In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
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 by patience and comfort of your holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life. That is perhaps one of the more well-known prayers contained in our Book of Common Prayer. It was written by Thomas Cranmer for the first Prayer Book in 1549 and is rooted in a passage from Romans. This morning, instead of preaching on a specific passage of Scripture, I’d like to use this wonderful prayer to speak about Scripture as a whole.
For us as Anglicans, Scripture is absolutely foundational and essential. Our understanding of faith is built upon Scripture, tradition, and reason, which Scripture being primary. The Prayer Book teaches us that Scripture contains all things necessary for salvation, and yet the Bible is an oft-misunderstood, misused, and under-utilized gift from God. For nearly 500 years, this prayer has shaped our Anglican approach to Scripture.
The first thing that the prayer notes is that all Scripture was caused to be written by God. God is the source of the Bible, not because God dictated it, but because God inspired it. Faithful men and women wrote of their encounters and experiences of God. Humans are capable of many wonderful things and works of art, but we are also bound by the limitations of our humanity. God has chosen to be revealed through us creatures, as imperfect as we are. And so the Bible is not and never will be the fullest revelation of God. The Bible is certainly inspired, authoritative, and is worthy of our awe and reverence, but not our worship. God alone is to be worshipped and the fullest picture of God is found not on the pages of the Bible, but in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus. The Bible is only helpful in that it points us to Christ. God is bigger than human language or understanding, so God cannot be limited or confined to the pages of Scripture, even if those pages are divinely inspired.
Next, Cranmer’s prayer says that these Scriptures were written for our learning. Now by learning, he doesn’t mean that Scripture is an object to be studied in and of itself. Again, Scripture is only helpful so long as it brings us closer to God. There are some people who are quite good at quoting Scripture and memorizing it, but that isn’t the point of Scripture. And the sort of learning that happens in Scripture is important – Scripture is not an instruction manual for life, nor does it tell us what to do. I realize that might be what you’ve been taught about Scripture – that it exists to tell us what to do. But that is a humanly focused, you might even say selfish, way to approach Scripture. It’s rather egotistical to say “The Bible is about me,” but yet, that’s often how it is treated.
The Bible is not about us, it’s about God. The Bible was written for our learning about God, not for our learning about how we are to act. Any instructions that can be gleaned from Scripture are built upon our understanding of who God is. Without Scripture, we wouldn’t know about God’s history of salvation, relationship, and love with creation. Now, it may well be the case that the Bible leads us to respond to God’s grace in specific ways; but the Bible doesn’t tell us what us to, rather it reveals the story of God’s love for us and then invites us to be transformed after we have learned of it.
The great danger in thinking that the Bible is about us more than God is that through that approach, we might dare to speak for God instead of letting God speak to us. When we reduce Scripture to a list of rules, we can weaponize Scripture to use against other people. I don’t need to list all the ways that Scripture has been mishandled to harm others to make this point. Instead, Scripture tells us that God is just, merciful, creative, ever-present, and loving, and Scripture’s purpose is to draw us deeper into union with the God who is revealed through it.
The prayer then prays that God will grant us to hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Scriptures. It’s important to remember that this prayer was first published in 1549 when literacy rates and access to printed Bibles weren’t what they are today. For most of Christian history, the public hearing of Scripture in the vernacular wasn’t a possibility. It’s a reminder of how fortunate we are to live in a time and place where we can actually hear the Bible read, and so come to know God’s love for us through it.
The petition for us to hear the Scriptures also reminds us of the importance of gathering with fellow Christians to hear our sacred story read aloud. Though the reading of Scripture is not a Sacrament of the Church, the act of publically hearing Scripture is a sacramental act, in that God’s grace is conveyed through our hearing of these holy words. As Jesus noted, wherever two or three are gathered in his name, he is with us. When we gather to hear the words of Scripture proclaimed, Jesus is present.
We then pray that we might be granted to read the Scriptures. This, I acknowledge, is perhaps the hardest part of this prayer for many modern Christians. There are plenty of surveys out there that tell us that Christians do not read or understand the Bible nearly as much as they want to or think they ought to. Sitting down to read the Bible isn’t that different from sitting in a Paris café trying to understand a conversation in French when your only experience with French was a one-semester introductory course in high school. If I tell you that you need to read the Bible every day, you’d probably get as much out of it as you would that conversation in French.
The Bible really isn’t a book, it’s a library of books. The Bible is an ancient collection of poems, letters, stories, and reflections about God. As any English teacher will tell you, you don’t read Shakespeare’s sonnets in the same way that you read Homer’s Odyssey, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, or Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Lincoln. And yet, when we pick up the Bible, we get stuck because we’re not clear about what we’re reading. Just consider what we heard today: history and social commentary in Judges, poetry and praise in Psalm 123, a letter with exhortations in 1 Thessalonians, and a parable in Matthew. And none of those readings have only one way to understand them.
But as intricate as the Bible can be, I can’t tell you how many of you have told me that you want to know more about the Bible and you want to be able to read it more fully. So stick with that desire, because that desire comes from God. God wants you to encounter more fully the grace, mercy, and love of God through holy Scripture.
The way to go deeper into Scripture is to not only read it, but to mark it. Yes, I am giving you official permission, and even encouragement, to write in your Bible. By marking, this prayer is asking for God to help us to study the Bible. So study it crucially, read commentaries, discuss it in groups. Each week in our parish email that goes out on Wednesdays, we put a link to the readings for the upcoming Sunday – click that link and get those passages into your mind so that you will be ready to more fully hear them on Sunday. One person has said that to read the Bible without meditating on it is like trying to eat without swallowing. Remember, the Bible is a pathway to God, not an object of our worship, So feel free to question the Bible, disagree with it, dissect it, wrestle with it, pray with it, get to know it, mark it up.
We then pray that God grant us to learn from the Scriptures. As Jesus departs from his followers, he tells them to make disciples. The word “disciple” means “student.” As Christians, we are lifelong learners. God is always bigger than we can conceptualize, so there is always more to learn. Don’t ever think that you’ve finished learning or growing in faith. What makes Scripture so amazing is that, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, it changes each time you approach it. You might know a passage inside and out, and yet it will always have new things for you to learn.
The last item in that list is that we might inwardly digest Scripture. It’s a lovely metaphor for internalizing Scripture, for making God’s word a part of our very being. In Deuteronomy, God says “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” To inwardly digest the Scriptures, we must consume them and make them a part of our lives. So read Scripture, talk about it, find ways to bump into Scripture throughout your day. Scripture is like a seed, it must be planted in our lives in order to bear the fruit of transformation.
Cranmer’s prayer then notes that with Scripture we are to be patient and we find comfort. By patient, he means that we are consistent and steadfast in turning to Scripture. And by comfort, he means something like what St. Augustine was after when he said that “Scripture are letters from home.” The Bible provides us comfort and encouragement because they remind us of the things that are truer than true – that God loves us, that God is merciful to us, and that God desires peace for us.
As the prayer concludes, it says that the purpose of this hearing, reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting is that we might “embrace and hold fast to the blessed hope of everlasting life.” This hope comes from the fact that Scripture is a living book because it points us to a living God. God still speaks through Scripture as much as God spoke to Moses, Isaiah, or Paul. Through this sacred text, God’s love is proclaimed anew today.
So if you were to put the Bible in the proper place on a bookstore shelf, it would be found in the romance section, not because it has a trashy cover, but because, as its core, the Bible is the story of God’s unconditional, unwavering, and all-surpassing love affair with Creation. We read the Bible not to find answers, but to find help in asking the right questions as we are drawn more deeply into God’s love for us.
So take up and read the Bible. You might not understand it all, so get an annotated Bible. Ask me for some recommendations for books to read about the Bible. Find a group of parishioners and have coffee with them and talk about Scripture. Ruminate on the passages we hear each Sunday for the week that follows. Think about what those passages say about God and how you can faithfully respond to that revelation. I promise you, you will not regret reading the Bible; but you may well regret not reading it.
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 by patience and comfort of your holy Word, 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.
