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?"