my favorite words; its origin is Latin. In, of course, means “in” and the “spired” part comes from inspirare , which means “breathe or blow into”. I love this word because it makes me think I can be inspired with every breath.
This word becomes even more interesting to me when we look at in Greek. The word is theopneustos , and it literally means “breathed [into] by God” (Raymond Brown), or “God-breathed.”
“All scripture is God-breathed…”
It is such a beautiful image, and adds depth and richness to my contemplation of this passage. In fact, I have to admit I've sort of fixated on this image all week.
Now, there are some who point to this verse as proof that the Bible should be read literally, as though God breathed into the ears of scribes what it was God wanted them to write. With this understanding, the bible is infallible (that is, incapable of being wrong) and the unquestionable word of God in every single verse.
But this is not the view held by most Presbyterians. We believe that while scripture was inspired by God at its writing, it was still written by human beings in a specific time and place. The Confession of 1967 articulates it this way: “The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current. The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding.”
That is to say, we do believe that scripture still speaks to us today, but part of figuring out the meaning is understanding what it meant in its original context, to its first audience.
But we don't just rely on these methods of historical and literary analysis. We believe in order to truly understand the bible, we need scripture to be God-breathed again, right here and now. We recognize that the presence of the Holy Spirit as we read and study the bible is essential. This is why we say those verses surrounding the reading of scripture each Sunday, and why Ted and I say a prayer before we begin preaching. This is not to mention all the prayers we say while writing the sermon. In fact, in my first few years of ministry, I kept a lit candle nearby, a reminder of God's presence with me while I wrote.
Even when a passage of scripture is familiar to us, one that we think we know and we're comfortable with, we still need God's Spirit, God's breath, to animate the words on the page and breathe new life into them for us. Rob Bell writes in his book, Velvet Elvis , 2 “The rabbis spoke of the text being like a gem with seventy faces, and each time you turn the gem, the light refracts differently, giving you a reflection you haven't seen before. And so we turn the text again and again because we keep seeing things we missed the time before.”
These are some of the ways we experience scripture as God-breathed, almost alive in the way it continues to hold new meaning for us.
And let's face it: we have to have God inspiring us when we read the scriptures, because to be honest, although there is much in the bible that is beautiful and inspiring and thought-provoking, there is also much in the bible that is perplexing and disturbing, not to mention—dare I say it?—boring.
At Knox Presbyterian Church, my husband Jim and about 20 members of his congregation are reading the Bible in ninety days. They started in September and committed to reading straight through, around an hour a day, about 12-15 chapters. Right now, they're somewhere in Job, roughly one third of the way through. This is hard work, and some are struggling to keep up. It is eye-opening because everyone-even Jim!—is reading parts of the Bible they never knew existed, and at their weekly gathering there are lots of questions about what they've read. But even though it is hard, everyone who is doing it is grateful for the experience, and grateful to be doing it with the support and encouragement of others. Here again, the scriptures are being God-breathed.
But it is not only scripture that is God-breathed. This image of the breath of God animating us appears in other places in the bible.
In Genesis (2:7), God “formed a man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” This is an example of interpretation—we don't take this verse as being literally true, but a poetic description of how our life, our very breath, is a gift from God.
Another instance is in the Gospel of John, chapter 20. The disciples are huddled together in a locked room on the evening after they have gone to the tomb and found it empty. They are scared not only because they're not sure what is going on, but they're afraid that what happened to Jesus might happen to them. And then Jesus suddenly appears among them, says, “Peace be with you” and shows them his hands and side. And then just before he disappears again, he breathes on them, telling them “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22). Here again is the breath/Spirit connection.
And to me, this breath/Spirit image is critical not only to our understanding of how to read the scripture, but of how we understand ourselves.
It goes back to those verses we say surrounding the reading of scripture, about how “in the beginning was the Word” and then afterwards giving thanks to God “for the Word of God in scripture, for the Word of God among us, for the Word of God within us”. We do that as a reminder that the Word of God is not limited to the words on the page of any given bible. The capitol W Word is Jesus Christ, whom the Gospel of John so poetically describes as being “in the beginning…and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” And that Word now continues to live—not in the ink on paper of the bible—but when we ponder words of scripture as individuals or in groups, or when we gather on Sunday mornings. And that Word continues to live in us, within each one of us. That Word, God-breathed, is in our midst, still offering the gifts of life and hope and encouragement and, yes, correction and reproof and new growth.
And ultimately, the Word of God invites us to be God-breathed ourselves, to live lives that are infused with the holy, with an ever-growing awareness of the Spirit of God that is constantly in our midst.
This is how we are called to live.
So I invite you this week, and every week…
to breathe, and to be breathed by, God.
Amen.
1A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Go Back
2 Rob Bell. Velvet Elvis . Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005. p. 90 Go Back
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