We are continuing our Lenten book series Sacred Rhythms by Ruth Haley Barton and the theme I will be exploring with you today is the theme of scripture. Now, I am very familiar with preaching on Scripture but I have never preached about scripture as a whole and its importance in the sacred rhythm of the life of faith. It’s a little bit hard to know where to start because the topic is so broad. After all the Bible is not just a book – it is a library of books. It contains, poems, songs, psalms, proverbs, history, myth etc. So I started thinking about my own journey with the bible, where it started and how it progressed.
I suppose my journey with sacred scripture started a lot like yours. Most of us started learning bits and pieces of the Bible long before we could ever read it. I have a vague memory of the first time I noticed a rainbow in the sky and my mom using that occasion to tell me about Noah’s ark and the great flood and how a rainbow was a sign of God’s promise to never again cover the earth in a flood. This is not unlike how the very first people who heard these stories heard them for the first time. The stories were told to explain the phenomena they saw in the physical world, to make meaning out of the events they experienced in life. They were used to help them remember the positions of the stars, used to tell them where they came from and where they were going, used to explain why there is evil and the world and why we die and what happens when we do. The questions that people have had since the beginning of time are much the same as they are today and that is why scripture remains relevant I suppose.
The first time I had a real encounter with scripture as a whole was when I was 15 years old. We had a family Bible that was kept in a drawer but nobody ever read it much. Mostly because it was hard to read. But then when I was 15 I came across a copy of “The Good news” Bible. Are you familiar with “the Good News Bible”? It’s a paraphrase (not a translation I was taught later) of the gospels in very simple language with stick –figure illustrations to boot! It was a very easy read and I was able to get through it in short order. I remember being very moved by the stories, by the parables, teachings, and compassion of Jesus. And then fascinated by the Acts of the Apostles and the Story of Paul. And there was something about all of that that my soul immediately recognized as true. I don’t mean true in the sense that something actually happened – like there was actually a Noah’s ark and a great flood and all that. I mean true in the sense that the stories, parables, teaching and compassion of Jesus was resonating with the truth that was already inside me – like when you are singing a note and another person matches your pitch and you have this experience of being in tune. The truth in my soul had found its matching pitch in the scriptures. I felt like the Ancient Greek scholar Archimedes who was baking his brain for weeks trying to figure out how to find the volume of irregular object and one day when he stepped into the bathtub and saw the water rise, the solution became self-evident. They say that Archimedes was so excited he jumped out of the tub and ran through the town naked yelling, Eureka! Eureka! “Eureka” is Greek for “I found it”. Encountering the scriptures for the first time was my Eureka moment, my “I found it” even if I didn’t run through the streets naked as a Jay bird.
What was it that I found? Well, I suppose I didn’t even know at the time exactly what I was looking for, but do you remember what it was like being a teenager? I suppose that some people have very fond memories of their teenage years, but mine were hard. And I know they are hard for a lot of people. You are in the process of becoming and it is a very scary time. You are no longer a child but you’re are not an adult yet either and the place in-between is painful. It’s the time where you fall in love for the first time and have your heart broken for the first time. You start experiencing the real hardships of life but you haven’t developed the strategies yet for how do deal with them. The trick of the teenage years is that you have to survive long enough to learn how to survive. It’s the time in your life that you first start asking those existentially painful questions: what does it all mean? What is the purpose of life? Why is there suffering? Is there a way out? And it was at this time that the easy-to-read version of the New Testament fell into my lap – complete with stick-figure illustrations and all.
Now that path from that 15 yr. old boy who had found all the answers to life’s persistent questions to the person I am today wasn’t exactly a straight line and based on that I don’t expect my future to be a straight and predictable line either. There is a funny Mark Twain saying that I’m reminded of at the moment. Mark Twain said, “When I was 15 my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to be in his presence. When I was 25 I was amazed at how much he had learned in such a short time.”
When I encountered the scriptures for the first time, I thought I had all the answers. And I became hyper-religious and judgmental, which is what happens when you think you know it all. Little did I know the scriptures would open up a lot a more questions than they provided answers. And my search lead me to other religious traditions and their scriptures as well as other books on philosophy and interesting people who liked to discuss the deeper questions of life. The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. But I keep coming back to the Christian Scriptures. Not because I think that it is the best religion out there and the Christians have the market cornered on truth. I come back to them because they are my Native language. Religion is a language through which we speak to God and God speaks to us. And Christianity is my native tongue – the language I will always speak the best no matter what other languages I might learn. If Religion is the language, the scripture is what keeps me engaged in the conversation.
Have you ever heard the saying, “you are what you eat?” Well, that is not just true for the body but it is true for the mind and the soul as well. I heard someone say once that you are the sum total of the 5 people you spend the most time with. But it’s not just the people we hang around – it’s the programs we watch on tv, the books we read, the news we listened to. We are what we eat mentally and spiritually. I was thinking about this when I made a new year’s resolution to read 100 books this year. I have a feeling that if I’m going to make good on this a lot of those book are going to have to be small. So, I’ve been reading the Harry Potter series. In the Harry Potter world of wizards and magic, everything is alive. When the kids play chess, the chess players are alive and they don’t always do what you want them to do. That’s what makes wizard chess harder than regular chess. The people in photographs are alive and will wave at you. The books are alive. So you when you read a book, you are entering into a dialogue with a living being. And I thought, you know, that is kind of what the Bible is like. The call it the living Word for a reason. Every time I open the bible, it is different. Of course the bible isn’t really different, but it seems so because I am different every time I read it. It’s kind of like Mark Twin saying that he was amazed his father had changed so much in such a short time. Really it was the boy who changed, not the father.
But what I find fascinating about scripture is that there is something there for whatever stage of spiritual maturity you are at. It’s kind of like the crowd of people who go to watch a symphony. Everyone in the audience appreciates the symphony at a different level. Some people may not have musical appreciation at all and just like to go to see everyone dress up in fancy clothes, whereas others may be very highly educated in music theory and history and can appreciate it on a very different level. Yet, they all get something out of it. The bible is like that. There is something there for young children and there is something there for the scholar. Or it’s kind of like a Disney movie. Disney movies are like that. There is a story there for the children but always a deeper message for the adults too.
Speaking of Disney movies. One of my favorite is the “Never Ending story”. It’s a story about a boy reading a story. The main character in the story the boy is reading about is on a quest to save both a princess and magical world the lives in called Fantasia. The hero of the story is told that in order to save fantasia, the hero must find a human child who lives beyond the boundaries of fantasia to keep Fantasia from disappearing. This human boy must give the princess a new name. It’s only near the end of the book when all hope seems to be lost that the boy reading the book realizes he is the human boy they are speaking about – that he is part of the story not as a reader but as a character. The story becomes alive for him the moment he realizes he is part of it.
And that is what scripture is for us. It is not just a story from long ago that we are reading about. But it is an encounter with the living God and the person of Christ who is at work in our world as much now as then. And the moment we realize we are characters in a truly never-ending story, it is only then that the words on the page become the living word in our hearts.
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