Sometimes my sermons have a strong teaching element. This sermon is one of those, in which I try to give my hearers a perspective on how, in the Anglican tradition, we understand the place of the Bible in our lives. I used the structure of the Collect of the day as an organizing principle.
Sermon for the 25th Sunday after Pentecost
Episcopal Church of the Holy Family, Jasper, Georgia
The Rev. Mary P. Johnson, Rector
Texts: Isaiah 65:17-25; Canticle 9; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19.
This is the Sunday that ends our three-year cycle of Bible readings for worship. Next week we step outside of time, and celebrate, on the last Sunday of our liturgical year, the eternal reign of Christ the King. And the week after, we will have moved into Advent, anticipating the coming of Jesus into our lives. At the very beginning of our liturgical year, we begin anew to hear, rather fully, the story that God tells us in the pages of Holy Scripture. And today, as we do every week, we prayed the Collect appointed for the day, that special prayer at the beginning of the Eucharist that gathers or collects our disparate thoughts so that we may focus on God, as a community of faith in our time and place. Each week the Collect brings forward one theme, or one characteristic of God, or one element of our relationship with God. This week the theme is the Holy Scriptures. Listen prayerfully again to this Collect, written by Thomas Cranmer in the 16th century:
Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
This prayer is very helpful in enabling us to get at the way Episcopalians understand the Bible. And it’s not really surprising that, in our tradition, it is a prayer, rather than some other sort of document or theological statement, that best articulates the way we read the Bible. Father Ted is always reminding us in the classes he teaches that “Lex orandi, lex credendi” is an important Anglican principle. “Lex orandi, lex credendi” is a little Latin aphorism that translates, roughly, “How we pray tells us what we believe.” The praying comes first; the relationship comes first. In the two-way communication between us and God that is prayer, we work out, we discover, what we believe. Yet, in saying this, we do not underestimate the very essential role that the Bible plays in this process of knowing God and seeking to love and obey him.
This prayer speaks to God’s purposes in giving us the Bible. We are to learn something from its contents. We are to learn to know Someone; and we are to hope in and trust in the God we meet in Holy Scriptures, who is Life-giving. This task of learning is so important that we pray for God’s help in accomplishing it.
We pray: “grant us so to hear [the Scriptures], read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them…” The prayer gives precedence to HEARING the Bible read aloud. That hearing implies at least two people: a speaker and a listener. The underlying assumption here is that these words of the Bible are to address us in community. We listen; we listen to a specific person read a particular passage of the Bible for a particular occasion. And that reading speaks to us where we are in our own lives, with their unique mixture of sadness and joy, anxiety and contentment, pain and joy. In asking God to grant us to HEAR the Holy Scriptures, we are asking God to continue to give us the blessing of gathering for worship with others who are also listening.
The next four verbs: read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest, speak to our need to go below the surface. The Bible bears studying by every Christian, not just those who are called to ordained ministry. One of the most powerful insights of the protestant reformation was that the Bible was for all of us. It wasn’t a secret codebook that could only be interpreted by an inner circle. In England, William Tyndale, a 16th century cleric, completed the first popular translation of the Bible into English, the one that was the skeleton of the King James Bible, and said that he believed that the Bible should be in the hands of every plowboy. In fact, a major impetus of the move towards universal literacy in England was a desire to make it possible for everyone to read the Bible and, in reading, find a richer relationship with God.
But reading the Bible can be pretty challenging. Some parts are boring. Some parts are confusing. Some parts seem downright foreign. And some parts absolutely grab us and have the potential to transform our lives because of how they invite us to see the world and our place in it, and to hear God calling us to new life. The verb “mark” as it was intended by the writer of the Collect, in his day, means to pay attention, to take special note. It’s the “mark” of “Mark my words!” Sometimes it’s as if God speaks to us so directly through the words of the Bible that we wonder how we can possibly have come upon a particular passage at that such a time in our lives. And, frankly, there can be no harm, and perhaps a lot of good in understanding “mark” as we do in our own day. Having a Bible of you own, in which you can underline, highlight, add question marks or comments, as you read and study it, is a really good idea.
We hear—and this is primary, and part of our worship in community with the People of God. We read, we mark, and, says the Collect, we learn. Biblical scholars have a great deal to teach us. Translations get more accurate, archaeological and manuscript discoveries give us greater insight into the daily life. Close reading of the biblical texts by people with skills in their original languages can yield new insights about the intentions and contexts of the very human writers whose need to put down in words something about God’s ways with his people was and, we believe, still is, guided by the Holy Spirit. Once you start reading and studying the Bible regularly, you will probably discover what Christians have learned through the millennia. It’s really fascinating. It’s worthy of all the intellectual effort you put into it. But learn as the writer of the Collect meant it also involved the lost art of memorization. In an age when books were scarce, and when people weren’t inundated by messages in print wherever they look, they learned to commit what they heard and read to memory. Those words of the Bible that you hide in your heart by memorization can come back at very important times. Remember the scene in the John Grisham novel, The Client, in which the young protagonist was terrified to tell what he saw at a death scene? Lying in a jail cell, he looked up at words from the Gospel of John that someone else had memorized and written on the wall: “You shall know the Truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Those words gave him the courage to do the right thing.
We hear, read, mark, and learn the message of the Bible. But if it doesn’t change us, make us different than we were before we heard it, it hasn’t done its job. Or, maybe it would be better to say, we haven’t done our job. We have to inwardly digest the message of the Bible. Digestion takes the nutrients from our food and transforms them into a form that our blood can carry to every single cell in our bodies. When we inwardly digest the words and message of the Bible, we are taking it into ourselves. There are sacramental elements to this kind of mindful, open-hearted encounter with God’s Word. We take the Word of God made Flesh: Jesus, into our very being when we receive his Body and Blood in the Eucharist; we also receive Christ through the Word of God, the Holy Scriptures.
Archbishop Cranmer’s expectation was that, as God’s people hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the words and message of the Bible, it would have a wonderful effect on them. The outcome would be lives that were more full of hope, more confident in the joys of new life that are made possible for us by what Jesus did in giving himself to us.
We read the Bible as a document of hope. We don’t read it as a handbook on how to live, although there are many wise instructions in the Bible. We don’t read it as a science book, although the Bible contains some remarkably astute observations about how things work. The truth that God created the heavens and the earth is of a completely different nature than the truths about how life works at the molecular level. We don’t read it as a document that judges people who commit sins that aren’t the ones we are tempted to commit. We don’t read it as a code book or map for understanding the events in the future. We read the Bible as a document that lets God’s grace in to our lives, and that addresses us both as a community of the faithful, and as people of faith. We read the Bible because God meets us in those pages, and invites us into new life.
We hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest passages like the one we heard today from Isaiah, because they awaken and preserve hope in us, and a longing for a world in which God’s goodness and justice and, above all, God’s love prevails.
We read passages like the very practical one about living in community in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians because we are reminded that we are part of a community that can get bogged down, sometimes, and frustrated about the incomplete state of other people’s sanctification—as they are frustrated about the incomplete state of OUR sanctification. We read for those encouraging words that say to people in Paul’s day, and, by extension, to us: “Do not be weary in doing right.”
We hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest passages like today’s Gospel lesson, because by them we gain confidence that God is working out his purposes, despite appearances to the contrary. When the forces of evil seem to be winning, when we or those we love go through suffering or persecution because of a decision not to be weary in doing right, we read these words of Jesus with hope. These all are words that remind us that God is the God of life, in whose presence we have true joy and delight. The dreadful portents that are signs that the end is near are, even more truly, the signs of the approaching dawn of God’s new heaven and new earth.
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