A Voice in the Texts

November 16, 2003 - Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 28B)

By The Very Rev. James Hubbard, Dean Interim

- Daniel 12:1-4a, 5-13
- Psalm 16:5-11
- Hebrews 10:31-39
- Mark 13:14-23

(From The Lectionary Page)

Our collect for today is one of the better remembered and most loved collects in the Book of Common Prayer.

“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 Saviour Jesus Christ.”

It is said often of the Episcopal Church that if you want to know what the Church believes read its prayers. My text this morning is this prayer.

Note that the collect attributes God with the responsibility for the Scriptures. That is God caused them. The Church has always maintained with the author of II Timothy that the Scriptures are God-breathed, inspired. Some believe that the words of Scripture were dictated by God to the writers. Those who maintain this tend to be literalists in their reading of scripture. So for example, in Genesis 1 the literalist believes that God created the world in seven 24 hour days. Likewise they add up the years of the genealogies in the texts and find out that the world is 4004 years old from creation until Christ. The literalist is in immediate conflict with the evidence of the sciences that the earth is billions of years old and human beings have been present for how many million years.

Episcopalians are generally contextualists rather than literalists. That is we attempt to understand the intent of the author, the culture, the sources of the material, the life setting and from those various contributions understand what it is the author is saying. So for us the creation story is a beautifully crafted early understanding of God’s role in the beginnings of all things. The days of the creation become the literary structure upon which the author hung many profound insights. The words of Scripture, as words, are not inspired. The author was inspired, inspired by his or her experience of a transcendent God. The author of Genesis had met the living God. That comes through on every page, and because that is so, God comes through. It was this person’s experience with the living God that was the source of inspiration for the book of Genesis. Because the author was inspired, the words are inspiring.

But the Bible does no good just because the author’s were inspired if we do not listen to what they have to say. In our reading we listen for the voice of God. A couple of centuries ago a well respected layman said of his friend’s public reading of the scriptures, “He never reads Scripture as if he had written it; he always reads it as if listening for a Voice (159:20:499). This would be a good guideline for each of us who reads scripture publicly. Read as if listening for a voice. I have never forgotten, though I can no long find the reference, that Abraham Heschel wrote, that if we are to hear the voice of God anywhere, we will hear it in the scriptures. We need to listen and to hear.

But we can not just listen to scripture in the liturgy, we must be reading the scriptures daily for ourselves. The Episcopal Church in Minneapolis passed a resolution, passed again at our diocesan convention this weekend, recommending tithing, daily prayer and study. It is unfortunate from my perspective that scripture is not mentioned as the focus of that study, but I suspect it was intended. It is the daily reading that will make the wisdom and insight and power for life found in the scriptures available to us. I remember how as a boy having read the bible through two or three times, that these various and diverse ancient texts began to take on for me an internal consistency that I had never previously recognized. The scriptures can become a guide for us in daily living precisely because they are a record of many people’s experiences of and with God. The authenticity of their experience comes through and when we read daily and are familiar with them, we can have our lives guided and shaped by them rather than by the television and the accepted cultural practices to which we give so much of our time.

In Harriet Arnow’s Appalachian novel, The Dollmaker, Gertie is talking to her children who don’t want to read or listen to the bible.

“I ain’t preachen,” Gertie said, “but somebody’s got to teach you the Bible. Don’t you know, Youngens,” she went on, “that a long, long, time ago, away back afore ever old John Kendrick—you recollect his grave’s in our graveyard, an many’s the time you’ve heard your granpa tell on how he rid a mule into the battle a Brandywine, an how that mule outswum them horses—well away a long time back afore he was born his people warn’t allowed to read their Bibles. In them days a Bible cost a heap a money an a body had to read em on the sly. But more than anything, them people—they was your people, recollect—wanted a place where they could read their Bibles when and how they pleased. An now just because our preacher’s gone to Oak Ridge an they ain’t enough people left fer Sunday School, that’s no reason to do without the Bible….” 160:44:501

To mark the pages of one’s bible is to indicate that you take what you read seriously and want to remember some insight. I have an old bible which I bought in 1963. That bible has kept me company for these many years and it is full of notes and thoughts, readings and references. There are better study Bibles. This copy doesn’t have the Apocrypha and so it is incomplete. I had to buy a second volume to get that part of the scripture, but because of the notes, I don’t want to stop using this copy. The cover came off, the pages came loose. And one of my parishioners seeing that found a way to have it recovered and rebound and so has preserved this book for me, hopefully for another 25 years of use. It is mine because it is marked.

There was a time when we memorized passages from the bible. I can still ask people at a funeral to say the 23rd psalm with me, and if I will use the King James Version, the older set will without hesitation say it from memory. Now memory work is a thing of the past. There is in current educational practice the insidious idea, that there is little or no value in rote memory work. That is nonsense, but it does prevail as wisdom. And so poetry and prose, Shakespeare and the Bible are no longer routinely committed to memory. The peculiar internalizing that can take place through memorization is lost. . One of the directions that I long for the Church to take in giving children a thoroughgoing Christian education is to go back to learning passages of the bible by heart. Hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.

To inwardly digest the scriptures is to make them yours. [In the story I read you from The Dollmaker, Gertie reflected that] there was an excitement about the scriptures that was very real in the 16th and 17th centuries. For ages the scriptures were unavailable to the ordinary Christian. With the advent of the printing press, came the Reformation and with the Reformation an enormous upsurge of interest and excitement about the scriptures. Roland Bainton, the Reformation scholar and historian, has reminded us of how electrifying it was for Zwingli’s congregation in Zurich to hear him Sunday after Sunday expounding from an open Greek Bible on the pulpit before him. One young humanist in the congregation, Thomas Platter, said he felt as if he were being lifted by the hair of his head. Platter was so excited by the gospel that he supported himself as a manual laborer by day in order to study Greek at night, and studied with sand in his mouth in order that the gritting in his teeth would keep him awake. “The news of the discovery of America,” wrote Bainton, “had produced no such excitement.” (159:14:498)

‘…that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life…’

Once upon a time there was a great Viking leader. He conquered a kingdom ruled by evil men who oppressed and starved the poor and weak. Like all Vikings of his time he left the mainland and returned to the sea, taking with him a portion of the people he had liberated, at their request. They sailed south into the tropical climates and came to a small island. He left on the island half of his newly found subjects and gave them orders to build a wall completely around the island using the supplies and plans he freely gave them. They agreed to follow his commands.

A few days later he came to a second and similar island and left the second half of his new found subjects with the same orders. Both groups began by building the walls demanded by the Viking leader. Soon it became apparent that the task was tedious, exhausting, and apparently almost impossible to achieve.

On one island, the leader’s began to change the plans and simplify the design. Gradually, they reinterpreted the meaning of the order; they felt that the original plan was beyond their capacity. They turned to building comfortable homes for themselves and forgot about the wall.

On the other island, the people struggled day in and day out. They, too, wondered if the project could truly be completed. They wondered why the Viking would want such a wall. Yet, they went on with it. In the process, they did not notice the changes the task itself was effecting on them. Their bodies were becoming stronger.

At long last, the wall was finished. It was standing and solid. One night as they lay exhausted in their small huts a wind began to rise. These people of a northern land had never experienced a hurricane, but one was on its way. When the winds built and the water rose, the inhabitants of both islands for the first time understood the wisdom of their absent Viking lord. For one group the imperfect wall proved its salvation. For the other, the lack of any wall at all led to their destruction. [Pulpit Resource, vol 15, no. 4, p. 25-26]

How like the building of this wall is the hearing, reading, marking, learning and inwardly digesting of the holy Scriptures. They too are a wall, a discipline, a place of refuge. They are more for they are as well a source of wisdom, a meeting place with God. Without them we are awash on an island inundated. With them we are sustained and we thrive in the kingdom of God. That blessed hope comes, not from the scripture, but from our Saviour Jesus Christ, but we know of him reliably only through the words and pages of those most sacred texts. Amen.