People have a problem. Our problem is that we don’t know. We don’t know a lot about a lot of things. We don’t even know how much we don’t know! But our biggest problem is that we don’t know about the deepest reality, the deepest truth, the deepest meaning, of everything. In classic terms, we don’t know God. There is an old story about a man named Moses, who one day was out in the wilderness tending a flock of sheep for his father-in-law. There on the side of a mountain, God suddenly appeared in the midst of a bush that was burning but not burning. God told Moses that he was the God of Moses’ ancestors, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses was going to get to know God, but Moses’ first reaction was so very telling of the whole human problem. The old story from Exodus says that Moses “hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (3:6b).

People have devised all sorts of ways to assist us in knowing each other. One of our recent and clever little inventions is called “Facebook.” Unlike Moses with God, we are not afraid to hide our faces from each other. In fact, we are now capable of broadcasting our faces to anyone in the world who has a computer. And it is much more than just our faces. Through contraptions like Facebook, we can tell and show each other pretty much anything we want too about ourselves. We can publish pictures, play games, and make comments, all without ever actually facing anyone! Facebook is all part of the amazing computerized world in which we can download information about anything, a world that requires we establish our identity through usernames and passwords, a world has certain rules of etiquette, and a world in which we don’t “write” to each other anymore, we “text.” But I would propose to you today that a creation such as Facebook is really not so new. In fact, it is a very old concept. Long, long ago, and far, far away, there came to be the original Facebook. Literally, it is a book through which Christians believe we can see the face of God. And when we can see the face of God, we can know God, and not be afraid to see him. We can know reality, truth, and meaning. Our problem is solved!

As we continue our series of Sunday messages about knowing God, we look back and see that we have covered key tools like communion, baptism, worship, and prayer. Our topic today is the first Facebook: the Bible.

I have here some of my most treasured possessions, all Bibles. Here is a family Bible given to me by members of a church I served in Union, New Jersey, in 1979, my first year of seminary at Princeton. It was printed in New York in 1843 and is inscribed with the names Henry and Dorothea Winkel. Here is a Bible given to my great-grandfather Eduardo Baca by his pastor Rev. Matthieson on New Year’s Day, 1880. Here is a Bible printed in Edinburgh in 1793, inscribed by Margery Campbell, who bought it in Harrisburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1800, and that was given to me 30 years ago by my first mother-in-law, Alverta Campbell Tucker. And here is a Bible, (in Spanish, of course) printed in 1915, and purchased by my grandmother Magdalena Valenzuela Baca, in which she inscribed the name, date, time, and day of birth of her 10 children, including my father, Aguinaldo, born at 2:00 a.m. on Tuesday, April 11, 1927. I was given this Bible on the day of my ordination to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament, on June 13, 1982.

The Bible is one of the primary and non-negotiable elements of Christian faith and faithfulness. That is why folks like me and members of my family treasure the old family Bibles so much. Without the Bible, we know that we cannot know the face of God.

But what is the Bible, really? It is most certainly a human document, in that it has a history and was created—at one level—by human minds and hands. It is a collection of writings: histories, chronologies, songs, biographies, sayings, and letters. It was developed over many centuries. It has been fought over by church scholars and leaders concerning which writings are worthy of inclusion in the book or not. It is divided into two sections, what we call “testaments,” or “covenants,” one that speaks of God before Jesus, and one that speaks of God after Jesus. It is a primary article of the Reformed and Presbyterian heritage upon which this congregation is founded that every Christian must read this book in their own language and that every Christian is responsible to exercise their privilege of meeting God through it as they read it for themselves. To those of no faith, the Bible is purely a human creation, full of holes, with its own human agenda, not at all related in any way to who and what God really is. To those of faith, it is something else entirely.

What is the Bible, really? It is a human document, but not only a human document. Christians affirm that the Bible is also “inspired” by the very Creator and Lord of the whole universe, that it speaks in a unique and authoritative way to the truth of Jesus Christ, that it is the written basis for all Christian faith and life, that through its words the Spirit of God continues to communicate with us in order to reveal God to us. It is our burning bush by which God shows us his face.

What do we mean when we say the Bible is “inspired?” N. T. Wright is helpful in outlining the 3 basic options we have for understanding that word and its application to the Bible.ⁱ One option for our understanding is that the Bible is inspired like other great art or literature. This option holds that humans can sometimes achieve a special level or state that speaks more beautifully and profoundly, and that the Bible was written purely at this extraordinary, almost superhuman level. But that is not what classic Christian theology believes. A second option for our understanding of “inspired” is that even though God is completely removed from the human level, still sometimes God chooses to break into our world and zap us with special knowledge. This option sees the Bible as dictated purely by the Spirit of God with human beings serving only as the scribes, or laser printers, if you want a more modern example. But that is also not what classic Christian theology believes.

The third option is the one we Christians believe and hope to believe and understand even more as we go along in the journey of faith in Jesus. This view holds that heaven and earth, God and God’s creation, sometimes “overlap and interlock” (see Wright), and that the Bible itself is one of those instances where God is speaking a divine message in and through human thoughts and words and stories. In other words, the very act of thinking, speaking, and writing—in words—is part of the way God chooses to reveal himself and his purposes in the world. The words of Scripture, therefore, have to do with the Word (capital W) of God himself, the powerfully creative knowledge and will that we believe supremely expressed itself in Jesus. Think of the beginning of the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh and lived among us….” The Word of God is absolutely and irrevocably central to Christian faith and practice. That is why we Presbyterian Christians ordain our pastors to be Ministers of Word and Sacrament. In the Word of God in Jesus and the words of people in scripture, we can know God.

I’ve just laid a bunch of heavy theology on you. Let’s go at this another way. Let’s look at real people in real life and see how this works. An older disciple of Jesus named Paul is writing a letter to a younger disciple named Timothy. Paul is trying to teach Timothy how the scriptures are so vital to Christian life. Paul was speaking of the scriptures that you and I call the Old Testament. Did Paul know that one day God would use his words just like God was already using words of folks like Abraham and Moses and David? Who knows? Let’s just focus on what Paul says. Paul first talks not about scripture but about how Timothy has seen Paul’s life: Paul’s teaching, conduct, vision, faith, patience, love, steadfastness, persecutions and sufferings. Timothy knows Paul first, in all the good and bad and ups and downs of Paul’s life. You see, you and I learn the Christian faith and life first usually from other people. Whose life was an example to you of being a disciple of Jesus? For whom is your life an example of being a disciple of Jesus?

Next, because Timothy knows Paul, Paul can tell Timothy about one of the keys to his successful Christian life, that key being the sacred writings. The sacred writings have a power and place in making for a Godly life like nothing else. The writings are sacred because they are one place not where we are confused or misguided or helpless, but where we are in touch with God himself in the context of our lives on this earth, and therefore where we are enlightened instead of confused, directed instead of misguided, and powerful instead of powerless. We are all familiar with the saying that nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. That saying gets at the deep truth we believe about the sacred writings, the Holy Scriptures. Nothing is as powerful as the truth, the knowledge, the very essence and nature of all things and of God. Scripture is not just ideas. It is a unique vessel through which God actually says what he wants to say to us.

And then, Paul concludes this little teaching to Timothy with what can only be the logical conclusion. Why do we care about what God is saying to us? Why do we care about the sacred writings? Because they are unique in meaning and power when it comes to how they function in making us into disciples of Jesus. They teach, reprove, correct, and train us so that we become proficient and equipped for being righteous and for doing righteousness. The Word of God speaks in the Bible and leads us to where we experience the blessedness of God and produce the blessedness of God in the world around us. That is what Paul said to Timothy, because Paul had read of it in places like the 119th Psalm and Paul had experienced it in his own life with Jesus. We belong to God, we are formed and fueled by God through his Word, and then we do God’s work in the world.

Where is your Bible right now? Do you bring it to church with you and it’s in your lap right now? Is it lying on the table by your bed and you read it every morning and every night? Is it an old book with pages torn and the binding falling apart? Is it in the electronic memory of a palm-sized digital device that you carry with you at all times? Is it gathering dust on a shelf somewhere? Is it waiting for you to take it seriously enough that you’ll go to the trouble and hard work of reading and studying it, and then the even harder work of applying it in your life? Is it a tool you let God use in your life so that you can walk in the Lord’s ways, so that you can do no wrong, so that you can be blessed and happy? Your Bible is the most powerful book the world has ever known and ever will know. Read it.

Amen.