Richard's Sermon for Bible Sunday: 29th October 2017

So how well do you know your bible?

1.      How many books are there in the bible?

2. How many of these are in the Old Testament and how many in the New Testament

3. Do you know from which books of the bible these openings are?

a) ‘In the beginning….’;

b)‘The revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place…’;

c)‘Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets.’

d)‘In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons.’

e)‘In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven.’

4. In what languages is the bible written?

5. Who are the four patriarchs?

6. Name four churches to which Paul wrote letters (there are seven in total).

7. Who was Philemon?

8. Name four prophets who have books of the OT named after them (there are sixteen in total)

9. What is the last book in the Old Testament?

10.Which of these is not a book of the New Testament?

a) Acts of the Apostles

b)  Epistle to Titus

c) Epistle of Stephen

d) Revelation of St John

1.      66

2.      39 +27

3.      Genesis + John, Revelation, Hebrews, Ruth, Acts

4.      Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic

5.      Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph

6.      Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, Thessalonia

7.      Man to whom Paul wrote a personal letter

8.      Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos, Hosea, Zechariah, Haggai, Jonah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Obadiah, Micah, Zephaniah, Malachi, Joel

9.      Malachi

10.  c)

As we mark today Bible Sunday and give thanks for the revelation that the scriptures offer I want this morning to offer up three concerns.

The first is the worrying extent of biblical illiteracy

Bible Society YOUGOV report from 2014 interviewed 5800 adults and 800 children and reported on the worrying number of children who have little idea of bible stories that we might accept as classics.

For instance, A quarter of children (23%) indicate they have never read seen or heard Noah’s Ark or The Nativity (25%), rising to 38% for Adam and Eve and 43% for The Crucifixion

More than half indicate they have never read, seen or heard Joseph and his coat of many colours (54%), Moses parting the Red Sea (56%) and David & Goliath (57%)

Steve Legg story – ‘Why did Mary and Joseph name their baby after a swear word.’

But perhaps that biblical illiteracy begins with those of us who follow Christ and if we don’t know the bible very well, we can’t really complain about what is happening in society at large. I’m afraid that there is a worrying amount of biblical illiteracy within churches also. And with how things are in the wider society it is even more important that we do know our bibles.

The second concern is about the sort of knowledge we gather. For what we are about with our relationship with the bible shouldn’t really be about knowing the bible as we might know a set of facts.

Can anyone recite those four famous actions in today’s collect, that beautiful prayer written by Thomas Cranmer and used as the Bible Sunday Collect? We are to ‘read, mark, learn, inwardly digest’

So read – of course; on your own, in church, regularly, include listen, use a translation you can get on with;

mark, take note of -  definitely; BRF notes, bible study groups (home groups plug)

learn? Well you have heard me read a passage that I have learned and it’s not as difficult as you might think. Passage means so much more as you spend more time with it.

And inwardly digest, take it into you, make it part of you, so that you are nourished, strengthened, so that you grow.

‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly’, as St Paul writes to the Colossians

There’s the nub. You can know everything about the bible, but unless you inwardly digest what is there, little better than ‘clanging gong or noisy cymbal’ to borrow another phrase.

The bible is to be a conduit of our relationship with God, one of the things which makes that relationship possible. It is what we digest so that we can grow into the ‘knowledge of the fullness of the stature of Christ’. Through reading, marking, learning and especially inwardly digesting we find out what God is like, we are put in touch with his nature;

Through reading, marking, learning and especially inwardly digesting we find out what his purpose is for his children;

Through reading, marking, learning and especially inwardly digesting we find out how to behave towards and live with each other.

The third concern is, in many ways, the opposite of the first.

Of course the bible isn’t God himself, isn’t the relationship itself, rather the means he has given us to develop that relationship. There are many churches which fall into the dangerous area of bibliolatry, not wavering from scripture at all so that it becomes a constricting cage and they end up worshipping the bible itself. Rather the pages of scripture are like a window through which we can come into contact with God’s beauty. We look through it, not at it.

The great New Testament scholar, Bishop Tom Wright, has suggested that the Christian life can be compared to taking part in an unfinished Shakespeare play. He asks us to imagine that there exists such a play whose fifth act has been lost. The first four acts provide great deal of characterisation and such excitement within the plot that it is generally agreed that the play should be staged. However, rather than leaving everyone guessing after the fourth act or asking someone to write a fifth act, it is decided to give the key parts to expert actors who would be told to immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and then work out the last act by themselves, to improvise it. This is the manner, Bishop Wright tells us, in which we might approach the Christian life. We have the scriptures and we have the Christian tradition and we have reason. Anglicanism is sometimes said to rest on the three pillars of scripture, tradition and reason. Perhaps we should think of it instead as our faith resting on the living word of God as interpreted through the Christian tradition and by our reason – it’s a sort of dynamic relationship.

And so, the scriptures and tradition will not necessarily tell us exactly what we ought to do in any given instance, but they will be the bedrock upon which we are called to improvise. The more we are steeped in the bible, the more we can read, mark, learn and inwardly digest, the truer will our improvisation be and the worthier will it be of the God we follow.