The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
August 27, 2023
Proper 16A
Growing up, I sometimes would read my copy of the King James Bible (which is what my old tradition used) but you can imagine I didn’t get very far. I read the book of Genesis (since it was first, and I knew it had someone named Joseph in it), I read the book of Revelation (since it was at the very end, made sense to at least get the first and last sections), and the Gospel of Matthew. The Gospel of Matthew I could mostly understand, even in the King James “thee thy thou” language.
But the rest of the Bible was an incomprehensible mystery to me. I would try to read bits and pieces, but then I would end up thinking about how little of the Bible I understood. I would realize how little I knew and thus would give up on the whole thing. It was like the wide ocean, and I had no way to navigate it. I was simply lost. And imagine how much more confusing the King James Version’s translation of Paul’s letters would be to a young person! I didn’t even dare to try to read those. Paul’s letters were like being on the open ocean with huge waves crashing into me.
And then, out on this wide ocean, I saw something marvelous. The open ocean of the Bible was still a mystery, but I knew a treasure when I saw it. One day, I remember being at a store with my mom. It was a little craft sort of store, some homemade goods. And there was a little rack with bookmarks with names on them. Of course I wanted the one that said “Joseph” – and when I picked it off the rack, it had a Bible verse on it. It read, “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” This morsel of the Bible, even in the King James Version, spoke so very clearly to me as a young person. In all the wide sea that is Paul’s letters, here was something I could grasp and treasure.
“Be not conformed to this world” – this matched up so well with what I’d seen in comparing the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew with the world around me. Jesus says to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and the world tells you to love money, or fame, or achievement, or “family”, or power. In the Kingdom of Heaven, there’s diversity and difference, and in the world there is narrow, confining conformity. In the Gospel of Matthew, the ethic starts with finding out your own flaws; in the world, it’s all about tearing down someone else’s moral failings and ignoring your own.
And the next line from Paul: “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Oh, how wonderful that was for a kid who loved to think, think, think! Thinking, learning, digesting what I’ve learned – learning was in pursuit of truth. And the renewal wasn’t a “one and done” sort of life – renewing my mind meant being open to learning, and to being transformed by it, moving toward understanding what is the will of God, what is good, what is acceptable, what is perfect.
That little sentence of Paul’s letters, then, helped me to explain what I saw at work in the Gospel of Matthew, and it became a way of being. I may not have understood the rest of the Bible – and, let’s be honest, there is still much to be learned and discerned in the Bible – but those pieces gave me a foundation of faith that remains deeply important to me. That yearning to understand, that desire to be myself in the fullness of the Kingdom of God, that hope in the love of God – that is, and I suspect always will be, at the very heart of who I am.
And as we get to the heart of who we are, we also realize the centrality of the question: “Who is Jesus?” Who is Jesus, that we follow, committing our lives to him? Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” and he asks that same question of us. Who is Jesus? What does his life, death, and resurrection, what does his teaching and preaching and ministry mean for us? Not in an abstract sense – but in the real, and personal sense?
Our gifts, and our calling all differ. There is diversity and difference in the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus Christ invites us to answer that question, “Who do you say that I am?” with what we think, say, and do.
Having that little morsel of the Bible at hand becomes a guidepost for us, for who we say Jesus is. My little morsel of Bible from childhood has been about discerning – figuring it out, always listening, looking for what is good and leads us to our perfection, our fulfillment in Christ. Other morsels of the Bible might speak to a different calling, and yet we are one in Jesus Christ.
I think of someone whose favorite verse is also from Paul’s letter to the Romans about how nothing in heaven or earth can separate us from the love of Christ. That mystical tidbit of Scripture speaks to the power of encouragement and hope. Or someone’s favorite verse being from the prophet Micah, to do justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with God, that justice, kindness and humility are woven from the same cloth. Or maybe a verse that comes at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, where “as you have done it to the least of these, so you have done it to me” is a powerful and mighty command that how we treat the poor, the hurting, the sick, the imprisoned, the rejected and the neglected will show us whether or not we truly love Jesus, because Jesus claims all the downtrodden on earth as his own body. All of these are deeply important – and each of us get a little piece to bring to life in our own lives.
You may find yourself longing for a passage of the Bible, a morsel for your own. You may feel lost on the wide ocean of the Bible. Keep reading, keep listening, keep watching. You never know where the invitation might come. It’s not like I picked that verse for myself all those years ago! Did the person who made those bookmarks thirty years ago know what they would give me? They were picking verses from the Bible to put on bookmarks to go along with names. And little Joseph all those years ago latched onto that little sentence, and through it has been transformed by the renewing of his mind.
What piece of the Bible is Jesus drawing you to? And how will it help you to answer that question, “Who do you say that I am?” And how will you make that piece of the Bible grow and flourish and answer that question in what you say and do and pray? Amen.