Bible Sunday

 We are coming to the end of ordinary time in the church calendar. This week is the last Sunday after Pentecost.  Then it will be All Saints’ this Thursday, All Souls’, Kingdom season for a few weeks, and then the Feast of Christ the King, in Glory enthroned, then the new church year will begin on Advent Sunday, when we start again, with anticipation as we prepare for the birth of the child destined to be the king of kings.

It’s a tense moment – because today is also BIBLE SUNDAY

This annual Bible Sunday gives us a chance to step back and look at the Bible as a whole.

·    The Bible is great – it tells us important things, and gives us a clue about Biblical characters – for example, we know that Moses wore a wig.  It says that sometimes he was with Aaron and sometimes he wasn’t.

·    We know that God created Adam at teatime.  It tells us he was created a little before Eve.

·    The shortest man in the Bible?  Nehimiah (knee-high-miah)

Here are some facts about the Bible:

·    The Bible contains 66 different books – it’s like a collection.

·    They are divided into the Old and New Testaments – Testament means promise or agreement.

·    The Bible was written by over 40 different authors from all walks of life – shepherds, farmers, tent-makers, fishermen, priests, doctors, philosophers and kings.

·    Moses wrote more than anyone else in the Old Testament – the first 5 books

·    Paul wrote more than anyone else in the New Testament – over half – 14 books

·    It was written over 1,500 years from 1,450 years before Jesus was born, to about 100 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

·    It was written in three languges – Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek

·    The books in the Bible weren’t decided on until 375 AD – this is called the Canon of Scripture – Canon means Standard basically.

·    The Bible was first translated into English in 1382 AD

·    The Bible was translated into Welsh less than 200 years later.

·    The longest book is Psalms

·    The shortest is 2 John

·    The Book of Esther doesn’t mention God

·    The oldest man in the Bible lived to 969 (Methuselah)

·    The Bible originally had no verses or chapters, just one long text!  Imagine finding a reading on a Sunday morning!

·    There are over 500 verses on faith, 500 on prayer, and over 2,000 on our relationship to money and possessions

·    There are 49 different foods mentioned in the Bible

·    The Bible has been translated into 2,018 languages – in comparison, Shakespeare has been translated into 50 languages.

·    It is the best selling book in the world

It’s a massive topic for one sermon – so I’ll try to paint a picture of how fascinating the Bible is.  Understanding a bit more about the Bible can really help us with faith, it’s also really quite a good read.

Someone once said….

"Who is silly enough to believe that God, like a farmer, 'planted a paradise in the east at Eden'.  
Or put in it a visible, real 'tree of life' and if anyone eats the fruit with his teeth they gain life. …
And when God is said to 'walk in the paradise in the cool of the day' 
and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, 
I don't think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions.  
They indicate certain mysteries not actual events."

You may recognise these words.
 They're not mine.  
They sound very modern, but they come from the brilliant 3rd century Christian scholar called Origen. 

Origen believed that there are different ways of reading the Bible, 
that the Bible has different levels of meaning.  
He was not alone.  
In fact, his view shared by many Christians.  Origen spoke about 3 levels of meaning:

Literal, moral and spiritual.  


A good example is the exodus – the people of Israel leaving Egypt.  
On one level we can read it literally, as a story about Moses and the people leaving Egypt.

On the moral level, we can see it as a story about conversion from the slavery of sin to the freedom of grace.

On the spiritual level, it can be read thinking about our redemption in Jesus – we have this reading at Easter…being set free.

From the earliest days of Christianity, we have understood that the richness and diversity of the Bible needs to be explored.  It speaks to us in all chapters of our lives, it challenges us, it supports us, it comforts us and it tells us off!

The four Gospels even, are written for different audiences, giving people a chance to see the stories from different perspectives.  The Old Testament was the only Bible that Jesus had, he didn’t have the New Testament, it hadn’t been written.      

The origins of the New Testament as a bit of a mystery!  Our version has 27 books or letters, but why were they chosen?  This was towards the end of the 2nd century with characters like Bishop Irenaeus, But exactly how that happened we don't know. 

There is the Gospel of Thomas, building on the idea of Jesus being the Light of the world, and the Gospel of Mary, where the apostles question Mary about why Jesus should talk to her and not them.

But the Bible is what it is!  If you read the Bible in South America, you might be a liberation theologian, who believes that the Bible encourages revolution in the hearts and minds of people, so that the mighty might lose their thrones, and the poor might be lifted up. 

Wherever you read the Bible, it’s God talking to you, your family, your community, you’re nation!  And it speaks to us today, here in Cardiff, in the midst of our trouble and upset, but also in our celebration and our thankgiving.

I commend it to you!  The greatest library of books, with stories fascinating, frightening, fantastic and fabulous.

Finally,

·    Solomon is credited as being the wisest man in the Bible, Ann tells me this is because he had 700 wives to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid.

·     A father was reading Bible stories to his young son. He read, "The man named Lot was warned to take his wife and flee out of the city, but his wife looked back and was turned to salt."  His son asked, "What happened to the flea?"

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio

21^st October 2012

Trinity 20 (Pentecost 21)

We are coming to the end of ordinary time in the church calendar. Next week we have Bible Sunday, the last Sunday after Pentecost.  Then it will be All Saints’, All Souls’, the Feast of Christ the King, Kingdom season for a few weeks, and then the new church year will begin.

It’s in four weeks time it’s Advent Sunday, when we start again, with anticipation we prepare for the birth of the child destined to be the king of kings.

As the end of each liturgical year approaches, we have a few weeks being asked what we’ve learned.  All those readings, all those sermons, all those questions! 

The first mistake we make is to think that we come to church to get answers!  Well we don’t.  To quote Hamlet;

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.  Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.

We are given clues about the direction in which we should be pointing.  A bit like the way in which plants turn towards the sun, to get a bit more of precious sunlight.  But answers don’t always just appear when we come to church!  We are more likely to be leaving with questions…about ourselves, our faith, our direction in life and what is really, really precious to us.

So here we are!  Waiting to find out what we’ve learned from coming to church and enduring…sorry listening…to the sermons about the readings we’ve had.

It’s a tense moment.

Throughout the Gospel according to Mark, we are given many examples of Jesus attempting to get the Disciples to understand power and true humility. 

·     He has sat a child on his lap and told them that they must become like the child. 

·     He has told them off when they judged someone for doing the work of Jesus, just because he wasn’t like them.

·     He has spoken about the personal cost of discipleship, and we hear of how his followers must become the servants of others, and expect persecution and hardship.

So, it’s quite shocking to hear that the disciples in the reading today are discussing power and who can sit at the left and right of Jesus in his Kingdom.

He had tried to settle the disputes about greatness with the child and the woman and after this event he talks about his coming death to the amazement of the disciples.

Matthew’s version of this story has the mother of James and John asking Jesus about their seats in glory, but here they are asking for themselves. 

And in answering, Jesus reverses all the normal things about greatness. 

The same happens with the servant song from Isaiah.  Written 400 years before, it foretells the coming messiah.

In the topsy-turvy world of Jesus, the innocent servant is suffering – and cut off from the world.  This is far from what the brothers were expecting!  But because of this Jesus becomes the one who sits alongside the grieving, the sad, the lonely, the poor, oppressed and destitute.

So why is it that we always search for glory?  Why is it that we always need to value what we have in human terms?  Why do we come to church for answers?

So why go to church if we are doomed to fail so badly in being a good Christian.

Now, at this point in thinking about my sermon, I made the mistake of typing a question into the Internet.  I typed Why go to church?

And do you know what?  My screen was filled with the most self-righteous nonsense I’ve seen for a very long time.  Mostly telling us that church attendance is required for us to declare we are right and somehow better than other people – set apart from the sinners for an hour or so.

It might be difficult for some to imagine but in the ordinary difficultness of now, we are here to turn a little bit more towards the light, and to try to learn a little more about ourselves and the God who loves us.  We are not here to instantly turn into modern day saints; we are not here to show the people out there how good we think we are.  We are here in the words of Sri Lankan Christian leader D.T. Niles:

‘As one beggar showing another beggar where to find bread’.

To be fed, to be recharged and to be sent out…to tell others where that bread may be found.

This isn’t about making ourselves great.  It isn’t about choosing our thrones for the world to come, it’s about true humility and honesty.  Someone once said that the church is;

A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.

This is reflected perfectly in the post-communion prayer that is set for the day – we rarely use anything other than the ones that are in the book, but it goes like this.

God the Father, whose Son, the light unfailing, who has come from heaven that he may deliver the world from the darkness of ignorance: may the eyes of our understanding be opened through these holy mysteries that we, knowing the way of life, may walk in it without stumbling.

This isn’t a prayer for a throne, riches or knowledge.  It’s a prayer that the world may be freed from the darkness of ignorance and that we may walk without stumbling.

Should we ask for anything else?