Bible Sunday 2023

This sermon was written for Bible Sunday 2023 and was preached at our Sunday morning service that day (29th October). In the news recently had been stories of awful atrocities committed in Israel and Gaza with escalations of violence on all sides.

My sermon this morning has been a particularly difficult one to write. For me, the weight of everything that’s happening in Israel and Palestine just feels so heavy. I’m sure for you, there’s a similar feeling. It’s a kind of grief, I guess, mourning the senselessness, the cruelty and the seeming hopelessness of it all. There are no easy answers, and there really does not look to be a way out of this situation, save for a multiplying of the violence.

Today, we’re supposed to be celebrating Bible Sunday; a day to come together to celebrate the gift of the scriptures to God’s people.

But, for me, at the moment, I cannot help but think about the fact that this book is intricately linked with the soil and the sea of the land we are watching fall to dust every day on the news. It is intricately linked with the people who live in that land. Who die in that land.

I do not know how to preach on the gift of God’s word whilst ignoring God’s land and God’s people.

Image of the Bible 

 

Our Bible, as you know, is made up of the Old Testament and the New Testament. When Christ lived in Galilee, the scripture that he himself knew was the Jewish Tanakh or Miqra (comprising the Torah, the Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim; or the Law, the Prophets and the Writings, or Scriptures). This is what we know as our Old Testament. The books of the Jewish Tanakh alongside our own Gospels are four of the five holy books of Islam too, with the Quran making the fifth and, for Muslims, the most important. It is for this reason that collectively, we are often known as People of the Book.

 

This common root, this grounding in shared scripture, feels like it should connect us. We have – as the Labour MP Jo Cox used to say – far more in common than that which divides us. But I’m not so sure it does. I think – especially nowadays – our commonality just seems to make things worse. Our grounding in scripture and our shared cultural history should link us, uniting us in a global family and providing bridges that cross barriers of language or custom. But instead, it divides, as we (Christian, Muslim and Jew) find ourselves focussing on our differences instead.

And, what hope do we have? Finding common ground with fellow believers of Jewish or Muslim faiths is a mountain to climb, especially when we find it hard enough to agree with fellow Christians. It’s not helped that we have a tendency to view the Bible as an instruction manual. All the ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not’s become rules to follow blindly, and so, when we find differences, they immediately become points of conflict that require a resolution.

But scripture is so much more than that. Yes, there is law and history, but there is also allegory and poetry and mythology and parable; all places where contention is comfortable, and contradiction is celebrated. You could even argue it is integral to our faith; God is three and one. Christ is human and God. The Bible is the divine word of the Lord and the product of flawed human minds.

The problem with viewing the Bible as an instruction manual is that following the instructions can become the point in itself. I don’t know if any of you follow the Kissing Fish page on Facebook (and if you don’t yet, I really recommend you start to do so), but it shared a quotation from an author called Stephen Mattson recently. I’m going to quote it in its entirety now:

 

“Many Christians fail to grasp the basic point of the Bible: to follow Jesus. Unfortunately, many Christians love the Bible more than Jesus. They say things like ‘a biblical worldview’ and ‘we’re a bible-believing church’ and ‘we believe in the bible.’ But in reality, they should be having a Christ-like worldview where they ‘act like Jesus’ and ‘believe in the words and actions of Jesus.’ Even Satan quoted the Bible in an effort to tempt Jesus. 

People sometimes say that the Bible is like a love letter to humanity. But imagine if someone gave you a love letter and instead of loving that person you actually just obsessed over the letter. Can you picture someone becoming so obsessed with the love letter yet ignoring the person who sent it? This is what Christians are doing with Jesus. They’re using the bible to avoid Jesus.

You should love Jesus more than you love the Bible, and it’s more important to be Christlike than it is to be ‘biblical.’”

 

The point of the Bible, of all of our scriptures, is to show us the way of God. This is why scripture is beautiful; it opens up a communication between us and our divine creator. And though none of the Bible, the Tanakh nor the Quran can ever solve the awful problems that humanity brings upon ourselves, they do all show us a way. Where we may see no way out of a situation, the holy scriptures from all of our religions say the same thing:

“I lift up my eyes to the hills—
    from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
    who made heaven and earth.”

And so, this Bible Sunday, may I encourage you – look down to the words of the Bible, and then let it lift your eyes to the hills, in search of a saviour – the saviour from whom all help will come.

Amen