Christians and the Old Testament, Part 2: The Character of God

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

July 18, 2021

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Prelude

 

Greeting and Announcements

 

Mission Statement

We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.

 

Call to Worship

We gather together in the name of Jesus Christ—
members of God’s family,
and siblings to one another.
There are no outsiders here among us,
no one has any special standing or bragging rights.
For we have been brought together by the redeeming love of Jesus.
Let’s join together in worship!

 

*Hymn #123 El Shaddai

El shaddai, el shaddai,
El-elyon na adonia,
Age to age you’re still the same,
By the power of the name.
El shaddai, el shaddai,
Erkamka na adonai,
We will praise and lift you high,
El shaddai.

 

Prayer of Confession

God of Wondrous Majesty. You have been you since before the earth was formed, since before there was time, since before we even existed. Still, we struggle with your mystery, and try to squeeze you into the cramped box of our definition. Forgive us, and help us to embrace that your eternity is a boundless as your love.

 

Assurance

Hear the Good News: God is the same yesterday, today, and forever—too big for us to comprehend, but so personal that the Divine is always right in your own heart. Amen.

 

Exodus 34: 6-7

⁶ And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, ⁷ maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”

 

A Message

“Christians and the Old Testament, Part 2: The Character of God”

 

Friends, continuing on in our “Stump the Preacher” series, we’re still tackling the very intriguing question Diana asked me: If our evangelical friends are all about Jesus, then why do they start quoting the Old Testament to tell people what they shouldn’t do? It’s a very deep question with a lot of layers, so we’re uncovering those layers one by one. Last week we started by talking, in more general terms, about how Christians should read the Old Testament. We talked about how all of us, evangelical or not, should not be shy about reading from the Old Testament and gaining abundant wisdom from it. Part of the dynamic in why it sticks out when our evangelical friends start quoting the Old Testament is because we’re not used to hearing Christians quote the Old Testament at all. And that shouldn’t be so, we should all appreciate and respect the words of our ancestors in the faith. This week we’re getting into the next layer of Diana’s big question. An underlying assumption that Christians have read into the Old Testament for most of the Church’s existence—that there’s a fundamental difference in the overarching message between the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospels, and, in particular, that the character of God changes substantially between the time of the Old Testament stories and the time of Jesus.

 

It’s something that I think a lot of us intuitively know we shouldn’t think, and yet I have to admit that even I find myself caught up in that idea from time to time. It’s the biggest reason why it jars us to hear our more conservative friends quote the Old Testament to tell us what we shouldn’t do. It’s this idea that the morals and ethics of the Old Testament world are those of “an eye for an eye”, but that Jesus showed up and told us to “turn the other cheek”. It’s this idea that the Old Testament is filled to the brim with violence, vengeance, and warfare, but that Jesus told us to “love your neighbor”. And, most importantly, that God champions that violence in the Old Testament, but then drastically softens right from the first verse of the book of Matthew. Is God a different kind of God between the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospels? Does the character of God change? Ever? If you draw wisdom from the Old Testament are you implicitly supporting the brutality we find in those pages? If you quote the Gospels, for that matter, does that mean the message is automatically all about love?

 

How did we get to this idea in the first place, that God is harsh and vengeful in the Hebrew Scriptures but full of compassion and love in the Gospels? We didn’t get here recently, or alone. And the chief mode of transportation that has driven us to that conclusion, and then reinforced it, over and over, has been antisemitism. Christians have denigrated our Jewish neighbors as greedy, selfish, uncouth, angry, and unreformed. And ignorant Christians from our past, and even our present, have argued that the harsh world of the Old Testament begets a callous faith which begets and stingy and rude person. William Shakespeare cashed in on this dynamic in the late 16^th Century when he wrote The Merchant of Venice, a comedy about a merchant named Antonio who defaults on a loan provided by a wealthy, miserly Jewish businessman named Shylock. Shylock demands a pound of Antonio’s flesh as “collateral”, so to speak, for an unpaid debt. The play heavily implies that Shylock’s Judaism makes him self-centered and vengeful, while the Christian characters emphasize mercy. In Shylock’s comeuppance at the end of the play, he’s forced to convert to Christianity. The greatest harm that Christians inflict, and it’s harm we have inflicted over and over, is when we use our faith and our scripture to dehumanize another. We need to clean our own house here before we have any right to criticize anyone else’s faith practice, including that of more conservative Christians. Jesus came that we may have life and have it abundantly. As long as we deny that abundant life to another through discrimination, we turn out Good News into a weapon, and destroy the Kingdom with it. We have to stop that.

 

This idea that God, as depicted in the Old Testament, is an angry, vengeful, warring deity, isn’t exclusive to Christians. In fact, many who have distanced themselves from the Christian Church have done so, in part, because they can’t find harmony between their personal sense of morality and what they perceive to be the immorality of the Old Testament.

 

In 2006, when I was in college, a book got published by a professor of evolutionary biology at Oxford University and then skyrocketed to popularity. The book was titled The God Delusion, and the author was Dr. Richard Dawkins, the most outspoken atheist of our time. It’s pretty safe to say that Dawkins isn’t a big fan of our scriptures, and he described his perception of God like this:

 

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.[1]

 

Let it be stated for the record that Dr. Richard Dawkins owns a thesaurus. And he’s darn proud.

 

But as much as I, a Christian minister, would love to dismiss those words as elitist vitriol and tell Dr. Dawkins to just stick to teaching biology, I can’t. I can’t just ignore those words, those ideas. It would be ignorant and irresponsible of me, a Christian minister, especially a young one who saw so many of my friends read this book cover to cover and start quoting it for their own wisdom. Dr. Dawkins may have come along and poured a huge can of gasoline on the fire, but he didn’t start it. Those beliefs, that the God we see depicted in the Old Testament is cruel and barbaric and so are those who worship that god, are all around, and if Dawkins hadn’t voiced them someone else would have.

 

In fact, someone else did. The very next year, in 2007, the late British-American sociopolitical writer Christopher Hitchens came out with God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and described the God we encounter in the Old Testament like this:

 

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.[2]

 

And though I’m not sure it was his intention, Hitchens leads us on a rabbit trail right back to antisemitism.

 

What are we supposed to do with this information? Is it true? Is God different between the Old Testament and the New Testament? What does all of this say of our faith?

 

Though I admit I, too, have been tempted by these ideas, these ideas that say don’t read the Old Testament, it’s scary and it’s full of big words and everybody kills everybody else and God is super angry all the time—I’m here to tell you no, that’s not true. In the ancient words of Aristotle, God is the unmoved mover. To say more about that God didn’t change, God doesn’t change, God won’t change. From everlasting to everlasting, God is God. It’s the stuff around God that changes.

 

God created us with love. Genesis tells us that before we ever existed God knew the world was incomplete without people, and that God created them in the Divine Image. But Genesis also tells us that basically from the moment our feet touched the grass in the Garden of Eden we haven’t stayed out of trouble. And that trouble just kept escalating as we became stronger and more numerous. It started with an apple. Then Cain murdered his brother—this escalated quickly. We broke up into smaller alignments and pitted ourselves against one another. We hoarded wealth and resources. We had deception in our own families, and withheld love from our own children. The first ten rules God gave us in stone we threw on the ground and broke while our friends danced around a metal cow. We tried to be a family but it was really hard. We split up and didn’t live near each other. We broke promises. We valued stuff over people. We did what was right in our own eyes. And throughout that twisted tale we have war after war after war, and bazillions of deaths. And God navigated us through that carnage, never giving up on us. God, unlike us, was faithful. God wasn’t afraid to roll up the Divine sleaves and get the Creator’s hands dirty. Like the mom of a strong headed 2 year old, God saw the house get trashed and cleaned up after a party She wasn’t invited to.

 

And God tells us, over and over throughout the Hebrew Scriptures as the Divine refrain: “The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” Our actions continually had consequences, and God delivered them, but God’s chesed, this Hebrew word that attempts to capture the depth of God’s love that doesn’t translate well into English, God’s chesed is unchanged throughout the ages. This only becomes all the more clear when humans get to meet God Incarnate, the person Jesus, in the Gospels, and all Jesus wants to talk about is love, justice, nonviolence, and building the Kingdom of God. And then human violence snuffs all that talk out.

 

My conclusion to all of this is to say that God loves us in such an unending way that English speaking theologians can only describe Divine love by borrowing words from other languages—chesed from Hebrew, and agape in Greek. God’s love is so immense, so unchanging, and so eternal, that it has taken all of humanity, spanning the ages and all cultures, just to try to understand it. But God’s love will be as apparent in this world as we will allow it to be. If we obscure it with out violence, our selfishness, our injustice, and our hatred, then those who read our stories some day might come to the conclusion that our actions reflect a God they won’t know. But if we magnify God’s Image through our own acts of lovingkindness, our own charity, our own good, pure hearts, then the world will know God more because of it, and know that God is love.

 

Amen.

 

*Hymn 149 Let’s Sing Unto the Lord

Let’s sing unto the Lord a hymn of glad rejoicing.

Let’s sing a hymn of love, joining hearts and happy voices.

God made the sky above, the stars, the sun, the oceans.

Their goodness does proclaim the glory of God’s name.

A – le – lu – ia!    A – le – lu – ia!

Let’s sing unto the Lord.   A – le – lu   –   ia!

 

Let’s sing unto the Lord a hymn of adoration,

Express unto the Lord our song of faith and hope.

Creation’s broad display proclaims the work of grandeur,

The boundless love of One who blesses us with beauty.

 

Let’s sing unto the Lord.

A – le – lu   –   ia!

 

Time of Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer

God, we are aliens and sojourners in this world,
but you invite us to be your guests.
You lavishly offer us your hospitality
and lovingly welcome us into your family,
You invite us to share in the abundance of your kingdom.

God, you have shown us that providing hospitality to strangers
opens a doorway into the Kingdom of God.
Remind us that when we offer hospitality to others,
we are receiving Christ into our midst and so fulfilling the law of love.

We open our hearts to embrace the stranger, the friend, the rich, and the poor,
We open our lives to offer a generous heart toward all.

 

Our Father, Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.

 

Offering, *Doxology, and *Prayer of Dedication

 

*Hymn 103 Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible, hid from our eyes,
Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, Thy great name we praise.

Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,
Nor wanting, nor wasting, Thou rulest in might;
Thy justice, like mountains, high soaring above
Thy clouds, which are fountains of goodness and love.

To all, life Thou givest, to both great and small;
In all life Thou livest, the true life of all;
We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree,
And wither and perish—but naught changeth Thee.

Thou reignest in glory, thou dwellest in light,
Thine angels adore Thee, all veiling their sight;
All praise we would render; oh, help us to see
’Tis only the splendor of light hideth Thee.

 

 

Benediction

We leave this place no longer strangers,
but members of God’s own family,
brothers and sisters through the blood of Jesus Christ.
Together, we are being built into a holy dwelling place
where God lives by the Spirit.

So go out with joy and confidence
to love and serve the world,
for we do not go alone.

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[1] Jon Kuhrt. Grace + Truth. “Is the biblical God a misogynistic bully?”. < Is the biblical God a misogynistic bully? – Grace + Truth> 17 July 2021.

[2] Good Reads. “God Is Not Great Quotes”. < God Is Not Great Quotes by Christopher Hitchens (goodreads.com)> 17 July 2021.