Sermon on 18th Sunday after Trinity - Fr Sam Rossiter-Peters

May it be given to me to speak in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. As Christians, we're called to a life of prayer, not simply as a duty, but as the way we open ourselves up to God's presence and his will. Prayer draws us closer to God's purposes, not always to full understanding, but at least to faithful trust.

And it helps us to bring the world before him in loving intercession, joining in the Holy Spirit's work of making his kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. One way that we see that calling through here at St John the Baptist is through our service of morning prayer, which a number of us pray through the week with you and on your behalf. As one of the people who lead this service, I've come to know it quite well, and there has come to be one particular prayer within it that I appreciate almost more than any other.

It will surprise you probably to learn, though, that it isn't the psalms or the readings or the collect. It's a simple plea that's made after the second reading. Open my eyes, O Lord, that I may see the wonders of your law.

This line in the liturgy is drawn from Psalm 119, verse 18, and I love it because it helps me to acknowledge the moments when the things that I've just read in Scripture confuse or sadden or even anger me. Perhaps it will surprise you to hear that a priest sometimes feels saddened or angered by sections in the Bible, but I suspect that I'm not alone. Sometimes the wonders of God's law, his word, are difficult to see at first glance.

Psalms 119:18

There will be different parts of the Bible that each of us struggle with, and parts that we struggle with for particular reasons, given our context. The message of God's love might be painful to hear when we're facing sickness or when a loved one dies. And there are parts that most of us struggle with as well, especially in this contemporary world.

Some passages like slaves, obey your earthly masters, Colossians 3, verse 22, or I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man, 1 Timothy 2, verse 12, or the much debated lines in Romans regarding same-sex relationships, such as Romans 1, 26 to 27. These are not easy texts. Taken at face value, they seem to reflect a world and a morality which is very far from our own.

Colossians 3:22 1 Timothy 2:12

And for some readers, they're not just difficult, they feel actively, personally unjust. And that tension is precisely where faithful interpretation must begin. As I've told you before, I was brought up in a church where I was told to read the Bible in black and white.

These verses, indeed most verses in the scripture, were taken just as they appear in the English translations, no questions asked. But since studying theology, I've learned that reading scripture in that way, flatly, without context, is not a faithful way of understanding the Bible. It might seem simple, but it ignores how God actually chose to speak, through history, through language, culture, and human authors.

For Anglicans, scripture is not a dead text. It is a living word that demands careful, faithful, and prayerful interpretation. The first mistake we make, the Bible is not one book, but a wonderful and complex library of 66 books, written over a period of more than a thousand years by 40 or more authors.

It spans genres, from origin stories, to law, to prophecy, to poetry, to wisdom, to letters, to apocalyptic vision. Each book needs to be read for what it is, not simply what we assume or perhaps want it to be. If we want to understand a verse of scripture, we have to do the work.

Faith isn't afraid of questions, and scripture is certainly not threatened by study. And so we must ask, what did the original Hebrew or Greek say? Anyone who speaks more than one language will know that most languages don't map exactly onto each other. When you make a translation from one language to another, you make a choice about meaning.

So, what was the original meaning? What has been lost in translation? What do these words actually mean? This is especially true of St Paul's letters. And it's not just about his language. When St Paul wrote, he addressed real churches with real problems.

His letters were occasional, written into specific situations. So when he spoke about women teaching in 1 Timothy, or household order in Ephesians, faithful interpretation means asking, is this a universal command? Or was Paul applying the gospel to a particular context? If we ignore context, we risk mistaking pastoral advice for eternal law. And that leads to distortion rather than faithfulness.

And yet, even if we understand more about the genre of the book, the author's intent, the historical setting, there are still parts of scripture that do, indeed should, give us pause. Across scripture, we read of God meeting humanity on its journey through history. A journey which moves forward.

So what once seemed normal in ancient cultures, like slavery, or extreme patriarchy, has been slowly challenged by God's justice breaking into daily life. Let us remember, when St Paul wrote, slaves, obey your earthly masters, he was speaking into a context in which slavery was just an ordinary part of everyday life. Just as ordinary as, for example, the use of coal is for us.

But just as rightly, we look back on slavery as a great evil, perhaps the one of the greatest evils in human history. So I wonder, what will people 100 years from now think about our use of fossil fuels and the destruction of our environment? These texts are written into context. A context of moving humanity.

So what do we do with these texts that so trouble us? Because the easy thing would be, and I've heard this said to me personally, the easy thing would be to be famed by this warning from 2nd Timothy. Having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. The accusation when we start to try and interpret the scripture is, oh, you're just trying to find a truth that suits you.

You're trying to be like those people that Paul warned Timothy about. But instead, I suggest that we ought to wrestle. Wrestle with the scriptures that cause us difficulty.

St. Paul was not commanding that we must not question scripture. Remember, St. Paul was from a pharisaical background. His entire life was about questioning and debating the meaning and interpretation of scripture.

When we treat scripture as something concrete and set in stone, we risk it becoming an idol. The Bible is, remember, not God. We do not worship a book.

We worship the living God revealed in Jesus Christ. And so we take that harder road. We become Israel.

And we wrestle, just as Jacob wrestled all night with God and refused to let go until he received a blessing. And in that struggle, he was renamed Israel, the one who wrestles with God. That name wasn't just given to Jacob, but to the people of God.

The Old Testament is the story of a people who have wrestled with God, who questioned, who doubted, who lamented, who argued, who learned and grew. They were not slaves to God, their heavenly master. They were disciples in relationship with God.

Jesus continued that same relationship. When he came, he took on students. He lived, he taught, he argued with them.

The story of human relationship with God is one of learning, of striving, of struggling. And that must be our truth as well. Anglican theology has long recognised that God guides us, not just through scripture, but through several sources of wisdom.

Richard Hooker spoke of scripture, tradition and reason working together. And John Wesley later added experience to describe how God shapes believers through their life. These four, scripture, tradition, reason and experience, form what is now called the Wesleyan quadrilateral.

This acknowledges that God hasn't stopped speaking, not by adding to scripture, but by guiding the church by the Holy Spirit. And this is how the church came to recognise that although Paul wrote to a world in which slavery was totally normal, slavery is absolutely evil. Because the truth of the gospel is that all people are equal and free and have dignity.

This is how the Anglican church has come to recognise that though St. Paul wrote into contexts where women were silenced, the Holy Spirit gifts and calls each of us and has called women to be priests and to be bishops and indeed to be the archbishop. And this is why inclusive Christians today, reading scripture faithfully, have come to see that self-giving love between people can bear the fruit of the spirit and reflect God's love, whether it be hetero or homosexual. Good trees bear good fruit.

And Jesus told us to judge by the fruit. Wrestling with scripture is indeed the harder path. It doesn't sound like it, but taking things and black and white requires no thought.

But it is the path that Jesus taught his disciples. It is the path that God taught Jacob and Jacob taught his people. Look at our gospel even today.

In the parable of the persistent widow, Jesus praises the one who refuses to keep wrestling, who refuses to stop asking for justice. And so we too must return to scripture again and again, persistent, wrestling with it until its truth is revealed. Returning with reason, tradition and experience as companions in discernment.

And this isn't a licence to disregard difficult passages. All scripture is indeed God breathed and demands our attention. But when a passage troubles us, we have to ask, is it troubling because Christ is calling us to deeper holiness? Or is it troubling because the spirit is inviting us to wrestle, to find a deeper truth in a new world? And so I invite you, have the courage to wrestle, to question, to debate.

This is not bending scripture to your will, but rather it is being faithful to your call as a disciple. Put into practise that which you have learned, not from a book, but from the word made flesh, who came to call you, who blesses you and who asks you to use what you have to reach out to the ends of the earth with the love of God. Amen.