God speaking?

“What’s your favorite bible story?” I ask my nephew.

“Jesus throws them out of the temple!”

“What happens before that?”

“Jesus goes to Jerusalem”

“And after it?”

“The money.  The lady has a patch on her arm. Her sleeve is torn.”

“And what happens after that?”

“They plot against Jesus.”

I sometimes think that my three and a half year old nephew has a better grasp of the chronology of Jesus’ last days than I do. Night after night he chooses those stories to be read to him - or the Jacob and Esau cycle, or the stories of Moses. It’s part of his bedtime ritual, along with Thomas the Tank Engine and Goodnight Moon.

But something happens when we grow up.Our bedtime rituals change; we drop story time, and reading the bible somehow gets dropped along with all the other stories.  That wouldn’t matter if the bible were just that, a book of stories, but Scripture is far more than that. The Catechism (which begins on page 845 of the Book of Common Prayer) reminds us that God speaks to us through the Bible. 

Every so often, I find myself wishing that God would speak to me.  I’m faced with a dilemma, a difficult choice, or I’m feeling down, or I have doubts.  “But surely if God spoke to me directly,” I think, “my problems would be resolved.”

Of course the problem with God speaking through Scripture is that something written down two thousand years ago is not going to be able to directly answer many of the questions we have today. The bible won’t be able to tell us which car we should buy or what is an appropriate curfew for our teenagers or who we should vote for. 

But if our Catechism is right, then God does speak to us.  Not in a voice that we can hear with our ears, but in the words of Scripture that record God’s interaction with human beings throughout generations and centuries.  We hear the call of Moses and the prayers of David, the poetry of the prophets and the wisdom of the apostles.  And all of it is laced through with the divine: in Scripture we are invited into a relationship with God, who through the Holy Spirit can guide our lives, and we hear the passions and the priorities of God, passions and priorities that we are invited to share, that will help in our decision making.

But none of that will happen if our bibles stay on their shelves, only opened when we have to choose the reading for a wedding or a family funeral. We need to take them down and, as the collect for Proper 28 reminds us, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the scriptures, so that we might know God more fully and hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life in Christ.