Readings:
Sermon:
Now the Bible as a resource for practical Christian living might sound pretty self-evident; but it’s not always the way in which the Bible is used. The Bible is often used controversially, as a way of scoring points in favour of one dogmatic or moral position over against another. The trouble with that is that it is easy to justify most things by means of it. As G.K. Chesterton said, it’s not enough for someone to read “their Bible” because they need to read everyone else’s Bible as well.
How then should we use the Bible? Today’s collect tells us. The first thing it tells us to do is not to read the Bible at all, but to hear it. That evocative reformation picture of a vernacular Bible set up in every church in England has fixed in our minds the idea that the Bible is essentially a printed page for an individual to read in silence. But that is not how the Bible was written; and today’s collect reminds us of the fact. The scriptures were read aloud and listened to, for centuries before ever they were printed and published and read in private. “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy”, wrote St John at the beginning of his Revelation, “and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it”. The Bible is never “my” Bible: it is first and foremost “our” Bible, the Bible of the church, the Bible we hear in church, the Bible proclaimed in the context of public prayer and celebration of the sacraments.
So first and foremost we are to hear the Scriptures, but after that, of course, to read them as well, and to mark them, and to learn them, and inwardly to digest them. That too takes us back to the Revelation of St John, where the seer is told to eat the scroll, and he finds it both a sweet and a bitter taste. The Bible, as we inwardly digest it, can be a mixed experience: nourishing but also disturbing.
But the point of this exercise of feeding upon the Bible, absorbing it, making it part of ourselves: well, that point is also spelt out in the collect. It is that by the “comfort” of God’s word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the hope of everlasting life. “Comfort” of course in the old sense, the sense of the “comfortable words” – meaning strength, encouragement, reinforcement. We are spiritually fortified by the word of God, giving us confidence in the hope of God’s eternal life. In the Bible we find the stories of God’s comfort, God’s fortifying love and care, God’s providence, God’s protection, God’s grace and glory. These are stories with which to stock our minds and our imaginations, our hearts and our wills, so that we live out our lives in the light of them.
Digested in this way, the Bible does not answer all our questions, for it is not an encyclopædia or a dictionary. The scribes, you remember, treated in this way, “searching the scriptures” as Jesus put it, and he roundly condemned them for it. It does something more important: it fortifies our mind and heart, it enlarges our imagination and our thirst for God; it holds out hope – the blessed hope of everlasting life.