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SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE ~ BIBLE READING During Lent, we'll be looking at what the church has traditionally called the spiritual disciplines. "Discipline" can be a very scary word to people, depending on what your background has been and how you yourself experienced discipline as a child, either at home or in school. But I invite you to look at discipline during this season in a new way. The root word of "discpline" is the same word that's in "disciple" and it simply means "to learn." We often think of discipline as meaning punishment. But discipline is something we do in order to learn. The spiritual disciplines shouldn't be a thing that we come to out of fear, because God is not a God of fear. God is a God of love. And the spiritual disciplines are things that we undertake in order to learn more about God and in order to experience God for ourselves. People in the church are often afraid to take on a spiritual discipline, for fear that if they mess up and miss a day God is going to strike them with a bolt of lightning and "discipline" them in that way. People will just put off spiritual disciplines because they are afraid of not carrying through. I would encourage you -- if God were going to strike you with a bolt of lightning for messing up, I would be just a fried little mass of ashes up here. It's not going to happen. God is a God of love and extreme patience and kindness. If you decide you're going to read some of the Bible every single day, and you manage to keep it up for two days and then miss the next four, you've had two days by which you were better able to connect with God and know God better. The disciplines are a gift to us, not a rule. God is not standing up there ready to bang us on our hands if we mess up. So I encourage you, as we go through Lent and we talk about the various disciplines, to think about what you might like to add to your life that can help you grow closer to God, because that's what they're for. They're gifts. If we mess up and we don't do it, we're the ones who lose out because we're not as close to God as we would have been had we kept it up. But it's not something that we're going to be punished for if we miss. Just take encouragement from the times you do do it, and you're that much further ahead. This morning we're going to focus on the first of those. There are many within the church and I could have picked different ones than I did. There's no particular sanctity in the order. But we're going to be looking at Bible reading. In your bulletin is an insert that is a mini-sermon in itself. If you have never read the Bible before, and maybe don't own a Bible and are thinking about going to get one, or if you have not bought a Bible in a number of years, you're going to go into a Christian bookstore, or even a regular bookstore, and be overwhelmed by the numbers and different kinds of Bibles that are out there. One of the most common questions that I get is, "Anne, how do I pick a Bible?" It used to be you could walk in, they were all the same, and you could pick the color of the binding and that was about it. Now there are all kinds, and this insert is a way to help you sort through the maze. It talks about the difference between a paraphrase and a translation, between study Bibles and devotional Bibles, red-letter Bibles, the Apocrypha, and specialty Bibles, with some suggestions for things that I have found helpful. So if you find yourself perplexed by it, then this is a tool for you to use. If you come away with nothing else this morning, I want you to just come away with a desire to read the Bible. It can be very intimidating. There are people who would often rather pick up War and Peace and go through it than the Bible. At least in War and Peace there's a story line that you can follow. People can get intimidated by the size of the Bible. What is it? It's 66 separate books, written across a period of a minimum of 1,000 years, maybe 1,500 to 2,000. Dating of scriptural books is a lot of conjecture, but there are many different times and cultures and people represented in scripture. You can read pieces of it that in one sense are all connected, but in other senses are all completely different. We have what we call two "testaments" -- the Old Testament or the Hebrew scriptures, which are the same scriptures that the Jews go to today as the word of God, and the New Testament, which is the portion about Jesus Christ and the birth and experiences of the early church. They are all scripture for us. There's a passage from Paul that says, "All scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, correction, reproof...." When Paul wrote that, there wasn't a New Testament yet. What Paul is referring to is the Hebrew scriptures. Don't buy into the idea that Christians should ignore the Old Testament and only read the New Testament. The Hebrew scriptures are the context out of which the New Testament makes sense. Why would we read it? Why would we undertake this? We call the Bible "revelation." What we mean by that is that this is a place where God is revealed to us. We read this to find out who God is, who we are, and what the relationship between God and us and between us and each other ought to be. A lot of the trouble people have with the Bible is that they come to it wanting something that the Bible isn't prepared to give them. The Bible is coming to give us who God is, the nature of God, and religious truth. This was not written to be a science textbook. It wasn't written to be an educational handbook, a list of social order, or history. It was written to be the revelation of God. Now we might find some of those other things within it, but that's not the truth we're looking for when we go to scripture. We're looking to find out the truth about the nature of God, the nature of human beings, and how it is we work out living together in love. A question that I often get is, "Well, Anne, is the Bible true?" That's a loaded question, because people can mean all sorts of things when you say, "is the Bible true?" Let me give you an example from the creation story, which a lot of people are familiar with. God creates the world, the Bible says, in six days and then rests on the seventh. So you ask person number one, "Is that true?" Person number one says, "Yes." And what they mean is that God created the world in six 24-hour periods in exactly that order, in exactly that way. Then you ask person number two, "Is that true?" Person number two says, "Yes." But what they mean is, "Well, maybe it was in that order and there were six eras of maybe a million years each, which God took to do that work of creation, but it was basically that way, in that order." Then you ask person number three, "Is that true?" Person number three says, "Yes, it's true." And what they mean is that it's a figurative and symbolic way to say to the world that God is the author and creator of all that is. All three of those people are going to say, "Yes, the Bible is true." But they mean very different things. I think we can learn from that, because the Bible has many different kinds of truth in it. There are all kinds of different literature in the Bible. There are personal letters to people, there are corporate letters to churches, there is poetry, there are proverbs, there are stories, there are histories, there are genealogies, there are listings of numbers. (They don't call it the Book of Numbers for nothing, let me tell you.) There are different genres of literature. There's a wild kind of literature called "apocalyptic" which you find in the book of Revelation. Often if people start there they open it up and say, "Oh my goodness, I'm not reading any more of this, it makes no sense!" Each kind of literature has its own truth. You don't go to a poet and say, "Excuse me, your poetry has to be scientifically true." That's not how you get truth out of poetry. Poetry has a deeper kind of symbolic meaning to it. Jesus told stories, or parables. He didn't mean for us to think that they were all historical things that actually happened. They were stories to illustrate what God is like, and what the kingdom of God is like. Jesus thinks, "How am I going to explain God? God is like a man who had two sons, and one went off and spent all the money, but when he came home the father was there, ready to welcome him, and forgave him." He didn't mean he actually knew a man who had two sons. It was a story. That story is true. It's not true historically, but it's true in the portrayal of God, that God is like the loving father. We see that in our culture. We have Aesop's fables. Are they true? No, not historically. There wasn't a fox that really looked for some grapes and came up talking and saying, "sour grapes." But they're true in what they tell us about ourselves, and the morals of the fables are very true. I encourage you to look at scripture in that way, that the different things you read are true, but they're true in a variety of different ways. One of the ways that the Bible gets abused, I think, is that people want to take God and instead of having this book be the revelation OF God, they want this to BE God, and want God to fit within these pages, closed up, and not escape. People will hold up passages of scripture to God and say, "You have to do this, God, because it says so right here." Ask and you will receive? "I want a Mercedes NOW." That, I submit, is a misuse of scripture. This is not a box in which we contain God and God can't get out of it. God is bigger than this. This reveals to us the nature of God, but it in itself is not God. When we recognize that, that allows us to read it more freely. One of the difficulties people have with reading the Bible often is that they are afraid of it because it's been held up as "this is scripture, this is God's word, this is sacred," and they read something that they don't quite agree with. They read in Joshua about a lot of bloodshed and they say, "This really troubles me." But they're afraid to say that because they think it's sacred and they shouldn't ever question it. They never get to really know the God that it represents, because they're afraid to look in it and ask the hard questions. God is big enough to handle any question that you have. It's one of the reasons we're doing this class coming up in Lent on questions of faith. If you have a question, ask it. Ask it of someone else, and ask it of God. It is a wonderful thing, and a freeing thing, to be able to go to God in prayer and say, "You know, God, I just read this, and it bugs me. I don't think what you did there was very nice of you, and I want you to explain what's going on." That is a real living relationship with God. And it's OK. God is big enough to handle all of our questions, all of our difficulties. We may or may not have an answer right then. But we lose so much if we don't really sit down and wrestle with the things that we find here. If you read through every page of scripture you will find things that you love. You will find things that uplift you, that comfort you, that give you joy. You will find things that make you angry, things that you don't understand, things that you really wish had not been written in here. That's all right. I encourage you to read it, being open to those kinds of questions and issues, because the only way that you're really going to get to know the God who is revealed here is by asking those questions. Think about our human relationships. If we hold off from someone, and keep them at arm's length because we're afraid to question anything that they do and look at it, we're never going to know that person. When we enter into a relationship, we take everything -- the things that we do understand, the things that we don't, the things that make us happy, the things that drive us crazy, all of that comes together with the relationship that we have. With God it is no different. We take it all and we sort out those things in love with God. How do we read this? How do we go about it? I would submit to you that the way NOT to go about it is to open it at the beginning and read it through to the end. It's going to go fine for a while but at Exodus 25 you're going to shut the book and say, "Nope, not any more," because that's when it starts to get tough slogging, through all kinds of detail about building the temple and laws. So I would encourage you, yes, to start at the beginning and read through the 25th chapter of Exodus, which is the second book, and then to skip some, and to go to the beginning of the New Testament and read the Gospels -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John -- and get the stories of Jesus. Genesis and Exodus give you the stories of the foundation of the Hebrew people. The Gospels will give you the foundation for the forming of the people of Jesus Christ. In the middle of the Bible you find the book of Psalms. People for thousands of years have found the book of Psalms a comfort and a help to them. It was Israel's songbook. There are 150 of them of varous lengths, some just a couple verses long, some like Psalm 119 which is the longest and goes on for several pages. But the beauty of the Psalms is that the psalmist gives us every emotion that you could possibly feel. It's poetry, and in the psalms you will find expressions of joy and praise and isn't-life-grand, misery and woe and isn't-life-awful, anger, happiness, pain, jealousy. It's all there. If you've ever felt it, it's there in the psalms somewhere. A lot of people find comfort that all of those emotions are part of holy scripture. Some people take just a psalm each day and read it through. Pray them aloud. They're meant as prayers and that can be a very powerful experience. So the psalms are something that you can pick up anywhere and usually find a point of connection. The proverbs also are fun. They come right after the book of psalms and that's what they are, little proverbs or sayings of wisdom. If you like getting proverbs in fortune cookies, you will like reading the book of Proverbs. It's interesting reading, very true for where we often are in our lives. Going back to the New Testament, when you finish the gospels go on to the book of Acts which immediately follows, and which tells the story of the emergence of the church, what the disciples did after the death and resurrection of Jesus, and how they received the power from the Holy Spirit to go on and transform the world. Then the book of Romans gives you a taste of theology, and Corinthians gives some instruction for how to live life out in the church. If you're a history buff, you might like the books of Samuel and Kings, that tell the stories of David and all of the kings of Israel as they came along. Maybe you've been in the church all
your life but have never really sat down to engage the Bible. In the times
that we have together on Sunday mornings, in an hour 52 times a year, that's
not at all enough to get to know God. You can get little pictures of what God
might be like. But my job here is to give you enough of a picture and enough
encouragement that you can go home and say, "I want to know God. I want
God to really know me. I want to be in relationship with God. Anne says it's
possible, other people say that it's possible. I don't know what that's
about. I want to find out." I'm telling you that a major place to start
is right here, in scripture. This is the Word. Jesus is this Word, made
flesh. God gave us the revelation of who God is in the Bible, and God says,
"They're not getting it. I guess I'll have to go myself." And God
became this Word in the flesh, to say, "See, this is what it's like.
When you live this out, this is what it looks like. This is the Word in the
flesh." That's what we mean when we say that Jesus Christ is the Word,
made flesh -- the same Word. I've said before that I think everything that
needed to be said was said in the first five books of the Bible, and the rest
comes along and re-emphasizes it, and says it in another way, and fleshes it
out. You have prophets who come later in There are two basic ways to read the Bible. They are reflected in the two kinds of Bibles that there are. There are study Bibles and there are devotional Bibles. In a study Bible you will find more academic kinds of notes, that give you maps and charts and tell you things about the original languages and the original culture in which the Bible characters lived. It gives you clues as to what the text meant to the people who originally received it and originally heard it. That represents one way we read scripture, which is to study it to learn those things. We can get a lot by learning what these words meant to the people who lived 2,000 or 3,000 years ago who heard it. Another way we can read is represented in the devotional Bibles. That's to read scripture to hear what God is saying through it to us today. Devotional Bibles have notes along those lines. They ask you questions like, "Think about this passage in terms of your life this week. Is there anything that you might do differently with your life right now because of this?" And both of those ways of reading are good and helpful. That latter way of reading is the most frequent way that God speaks to me, through scripture leaping off the page saying, "Anne, pay attention to this, this is for you right now." And you just know as you're reading that it's God's message for you, right then and there. Sometimes I swear, even though I've been through this many, many times, that I have never seen those words before, that some little elves are sneaking into my Bible in the middle of the night and penning in some extra verses. This is a living word. God will speak through it. If you come to scripture expecting to encounter the living God in it, you will. Like any discipline, you need to engage it. There will be times when you read it and you've read four chapters and you haven't got a clue what it said. That's all right. Happens to me too. There are other times, when I keep the discipline up, that maybe I'll remember something from those four chapters two weeks later and say, "Oh, my goodness. That's where it came from." Engage it. This is the living word of God. It is true, in a lot of different ways. And I encourage you this Lenten season to get to know the God that's withIN it. The God that's also withOUT it. The God that loves you. Amen. (c) 2000, Anne Robertson Return to AnneRobertson.com |