I am in the St. Mary’s library today doing a little bit of research. Did you know we have a library at St. Mary’s? It’s tucked away in the corner by the alley entrance. In here we have mostly books, although we do have a small audiovisual collection. We have fiction and non-fiction books. We have books for children and adults. We have books in English and in Spanish. All the books are either religious, or at the very least religious-adjacent. We have books on religion in general, books on church history, theology, and scripture, which is why I am down here today, to look up a few things for the sermon.
I’m doing a little research on scripture because of the Collect that we heard today. “Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning.” Scripture is critically important in our faith tradition in the Episcopal Church. Some people like to think of us as the Prayer Book church. There is a lot of truth in that. The Prayer Book, the Book of Common Prayer, is critical to our identity. The whole concept of the Book of Common Prayer and what it stands for, is critical to our identity. And yet we need to keep in mind that the Prayer Book itself is grounded in Scripture. Something like 80% of the Prayer Book is either a direct quotation, or a paraphrase of Holy Scripture. When we use it, we are engaging in Scripture, and when we pray in the forms of the Prayer Book, not only do the prayers themselves have a grounding in Scripture, but they send us deeper into Scripture through the Lessons. If you pray the Daily Office of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, you will, in the course of two years, have read the entirety of the Bible, with parts of it being read multiple times. If you don’t do the Daily Offices, the Eucharistic Lectionary with its three-year cycle, you are getting a breadth of Scripture, through the three lessons and the Psalm. In the Eucharistic services, the sermon, in our Episcopal tradition, nearly always come out of the readings of the day. It is highly unusual in the Episcopal Church to have “thematic” sermons. It is unusual to have a sermon like this where I am preaching about an idea in the Collect instead of something directly coming out of the Scripture readings of the day.
Our worship life is full of Scripture. Beyond our worship life, how is it that we discern things in the Episcopal way? That is also deeply rooted in Scripture. We have the concept of the three-legged stool. The idea that in order to understand anything about faith, anything about God or what God wants us to do in this world, we need to look at that dialogue of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason, that dialogue of our minds, the voices of our ancestors, and Scripture. There are debates among Episcopalians as to whether all three of those are equal, or does Scripture have a bigger role. But however you look at it, Scripture is critically important.
Since Scripture is critically important to us as Episcopalians, it is important for us to understand Scripture. But it is also important for us to understand how we understand Scripture. Did you catch that? We don’t only need to understand Scripture itself, we need to understand how we understand Scripture. This Collect today gives us profound insights into how it is we understand Scripture as Episcopalians.
Let’s take a look at the Collect again. “Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” “Grant us to hear them.” First and foremost, we hear the Scriptures read in worship. That is where it all begins. It reminds us, teaches us, that first of all Scripture is the life-blood of the church. Whenever we gather together to worship, we put Scripture at the center of it. It reminds us that we understand Scripture in the context of the church, and it teaches us that our first engagement with Scripture is a communal engagement, not an individual one. We engage in it together. We need to always engage it together.
“Read and mark.” I’m going to lump these two together because there is so much overlap. Reading and marking reminds us that it is not just a communal engagement, but there is an individual component to it. We need to read and mark the Scripture, and we need to go deep into them to understand what it is the Scriptures are saying. Marking is interesting. If you don’t write in your Bible, that is fine. If you don’t write in your books, that is fine. The Bible is not a book that is set apart from other books. It is not put on a pedestal where the gilded pages are never opened. It is OK to write in your bible. You are meant to mark it; you are meant to learn from it so deeply that you make notes in it. You need to engage in it at that level. I had a professor in college who said that if you don’t get a new Bible every five years because you’ve written in it so much you can no longer see anything, then you are not reading it enough. That might be a bit of a hyperbole, but the message was loud and clear: you are to engage with it at that really deep level. It also reminds us that Scripture is a tool. It is something that has a purpose and not something that gets put on that pedestal. It is not something that we worship, and it is not something that we follow. We worship and we follow the God that Scripture points us to. The Bible is not the God that we follow and that we worship. That would be a sin of idolatry. That would be idolatry of the Bible itself. It is a tool: we read it and we mark it.
The next thing is that we learn from it. Again, the idea that it is not something that gets its own worship or gets its own following, but it is something that is designed to teach us something. It teaches us about God, it teaches us about humanity, and it teaches us about how we, as followers of God, need to engage in this world.
“Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” When we hear these words, we might think of the Book of Ezekiel and hear the echos of the time when God said to Ezekiel, “eat this scroll.” We’re supposed to “inwardly digest” the Scriptures. Now, of course, this is not in the literal sense. Don’t go chew into that Bible in a literal way. This is a metaphor that Scripture is not just something of our mind, but it is meant to go deep down inside of us. To go from our mind to our heart. To go into our bones and into our marrow to shape our very being. Scripture is meant to give a framework to us for our life.
When we think of the idea of inwardly digesting Scripture, it also means that Scripture is meant to nourish us. Just as food gives nourishment to our bodies and gives us life, Scripture must do the same. It gives nourishment to us and must be life giving, however we interpret Scripture. And all Scripture has to be interpreted. There is no interpretation-free understanding of Scripture. You have to interpret it. However you interpret it, it has to be a life giving interpretation. If your understanding somehow takes away life from yourself, or to someone else, you have to go back and try again. Scripture is meant to be life giving. It is meant to nourish us and this world.
So, my friends in Christ, I encourage you to engage with Scripture, to hear the Scriptures, to read, mark, and learn the Scriptures. And most importantly, to inwardly digest them. To have such a diet of Scripture, whether through our worship together, through individual reading of the Bible, through studying of books about Scripture, you must engage with it in such a way that you are fully inwardly digesting it and allowing the Good News to shape your life, and allowing it to nourish you, to give you life, and to give life to this world. Keep going back to it and find the way that it brings life.
AMEN
