The Spiritual Practice of Studying Scripture

I suppose that’s one way of explaining how I got into this work and what I continue to enjoy about it.  I believe, most days at least, that the world is a good place, but so often that goodness is obscured by all kinds of things:  divisiveness in our politics, our families, even our churches…and how hopeful it is to imagine that we have this book of wisdom, and that we might ease some of that strife by living our lives according to its words of healing and grace?  That seems like something worth aspiring to.

So I started studying, and over time in the Bible I discovered wonderful surprises hidden in these pages, as well as the realization that much of it was more complicated than it seemed. I’ve had to rethink that story about the woman caught in adultery many times over, and each time I read it I discover something new.

Because I love exploring these mysteries in the Bible, during the first year of my ministry, I teamed up with a mentor who helped me write a curriculum for Bible study.  We called it Wrestling with Scripture, and in it we introduced small groups to a method of reading the Bible.  The study helps uncover the meaning and application of Bible stories by going progressively deeper with the stories like peeling back layers of an onion.  In order to introduce people to this method, we utilized three passages of Scripture as examples:

The first was the passage from Matthew 5 in which Jesus famously instructs his followers to love their enemies.  He offers this teaching with three illustrations—turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, and, when being asked to give one’s coat, to offer one’s cloak as well.  The plain sense of these teachings is that Christians should be accommodating towards those who hurt them, acting, some have suggested, like pushovers.  But deeper readings of the text suggest that more is going on here.  A theologian named Walter Wink wrote an article some decades ago exploring the historical context of each of Jesus’ examples.

Here were some of his discoveries:  He found that a Roman soldier was allowed by law to force a common citizen to carry his pack for a mile, but an additional mile would have been a violation of that same law, and would put the soldier at risk of punishment, so insisting on going the second mile was actually a way for a common person to protest against this burden of Roman occupation.

Wink also found that in a court of law, convicted debtors were able to sue for as much as any extra clothing one might possess, but they could not go so far as taking the shirt off one’s back.  Similar to the extra mile, the insistence on giving one’s cloak as well would be a way of publicly ridiculing anyone so greedy as to demand the cloak as well.  (It’s hard to tell if anyone ever actually tried this, running through the streets naked to make someone else look bad, but Jesus make his point).

And finally, Wink points out that it was legal—regrettably—for a master to strike a slave, and that there was a socially acceptable way of doing this when one was in a position of power.  Turning one’s other cheek forced the master to strike the other person in a different way:  not the “respectable” way that treated a slave as less-than, but only in the way that the master would strike an equal.  Jesus’ teaching was therefore an attack on the very idea that there would be a hierarchy of masters and slaves.

In all three of these examples, Jesus is not telling his followers to be doormats, but rather to creatively protest against systems that are unfair.  Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless others have peacefully protested against their enemies in ways such as these.

The second scripture in the curriculum we wrote was from Exodus 32, the story of the Golden Calf.  The background to this, in case you’ve forgotten or haven’t heard it before is as follows:  In the story of the Golden Calf, Moses has gone up to Mount Sinai to receive the 10 Commandments and the rest of the Law, and the people wait at the bottom for his return.  When Moses is gone a long time, the people fret that there must not be any God up there after all, so wanting a God they can see in the way neighboring peoples do, they pool together all their gold jewelry, melt it down and make a god for themselves.  This makes God upset.  Many of you probably remember that story.  The element of this story that is often surprising upon a closer reading is verse 14, which says that when God gets upset and threatens to abandon and destroy the people, Moses pleads with God to reconsider, and verse 14 reads:  “And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”  God mind can be changed???  And this study generates discussion about several big questions:  what you think about a God whose mind can be changed, whether that matches with other assumptions you may have about an all-knowing and all-powerful Creator, what the story suggests about the power of prayer, etc.

Finally, the third passage in the study is one I know I’ve preached about here not too long ago, it’s from the Book of Revelation, chapter 17.  Plenty of people find Revelation frightening, or at least intimidating, and this is one of the most graphic and mystifying passages in the book, about a whore and a beast making war on a lamb, in a setting surrounded by 7 mountains, and the beast is described with 7 heads and 10 horns, accompanied by a sign that reads, Babylon the Great.  At first most folks are unable to make heads or tails of the story, but in the study we move through the passage methodically, establishing the plot and organizing the characters.  We then return to the first chapter of the Book of Revelation, which fills in the important context that this is a letter written from a Roman prison, and that it’s symbolic language is targeted at the Roman occupiers whose persecution of Christians is described in the book as a war on Christ, the Lamb of God.  Soon the passage, and the Book of Revelation itself, ceases to be so scary, once we see that it is not a prediction of the endtimes, as literalists started to argue in the 19th century; rather Revelation is a political and social commentary on the dangers of Empire and struggle for good, which is to say that its message is not so different from Star Wars.

Each of these studies shows how the Bible, when we peel back its layers of wisdom, becomes an incredible resource for the everyday struggle to have faith.  The Matthew passage inspires Christians to stand up for oppressed people, and to peacefully stand up for themselves.  The Exodus story shows that people of faith have always struggled with doubt, and that it’s alright to ask big questions about the nature of God.  The Revelation passage reveals that even when it seems like the forces of evil are overwhelming the world, we believe in a God who is always working for good.

In ministry, I talk with all kinds of people who have regular problems in everyday life.  It’s not uncommon for me to meet people who are struggling in some way, but then make some kind of miraculous connection between their struggle and the Bible they’ve been reading and hearing for their whole life.  Some examples:  Sometimes we struggle to understand why our actions don’t match our good intentions, and then somewhere in a distant memory, we find that we are not alone—we hear the confession of Paul:  “I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”  (Romans 7:15)  Someone else may struggle with tremendous grief and loss, and be upheld by the 23rd Psalm:  “even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.”  Sometimes a person needs to be genuinely angry with God for a while, and the only thing that allows them to tolerate the Bible is that it includes honest cries like “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me…”  Imagine that a person struggles with addiction or depression, and in their struggle remembers the words of Jeremiah:  “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”   Sometimes our church committees struggle to do the right thing with the resources we have, but then someone speaks up:  “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was naked and you clothed me…” and suddenly the right way is clear.  Imagine that a parent and child have become estranged, but a breakthrough happens when one of them hears the story of the Prodigal and his Father, who runs with open arms to welcome him:  he was lost, but is found.  The ice breaks through a courageous phone call, and a relationship is reborn.

I would like to tell you that these theological connections between life and our sacred texts happen without any particular effort—that God delivers them to us the moment they are needed.  Sometimes that happens; an infrequent church attender will tell me that in a moment of great need they randomly opened the pages of the Bible and the right words were there immediately.  What is far more common though, is that the powerful connections I am describing come to us as a result of sustained effort.  Years of study and a steady commitment to worship grounds our lives in faith.  I thought about telling you some tear-jerker of a sermon illustration to make you feel the power of these biblical connections, but then I feared that might obscure the point.  It’s not that Bible readers and churchgoers have it easier than anyone else, or that this book fixes all of our problems; but it is true that those who study and worship with a sense of commitment do receive the grounding of the Bible in their lives—I have not found a shortcut to it; but I assure it you it has power.

Throughout this series of sermons on practices of faith, I have argued that the wonderful thing about practicing faith is that often it need not add something that you are not already doing—we can experience sabbath, social justice work, saying yes and saying no, honoring the body—we can do these things with greater mindfulness and spirituality and yes, discover God in the everyday.  It is also true that studying Scripture is an indispensable practice of faith; and that we must be committed if we really want it to become the storybook of our lives.  When that happens, it is a beautiful thing.

I will admit to you that in the busyness of my own life, I am often guilty of forgetting these very things I am telling you. Sometimes my preaching defaults to things I studied a long time ago and do not rethink as often as I should.  I can feel it when the sermons and the text have become uninspiring to me, and when that happens I always have myself to blame—I’m not studying enough.  To that end, this week as our Practices of Faith series comes to an end, I’m making a commitment to myself and to you for the last month of this summer.  I’m renewing my own practice of scripture study by having chosen for my next four sermons four scriptures I have never studied—so if I don’t spend time studying, you’ll know it!  But I’m making this commitment not out of guilt or as a burden, but rather as a joy.  The time that I spend immersed in the pages of our sacred texts always repays me many times over, and I look forward to learning something new.  Pray for me—in joy—that God’s wisdom will be revealed in this commitment.  And I pray that today’s reminder may encourage some of you in studies of your own.  I’m always happy to talk with you about where to begin.  Amen.