A dear sister in the church contacted me recently to let me know she did not like my sermon on Tamar from Genesis 38. It really is a rough story, 'R-rated' almost. I can understand her difficulty with it, and before I preached it I thought long and hard whether or not to do so. I've had some self-doubt after her comments, and it may well be that it wasn't well put together, or made the right applications, or was just poorly presented. That could well be the case...sometimes I realize how unworthy I am to preach.
But this was not her point...she's always been positive and encouraging to me; her problem was with the story itself. Maybe a general Sunday morning crowd is not the place for a story like that. Maybe it belongs in a small group of older, mature adults. Maybe.
Or maybe not. As I've thought about this today I've thought about all the stories from the Bible that we would have to not preach about if we were nervous about the 'mature' content, and the list continues to grow. Much of Abraham's story, out. How do you preach about a guy who is so nervous about his own security he sends his wife to another man twice? Later on he then tries to kill his son! Most of the Judges (and Samuel and Kings...) is out...too much bloodshed. David and Bathsheba is certainly out, as it involves the triad of lust, immorality, and murder. The story about the other Tamar and Amnon and Absalom likewise is a story of rape and murder. Hosea buys his wife back after she spends time as a prostitute.
And then what do we do with Jesus? He's accused of being a drunk and a glutton. He hangs out with whores, tax collectors (the mafia of the day), and various sinners. He argues with people and causes a riot in the temple and is followed by scandal wherever he goes. He dies a bloody, gruesome death.
I'm sure that some would be content with a bunch of homilies about being a good person. James is a nice book, we might think...not a lot of stuff in there could make us nervous. And Proverbs, that's nice too...until you see foolishness described as an alluring, wayward woman.
But when we take it as a whole there are a lot more stories in the Bible that are objectionable than we would care to admit. Maybe we're just too squeamish today, but I think it has more to do with the fact that we think that grace is clean and sterile. God comes in, lysols our tiny little mistake, and we move happily on.
The more I preach, though, I see how foolish that vision is. Grace is messy. God doesn't just have to make a minor course correction to our lives, he spends time cleaning up after us like we are an infant with a bad case of diarrhea. It's nasty, and we don't want to talk about it, but it's real, and that messiness is reflected in all these stories. As much as we want to explain these stories away, we can't, because then we have to ignore our own stories of sin. There's nothing in the lives of people I have served with that isn't reflected by the Bible.
More importantly, though, there's no mess in our lives that can't be saved by grace. Most of these stories ultimately are about redemption of one sort or another. As messed up as people are, God comes in and makes things right, even when it seems impossible to us. We may not like to admit it, but we need to read these messy stories to remind us of God's great blessing.
