Last After Trinity, Bible Sunday, 26th October, by Fr Jack

Isaiah 45.22-end

St Paul to the Romans 15.1-6

St Luke 4.16-24

Today’s readings are set for Bible Sunday. Bible Sunday is inspired by today’s collect:

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: help us so to hear them, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word, we may embrace and for ever hold fast the hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

That magical phrase: ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them’.

Do not be fooled. Despite the gentleness of our Anglican tradition, and beauty of these turns of phrase: whenever we pray, whenever we read the Bible, whenever we receive Holy Communion, we are handling fire, that is transformative and real.

That spirit is alive in today’s first lesson from Isaiah. The word shall go forth from God’s mouth, and we shall be changed - summoned, saved, brought into God’s glory.

Let’s look together this morning at how we read the Bible, how we handle this fire, well.

I remember years ago then Chief Rabbi Lord Sachs delivering his Rosh Hashanah message on the BBC. I remember Lord Sachs saying something like: there are people who tell us that bringing a child up in a faith today is indoctrination, or abusive. And I can see that sometimes that is the case. But just as abusive is bringing a human being into the world without knowing their story

Jesus stands in the synagogue today and, bringing Isaiah’s prophecy before the assembly, effectively says ‘This story, this promise of hope in God. This is our story, your story, and I am writing it here and now’.

St Paul writing to the Early Roman Church today wants us to lean into the Scriptures, for encouragement and to be fed.

And we can’t find our story, or allow Jesus to write God’s story in us, from arms length.

So, the rubber starts to hit the road. Just look at our Jewish roots: when, like Jesus at the Last Supper, a Jew says of the Passover and Exodus ‘I was brought up out of Egypt, from slavery, to be led into the promised land’ she or he means it. I was brought. I am being brought. These events of millennia ago are present here and now in my life and yours. God’s work is ongoing. And we read, mark, learn and digest these texts because we live inside this story.

We are like books of the Bible, being written by God. God’s masterpiece (as the letter to the Ephesians says).

So first and foremost to read Scripture well, we cannot treat it like something we hold at arms length, or that we use (like a kitchen utensil), when we want to. No, the Scriptures are a tapestry in which we are thread. We belong in this story of humanity and God, with all its wonder and joy, horror and mystery.

And we know that the Scriptures are not simple. Not one book, but a library of texts written by scores of different authors, over centuries. A long and complex story, a whole host of different genres and intentions and reading-styles.

I can recommend three very different books today.

This sermon is on the website, so you can look it up and trot down to Daunt on Cheapside to buy:

1. John Barton’s superb recent History of the Bible. Also available as audio on YouTube from when it was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week a little while ago.

2. AN Wilson’s very entertaining and thoughtful ‘The Book of the People: How to Read to the Bible’. It’s great to read and give away copies too.

3. A chapter by Fr Jarred Mercer on how to read Scripture in a super little book called ‘Love Makes No Sense’ written by a gang priest friends of mine largely in the university and churches at Oxford.

So do look one or two of those up and see what you think.

Some Christians in recent centuries have fallen into one of two ditches. One lot have made the mistake of treating the Bible as if it were the Christian Qur’an. Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the inerrant, complete word dictated of God. We do not, and never have believed this of the Bible. The Word of God for Christians is the person, Jesus Christ. As St John tells us, the Word, the Logos, the meaning and purpose and complete revelation of God is Jesus. We do not follow a book, we follow a person: God. And to idolise a book, even a book inspired by God, through which God reveals God’s self to us, like the Bible, is still to make an idol. The book does help us to know and love and serve God, but it isn’t God.

The other ditch is to turn the Bible into a battlefield of argument and wishful thinking, or to turn away when the Bible is tricky. We can’t do that either. Because the Bible isn’t a toy we play with, remember, it is the landscape in which our lives find their story - good and bad, inspiring and difficult.

And here we come to something else that needs debunking. I am often asked by school groups if I believe the Bible is merely symbolic or literal. It’s the kind of question GCSE text books ask. It is a stupid question.

For a start, there is no such thing as ‘merely’ symbolic. Symbols are desperately powerful and important. The symbol of marriage is life-changing as two people live it out. The symbol of the Eucharist is God with us, feeding and transforming us by Divine love.

A very wise priest friend of mine, if asked if the Bible is ‘just symbolically true' or ‘literally true’, I think would answer that that ‘is a boring question’.

Is this or that book of the Old Testament a blow-by-blow news report of what happened? That’s very much the least interesting way of approaching these texts. What is alive here of God and humanity? How are we entangled in these texts? How are they part of God’s story-making in us then and now? That’s how Christians have always read the Bible.

To read, mark, learn and inwardly digest these texts is to live these stories that have spoken the truth of God’s love and the human condition for centuries. To filter them according to our tastes, or to label them with superficial modern categories will lead us nowhere. And, as we’ve said, to make an idol of the Bible is equally dangerous.  And these are all pretty modern mistakes.

St Augustine writing 16 centuries ago, takes the psalms, and allows them to be ancient Hebrew song-prayer-poems. He also sees the face of Christ in them, in the crucifixion psalms of death and anguish. He also sees his own experience in them - in his sinfulness and character flaws, and in his desire for God and search for holiness. Well, which is true? Which is it? What a silly question: yes, yes, and yes.

And here we see that to read the Bible well, we must read it together. In every sense. We must come together to hear the Bible in our liturgy: Morning and Evening Prayer and at the Eucharist. To be pickled in it together. Reading the Bible alone is very important too, but these texts were written under God’s inspiration by communities, for communities.

And we must read the Bible together in the sense of allowing the Scriptures to mutually interpret itself. The Old Testament, the Gospels and the other New Testament texts speak in conversation, through harmony and through tension. Like colour on an artists pallet, and then working together on the canvas of our lives.

Another dangerous habit of Christians in recent centuries (forgetting the ancient wisdom of our forbears) is what’s called proof-texting. Taking a line from Scripture and using it in an argument. Well, ‘The Bible says x or y’. Well, friends, the Bible has a lot of different voices, and says lots of different things. And famously the devil knows the Bible better than any of us, and it’s not been much help to him. Lonely quotations rarely speak for God very well. We need to be held by all of Scripture together, to come to a wise and searching understanding of what God is saying.

So, where have we got to?

Today we are enjoined by Holy Church to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the Scriptures. We do that by realising that we live in this great story of life, we aren’t consumers of it. It is the fabric of our lives and the story of which we are being made.

And that means we read it together. Together in churches gathered to hear God’s voice, and together with itself, seeking to hear the whole voice of God in whole of Scripture.

And that that Word, that voice, is of the God who is: of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Just as Jesus speaks in the synagogue today, He speaks to us. Not a book, but a person, who reveals God’s self, for love of us, in this amazing gift of the Holy Bible. Thanks be to God.