How to Read the Old Testament

 

June 22, 2025 – The 2nd Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 7C

1 Kings 19:1-15a; Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 8:26-39

© 2025 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

How much do you know about the Old Testament? I don’t mean, how many stories can you recall. I mean, how much do you know about the collection itself—the composite of ancient texts written and rewritten by multiple communities and traditions over the span of a thousand years that we now call the Old Testament? How much do you know about it? Has anyone ever taught you how to read it—how to make sense of the ancient Hebrew texts and relate them to your life as a twenty-first-century Christian?

I don’t presume in one sermon to attempt to tell you how to read the whole, complicated, multi-faceted collection, but I do want to spend some time today talking about the Old Testament in general and offering some specific, concrete guidelines that I think can help us encounter these sacred texts as the life-giving, faith-forming, Holy-Spirit-inspired words that God has given them to us to be. And I want to use today’s lesson from 1 Kings as a model for reading and studying other Old Testament texts. 

Let me start by noting that I didn’t pick this story about Elijah encountering God in the sound of sheer silence. In The Episcopal Church, we use a lectionary—a three-year cycle that assigns four readings to every Sunday and other major feast in the Christian year. Preachers in our church don’t get to choose the readings, but, as Lora mentioned last week, we do get to decide what verses we want to focus on. 

The truth is that it’s often easier for a preacher to relate the Gospel text to contemporary life, which means that congregations like ours aren’t invited to wrestle with a passage from the Old Testament as often. That, combined with the fact that, until the current prayer book was adopted in 1979, the lectionary largely ignored the Old Testament altogether, has led us to think of the Hebrew Bible as second-class scripture. But, considering the fact that what we call the Old Testament was for people like Jesus and Paul the only Bible they knew, it’s important for us to find a way to receive it not as an afterthought but as the very heart of what God is saying to God’s people today.

The most important thing I want you to learn about the Old Testament is that, when we read it, we need to hear three distinct but overlapping layers at work in the biblical text. The first layer is the story of the text itself. What happened? Who is involved? What twists and turns does the story take? The second layer is larger the story of God’s people. How does this particular passage fit unto the overall story of God’s relationship with Israel? What period of Jewish history does this story come from? What happened before the story started, and what will happen after it is finished? The third layer is the even larger story of salvation. What does this particular story and its place in the history of Israel tell us about God’s ongoing work of salvation? How are the ultimate themes of creation and covenant, sin and redemption, exile and return reflected in the text? And, therefore, how does the story relate to our own experience of salvation?

Now, let’s turn to today’s reading from 1 Kings and use that three-layer model to explore the passage. First, let’s talk about the story of the text—the story of Elijah fleeing the wrath of Jezebel and finding God in the silence as he stood outside a cave on Mt. Horeb. This is a story about a victorious but exhausted prophet (Elijah) running away from an angry and vindictive queen (Jezebel) who has sworn by her gods that she will have the prophet executed or else they can take her own life. 

Jezebel is the Phoenician bride of the Israelite King Ahab, the ruler of the northern kingdom of Israel, the nation that broke away from the southern kingdom of Judah during a civil war after King Solomon’s reign. Elijah has defeated and slaughtered many of Jezebel’s prophets because they worshipped the Canaanite god Baal. Jezebel is furious and issues the death sentence. Exhausted from his previous victory, Elijah flees south to Judah, beyond the reach of Jezebel and Ahab. There, in the wilderness, the prophet collapses in the shade of a broom tree and asks God to take his life. He is completely spent and ready to die. 

But, while he sleeps, an angel of the Lord appears to him in a vision and encourages him to eat and drink in preparation for a long journey. Sure enough, God has provided a griddle cake and some water to sustain the prophet for forty days and forty nights, while he makes his way to Horeb, the mountain of God. There on the holy mountain God confronts him, saying, “What are you doing here Elijah?” And the prophet responds, “My passion and zeal for you have gotten me into this mess, O Lord. All the faithful prophets are gone. Your people have forsaken the covenant. I am the only one left, and they are trying to kill me.” 

God beckons Elijah out of the cave and promises to pass by. First, there is a violent wind. Next, there is a powerful earthquake. Then, there is a blazing fire, but God is not found in any of them. Finally, there is nothing left but what the NRSV calls the “sound of sheer silence”—a decent attempt at translating an enigmatic Hebrew phrase that defies translation. Whatever it is, the Lord is found in the absence—in the silence—and in the silence itself God confronts the discouraged prophet. “What are you doing here, Elijah?” a voice from within the silence asks. And then from that silence the Lord recommissions the prophet and directs him to go—go back to the north from which you fled for I am not finished with you yet. That’s the first layer.

Stories from the Old Testament are never told in isolation. They are always a part of a bigger narrative. The second layer for us to consider is the centuries-long story of God’s people. Ahab and Jezebel weren’t the only rulers in Israel to lead God’s people astray. This episode comes amid a long series of mostly faithless kings who, little by little, erode the moral and religious foundation of Israel. We are supposed to read this episode and remember that human leaders almost always let God down. But this story also shows us that, even in an era of pervasive decline, God uses faithful people like Elijah to carry out God’s will. It also teaches us that things usually aren’t as bad as they seem. The prophet was discouraged, exhausted, and felt all alone, but, as the story continues, we discover that God has preserved a remnant of 7,000 faithful people who are ready to support Elijah and his efforts of reform.

There are other stories from the history of God’s people that resonate with this one, and the biblical authors are counting on us to make those connections. The mountain to which God sends the prophet is Mt. Horeb, also known as Mt. Sinai. It is the same place where God met Moses centuries before Elijah showed up. Perhaps that’s why it took Elijah forty days and forty nights to get there—the same amount of time that Moses spent fasting on that mountain. You may remember that, in the time of Moses, God often confronted God’s people in violent winds, powerful earthquakes, and blazing fires. Elijah may have been expecting God to reveal Godself in one of those familiar and formidable expressions, but God was not found in any of them, and that is significant for us. Instead, God confronts Elijah in a haunting silence, and, when the prophet encounters the divine presence within that silence, he knows that God is sending him back to confront his enemies, not with earthly might, but with that same divine power. That is the second layer.

Haven’t we learned over the millennia that God’s power abides with us not in earthquake and fire, not in sword and spear, but in the persistent, unwavering, and often surprising holiness that unfolds within us and those around us? That brings us to the final layer of the story—the larger story of salvation—the great arc of redemption history that bends all things and all time toward God’s perfect fulfillment. This is where we connect the story of Elijah standing up to the evil powers of the ninth century BC to the countless examples of courage and faithfulness that stretch from the pages of scripture all the way down to our own day.

The story of Elijah reminds us that earthly power always stands contrary to God’s power and that the prophets who confront those who hold it are universally denounced and threatened by those who refuse to yield it back to God. It shows us that God can use our moments of weakness, vulnerability, and exhaustion to bring about real change. It teaches us yet again that God shows up in ways we don’t expect and that, even within the story of God’s people, our understanding of God’s power changes throughout the generations. And the story of Elijah reminds us that, even when we are ready to give up, God isn’t finished with us yet because God still has difficult but important work for us to do. That’s the third layer.

We must remember that the stories of the Old Testament are our stories, just as they were the stories of Jesus and Paul. They aren’t always easy to read. They rarely offer simple or straightforward moral lessons. And the characters involved are usually far from perfect role models. But these stories are no less holy than Luke’s account of the miraculous deliverance of the Gerasene demoniac or Paul’s vision of the unity of all people in Galatians. When we remember that every story of the Old Testament has meaning beyond the simple reading of the text—that there are multiple layers of significance to each encounter—we begin to hear them as sacred scripture that was written for our learning. 

God is the hero of every story in the Bible—from Genesis to Revelation, from beginning to end. It’s up to us to find God in all of them, or else we’ll never be able to find ourselves in the story of salvation that God tells.

The Long Season of Salvation

 

June 8, 2025 – The Day of Pentecost: Whitsunday

Acts 2:1-21; Romans 8:14-17; John 14:8-17, 25-27

© 2025 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be seen here.

As a longtime fan of the Chicago Cubs, my life changed considerably in 2016. When they broke the Curse of the Billy Goat to win their first World Series in 108 years, my favorite team went from Loveable Losers to World Champions. Since they were no longer available as a sermon illustration for enduring hardship and repeated disappointment, I’ve had to find new ways to describe what it means for God’s people to wait for salvation. And I’m not the only one who had to come up with a new marketing plan. 

Back in 2001, I worked on the ground crew at Wrigley Field. It was a magical summer. One of the things that made it magical was how well the Cubs were doing that season. Week after week, the team remained at or near the top of the division. The veteran ground crew members, who had experienced years of disappointment, were giddy with child-like excitement. They kept telling me that this year felt different. And, sure enough, as the season wore on and the trade deadline approached, instead of trading away star players in exchange for prospects the way they usually did, the Cubs made a move that solidified their intent to compete that year. They acquired Fred McGriff, a veteran, all-star first baseman, whose bat might help them make a post-season run.

Baseball seasons are exceptionally long. Each team plays 162 games over six months, so, unlike football teams, whose hopes for a championship can be dashed in a single game, baseball teams deal in aggregates. The rhythm of the season becomes more important than individual games or weeks. The early part of the season lasts two months, during which teams give an indication of whether preseason expectations might be met. In the middle of the season, teams show whether they are worthy of giving up money and prospects to add stars at the deadline or whether they should give up their stars and save their hope for another year. And only in the final two months do fans discover whether those moves were right.

Normally, August wasn’t a great month for the Cubs. Once the July 31 trade deadline had passed, the team usually settled into a torpor during the dog days of summer. It was a familiar rhythm of hope giving way to disappointment, which was only broken by the occasional good season. I remember vendors selling t-shirts that had a list of “Top Ten Things Not Heard at Wrigley,” and somewhere near the top of the list was “August is our month.” For 108 years, those shirts made sense. Even in an exceptional year, when the Cubs made a run, fans knew that, as the end of the season approached, it was better to look ahead to Spring Training than to set your hopes on October—until, of course, all of that changed. Now, with a recent taste of ultimate success, it’s a lot harder for Cubs fans to remember that baseball seasons take a long time and that patience is even more important than a desire to win every game.

Many, many season years ago, the disciples were all together in one place, and the Holy Spirit came and filled the house where they were with a sound like the rush of a violent wind. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a blazing tongue rested on each one of them, giving to each disciple the ability to speak in other languages. So chaotic was the sight and sound, that faithful Jews from all over the known world, who were in Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks, came and marveled. “What does this mean?” some of them asked. “They are drunk on new wine!” others sneered.

Inspired by the Holy Spirit, Peter stood up and spoke: “Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.’”

These are the last days, Peter tells us. This is the final stretch of the season. With the death and resurrection of Jesus, God is winding up the story of salvation, and the Holy Spirit is God’s gift to the church for these last days. In the Holy Spirit, God has given us what we need to be faithful and fruitful until the very end, but what that means—what faithfulness and fruitfulness look like—depends very much on what we think the “last days” are. After all, it’s been 2000 years of last days, and it is hard to live with a sense of urgency for that long. But recovering a sense of where we are in the long story of salvation helps us remain faithful to God and faithful to the Spirit which God has given us.

When you hear a preacher start to talk about the “last days,” how does that make you feel? Most of us probably associate sermons about the end of the world with images like fire and brimstone, heaven and hell, wrath and judgment. That’s because most of the preachers who talk about the last days talk about them as if the signs described by the prophet Joel—blood, fire, and smoky mist—are close enough to scare us out of complacency. Because these are the last days, such preachers proclaim, the terrifying and decisive power of God demands radical and urgent action.

But you know what happens when human beings try to restrict and constrain God’s timeline until it fits neatly within their own understanding of chronology? It changes the way we think of God. It changes how we think of salvation. And it changes how we think of the Holy Spirit, tragically turning the gracious gift that God has given to unite us into a weapon that divides us.

Think about the Day of Pentecost. The very first gift that God gave the disciples after Jesus ascended into heaven was the ability to speak the good news of God’s salvation to all the nations of the earth. “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” the crowd of Jewish pilgrims asked. These members of the Jewish diaspora, rather than needing to translate the story of salvation from the Hebrew language used in the scriptures and in the temple into the language of their birth, encountered the story of God’s people as if it were written specifically for them. The gift of the Holy Spirit, therefore, was one of invitation—invitation to relationship and intimacy.  

But intimacy takes time. And human beings aren’t patient. When we get a taste of something we want, we don’t like to wait, and, if we can use the urgency and immediacy of salvation to fuel our impatience, all the better. Instead of relying on the Holy Spirit for the long, slow work of building relationships across cultures, our ancestors in the church translated the gospel into other languages in order to conquer the people who speak them and enslave them. “These are the last days,” the clergy who held shares in slave trading companies might have said, confusing their bottom line with God’s. “If we do not bring the gospel to the ends of the earth now, all hope for the African people will be lost.”

The same desire for control and domination continues to fuel the efforts of those who speak about the last days as if damnation will crash upon us at any moment. The Holy Spirit empowers us for urgent and compelling action, but there is a big difference between speaking about the last days with urgency and speaking about them as a threat. 

The last days foretold by the prophet Joel are the days that come after suffering and hardship, not before them. Joel taught that God’s people will know that their time of punishment is over when God pours out the Holy Spirit upon all people—when everyone—male and female, young and old, slave and free—is caught up in God’s wonderful work of salvation. These are indeed the last days, but that doesn’t mean that we should be afraid that the end will come at any minute. Instead, we should rejoice because it means that God’s salvation for all people is at hand.

These last days are defined not chronologically but theologically—not temporally but teleologically. Because God has raised Jesus from the dead, we live in an era of salvation history that is defined by radical inclusion not cultural assimilation. In Christ, all people have been written into the story of salvation, and the work of the Holy Spirit is to ensure that everyone on the earth knows that they belong to God. And that’s good news!

It's hard to remember that the arrival of these last days is good news when it feels like the whole season might come to a tragic end any second. But, when we remember that the last days will last until God’s work is finished—until God’s perfect time has come—we can approach them with real hope—the kind of hope that is empowered by the Holy Spirit. God has called us to share the good news of the gospel with the whole world, and God has empowered us to do that through the long and slow work of building intimate relationships that transcend cultures. That work requires patience and vulnerability, not speed and power. In the end, that’s how God’s salvation comes to us all.

Dissonance and Resolution

 

June 1, 2025 – Easter 7C

Acts 16:16-34; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26

© 2025 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

Over and over, as she walked behind Paul and Silas through the streets of Philippi, a slave girl cried out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” Day after day, this girl, whose name we are never told, followed the apostles everywhere they went, relentlessly yelling to any who would listen who it was that had come into their city. You might think that the apostles would be glad to get this sort of publicity, but her cries had the opposite effect. Eventually, Paul couldn’t take it anymore. He was exhausted, annoyed, labored through and through by her incessant cries, so he turned and said to the ungodly spirit within her, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her!” And it came out that very hour.

Who are the people that annoy you like that? Whose incessant cries drive you to the point of emotional exhaustion—to the point where the only thing you can do is turn around and yell at them to stop? 

Lots of people have the ability to bother us, but not everyone can get under our skin like that. I don’t like telemarketers, speed traps, or people who leave their shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot at the grocery store, but, after a moment of frustration, I am usually able to leave them behind. The people who really bother me are the ones who know just what buttons to push—the buttons that force me to confront not only what I do not like about the world but also what I do not like about myself. It is those individuals who instinctively identify that dissonance between the person I am supposed to be and the one who I really am and then hammer upon my inability to reconcile the two that awaken within me true rage.

The spirit of divination within that slave girl could see who Paul and Silas really were, and it knew even better than they did what was amiss within them. We cannot know exactly what brought this girl into the presence of the two apostles, but we can imagine that there was something about them—something about their identity as slaves of the Most High God—that drew this slave girl toward them. Maybe she knew that the God they served had the power to set her free. Or maybe she yearned for the companionship of some co-slaves. Whatever it was, as soon as she came near them, the spirit within her recognized a vulnerability within these two men. It could see the dissonance between the freedom that Paul and Silas proclaimed and the bondage that this girl endured. So the spirit began to shout until Paul couldn’t stand it anymore.

The Bible wants us to recognize and respond to the tension between our faithfulness and the world’s brokenness. The text makes a point of mentioning that it was on their way to the place of prayer that this slave girl found Paul and Silas. As Willie James Jennings writes, “As the disciples journeyed toward prayer, they gained a co-traveler who haunted their prayer walk. Such haunting is necessary and of the Spirit, as the tormented cries of the enslaved must always encumber the pious actions of the faithful.”  Even if the spirit within her was not of God, the Holy Spirit had the power to use its haunting voice to bring about God’s will. 

But Paul was not a completely willing participant, was he? The author of the Acts of the Apostles makes no attempt to redeem Paul’s impetuous decision to exorcise the demon spirit from the slave girl. There is no language about freedom or salvation here—only the language of annoyance. And that’s the point. When we are confronted by the dissonant collision between what we know to be right and our own failure to achieve it, our embarrassment masked as annoyance must grow into true pain and hardship before we can accept what God is trying to do within us.

What do you think Paul expected to happen when he cast that spirit out of the slave girl? I don’t get the impression that Paul thought a lot about it before he acted, but it wouldn’t take a fortune teller to know that, by eliminating her owners’ income stream, Paul was stepping into a world of trouble. To them, this nameless girl was nothing but property—an investment opportunity—and, now that the money had dried up, those owners wanted someone to pay. They dragged Paul and Silas into the marketplace—the center of commerce—and denounced them as Jews whose unfamiliar ways were threatening the peace and security promised by the empire. The sympathetic crowd was inflamed by their rhetoric, and they seized Paul and Silas, beating them and throwing them into prison.

It was in that moment that Paul finally knew that he had done something right. After being stripped naked, beaten with rods, thrown in jail, and bound in stocks, Paul and Silas began to sing. The hymns of praise they sang to God must have surprised the jailer. Surely he would have expected songs of lament and prayers of desperation, but these followers of Jesus were celebrating because they were wearing the marks of their savior. Regardless of his motives, Paul had managed to put upon himself the suffering of Jesus, which to him was a sign not of God’s abandonment but of his own faithfulness to the one whose reign stood in opposition to those who had imprisoned him. “If you can’t bear the cross,” the old gospel hymn declares, “then you can’t wear the crown.”

At midnight, while they were still singing, the ground began to tremble. An earthquake shook the prison to its foundations. The walls began to crack. The prisoners’ chains fell off. The cell doors swung open. All the prisoners had been set free—not just Paul and Silas but all who had been incarcerated. Fearing what would happen to him now that the criminals were let loose, the jailer drew his sword to kill himself, but Paul intervened. “Do not harm yourself,” he cried out in a loud voice, “for we are all here.” When God looses the chains and opens the doors and sets the prisoners free, the result is life, not death, and we must remember that.

Freedom in Christ means freedom for all. You cannot partake in the saving love of Jesus Christ and withhold that saving love from someone else without experiencing an unbearable dissonance. When you know that you are the underserved recipient of God’s unconditional love and are confronted by those to whom you would deny that same love, the experience is frustrating, emotionally exhausting, and spiritually draining. Often, when someone points out the inconsistency of our faith, our reaction is to use anger and self-righteousness to deflect our embarrassment and shame. Sometimes it just feels easier to retreat behind a wall of bluster and annoyance than to face the truth that, if God loves sinners like you and me, then God loves everyone—even and especially the people who get under our skin. 

Who are the people that annoy you to the point of emotional exhaustion, and what is it about them that God is inviting you to love the way that God loves them? In the end, it’s not really the people themselves who bother us. It’s the fact that they represent something about ourselves that we don’t like—something that we wish God would make disappear. But the only way that part of us will ever disappear is if we allow God to love it too—if we are willing to believe that even the least lovable part of ourselves is also loved by God—even that part of us which fails to love others the way that we have been loved.

Confronting that dissonance within us is costly. It usually leads to suffering and hardship. But Jesus has shown us that the way of the cross is the way that leads to everlasting life. “For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.”

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1. Jennings, Willie James. Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible. Westminster John Knox Press; Louisville: 2017, 159.