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Readings (click here for full text of the readings): I love movies. I love a few movies so much that I’ll watch them over and over again. There aren’t any surprises left, obviously, but I still enjoy seeing favorite scenes or hearing famous lines. When it comes to especially sad parts, though, I often close my eyes, I’m embarrassed to say. It’s not like I can change what’s going to happen. It’s not like what I’m watching is even real. And usually, Hollywood being Hollywood, things work out fine in the end, anyway. But I still can’t watch, because for some things once is enough, and I’ll open my eyes again when things start looking up again. The readings in our lectionary are sort of like a movie, because they appear each Sunday, one scene after another, never stopping but always going forward, and eventually starting back at the beginning after each 3 year cycle. There are some days you look forward to, when we hear favorite passages like the Beatitudes or words of hope like in Easter season. But there are other days that you can see coming from a mile away, which if the readings were a movie most people would step out to buy some popcorn or use the rest room, or at least close their eyes and plug their ears, because the words are tragic and depressing. Today is one of those days. Daniel speaks of “a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence.” The letter to the Hebrews says that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” And in Mark’s gospel, in the verses leading up today’s reading, Jesus forecasts wars between nations, civil strife and violence, persecution of believers, earthquakes, plagues, and famines (13:7-13). In the verses following today’s reading, He predicts that the sun will be darkened, the moon will turn to blood, and stars and planets will fall from the heavens (13:24-25). And we just heard Jesus adding a special woe to “those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants,” which doesn’t exactly make the parent of an eleven-month-old feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Jesus concludes these predictions of doom and gloom by saying, “Be alert; I have already told you everything.” Yet people have spent the last two thousand years debating about Jesus’s predictions of the end-times, and there are lots of different opinions. Will everyone have to endure the anguish of a seven-year period of suffering known as the Tribulation, or will Christians be taken up to heaven before that in something called the Rapture? Will Christians usher in the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth that Revelation predicts (which means that we’re making progress), or will God have to do something majorly supernatural to save us from our evil ways and start the thousand-year reign Himself? And some people don’t even think there’ll be a literal thousand year reign. So depending on your take on that question, people call you either a postmillenialist, a premillenialist, or an amillenialist. I’m not foolish enough to take on questions like that in a sermon. In the first place, the only one who really knows the answers is God. Secondly, as Ecclesiastes says, “there’s a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance” (3:4), and honestly right now I’ve had my share of weeping and mourning. Despite the troubling recent events in our world, and in our country, and in our church, there’s a lot to rejoice about. Thanksgiving is a week and a half away, Christmas not so long after that, and in the meantime the day when Catie goes from being an infant to a toddler, and hopefully escaping Jesus’s special woe of the day. So I thought we might look at the most hopeful thing we heard this morning, which was the promise in the Collect of the Day: “Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest [the holy Scriptures], that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.” Jesus, after all, said that He had told us everything, so how do we go about interpreting Scripture? What does it mean to read, hear, mark, learn, and inwardly digest God’s holy word? First, we have to read it. That seems fairly obvious, but you’d be surprised how often people say stuff like “well it’s in the Bible,” but when you ask them where, and what exactly the Bible says about whatever they’re talking about, they haven’t got a clue. 500 years ago the Protestant Reformation was all about putting the Bible in the hands of each individual Christian, in a language they could understand. No longer was the Bible only printed in Latin and only read by the priests. It’s available to all of us, but we have to take the time to read it. Second, we have to hear it. We can’t go leafing through the Bible trying to find a verse that backs up what we already think. We must approach the Bible reverently, with an open mind and a receptive heart. When we read the Bible, we stand on holy ground, and so we must prepare ourselves. This means being silent, and willing to change what we think. If the Bible is merely something that confirms everything you already believe, then either you’re God, or you just think you are. To fully prepare our minds, we have to study the Bible, as well. It’s not enough to read a verse or a chapter or even a book of the Bible; we also have to know the context. Who wrote it? When? Why? The Bible is divinely inspired, but it was penned by specific people in particular situations. The author was saying what his audience needed to hear, and so sometimes one book emphasizes something more than another. A technical name for this study of context is criticism, which doesn’t mean something negative. It just means an “investigation of the origin and history of literary documents,” as the dictionary defines it. By using our minds we mark the Scriptures and seek their hidden truths. There are several kinds of criticism: Historical criticism takes a good, hard look at who and when. Based on historical criticism, a lot of books that might have been included in the Bible were rejected back in the third and fourth centuries, because the authors didn’t have first-hand knowledge of Jesus. In our present day, we’ve discovered that some of the books traditionally attributed to Paul – namely Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus – were written by one of Paul’s followers, rather than by the apostle himself. We know this because the language of these books, and their major themes, are substantially different than the books actually written by Paul. Which explains how Galatians – written by Paul – can say that men and women are equal, but Ephesians – which comes right next in the Bible, but was written by a follower of Paul – can say that wives are subject to their husbands. Form criticism looks at what kind of literature the specific Biblical passage is. Is it poetry, like the Song of Songs? Is it prophecy? Is it a detailed theological explanation, like in the letters of Paul? This is a crucial question, because if you take poetry literally, you end up misunderstanding it and overlooking its beauty; but if you write off prophecy as mere symbolism, you ignore its importance. One of the questions before us this morning, then, is when Jesus says that the moon will turn to blood in the last days, is He speaking poetically, or is He making a literal prediction? Source criticism looks at how the books of the Bible came to be. We used to think that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, but it’s become clear that those books are a compilation of four different authors, each of whom had a different emphasis. This explains why there are so many duplicate stories told from slightly different angles, like the creation story, and in the life of Abraham. We also now know that Mark was the first gospel written, and that Matthew and Luke based much of their writing on Mark and a mysterious text called “Q”, which doesn’t exist anymore. Knowing this can help us understand the differences between the gospels, and wring the most subtle meaning from them. Utilizing both prayerful study and scholarly research deepens our engagement with Scripture. To say that someone other than Moses wrote Genesis and someone other than Paul wrote Ephesians doesn’t change the fact that those books were divinely inspired, and that God speaks to us through them, regardless of the particular person who penned them. And to call the Song of Songs poetry is to acknowledge the obvious, and to free our minds and hearts to see the passion and joy and beauty of that book, without getting bogged down in a literal meaning for which it was never intended. So once we’ve read, and listened, with all the tools that God has provided for us, then we can pray. We take what we’re reading to God, and we tell Him what it says to us. We listen for His guidance, and we dialogue with Him, beseeching Him to enlighten us with His holy wisdom. We might say a few things, but mostly we listen for the voice of the living God, speaking to us through the sacred scriptures, so that we might learn. And, finally, we rest. We let the words go, for they are a bridge between us and God, and it is God whom we truly love. The Scriptures bring us to the throne of grace, where we can be silent, and welcomed, and home. In the presence of God, we can inwardly digest his holy word in all its facets: in the Scriptures handed down to us, in the voice of God we hear in prayer, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Read the holy Scriptures. Hear them. Mark, learn, and inwardly digest them. So the collect commands, and so the church has done for centuries in an ancient art called lectio divina, which means holy listening. We’ve already talked about the four steps, without mentioning their fancy names. First comes lectio, which means listening or reading. Hear the word of God. Then comes meditatio, meditation, where we ponder, consider, analyze. Third is oratio, prayer, where we tell God of our response to His word, and listen even more closely to His reply. And finally there is contemplatio, contemplation, where we let go of criticism and question and even the words themselves, and simply rest in God’s presence. The four steps of lectio divina: read, meditate, pray, contemplate. Jesus said that He told us everything, and indeed He did. But His word is not simple, or easy to comprehend. We can’t take someone else’s word for what the Bible says, and we can’t merely browse through it. We must devote ourselves to holy listening, and read the Bible faithfully, using all the resources at our disposal, trusting that if we spend the time, make the effort, and truly open ourselves to Him, He will speak to us, and tell us everything we need to know. Only then will we truly be able to see Scripture for the holy gift that it is. We’ll return to favorite passages we’ve read time and time again, taking refuge in them from the storms of life. And we’ll also be able to read the more sobering parts of the Bible that don’t pull any punches, like this morning’s readings. We won’t close our eyes or plug our ears, because wars, earthquakes, and famines are part of life. But they’re also in God’s hands, as are we all. And we know that Jesus will never leave us, and eventually He’ll return in power and great glory – at a time that only He knows – and fulfill the promises made to us in Scripture, like in this morning’s Psalm: [God] will show [us] the path of life; Amen. |
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