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Letting The Word have power in our midst

Epiphany 3 : 27 January 2013  : NEHEMIAH 8: 2-6, 8-10

The Bible is such a taken for granted part of our belief system that we don’t stop to think about what a unique and unusual way this is to transmit the intentions of God. The belief that an anthology of literature, of sacred books, contains in a classic and complete form what God wants to communicate to the human race - none of Israel’s neighbours believed in anything like that - and the Jewish people themselves didn’t accord their sacred writings that kind of status until quite late in their evolving history, from about 400 BC on.

So in that first reading from Nehemiah we were listening to a key moment in the development of this new way of tuning in to Yahweh. Notice that the crowd does not understand what is being read to them. They speak Aramaic, but the text is being read out in Hebrew. So Ezra the priest reads from the Hebrew, translates it into Aramaic, and then applies it to the people’s lives. This is one of the first sermons being preached. Notice too the effect of all this on the people. They are struck to the heart and weep. We do not know which part of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, are being read out. We do not know why the people are so upset by what they hear. But these are words of power. They change people’s moods and feelings. So does the sermon. The preacher can turn those feelings around and get the people to rejoice. Powerful stuff!

Next we fast-forward several hundred years to another key moment in the development of biblical religion - the synagogue at Nazareth on Saturday morning. Here is another innovation. We don’t know quite when it started, either during or after the exile. Once a week the people in each locality gather in a meeting hall come prayer hall. There is a reading from the Torah. There is a reading from the prophets, or one of the other writings. Someone preaches a sermon off the text. The people respond with worship.

Synagogue worship is powerfully formative of our own worship tradition. The liturgy of the word, which we are in the middle of now, is pretty much a copy of it. Our custom of standing for the gospel reading is modeled on the honour that the people paid to the scrolls of the Torah as they were brought out to be read, and were often processed around the Synagogue. But the key thing here is that by coming together to listen to the words of the sacred text the people are acknowledging the invisible sway that God has over their lives. Even when under foreign occupation they were saying by this collective action - the author of these words is the one who has real authority over our lives.

Again, these are words of power. All this talk of freedom and liberation, so passé to those of us who grew up in the 60’s, will galvanise the people into anger and riotous behaviour when, in next week’s gospel reading, Jesus applies these words to gentiles also.

In this Church we do not have pew Bibles, nor do we give out the texts for the day along with the pew sheet. We want to encourage people to listen attentively together to the Word, rather than retreating into a private reading experience. Reading the Bible alone with a view to understanding it more deeply is a good thing to do at home, or in a Bible study group. That is why we list the readings for next week in the Pebble. Indeed, you would be doing your self a power of good to look at the readings at home before you come to Church on Sunday morning. Then your well-informed rational understanding will very helpfully background you as to what you are about to hear.

But the kind of attentive collective listening to Scripture that goes on in the liturgy of the Word, the first half of the Service is a different way of appropriating the Word. It brings the heart into play, and the imagination, as we ruminate over it in a prayerful contemplative kind of way. And something changes in the quality of our appropriating the Word as result of us doing this together. I will come back to this later.

For many years the Bible was lost in the experience of most Christians. In the Middle Ages everything was in Latin when you came to Church, and often the local priest was incapable of preaching. People appropriated the content of the Bible through the pictures that festooned the walls of the Church, and by hearing other Christians tell them Bible stories that had been passed on to them, sometimes none too accurately. The protestant reformers were determined to fix that by having the Bible read aloud in Church in the vernacular, by educating and pressuring the clergy to preach, and by trying to inculcate some kind of basic biblical literacy in the laity. The great achievement of the Reformation was that the Bible was re-received into the life of the Church.

But in doing so a distortion crept in. There was such a stress on understanding the message of the Bible that people’s religion could become something of a head-trip. It was great the Divine revelation was now being communicated through the agency of the Bible in words and concepts and ideas and rational insights. But Divine revelation amounts to more than that. It is also communicated through pictures and symbols and ritual actions and in the collective experience of the people of God. Revelation is the totality of all that I have just mentioned as it communicates the Christ event to us through all these mediums. And worship had become distorted as the sensuous mediums of pictures, images, ritual action were eliminated, as Churches became austere preaching halls. As the poet Edwin Muir said of the Presbyterian clergy of his youth, "They took the word made flesh, and turned him back into words." The Oxford movement and the Anglo-catholic revival in that sense was a movement of the Spirit to put all that right.

There was another distortion in public worship that the Protestant reformation had failed to put right. As pews and kneelers were introduced people knelt down for most of the Service and were immersed in a private devotional experience, which was pretty much the medieval approach to worship, in which the presence of the rest of the people of God was to a considerable extent irrelevant. The word "liturgy" in one of its meanings refers to the work of the people of God, like workmen working on street works, but the sense that this was something that they did together was pretty much lost.

The liturgical movement, that powerful movement of the Spirit, which renewed the worship of the churches throughout the 20th century was determined to put that right. It encouraged lay people to stand for much of the Service so that they could speak up and sing out together more effectively, and so that they could be aware of one another’s presence around them. One of the dynamic effects of the liturgy is to form that group of people into a collective Christ in that place at that time, and this posture change made them more aware of that. And of course that was why the greeting of peace was introduced at the Eucharist.

Sometimes the Anglican Church is criticized by revivalist Christians for not being Scriptural enough. In fact we are more Scriptural than just about any other Church for we insist that there be several readings at every Service, and much of the words of the liturgy come straight from Scripture. The aim is to immerse us in the thought word of the Bible through a kind of irrigation principle. We hear so much of it in Church that we cant take it all in as a rationally understood package, but it seeps in at every level to become our stock of ideas, and concepts and habitual turns of phrase with which to think about God, and with which to approach him in prayer. Indeed, often our critics only have a brief skerrick of the Bible read out to them in worship, followed by a long, long, long sermon. Anglicans and Catholics understand that in the Eucharist there is a direct relationship between the Divine words read aloud in the first half of the Service, and the words read out over the bread and wine in the second half. As the Vatican 2 dogmatic constitution on Divine Revelation put it, "in the sacred liturgy the Church unceasingly receives and offers to the faithful the bread of life from the table both of God’s word and of Christ’s body."

Which means that we are like the returned exiles of Nehemiah’s time. Gathered together before the priest Ezra listening to the words of God being interpreted and explained from original source to present day application. And it is not a ho hum business. We may well be cut to the quick by what we hear. We are getting the good oil on the rational origins of it all, but it connects with us in the stuff of our everyday living, and in the gut, the source of our affections and emotions.

Brains switched on, the heart engaged, our inner spirit connected to the wisdom of God flowing from the holy pages - this is what should be happening to us here also.