Sermon for Bible Sunday 2019 

Welcome to Bible Sunday! Every week is a kind of Bible Sunday, of course, because we read at least two, three or four lessons from the scriptures at every Eucharist. On a normal Sunday like today we hear from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the letters in the New Testament, and the gospel. That’s quite a lot when you think about it. It’s hard to take in so much material at one sitting.

So at the end of October every year we keep Bible Sunday as a time to think about how we read the Bible all the rest of the year. Or perhaps we don’t read it at all? The Bible is still the world’s best-selling and most-translated book, but it probably isn’t read, at least in this country, nearly as much as it was a hundred years ago, or five hundred years ago when ordinary people first got their hands on the scriptures in English. What a turning-point that was. It was a real religious revolution, and it changed countless lives, and the Church itself.

Of course once the Bible gets out of the grip of religious professionals, who knows what the results might be? They can go in many directions. After half a millennium of having access to the Bible in our own language, there are two extreme views of reading it that we should be wary of.

One is that it is a load of outdated, dangerous nonsense that we should leave in the past. This is the often unspoken view of a great many people today. They see no point in engaging with it at all, except perhaps to follow up references to Bible stories in Western art and literature.

The opposite, and perhaps even more destructive view, is to become a Bibliolator, someone who takes every word as the literal, unchanging truth and treats the Bible as a sort of divine rule book and a textbook of science and history. It takes quite a bit of mental gymnastics to hold this kind of view, but it is certainly around, even today.

Anglicans should not be tempted by either of these extreme views. In practice we are probably far more likely to dismiss the Bible than to regard it as infallible, but both positions are against our history and tradition. The Bible, according to mainline orthodox Christianity, is a witness to God’s self-revelation. It is the source of our knowledge of Jesus Christ, who is the true Word of God. It points to him, not to itself.

The Bible is a library of books, written by many different human authors over a thousand or so years, in Hebrew and in Greek at different times. The early Church took quite a bit of time to decide which books to consider as Holy Scripture and which books to leave out of the Bible. Even today we cannot agree completely. You’ll find certain books in Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican editions of the Bible that are left out of Protestant versions.

What all Christians can agree on is that the biblical writers were inspired by the Holy Spirit. They didn’t take dictation, as Muslims believe Muhammad did when he memorized the Qur’an. They wrote their own words, but they are words we continue to read seriously and thankfully. The priest and scriptural scholar John Barton, who has just published a new book on the history of the Bible, says that the New Testament tells us what we cannot tell ourselves. It tells us about Jesus. It introduces us to what he calls the Christian mystery of faith, through narrative, argument and teaching, not a list of doctrines.

John Barton also values the Hebrew scriptures, despite the often puzzling and even shocking content that we find there. He says that the Old Testament tells us who we are. We might turn to it to find out about God, but it is human behaviour and experience that is often described and analysed in its pages. We recognize ourselves when we read its vivid stories of sibling rivalry, greed, lust for power, competition for land, and temptations to worship what is not God. The social teaching of the prophets rings out as fresh and strong in our day as in the time of Amos and Micah.

So the Bible shows us what human life is like, and it shows us one human being, Jesus of Nazareth, who is perfectly transparent to God and who invites us to enter into his unique relationship of sonship with the Father.

What does the Bible not do? It is not a textbook of any kind, so it is no use trying to learn geology, astronomy or biology from it. It contains a Law that is sacred to the Jewish people, that nation to whom God first revealed himself. But while the moral Law is the eternal teaching that Jesus also gave us, about loving God and neighour, the ritual parts of that law have no significance for Gentile Christians.

I’ve become addicted recently to an Israeli TV series, Srugim, about young Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem trying to live modern professional lives in accordance with the Jewish law. It is absolutely fascinating, and the characters are very endearing, but the religious universe they inhabit is governed by regulations for every moment of their day. It is a completely closed world, and it’s one that St Paul wanted to free his converts from when he wrote to the Galatians.

That is the book that John Barton suggests we start with if we want to do some serious Bible reading. Fortunately it’s the one that Roberta introduced at the Bible Book of the Month group just a few weeks ago, so some of you have been rereading it already. Barton proposes that a good start would be to read a number of the New Testament books in more or less the order that they were written. So that means beginning with Paul’s letters, then the gospels followed by Acts.

At this point he suggests tackling the Old Testament by reading the gripping stories of David’s court in I and II Samuel. These writings may be as old as the poems of Homer. He would then turn to the much later teaching of the wisdom books – Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job and Sirach or Ecclesiasticus – you won’t find this last one unless your Bible contains the Apocrypha. These books come from the era of the Greek philosophers and tragedies, just a few centuries before Christ.

Only then would Barton turn back a few centuries to Genesis and the first part of Exodus, and then sample the prophets by reading the short book of Amos. He would bring his programme of Bible reading to an end by savouring the Psalms slowly.

The purpose of reading this way is to be introduced to the different parts of the Bible gradually, rather than head-on as in the traditional Bible Challenge. Barton quotes Martin Luther’s saying that the scriptures speak of sinful and lost humanity and the God who justifies and saves it.

When we have got that basic message, we can deepen our knowledge of the Bible by delving further into its more obscure passages. But no one should be put off making a start.

And we shouldn’t be afraid of engaging our brains when we read the Bible. One very important tradition of the Church is that we don’t read the Bible as individuals but together, as a community, so that we can explore its possible meanings and learn from one another. That’s why we often use lectio divina, slow and thoughtful reading of passages in a group, followed by discussion and prayer. That’s why the Daily Office that many of us use every day sets four Bible readings each day that we all read and can talk about and learn from. That’s why we encourage serious Bible study with good teachers for everyone, not just clergy and licensed lay ministers.

Do consider how you will engage with the Bible in the year that starts on Advent Sunday, 1st December. Perhaps follow John Barton’s programme. Or stay for the Bible Course after church on the first Sunday of the month. Or follow the lectionary and do the readings at Morning and Evening Prayer.

Don’t despise the Bible, and don’t idolize it. Engage with it, enjoy it, debate about it, meditate with it, let it get under your skin. And realize that it is a unique gift that has lasted for millennia. The one thing we must not do is ignore it.