Bible Sunday_2026

Readings

• Nehemiah 8:1-4a [5-6] 8-12
• Colossians 3:12-17
• Matthew 24:30-35

Sermon

Some years back, when I went on an extended holiday to India, the guidebooks had told me about taking my shoes off to enter Hindu, Muslim or Sikh places of worship. They didn’t mention churches, but in the rural south, most worshippers removed their shoes before entering church. They didn’t do that so much in the big cities, although I noticed that even in Calcutta, a very high number removed their shoes before going up to receive communion. Something the guidebooks presented as a different religious practice was actually much more a widespread cultural approach to worship.

Most of us today are familiar with what Muslim prayers look like, so listen again to part of our first reading from Nehemiah. “All the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. Then they bowed their heads and worshiped the LORD with their faces to the ground.” They say the Amen standing, raising their hands in prayer, then they kneel down, and then they worship, lowering their faces to the ground. One of the common words for worship in the New Testament, which is also used here in the Greek translation of Nehemiah, is proskyneō. It’s what the wise men do when they enter the stable and pay homage, it’s what the disciples do before the risen Jesus at the end of Matthew’s gospel. Sometimes our translations go for knelt before him, sometimes pay homage, sometimes worship. Profound worship in scripture often involves this bowing down and prostrating our bodies before the one being worshipped. What we now think of as part of Muslim prayer was a much more widespread practice in the ancient world, and pervades the New Testament as well as the Old.

This worship, in today’s Bible Sunday reading from Nehemiah, is the attitude people bring to this proclaiming of the law: a public reading of an early version of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. They approach listening to scripture with profound reverence, a bodily attitude that signifies humility and a readiness to obey. What attitudes do we bring when we listen to the readings? How attentive are we, and how much work does the reader put into reading them well, and making it easy for us to listen?

In today’s story, it’s actually quite hard to listen. Almost certainly the mass of the people there understand comparatively little Hebrew. They need the Levites to help them understand the law: as the reading says, “they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” Scripture might be a great gift, and we might want to receive it with reverence, but to actually respond, we need to understand what it’s saying.

We’re especially fortunate as English speakers: we have more translations available to help us understand than any other language group. However, it’s also quite possible to misunderstand a text that comes to us from a different culture, a different time, and a different place, and, I have to say, if a text can be misunderstood then someone, somewhere will have put that misunderstanding online to trap the unwary reader into following their own bizarre take, or even join their cult. That’s one of the reasons the church developed creeds. A creed is a summary of the key points of what scripture is about, to help keep our understanding within the main lines of what the church believes about God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Make the most of all the helps out there: your clergy and Readers, study groups, daily study notes, courses and books and so on. We all need to go on wrestling with the task of understanding, so that scripture might lead us back to worship God, follow God’s call, and seek to be faithful and obedient to what God asks of us as followers of the Jesus we come to know through Scripture, yes, but also through prayer, sacrament, and the company of others.

And we might still get it wrong sometimes. In our second reading, Paul says to the Colossians: “Above all, clothe yourselves with love.” One of the great doctors of the church, Augustine, a bishop in North Africa wrote a guide for Christian teachers. In it, he noted that not all interpretations of scripture were good ones. But, he said, whether your interpretation was right or not, it was still a good interpretation if it increased your love for God, or helped you love your neighbour better.

Jesus taught us that all God’s teaching, all the law that Ezra proclaimed in our first reading, is summed up in those two great commandments. Love the Lord your God with heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself. As you give thanks for the scriptures this Bible Sunday, remember that they are there to lead us into the way of love, which is the way of life.

Questions

Do you think our culture has practices that help us treat God with reverence? How do we best express reverent humility in our worship?

What helps you interpret scripture well? Is it teachers, books, notes, sermons, creeds, a commitment to live lovingly, or a combination of some or all of the above