Bible Sunday 2014

26 October 2014

We can forget sometimes, can't we, that we have the Bible? I don't mean forget that there is such a thing as a Bible - so much as forget how it has come to exist at all. Forget that it exists as a primary resource in our lives and, indeed, that - in and of itself - it is a miracle that it is here at all. After all, there is no real reason for it to exist in the first place really.

 

Yet it is here. And has been a part of the human story for thousands of years. Thousands of years. Think of that. How many other things, that people still hold in their hands and refer to and make use of, are thousands of years old? Stonehenge? The Pyramids. Caesar's Conquest of Gaul? But the Bible - well, in more senses than one - that's a whole different story.

What is the Bible? Through a series of chances, happenstances and some peoples' resolution and determination, it was pieced together over many years. Hundreds, if not thousands, in fact.

Little glimmerings of insight, experiences and truths, written down and formed into a whole compendium of ideas, doctrines and theologies. Scrolls, fragments of scrolls, jottings on papyrus painstakingly accumulated. "Does this make sense?" "Does that fit what we have experienced?" "If yes... well then it should be added."

And so the Bible was not so much written as accumulated. A compendium of experiences. Factual, legendary... some poetic, some sheer genius, that has moved humankind's thinking on from where it was to a whole new place.

The evangelist Rob Bell takes just one example. The sayings about 'an eye for and eye and tooth for a tooth'. It would be easy to think that this bit in the Bible is talking about if someone takes something from you - you have the right to take something from them. But that's not it at all. Well, when I say that, it was how things were until that particular part of the Bible came along. If someone killed your goat, you had the right to go and kill their goat. That was justice in those days.

And then God spoke through peoples' insights and understandings and inspired them - the word inspire is actually linked to the work of the Holy Spirit - meaning to breathe in truth and understanding - inspired people to think laterally. Through closer study of scripture, people came to learn how to become more reasonable and civilised. If you kill my goat, I kill your goat; then your son, furious with me, goes and kills another of my goats... a never-ending cycle of destruction rather than creation.

That's not what the Bible means by 'an eye for an eye'. What the Bible means is that if you kill my goat then I shall expect something of equal value. If you have fallen short of proper behaviour in society, then you need to provide an honest offering of compensation. You take my eye, then you should give me my eye back.

The times in which the Bible was being written were harsh and destructive. The Bible - God-breathed, inspired, however we'd like to say it - was a civilising influence. The first seeds and tiny shoots of social awareness, social coherence. A respecter of all humankind, rather than the winner-takes-it-all.

"Let the strongest take what he or she can get. That's the way the world is....?"

Nonsense says God. Nonsense says Christ. Nonsense says Scripture.

The Bible makes it very clear that God is on the side of the weakest, least considered, most neglected people in society. We are only as strong, as civilised, as the most vulnerable in the world. We are judged not by the things we do best, but the people we consider the least - and strive to help. That's what the Bible has done to transform who we are and where we are going over those many thousands of years.

Which is why we shouldn't pick up the Bible, glance at it, and then put it down again, as if it wasn't as important to our lives as all those other things that clamour for our attention, our time. And I'm preaching as much to myself here, as to anybody else. Treating the Bible in this way is tantamount to being invited to a banquet at Buckingham Palace, turning up in jeans and T-shirt, asking for a sandwich on a paper plate and wandering off even before the canapés have been brought out.

We need to sit down with the Bible on a daily, weekly basis. Pick up a chapter, or a passage, or even just a verse and spend time with it. Savour it. Chew it over. Read the words and stare out into space reflecting on it. Asking God to help us understand it.

The main problem with people who don't believe in God is that they treat scripture as if it were a sandwich on a paper plate and not a source of rich nourishment. They read a verse. Immediately assume they know what it means, then cast it aside in their presumption and not give it a second thought.

If we want to get to know God better, Jesus Christ better, to know ourselves as human beings and individuals better, then we need to set ourselves apart from time to time and spend time with God.

It is true that there is no need for the Bible to continue being written. Everything that needs to be said has been said, if only we'd take the time and trouble to hear it. However, it is not true that the story of God and humankind which can be found in the Bible is no longer being written. It is still being written in our lives, our own stories. They just need to be more closely connected one with another. So that there is a coherent story-arch between the lives of those who have lived and experienced God and the Christ-story and we who are very much part of it.

So it behoves us to recognise that, as part of this extraordinary and miraculous journey, that the stories of all those people who have taken the time and trouble to communicate to us down the millennia what little they have come to know and understand about God should be continued in our day, in our times, in our lives.

It is a precious inheritance. And we have the gift, the privilege, and the duty to live it out and to pass on what we have learned and understood about God and Christ to the next generation. Just as they did.

Additional information