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The Collect for Sunday November 19 Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. These days, Monday Matters offers reflections on the prayers we say in church on Sunday, the collect of the day. We do this based on the conviction that praying shapes our believing, that what we pray forms us. We do this hoping that the prayers we say on Sunday will carry us through the week. |
Bible believer
A word from the newly elected Speaker of the House: “I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘… People are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it – that’s my worldview. That’s what I believe and so I make no apologies for it. That’s my personal worldview.”
I don’t expect I’ll ever have the opportunity to sit down with Speaker Johnson and talk about how he understands what it means to be Bible-believing. I’m guessing we would mean different things by that, but I nevertheless count myself as a Bible-believer, serving in a denomination that is Bible-believing.
That might not be people’s first impression of the Episcopal Church, but the words of scripture are woven into the fabric of our church culture. I get a chuckle when Episcopalians begin to explore the Bible and marvel at how much of it was swiped from the Book of Common Prayer.
Our Sunday worship involves the reading of lots of scripture. Similarly, the Daily Office (Morning, Noonday, Evening Prayer) all include big chunks of the Bible. When a priest is ordained, at the beginning of that grand liturgy, that person commits to an understanding of scripture as the word of God, containing all things necessary for salvation.
Thoughts about the Bible are prompted not only by the new Speaker of the House, but also by the collect heard yesterday in church (see above), which is focused on scripture. As we say in our tradition that our praying shapes our believing, consider what this prayer says about us as Bible-believers.
It says first of all that God caused the scriptures to be written for our learning. It doesn’t say that it’s got science nailed, or that it provides a map for political party. It does say that it’s there for our learning. And since another word for learner is disciple, we as disciples take this mosaic of texts and see what they have to teach us. We think about how they help us grow.
We take scripture seriously, if not literally. A measure of that seriousness is reflected in the process outlined in the collect. We hear, read, learn, mark and inwardly digest the words of scripture. In other words, we work them through and take them in, so they become part of us. I’ll be the first to admit that many of these passages are hard to swallow. We grapple with them anyway, and as we do, we discover that they begin to shape us.
And why do we go to all that trouble? Because scripture will enable us to embrace and hold on to hope. Lord knows, we all could use more hope. It’s the hope that comes through the story of creation, when we read that God saw what God had made and declared it to be very good. It’s the hope we share with the children of Israel wandering in the wilderness. We all know something about wilderness and we all have the hope of being led to a promised land. It’s the hope we share with exiles who were eventually brought back home. It’s the hope we share with the women who went to the tomb on Easter morning and found their grief turned to amazed joy, their dead end into a threshold.
Jurgen Moltmann, great theologian, posed the question this way: Where would we stand if we did not take our stand on hope? The premise, the promise of our faith is that we make that stand as we take the words of scripture to heart and find in them a guide into a life marked by hope, a life marked by confidence in the God who is in the business of making things new. Think this week about the rewards and challenges you have experienced in encounter with scripture. What might you do to go deeper, for the sake of embracing a deeper hope?
-Jay Sidebotham
