From the Cutting Room Floor

I remember a conversation we had during a short story workshop I was in once. We were talking about how quite often we will begin writing a story and then realize about five or ten pages in that this story is just actually beginning, that really those first five or ten pages are prologue; they aren't really necessary. So they end up on the "cutting room floor." Our professor called it "writing your way into the story." That happens with sermons too. Very often I will cut a good five minutes worth of material from my sermon each week after realizing that, while it might be interesting (at least to me), it is really more like scaffolding on the outside of the sermon. Now that the sermon is done, that scaffolding should be taken down. I usually realize that when a little voice in my head on Friday or Saturday says, "You don't need that; so cut it." Strangely enough that voice sounds a lot like Paul Johnson!

Anyway, this past week (late on Saturday night) I cut a good bit of material from the beginning of my sermon. It just didn't need to be there and the sermon was tighter and more powerful without it. But its still interesting and edifying information about early church history. So I want to share it with you. When you read it you'll know why I cut it. It's not sermon worthy. But it's still worth reading. Here it is:

The earliest church did not have the New Testament. This makes sense because you cannot have something until it exists. The New Testament is a collection of scriptural documents that came out of the life of the early church. Over the decades as letters were written and accounts of Jesus’ life authored, some of those new documents came to be viewed, for many reasons, as more important than the others, even as important as the Hebrew Bible. But, while the earliest churches surely utilized the new writings from Paul and the others in worship in different ways, for the first several generations Christians had only the Hebrew Bible (in its Greek form which was called the Septuagint), what we call the Old Testament. And that, interestingly enough, was in many ways sufficient for those first generations. The original apostles were passing on the stories of Jesus and then after the apostles died those who had known and learned from the apostles continued to pass on those stories. But those stories of Jesus were always viewed through the lens of what we call the Old Testament. In fact, the Old Testament is quoted by the New Testament writers around seven hundred times, and the trend continues as you read the documents written by the leaders that came after the deaths of the apostles and even for the first few hundred years of the Church. In their writings, they rarely quote what came to be known as the New Testament, but there is one passage after another from the Hebrew Bible quoted in their letters and sermons. In fact, the first use of the term New Testament is found in the writings of the early theologian Tertullian who lived from the year 155 to the year 220. So never think that the Old Testament is unimportant—-Jesus and the apostles certainly did not.

In the gospels, Jesus speaks about his own ministry and identity in terms of being the fulfillment, the natural fruit born from the promises made by God to God’s people, promises that are recorded in the Hebrew Bible. During his temptation in the desert, Jesus counters Satan by quoting from Deuteronomy. He stands up in the synagogue in Nazareth and introduces himself through reading from the prophet Isaiah. He rides a donkey into Jerusalem because hundreds of years earlier the prophet Zechariah said that a great peaceful king would do that. As he is dying on the cross, he quotes Psalm 22. These are just a few examples, and he surely spent time with his inner group of disciples searching the scriptures with them, showing them the promises that had been made which had pointed to him all along. He does this after his resurrection even, with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. And then after Jesus is gone and the Holy Spirit has come, the apostles and other early church leaders, in trying to explain to people what happened in Jesus, feel the need to dig even deeper into the Hebrew Bible. But reading the Hebrew Bible is different for them now that they are on this side of the incarnation of Jesus. They see things in the scriptures now that they didn’t see before, although those words were always there. It is like when you watch a movie with a lot of plot twists. Then when the surprising ending is revealed, you think, “Wow, I never saw that coming.” So you watch the movie over again, but already knowing the ending this time, and all of a sudden you realize during this second, third, or fourth viewing that all the clues were there. You just didn’t know what to look for the first time you watched it. The way that Jesus lived through teaching and healing, how he died on the cross, the earth shattering reality of his resurrection from the dead, and his eventual ascension to heaven made a lot of people, even the apostles I believe, say, “Wow, we never saw that coming!” So after it was over they went back to the scriptures again, but already knowing the ending this time, and they realized that all the clues were there. They just didn’t know what to look for before they’d experienced Jesus.

When the apostles and other early Christians read of the ancient hope of the people of God throughout the Hebrew Scriptures they saw all those prophetic hopes wrapped up in the person of Jesus. So before the gospels were ever even written, and even before Paul may have written any of his letters, it is believed that the first documents (none have survived) produced by the earliest Christians were lists of prophecies from the Hebrew Bible that the church believed had been fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. These lists would be copied and then carried around by early Christian evangelists who would use these lists, known to scholars as testimonia, to “give specific examples to support their claim that Jesus had fulfilled the traditional expectations concerning the Messiah.” Those prophecies then made their way into the documents that would later make up our New Testament. Our New Testament is very much a collection of inspired writings that proclaim that Jesus is, through some strange, unexpected, God ordained way, the fulfillment of the hopes not only of the ancient Israelites, but of the world.

We take the New Testament for granted. It is essential and priceless to us. It is hard to imagine that the faith of the earliest Christians was supported by the Hebrew Bible, the oral traditions of the apostles' stories of Jesus, and letters that occasionally showed up, which they would read over and over again when they met together on Sundays. Maybe that will give us a little more sympathy for those early Christians that writers like Paul, Peter, James, and Jude were writing to because they kept screwing up. Also, it helps us to understand why there were so many letters being exchanged (surely far more than we know of) and why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, finally thought, "It's probably time to write some of this down." But knowing this about the early church should also help us to remember the immeasurable value of the Old Testament for growing us in our faith and even in pointing us toward our Lord Jesus.

I hope that was worth picking up off the cutting room floor. Enjoy this first week of Advent. Take some time to be quiet. Christmas is still several weeks away. It will be there when we get there; I promise. Just be quiet. God just might meet you in the silence.

In the love of the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

Everett