Bible Sunday

 

Bible Sunday 2021

 

Isaiah 55.1-11, John 5.36b-47

 

When my children were at primary school, there was one part of the curriculum which always struck me as particularly humane. “What did you do at school today?” I would ask. Often the answer was “nothing”, of course, but sometimes they would say “oh, we had ERIC today”.

ERIC – who was Eric? Some new teacher? It took me ages to discover that it stood for “Everyone Reading In Class”. It was basically a session where each child got out a book and read silently to themselves. Frankly it would have been my idea of heaven, and I think my children felt the same way.

 

Today is Bible Sunday, and there’s a bit of me that wonders whether, rather than me blathering on, I shouldn’t just declare this to be an ERIC day – Everyone Reading In Church (whether you are in the Church building or sharing in Church online through the podcast). I wonder whether I should tell you to open a Bible and just sit and read it for 10 minutes or so. It would be a lot less work than writing a sermon.

 

But the problem with ERIC is that though it might be my idea of heaven, it’s might be your idea of hell. I know it was for some children, especially those who struggled with reading, or just didn’t like sitting still. And if reading a story book is a challenge, then reading the Bible can feel like a much greater one. It’s not the same as getting lost in a page-turning whodunnit or a romance. It isn’t one book, for a start. It’s a whole library of different sorts of books, written over many hundreds of years by many different people, covering many different genres – history, poetry, prophecy, myth, proverbs, letters. Some of them are far more difficult to get our heads around than others. It was produced in cultures very different from our own by people with different assumptions and agendas. Sometimes it is quite baffling, and brutal. And it doesn’t help that often we just hear little snippets of it in church, without any context. How can we even begin to make sense of it?

 

Another barrier to reading the Bible can be the worry that we might not understand it correctly. After all, it’s holy writ, the word of God, somehow different and sacred, we think. What if we get it wrong? Perhaps we’d better leave it to the experts, just in case.

 

We might worry too, that people will think we’ve turned into religious extremists – Bible bashers – that we’ve surrendered our critical faculties to some Bronze Age mumbo jumbo.

 

As someone who’s had a lifelong love of the Bible, I’m passionate about helping people to get beyond those worries, though. I’m no fundamentalist or Biblical literalist, but I’ve found time and time again that God speaks to me through these ancient words, not necessarily because those who wrote them had a hotline to God, but because they were willing to struggle honestly with their experiences, with themselves, and with God too sometimes. I may not always come to the same conclusions they did, but their stories help me to see my own story more clearly, and so be aware of God’s Holy Spirit at work here and now. Of course, the Bible can be misused, and misunderstood, but the answer to that isn’t to keep it firmly closed and locked away, but to open it up and dive in, letting it become our book, our territory, our pathway into the heart of God.

 

Here at Seal, as well as in Sunday worship and in the private, individual Bible reading we do, we chew over the Bible together in our monthly Good Book Club - a Bible discussion group I run on the first Wednesday morning of each month, and in our Zoom Church sessions, and in home groups - let me know if you’d like to be part of one, or start a new one with some friends. In these groups we aren’t looking to find the “right” answers from an expert. Everyone brings their own insights, and they’re all valuable. Often it’s the questions we ask rather than the answers we give that open up the Bible most effectively, the doubts rather than the faith. It genuinely doesn’t matter whether you are an old hand or coming to it brand new. Some of the most profound insights I’ve had into the Bible have come to me from children; their reactions make me see stories that I am over-familiar with in a completely new way.

It’s when God’s story and our stories intertwine that we really start to hear what we need to hear, as God’s word becomes flesh in us, together.

 

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus makes that point to the religious experts who come to him. It’s all very well reading the ancient words of Moses in their sacred scrolls, but if they can’t recognise the Word of God in flesh and blood, standing in front of them, living out the love that the ancient scriptures call them to, then they haven’t understood what they’re reading, he tells them. If what we read doesn’t lead us to become more loving, more whole, and bring wholeness to others too, then we’re missing the point.

 

So how do we get started, and how do we make sure that we’re reading the Bible in a way that is life-giving, for us and for others?

 

I read a very helpful book earlier this week – I’ll put it at the back of church after this morning’s service. It’s called “How to eat bread”, but don’t worry; I’m not about to give up the day job and go into catering. The bread it refers to is the spiritual food we get from the scriptures. The subtitle is  “21 nourishing ways to read the Bible”. For the author, Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, the Bible is like bread, something essential, a staple food, but it’s endlessly versatile too. Bread comes in many forms; brown , white , wholemeal, granary, French, flatbread, naan, rye… the list goes on and on. And there’s so much you can do with it. You can mop up your gravy with it, toast it, make sandwiches with it… You can even spread Marmite on it, though I can’t imagine why you’d want to… And if it goes stale, well, there’s bread and butter pudding. You get the point.

 

Reading the Bible can be done in just as many ways. Some of those ways are academic, and maybe a bit specialised; reading it in the original languages, investigating its historical and geographical context, pulling it apart and analysing it. Those things are important. We need that sort of scholarship and attention to detail.  But we can also use our imagination to read the Bible, whoever we are. We can imagine we are part of the stories it tells. We can play with it, act it out, mull over individual words and phrases that strike us in it, draw it, paint it, embroider it. We can notice who speaks and who is silent, who’s included and who’s left out of the stories we read. We can look at it from the perspective of people very different from us, too, and be enlightened by that.

 

Miranda Threlfall-Holmes tells the story of a Biblical scholar, Mark Allen Powell, who read Jesus’ well-known parable of the Prodigal Son to three different groups, one in America, one in Russia and one in Tanzania. He asked them all the same question. Why did the prodigal son end up so poor and so desperate, longing to eat the food he was feeding to the pigs? The Americans said that it was because he’d wasted his money; it was his fault. The Russians said that it was because there was a famine in the land; he couldn’t have done anything about it. The Tanzanians said that it was because no one in his new land, where he was a stranger, offered him hospitality or help. The same story; three radically different interpretations, reflecting the backgrounds, the experiences and the unconscious biases of the hearers. Each view was valid, but very revealing, and brought the story to life in a new way.

 

So, on this Bible Sunday, as on every other day of the year, even though I haven’t declared this to be an ERIC day, I hope we’ll find time to open the book, so that we do have “Everyone Reading in Church,” or at home, or on the train, or anywhere else you happen to be, and that we’ll have the confidence to bring ourselves to it, just as we are. If you’d like help in getting started, there’s plenty of it around. The leaflet I’ve given you today has ideas and resources in it. There are more at the back of church and in this week’s newsletter. And there are the home groups and other activities I mentioned earlier too. However we do it, I hope that we’ll continue to open the book, open our minds, open our ears, and open our hearts to the God who still longs to speak to us.  Amen