Sermon for the 27th of October - Bible Sunday

Lectionary Readings for Bible Sunday, October 27th

Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you. Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

II Timothy 3: 14-4: 5
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.

John 5: 36-end
Jesus said to them, ‘The works that the Father has given me to complete, the very works that I am doing, testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me. And the Father who sent me has himself testified on my behalf. You have never heard his voice or seen his form, and you do not have his word abiding in you, because you do not believe him whom he has sent.

‘You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life. I do not accept glory from human beings. But I know that you do not have the love of God in you. I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; if another comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe when you accept glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the one who alone is God? Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; your accuser is Moses, on whom you have set your hope. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But if you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?’

Sermon for Bible Sunday, October 27th

Human beings are never finished, as a sculptor might leave a final chisel-mark on a piece of sculpture. We are never finished forming; we are always in the process of becoming. This might be a reassuring thought to you, or it might be slightly dismaying. You thought you had overcome that flaw in your character, as you saw it, once and for all, but then it resurfaced, only to mar your picture of yourself again.

But I think that in the Christian view of things, God intends for our experience of life to be full of possibility, at every stage, as every day dawns. We are given the infinite freedom to choose our responses to what life brings us. And life will bring an infinite variety of changes and chances to each of us.

So, if you do not think you are quite perfect, yet, it is a question worth asking: what kind of person do you hope to become?

Each day, with these choices we have to make---some small, some large---in our God-given freedom, we can set to work to use the gifts we have been given, or squander our talents; we can embrace a person who needs our love, or we can turn aside when we see a need to which we could respond; we can ponder deeply our purpose here on this earth, or we can skim along, living only on the surface of life.

It matters how we choose to live. It matters what we choose to expose our always- forming selves to: we can seek out good influences and good advisors, faithful friends. We can choose to allow certain ideas to take hold of us; we can read books that fill us with high and noble ideals of behaviour, that inspire us to act to achieve great good. We can devote our lives to reaching upward to the kind of fullness God intends for each of His lovingly fashioned human beings.

Or---and it is always a choice---we can allow ourselves to go along with what we see many others following: the "lifestyle" of the so-called "rich and famous," the trend- setters of the popular culture, the ones who say that it is not who you are but what you can buy that defines you and makes you worth knowing. The siren song of wealth and pleasure.

For many people in our imperfect world the possibilities of choice are severely restricted: by corrupt governments, by poverty, by lack of education, by a failure of vision, individual and corporate.

As Christians, the great challenge we accept as we try to live out our faith is to enlarge the realm of possibility for others. We can try to share the riches of our faith with those who are bowed down by want, by physical illness, by need of all kinds.

So what are these riches of our faith?I am now going to risk sounding like the fabled Bible salesmen of a few generations ago---(this was the case in America, though perhaps not here in England)---the ones who travelled from place to place hawking Bibles of all sizes and sorts as well as full 28-volume editions of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

But I don't mind. Here goes: if you don't have a Bible, buy one! If you have one, read it! If you don't read it often, begin to read it, every day! Become part of a group of those who gather to study and reflect on these texts!

Well, this is part of my job. I am here to talk about the readings we have been given for today, for our worship and for our further contemplation. They always bear further investigation---keep reading and thinking about these for today throughout the week to come! The Bible is no ordinary book. Of course the texts it contains can be interpreted in many and various ways, and sometimes distorted to justify all kinds of human behaviour, but it remains our sacred text, our repository of wisdom, our illuminating guide to living a good life, a Christ-like life.

We can never finish reading it, because as we grow older and encounter more of life, we will always re-approach this book with a different mind and heart, new sets of questions, a greater ability to relate one thing to another, to understand life more deeply.

Even Shakespeare, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Dante or whatever classic text you grew up with, cannot match this Bible and all it has to offer us as an influence and a guide.

For our private meditation and for our public worship---as here this morning---we are blessed in the having of it!

As novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace wrote:

IIn the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles.

Pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

As the British broadcaster and writer Elizabeth Oldfield commented on this passage in her recent book Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times:

Wallace, and scripture, warn that whatever we focus our attention on and seek to move toward will shape us--we will eventually look like our idols. We are formed by...what we consciously or unconsciously move toward. So we should probably make sure it's something or someone we really want to end up like.

This is a caution, but also a call to reflection. To return to the question: What kind of person do we hope to become?

I can speak for myself, here. I can only say, I am not perfect, as I know so well, but I do think I know better, after some years of living, what I am striving to become. A person more open to God's active presence in the world and to the unexpected possibilities that encounters with other people are endlessly bringing me---of love and grace and a more abundantly lived life.

They say that there are only a few basic themes in all of literature---and that these few are simply repeated, with variations, again and again. Some of these are the coming-of-age tale, as in Tom Jones, the voyage, as in Odysseus, or the quest, as in the King Arthur legends. But another that comes to mind for me this morning is the theme of losing a good that we do not realise we have until we have lost it.

Even if the materialistic culture we are part of has already lost the sense of wonder and awe at the power of these inherited words of our Christian tradition, even if we sometimes may feel that we don't have time to read anything at all that we might like to, even if we don't know how to begin, let us not fail to read and cherish the sacred texts that have been so lovingly handed down to us, generation after generation, through all these centuries past.

It is our free choice, today, tomorrow, every day, to pick up the Bible and begin. The persons we hope to become depend upon it.

Thanks be to God for such a gift--- Amen.