So following this morning's Epistle reading from Colossians 3, I was reminded of starting Secondary school, an odd thing to recall on Bible Sunday I know but there you have it.
When I started Secondary school I remember going to buy all the relevant uniform to kit me out. I remember getting my blazer, which seemed enormous, but I was told with a smile, "You will grow into it" as it was expected to last for a god few years. I can remember for the first few weeks going to school with a vest and a jumper in the vain hope that it would fill the blazer out!
It's like that often with our appreciation of Scripture - through it we will grow into an appreciation of it and it's importance and therefore also into a relationship with God Himself.
(In place of a conventional sermon, my colleague and I had a conversation (a dialogue sermon) and I enclose my part of the conversation below.)
Q: What is the importance of scripture for you?
A: This may sound like a crazy thing to say but when I first came to faith in my teens, I wanted to be one of those Christians that ate scripture up, that read it insatiably, but I wasn’t. The Bible bored me. It was a historic document, key to my faith, but I was told it was important, so it must be!
Over the years, I have wrestled with, grappled for meaning within, tried to relate to scripture in many ways and places. I used to spend much time, like many of us maybe, focussing on what I believed were the important parts of scripture - the Gospels, and to a lesser extent some of the Epistles and left much of the Old Testament and Wisdom literature well alone. I just didn’t get why they were there in the canon, I couldn’t make sense of them or relate to them. No one taught me how to realistically deal with scripture in devotion. As a result I rarely read it aside from in church.
Once ordained I daily read scripture in personal devotion and wrestled with it regularly - trying to relate it to my every day living. Over time I came to realise that within scripture is contained the whole gamut of human emotion and experience and God’s involvement within that experience of life.
In my university days, many Evangelical friends referred to the Bible as the Word of God and seemed to reverence the pages of this book that I just didn’t ‘get’ over and above the Word of God - namely Jesus, whose story it told. I found this hard to deal with.
I eventually realised that scripture wasn’t the Word of God nor was it simply words about God. I came to hear the voice of God still speaking to me through those dusty words of former millennia.
Finally, I read a book called “Life With God’ by Richard Foster, and American Baptist, who wrote a very influential book a number years ago wrote a very influential book called ‘Celebration of Discipline’ about a disciplined Christian almost monastic rule of life. In ‘Life With God’, Foster talks about Lectio Divina as a way of engaing with scripture prayerfully, asking God to speak through it and listening. He describes why scripture is important to him with a phrase you may well have heard me use - he talks of scripture as the big story of God’s involvement and relationship with people where God says to us ‘I Love you; I want to be with people like you; will come and be with me.’ Scripture for me still encapsulates and embodies that story and that invitation.
Q: How do we use scripture for personal devotion?
A: I read it daily, but in 2 ways - in devotion and in study. As study - scripture contains the building blocks of the life of Christian faith. It shows how God’s revealing of Himself over history has changed right up to it’s ultimate in the Incarnation. In the Epistles and beyond we discover how the early church came into being and grew as God’s ministry to and through her flourished. As a rule of thumb, I find scripture a challenge and a yardstick as to how we engage with God in our day and age - it asks me some very challenging ethical and moral questions about myself, my beliefs and my culture - some of which leaves me so challenged that I either discard it or discount it. I am not advocating either approach, but some of scripture is very challenging, especially when we realise it was written in one cultural context and language and then placed up against our own. But it also invites into a living relationship with God.
I read scripture devotionally too in that context as we pray morning and evening prayer, say the paslms, as I visit the sick and as I prepare for and lead worship. Through it I believe God has still got things to say to my often weak and failing humanity about who I am in relation to who He is and His love for me no matter what.
Q: What passage of scripture sums up the Good News of Jesus Christ?
A: John 3:16 - A former Archbishop once said that the Church was the only organisation that existed for the benefit of it's non members. In Jesus' words we are reminded that God loves the world - not the church, not just a club for the holy good and true, but the world - all of us always. His love is for us whether we feel we are worthy of it or not. Being loved and accepted under all circumstances by the one that brought all that is into being... well that surely has to be good news...
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