Preacher: Canon Karen
Date: 27/10/2019
Today is Bible Sunday. I imagine you all own a Bible. It would be interesting to hear the stories behind those Bibles – perhaps we can share some of them over coffee after this service. Perhaps some come from your childhood or a significant occasion in your life or from much further back in your family’s history. I’ve brought some of mine:
English and German grandfathers’
My childhood Bible
French and Swedish Bibles
Wherever and whenever they come from, our Bibles come from a moment in time. To listen to a reading from the Bible is to hear more than just the words – it is to hear it from a particular context or situation – from a moment in time.
In fact the Bible is quite an unusual book in the sense that it comes from many moments in time. We can all too easily think of it as the word of God, written in English, as if God only speaks in English. Well let’s think about when some of this book was written.
The book of Genesis was written when? Well some of it was written (J) in the 10th century BC. Some of it was written (E) in the 9th – 8th centuries BC and some of it was written (P) in the 5th century BC. It was written over a period of 500 years!
Or another book of the Old Testament from which our first reading was taken – Isaiah. Some of it was written (1) in the 8th century BC; some more of it (II) was written in the 6th century BC and the last bit (III) was written in the 5th cent BC. It took more than 300 years to write the Book of Isaiah. I think perhaps we tend to think that there’s a chunk of the Bible, which some holy person inspired by God sat down and wrote in a week or so – well it wasn’t like that.
The OT started in Hebrew and was translated into Greek in 3rd cent BC. The NT was written in Greek and both testaments were translated into Latin in the 4th cent AD, and only into English in the 15th Century, only 600 years ago. And the church was so cross with the man that did that work, William Tyndale, that they burnt him at the stake for heresy.
Can you answer this popular quiz question: which was the first book of the NT to be written? Some might say Matthew, others Mark. It is actually thought to be Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians which came first, being written about the year AD 50 and it took another 200 years before all of the books of the NT were written.
This book, we call ‘the Bible’ took somewhere between 1200 and 1500 years to write which goes to prove one thing. God, I think … writes slowly! God has a different timescale from us.
And each of the writings from different times reflect the people that wrote those words just as the words reflect their understanding of God.
Today, our two NT readings were written relatively close to the life of Christ. The letter to the Romans dates from around AD 57 written by Paul to an early church community. Paul had spent the previous ten years bringing the good news of Jesus Christ to communities bordering on the Aegean Sea and now it was time to move on. His destination was Spain – the oldest Roman colony in the west and the chief bastion of Roman civilization in those parts. And a journey to Spain would afford Paul the opportunity to fulfil a long-standing ambition to see Rome, not least because there was a flourishing church in that city and many Christians who Paul had met elsewhere in his travels were now resident in Rome and members of that church. During the early days of AD57, therefore, he wrote the letter destined for the Roman Christians – a letter which was to prepare them for his visit to their city and to explain the purpose of that visit; and he judged it wise while writing it to set before them a full statement of the gospel as he understood and proclaimed it.
That’s the context of that letter and Paul who wrote it and the Christians who received it would have had absolutely no idea that 1,962 years later, an extract from that letter would be read as part of Christian worship in a church like this in Cirencester.
Then around 25 years later Luke’s Gospel was written, perhaps some 80 years after the crucifixion of Christ, to tell his story and Luke is writing to explain that God’s love as shown in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is for all people. Luke’s is the gospel for the Gentiles, it’s the gospel of women, it’s the universal gospel.
And Luke likewise, had no idea that his little book would end up in a collection of books, some written more than a thousand years earlier which together set out to tell the story of God’s involvement with humanity.
And we still read these books; amazingly they are still relevant even though their context was so different from our own. We struggle sometimes to make sense of it, so there’s good reason to study these books a bit harder, but sometimes we come across a sentence which speaks straight into our hearts.
I wonder what people in a 1000 years’ time will make of Harry Potter or Shakespeare, of Dostoyevsky or Jane Austen. It may be that they too have the richness that allows them to last and if they do people will find some bits easier than others because they understand the context.
What’s important about the Bible is not the book. The translation is not particularly important. The King James version with all its thees and thous is no more Godly than any other version. It’s the message, the truths it contains which are timeless and make sense to every generation.
At morning and evening prayer in the week we pretty much use passages from the bible. The readings can sometimes be quite long but I think it is sometimes the shorter ones which are potentially more profound. I think it is ok to take a short passage and let it speak to us. Sometimes we have to understand the context of the whole chapter or book but for a spiritual treat, it’s good to take a phrase or a sentence and let it speak to the heart.
So imagine Paul preparing for his trip to Rome and writing to the Christian community he was looking forward to visiting:
We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Each of us must please our neighbour for the good purpose of building up the neighbour. For Christ did not please himself; but, as it is written, “the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.”
The words are timeless and that I think is the kind of truth we have to look for when we pick up this book. Not to see just a piece of literature or a book which has particular value, a book to have on our desert island alongside Shakespeare and one other – but a book that contains the truths about the relationship of God with humanity. It’s worth reading and it’s worth studying more and more.
Bible Sunday is a Sunday to make us think. It is a Sunday that challenges us to think about what the words of this book mean, to ask ‘where do these words come from?’ and ‘what are they saying to me?’ But to answer those questions we do have to pick this book up and look inside it and church, which exists for many reasons, in its pattern of Sunday and weekday services and Bible study groups can help us do just that.