The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Proper 28B
Every week for our Wednesday Bible study we have some short prayers we say before and after. It helps us to settle in for Bible study, and to ask God to help us be attentive and listening as we study the Bible. Our collect of the day that began our Eucharist today, “Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning,” is a part of our little Wednesday night Bible study liturgy. We’ve been praying it week after week, and now we’re praying it on Sunday!
Our little Bible study liturgy is an important practice, and I’m glad that we’ve adopted it. Bible study is more than satisfying our intellectual curiosity about the Bible. You’ve heard me say it time and time again that the Bible is not just some collection of facts about God that we figure out or memorize once and then toss away. We keep returning to the Bible because we keep listening for God to speak to us through the texts. We wrestle with them. We study some of the harder, less sweet passages of Scripture.
So our little prayer before and after reminds us that what we’re learning is not just intellectual curiosity; it’s about our spirituality and our experiences, too. We read Biblical passages again and again because the world and us have changed since we last looked at them. We read the Bible passages again and again because they’re a life-giving stream … yet so many Christians look at the Bible like a wet towel that once you’ve wrung out all the information from it, you can just hang it up to try and leave it behind.
This past year we had our Renewal Works program that gathered information from folks at All Saints and a committee gathered to review the survey results to help us in our spiritual vitality. Part of the main findings of the Renewal Works program nationally is that we should “embed the Bible in everything.” Now, this is an Episcopal program – though they’ve drawn data from a bunch of denominations, too. There’s a vitality that comes with bringing the Bible into our lives as a community again and again. It reminds us of our vocation, it calls us back to our foundations, it invites us to listen to the Holy Spirit of God speaking to us through the language of the Bible.
So the little liturgy for Bible study centers on the Psalms – specifically psalms that praise God for the gift of wisdom as shown in Scripture, and then ends with prayers. It’s a little liturgy that we take turns leading.
The Vestry, too, has a little liturgy for its monthly meeting. A little psalm, a canticle from the Gospel of Luke, and the passage from the Gospel of John where Jesus tell us to love one another as he has loved us. We pray with that passage of Scripture month after month because it’s so easy to get lost in budgets and numbers and decision-making, and we always need to be brought back to how we as a community of faith are called to love one another as Christ has loved us.
Or, if we want to pull up another passage of Scripture, how about toward the end of our reading from the Letter to the Hebrews: “let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.” Whereas John’s Gospel puts the love of community in the context of Jesus’s love for us, the writer of Hebrews puts it another way: community nudges us toward our better selves, and we cannot do it alone. We need encouragement and challenge to grow spiritually – and we need community.
A few weeks ago I shared a little present – some prayer cards for us as a parish. A little liturgy, an encounter with at least a meditation from Forward Movement. It wasn’t a one-time thing – it wasn’t a sermon prop for a day because I had nothing to say! We still have some extras – of the prayer cards and of the Forward Movement booklets. I wanted to help us share prayer as community – so even if we are apart, we are still praying together. And to help bring us back to the Scriptures – even if it’s just the little bit of Scripture mentioned in the daily meditation. Embed the Bible in your daily life, and embed the Bible in our community life.
And I envision a next step: committees picking pieces of Scripture that they can use to start their meetings. Small groups that gather to discuss the meditations, or a Bible study of their own – you don’t have to know everything about the Bible to read it and discuss it with others! We learn so much. We hear the Bible in our worship, we read it, we mark it up, we learn from it, and we inwardly digest it to make it part of ourselves – it’s spiritual nutrition, spiritual energy for our lives.
The Bible is a spiritual guide in our lives – we learn so much when we sit with it and listen to it.
We let it challenge us – what do we hear, and what do we *want* it to say instead? There are Christians who are quick to abandon their moral standards as soon as it becomes convenient for them or when the going gets rough – we don’t want to be like that!
We let the Bible comfort us – the pain and tragedy of human history is written in our Bible, too, and we listen to how countless people of faith before us have wrestled with pain and heard the responses of God in the midst of turmoil.
We even let the Bible confuse us – we wrestle with strange passages, conflicting verses, and we recall that our God is greater than all the words and pages that have been written.
The Bible is a guide in our lives of faith, and in our daily lives. We should return to the Bible day after day, curious to what God might speak to us through these human words handed down to us through the centuries.
May we hear the words, read them, mark them and inwardly digest them, to build health in our parish community, to build health in our own spiritual journeys, and to build greater health in the world around us through our own transformation and witness. Amen.