Immersed in the Story – The Bible and Hope

Some prayers, like some poems or pieces of literature, just grab our attention. They seem to be filled with clear images or descriptions of what we know to be true. That is how I feel about the Collect we prayed at the beginning of the service today. 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 Savior Jesus Christ...

The Holy Scriptures is a rich mix of History, legend, poetry, metaphors, parables, and traditions, of experiences with God captured in varied ways of communicating. We refer to the Bible as the story of God’s interaction with humanity and creation. It is the foundation for us to understand our relationship with God, through the way others have experienced God over the geneations.

Today we have an example of some of these modes of communicating – we have apocalyptic stories and images in Malachi and in Luke. Now we can read it as pure history, which some in the Christian tradition are wont to do, or we can read it with a broader view of how God imparts a greater vision. Apocalyptic stories energize us because they tap that curiosity we all have about the end of the world, the end of time - will it happen and will we know? The “Left Behind” series of books, which have been very popular over the last few years, play to this fascination. The feeling of uncertainty, which hangs over our day-to-day life and captures the news, war and terrorist threats, raises the reality for us that life is uncertain.

However, I tend to think such religious obsession with when the end will come is not very helpful in the day-to-day life of being a Christian. That outcome is in the hands of God and not ours to figure out; and I don’t believe that is what the Collect for today is intending for us to do. A rigid reading of the Bible is fraught with dangers for our understanding of God in the same way we have come to realize that a rigid reading of the Koran by Muslim fundamentalist, such as the Taliban can result in horrific abuses of human rights and the devaluing of human life.

In the reading from Malachi amidst the images and descriptions of those who do not fear the Lord being cut off there is the tempering description But for you who fear my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in his wings. Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to the fathers... What we see is that God really wants us to turn toward him and toward each other and he keeps sending us messengers – even today.

In my office at the hospital I have a large picture of Christ coming and he has wings outstretched. It is by a local artist. The picture quotes this passage from Malachi, "with healing in his wings." That is how God comes to us and that is how we need to read the scriptures. In the words of Professor Reginald Fuller, speaking about Malachi, "all he knows for sure is that he (GOD) will bring good out of evil."

Cannon Herbert O’Driscoll reflecting on today’s collect refers to the significant loss of scriptural knowledge in contemporary Christian Life. He says, "For generations the world of the Bible was an inner country where we could walk and explore in a way that made it possible to walk more confidently and uprightly in the outer country where our lives were placed." Again and again we hear faint echoes of that lost inner world in literature, in vestigial phrases from the Bible in conversation, in geographical place-names on this continent. Places like Bethel, Gilead, Shiloh, Bethlehem, and Canaan, whatever their present reality as rural village or industrial city, were once named by those who settled there because something reminded them of another place, a place they had rarely if ever visited, but that existed as totally real in sacred imagination.

There is a very real and important challenge in today’s opening prayer. To tell the story that has been given to us, we must go in search of it with diligence. We must love it, as Dr. William Countrymen, professor of Biblical Studies at our Divinity School at Berkeley, says, "as a living language in which the ongoing experience of Faith can express itself? It provides the language of prayer, the language of hymns and anthems, the language by which we describe and find ways to frame our spiritual life."

The Bible has authority for us. It is not simply a collection of interesting stories and images. It is, in our belief, one of the key ways in which God speaks to us. In our Anglican tradition we understand the Bible primarily to be the communication of God’s Love, and the Goal of God’s love, which is to bring us as the Collect says, to embrace and ever hold fast the Blessed Hope of everlasting life. We must read everything in the scriptures with this awareness, that it is the love of God for us which is present as the background. Thus even when we read passages that are disturbing and we may not understand them, remembering that God’s desire is for us to be in relationship with him and to experience the power of his love in our lives creates a space in us to know that God does not intend to trick us or hurt us, but to find a way into relationship with us.

As we Read the Bible we must allow our reading to be informed by this awareness that God is seeking to Love us, to help us to Love what God loves, to help us be living vessels through whom others will be drawn to him. We must read the Bible not as an instruction book as I have heard some describe it, but as a door through which we pass ever more deeply into the life of God. It will inform our prayers and our prayer life will inform our reading.

The Rev. Dr. Frank Hegedus, writing about this Collect says,

Only after much study and prayer can we hope to inwardly digest Scripture’’s message and be nourished by it. For Scripture is not unlike the manna of old described in the Bible itself. It is food for the journey, sustenance for the soul. Each day it is there for us to take once again. Everyday it is enough, yet is never exhausted. If not gathered, consumed, and inwardly digested, its words become stale and useless to us, jottings in a dusty old book on a shelf, incapable of providing nourishment. But hear Scripture, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest its words each day, and you shall never go hungry. In this way, we shall reclaim the Bible among us for what it most truly is- God’s covenant of love for this whole vast, conflicted world. "The Blessed Hope of Everlasting Life in Jesus Christ our Lord."

Amen.