Now one of the expectations that we have in the congregation is that we will be engaged in daily scripture reading, but what does that actually mean? And what does that actually do for us or what will it do for us? Well, I’m glad you asked. But before we dig into that, there is one caveat with this discipline. When we talked about fasting I said that while you can pray without fasting, you cannot fast without prayer. Those two go hand in hand. The same is true for reading scripture. You can pray without reading the Bible, but you cannot read the Bible without prayer. Those two things go hand in hand. Scripture reading needs to be surrounded by prayer, and as you are doing it you will often find your prayer coming directly out of what you are reading, or other pieces of scripture. And so for those who struggle with prayer, who don’t know what to say, a habit of scripture reading will help your prayer life immensely and give you words to pray that you didn’t know before. Additionally, it involves a specific attitude to approach scripture. As one person I read this week said, we should approach scripture with the same attitude that Samuel had when he was called by God, which is “here I am Lord, speak to me.” And if you don’t know the story of Samuel, then reading scripture is a great thing to do so you can hear the story of God’s people. This is a good reason to read the Bible.
Because as it turns out, there are many, many reasons to read scripture on a daily basis. And as I just said, one is to hear the stories of the people of God that have been passed down through generations. Scripture can connect us with the traditions that Judaism and Christianity decided were important to be carried forward. They tell the struggles and triumphs of faith, and have something to say to us. In that they reveal to us the story of faith and in doing that also reveal our story to ourselves.
These books also reveal God to us, and encountering scripture allows God to speak to us. Now in saying that, we talk about scripture being the word of God, but we also have to understand it as simultaneously being the words of men, or at least almost primarily men, who wrote them. And scripture deals with lots of the issues we encounter in life. That’s why it is so powerful in that it often, not always, but often speaks to us in our times just as much as it did when they were first written down. And so scripture can provide guidance and wisdom for us. We can go to scripture and to see what it says about happiness or joy or love or anger, or lots of other things. But here, as an aside, is a trap we can fall into, and that is we will often say “well the Bible says x or y or z.” Really that makes about as much sense as saying “the library says x or y or z.” because we have to remember that the Bible is a collection of books, written in different styles, like poetry or history or law, and just as we wouldn’t read those the same way now we shouldn’t treat them the same way in scripture either, they were also written in different times and different places and different purposes, and many of the books are in conversation with each other and disagreeing with each other. Which is why when we read scripture a lot, we begin to see these differences, and so it’s better to say that 1 Corinthians says x, or Leviticus says y, than scripture says it.
Scripture can provide hope and healing to us; it can inspire us and give us peace and joy. It can help us to understand the intimacy and closeness of God, that God knows the hairs on our heads, while also showing us the transcendence and majesty and mystery of God, the creator of the universe, whose ways are not our ways, and whose foolishness is greater than our knowledge. It shows us the character and nature of God. We can say that God is not just loving, but that God is love, that’s God’s character, because we are told that in scripture. And the best way to help to try and interpret and understand scripture is to be reading scripture broadly, so that when we heard Jesus say, as we do in the gospel passage today, that “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of robbers,” you will know that Jesus is quoting from Isaiah and Jeremiah. Reading scripture helps us to know and to remember God’s wisdom for us, and that should lead us to humility, which is always where we should be, and that, as we talked about with fasting, we shall not live bread alone, but by the very words that come from the mouth of God, which is what we hear in Deuteronomy. And so scripture should feed us, mind and heart and soul.
Now that is not anywhere close to all the reasons we should engage in daily scripture reading, but for the sake of time, I want to move onto how to do daily scripture readings. And just as there are a plethora of reasons to read, there are similarly lots of ways to read scripture. Every week in our scripture insert we give recommended scripture readings for each day of the week. In Lent they are different because they are set up to allow you to read through the four gospels during the forty days, along with a representative sample of the Psalms. But normally those daily readings are corresponding, to a degree, to the scripture readings that are assigned for Sundays. That’s a great way to get started in daily reading, if you aren’t already, because then things are tied together with what we may be hearing on Sunday, and so worship and scripture are connected, which is great. But one of the problems is that there are very short passages usually, and can easily be see outside of the context in which the passage is found.
To help alleviate that, you can read one book at a time, so you can see the context of passages and how a story is building and get to know the various books and what they say. As a general rule I would recommend doing at least one chapter a day, if that is what you are doing, although several chapters is even better. You can also add in a Psalm, and proverbs, one of the books of wisdom in the Hebrew Scriptures, have 31 chapters. So guess what. In most months you could read one chapter a day, along with other readings, and complete Proverbs every single month, absorbing those teachings. As you have longer periods of time, pick out a particular book and read it through in one sitting. Then you can see the full ark of the story, see an argument built up, especially in the letters, or just get a complete feeling for the whole book. It’s very different than reading it bit by bit. A sort of opposite way is to only read a few verses, and then meditate on those verses, reading them over and over again, listening for particular words that stand out to you, and then just focusing on that word and why it’s speaking to you. Or memorizing those verses and saying them over and over throughout the day, sort of as a mantra. This is a practice known as Lectio Divina, and can also be very powerful.
Another way is to pick a short to mid-size letter or book and read it all the way through every day, for say a month. Come with the expectation of encountering something new in the book every day. In fact you should always come to scripture expecting to see something new, some new revelation, and if you’re not seeing something new take a step back and try and read it as if it’s brand new to you, because scripture is always revealing itself in new ways. Some of you have head me say, but there are times on Sunday morning when I will hear something brand new in the scripture passage that I’m about to preach on and have been working on and thinking about for at least a week, if not longer. That same thing should be happening. And sometimes it’s really valuable to read a passage out loud rather than silently, because we tend to read differently in those two ways and hearing things in your head can be different than hearing them through your ears.
Now I would not recommend starting at Genesis 1:1 and reading all the way through to Revelations 22:21, because more than likely you’ll get bogged down at some point, either in Numbers, or definitely in the prophets and give up. Reading scripture can be hard, and there are lots of things that it talks about, references it makes that just aren’t known to us the way they were in the ancient world, and even things we think we might understand, like Paul’s analogy of being adopted, are totally different than what we imagine them to be. So don’t be afraid to ask for help, talk to others, talk to me, make use of our church library or the county library to find other resources.
And then there is the matter of translation, and which you should be
using. The first question to help answer that is what are you trying to get out
of scripture? What is the purpose you are doing at that moment, as it can be
different at different times. There is a difference between reading scripture
for inspiration or for a deeper spiritual understanding and study or to know
what scripture says. The two best translations that scholars use are the New
International Version and the New Revised Standard Version. We use the NRSV
here, and it’s the most used by scholars, but the NIV is good as well, and it
tends to represent the more conservative side of the church. I use the NRSV for
both regular study, but also my regular reading. But, if I’m looking to see
scripture in a different way, to change things up for me, I’ll pull out The
Message by Eugene Peterson. If you’re looking to do the same, it’s fine to use
a paraphrased Bible, or something that puts scripture into more common vernacular or
that gives a sense of the passage rather than trying to be word for word, if
that will help you understand something better, or just to be inspired by
scripture, but I would not read, say the Living Bible, and then come out and
say “the bible says” because that’s not really accurate or the purpose of that
which is a paraphrase not a translation. The more we understand scripture, the
better off we will be and the deeper and richer our faith will be.
And let me close with this. In the beginning of
John we are told that in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God
and the word was God and the word came dwell amongst us. Notice it does not say
that the word came to dwell on a page. The Bible is not God, and when we treat it that way, we make it an
idol. The Bible points us to God, it shows us God, and explains God to us. It
is a revelation, a revealing of God and Jesus and of how we are called to live
and to love. It can help us to transform ourselves through the renewing of our
minds, as Paul says, and can equip us for every good work. We should come to
scripture with the expectation that we will encounter God, that the Holy Spirit
will move through us and in us, and that through prayer, we will be moved
deeper into our faith and our knowledge of God and of ourselves and who we are
called to be and to whom we belong
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