It is a joy to me and I hope to you that today we are celebrating one of the “rites of spring” of the Village Church: Sunday School Promotion Sunday. I know that we all get a bit nervous, perhaps, hoping the kids remember the various things they’ve memorized. And we’re all happy to be together as one big family simply to enjoy each other’s company in worship. As routine and normal as all of this seems for this time of year, it truly is one of the great strengths of the Christian faith, this simple fact that we have such a strong tradition of handing down the truths of our faith from one generation to the next. It is a common saying that the Christian church is always just one generation away from extinction. It is another common saying that God has no grandchildren. By both of those things we mean to say that there is nothing more crucial than the passing down from one generation to the next the knowledge of the saving love of Jesus Christ. And that, truly, is what we are celebrating today.

When you stop to think about it, Christian faith is really nothing more than a relationship with a person. The primary relationships happened nearly 2000 years ago, among Jesus and the disciples. But those relationships were replicated and expanded to include more and more people. The faith that you and I have is directly tied in a long succession of other relationships all the way back to Jesus. You and I know someone who knew someone who knew someone who…well, if you go back far enough, we know someone who knew Jesus!

The Apostle Paul met Jesus only after he had been resurrected from death. But Paul well knew the dynamic of faith that must be handed down to each following generation: that is the way Judaism also works, too. We are so fortunate to have two brief letters that Paul wrote to a younger follower of Jesus, a person who was in the next generation of leaders, the young Timothy. To read these letters is to be taken back across nearly all of those 2000 years to one of the first times when the faith was transmitted from an older to a younger disciple, and in that transmission we still learn of the essential elements of what it means to reproduce our faith.

You and I can never know Jesus in the way the first disciples did, of course, and so we are dependent on the stories that have been handed down from one generation to the next, and we are dependent on the writings that survive from those early years that tell us of him, the writings that we call the Bible. It is always a great privilege to give a new generation of Christians their Bibles as they graduate from third to fourth grade. But recently, as has so often happened in our history, the Bible has come under attack. This week’s Time magazine reports that in 1976, 38% of Americans believed the Bible was literally true. Today that number is 28%. In 1976, 13% viewed the Bible as “an ancient book of fables,” and today that number is 19%. The Bible has always been a controversial book, but clearly, the trend in our culture at the moment is to give less and less credence and trust to the sacred writings that Christians have always believed were pivotal in the transmission of knowledge about God and the Savior, Jesus Christ. And so I want to talk about scripture today.

Another indicator of the decline of our culture’s trust in scripture lies in the popularity of a fictional novel that has called much of traditional Christianity into question, The Da Vinci Code. This is the last in my brief series of sermons about the problems orthodox Christians have with this book. In The Da Vinci Code, it is asserted that the Christian Bible, particularly the New Testament, is largely the product of the fourth century Emperor Constantine, who picked and chose from many different writings about Christ in order to create a book that would reinforce his particular views of Jesus, most of them created from whole cloth, and that would consolidate his power as emperor. Da Vinci asserts that Constantine destroyed many Christian writings that told the truth about Jesus as a human religious leader and his marriage to Mary Magdalene. Essentially, the book promotes the idea that apparently some 19% of Americans believe today, that the Bible is “an ancient book of fables.”

As usual, Da Vinci is dead wrong on most accounts, and misleading on others. Let me give you a very brief lesson on the history of the Bible. The Old Testament is comprised of many different writings that have their roots in the very early history of Israel, writings that were often edited and expanded, but that over the centuries came to be accepted by the vast majority of Jews as accurate and authoritative expositions of their history with God. The New Testament is similar, though it developed in a shorter period of time. Just a few years after Jesus’ departure from earth, “biographies” of Jesus’ life were being written, and letters from church leaders were circulating among the infant churches. Within a few decades, certain of these biographies and letters had developed reputations for being highly accurate and very useful expositions of everything from the basic facts of Jesus’ life to essential lessons about the nature of his life and ministry and the way that Christians should believe. It was not until late in the 4th century, however, more than 300 years after Christ, that there was nearly complete agreement among Christians about an authoritative list of “approved” books about Jesus and the church. Very early on, within a few decades after Jesus, though, there were 4 biographies, the books you and I know as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John that the church had largely accepted as reliable stories of Jesus and the beginnings of the church. Constantine actually had very little to do with the establishment of what we call the “canon” of the New Testament, and he did not destroy books with which he disagreed nor did he promote ideas of Christ that were not faithful to what by then was already the historic faith of the church.

And so, what is the Bible? It is a very human book with a very human history. But Jews, and then Christians, also believe that God was very much behind this history, inspiring its writers and guiding its development, so much so that we can say scripture is “divinely inspired.” As Christians, we adopted the Old Testament as the story of God with his people before the time of Jesus, and we quickly developed and then adopted our own stories of God with us in Jesus and the early church. That Judaism had a book at all was unique in its time for religions, and though other faiths rely on sacred texts today, it is the Jewish and then Christian faiths that have most strongly associated their identity with holy scriptures. We have always had faith that—in the sacred writings—God has revealed to us the most important information about the most important questions. And yes, there are some who distrust the scriptures as being simply the product of human imagination, but over against them are the millions and millions of Christians who, in the words and stories and truths told in scripture, have found reliable information about God.

One of the reasons we trust the writings is because we trust the people who have handed them down to us, and that chain of trust goes all the way back to the first generations. When Paul advised Timothy to continue in his faith, “knowing from whom you learned it,” he reminded him of this dynamic of trust. Another reason we trust the writings is because they have been trusted by the larger community of faith for so long. But perhaps the best reason we have to trust them is the reason of faith: it is only by the gift of God that a person can come to understand the Holy Scriptures as the unique and authoritative word of God to humanity. As such, the Bible is the most important book in the world, because it gives us instruction in the most important questions in the world.

Many of you have heard of one of the cute little sayings that has been making the rounds, and of course it is completely a creation of someone’s fertile imagination, but also a helpful and challenging thing for us to remember. The letters that spell Bible mean: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. If you haven’t been reading these instructions for a while, now would be a good time to start doing that again. If you have, then you are being, in Paul’s words to Timothy, “equipped for every good work.” May God bless you as you read his Word.

Amen.