Getting the Big Picture

The island that I hail from is proudly known as the Emerald Isle. And there are indeed 40 shades of green on display there, but only because it’s raining 40% of the time!

But I remember flying home from Malta years ago - it was one of the first times I'd been in a plane - and looking down on the province from a great height as we flew over, and being staggered at how green and fertile the landscape was.

I knew my little corner of County Antrim pretty well, but getting a birds-eye view of the place made me realise that this cliché about the Emerald Isle is actually true.

On a grander scale, this famous image of the earth was taken by the Voyager spaceship in 1990 as it left our solar system. Earth is something like 4 billion miles away at that point. On seeing this image, the astronomer Carl Sagan was moved to write these words: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”.

It’s the ultimate birds-eye view.

Sometimes it takes a change of perspective to make us really appreciate what’s going on. We can get so caught up in the fine detail that we miss the big picture and the truth that it can bring us.

And after the summer we’re going spend the best part of a year working our way through the storyline of the Bible to try and get a really good grip, not just on the story itself, but on our place in the story.

Week by week we dip in and out of this ancient collection of books that we call the Bible.

66 different books, scores of different authors writing over a period of something like twelve centuries, with the last writings being penned almost two millennia ago.

It doesn’t sound like the most likely place to find inspiration and guidance for living in today’s world, and for that very reason many people dismiss it without really engaging with it.

And yet, the testimony of those who take the time to read the Bible and reflect on it, is that it’s not so much a book that we read, but a book that reads us. A book that God uses to speak into our lives.

And many of us, if not all, will know times when just that has happened. Maybe in church, maybe in the privacy of our own homes. Maybe in one of the groups that meets here to do Bible Study. Suddenly the words come alive and strike us with a force we couldn’t have anticipated.

I remember a few years back taking a new members group here in Belhelvie and introducing them to an ancient practice called Lectio Divina – nothing to do with Davina McCall!

It just means Spiritual Reading. You take a short passage in the Bible, you bring yourself to stillness, you read it through slowly a couple of times, or have it read through, and you open yourself up to what God is saying to you through it.

Slowly and deliberately I read a short passage from the letter to the Ephesians to the folk who were there. We went through it a couple of times, letting the words settle down into their souls. And each person in that room was profoundly moved. There were tears. One person said it was the most powerful experience he’d had since he sat with his dying father.. They knew, in that moment, that God had been speaking his word into their lives. And all I had done was read a part of the Bible to them, slowly. God’s Spirit did the rest.

And though there are many reasons we might read the Bible – the main one, it seems to me, is that we might know and experience God for ourselves, first hand.  At the end of his gospel, the Apostle John says:

“these (things) are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

That’s why – ever since I came here – I’ve been trying to encourage you to read the Bible prayerfully for yourselves.

But why do we find that so hard?

Well, I guess that part of it is that we find the Bible intimidating. It’s nearly a million words long, there are cultural differences we don’t understand, long stretches of it that seem – if we’re honest – less than inspiring. It’s hard to know where to start, and it’s easy to get discouraged when we do read it.

I always feel sorry for folk when they tell me they’re trying  to read through the Bible cover to cover, because Genesis and Exodus are fine, but you need the stamina of a paratrooper to get through Leviticus and Numbers!

There’s so much to plough through. But more than that, the Bible’s such an immense book, it can be really hard following the overall thread of the story. We get drawn into the particular narratives of Moses or Abraham or David or Peter in the New Testament, and we may know them well, but how do they fit into the big story? Where’s it all going?

That we need is a bird’s eye view that will help us get everything in perspective.

Well that’s why I’m planning to start preaching and teaching my way through a resource called ‘The Story’ from this autumn.

The Story is a condensed version of the Bible, arranged into 31 chapters and told chronologically, from Genesis all the way through to Revelation and there are DVD resources that go along with it too, some of which we’ll be watching on Sundays.

I would like as many folk in my congregation as possible to begin this journey with us in September, and to get this book in their hands. And the idea is that week by week we’ll read the chapter in our own time,, and when it comes to the Sunday I’ll preach into what you’ve been reading.

Better still, the children will be doing the very same material, at a level appropriate for them, so when we come together on Sundays we’ll literally all be reading from the same page.

For those who want to go further, there are questions for each chapter at the back of the Story, designed to get you thinking about what you’ve read, and if you want to you can do that by yourself, or maybe with others in a small group or a Bible study. And I’m really hoping that folk will feel the freedom to ask questions as we go through this, and put them to me before we get to the Sunday preach, so that I know that I’m scratching where you’re itching.

So together, the aim is to work our way through the Story over this next year, beginning in the autumn term. Not so we become Bible experts and get our heads stuffed full of marvellous knowledge. But so we get a better overview of what God is about in the world, and our place in what he’s doing.

Because if history’s going somewhere – and I believe it is – then our ordinary, every-day, walking-around and getting-on-with-it lives have a far deeper meaning than we might realise.

We don’t live only to ourselves, or to one another. We each have a part to play in the unfolding Story of what God has done and is doing in the world. And when we realise that, nothing we do will ever seem quite the same again.

Quite a few years ago now I heard these words at an ordination service, and they’ve stayed with me ever since.

This evening, you haven’t been called to ministry;

That happened at your baptism

You haven’t been called to be a caring person;
You’re already called to that.

You haven’t been called to serve the Church in committees, activities and organisations;

That’s already implied in your membership.

You haven’t been called to become involved in social issues, ecology, race, politics, revolution;

For that is laid upon every Christian.

You’ve been called to this charge, for something smaller and less spectacular.

To read and interpret those sacred stories of our community, so that they speak a word to people today.

I want to take that call seriously. And I want you to take it seriously too.

God speaks. The Story continues. We owe it to him, to ourselves and to our children, to find our place in it,

“Listen my people to my teaching, and pay attention to what I say.

I am going to use wise sayings and explain mysteries from the past. Things we have heard and known,
Things that our ancestors have told us.
We will not keep them from our children;
We will tell the next generation about the Lord’s power and his great deeds,
And the wonderful things he has done.”

Amen

God's Questions - "Can These Bones Live?"

The writer Frances Dewar tells of an old house near to where he stays in Durham. Above the front door there’s a painting of a sundial and underneath it are painted the Latin words Dum Vivimus, Vivamus. While we are living, let us live.

I wonder what those words awaken within you.

While we are living, let us live.

For many of us, just hearing those words will be enough to put us in touch with an unnamed yearning that’s a huge part of being human, but that’s rarely if ever vocalised.

We want to know how to live.

No-one really teaches us how to live any more, if they ever did in years gone by.

Once born, we quickly learn the basics of keeping ourselves alive, and if we’re fortunate enough to have good family and friends around us, we can learn a good deal from watching how they live. But that’s not enough to silence the inner voice which tells us that there’s more to know about this business called living.

For all our achievements and accomplishments in life, we know, if we’re honest with ourselves, that we still haven’t got it all together. We’re homesick, not for a place or for a time, but for that integrated, joyful, life-giving person that we long to be.

We catch glimpses of that person now and again, but most of the time we’re so caught up in the business of living and making a living that we forget to live and settle for mere existence. But the yearning doesn’t go away, it just goes underground for a while.

It surfaces in those moments when we know we’ve acted shabbily and wish we'd done better, or when we catch a glimpse of something in another person which doesn’t provoke envy but makes us want to be better people than we are.

It surfaces when we find ourselves wondering where the years have gone, and how we’ll use the time that remains.

It surfaces when we realise that there are depths of creativity or potential within us that we haven’t even begun to tap into.

It never goes away, this yearning. All of us, no matter who we are, yearn to know how to live.

And our text today speaks into that yearning.

Ezekiel’s not a book or a person you’ll be familiar with, I’m guessing. He’s one of the Old Testament prophets, and prophets were a rare breed. Priests were the respectable folk who mediated religion for the masses; by nature, they were conservative.

Prophets had no such inhibitions. They were freelancers; radically allied to God, but never wedded to the religious institution. And they were mavericks to a man – not given to rituals and ceremony but to thundering dreams and visions that carried echoes of eternity. They delivered words from God that no one else dared to say, or even dream of.

Their shuddering prophesies tended to come as warnings when Israel fell into bad ways, or as visions of comfort and hope when all seemed lost.

At the beginning of the 6th century BC, the time that Ezekiel spoke his words, all seemed lost. The Holy City of Jerusalem had been so thoroughly destroyed it was said that a man could drive a plough right across the middle of it and never hit a stone. Thousands of Israelites had been slaughtered, thousands more carted off to Babylon as slaves. Sitting weeping by the rivers; homesick for what they had and for what they’d hoped to become. This was the end, they thought. God had washed his hands so thoroughly of them that there was surely no way back.

Not so.

Against this background of utter hopelessness came Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones: a powerful metaphor of what God would do for his people, Israel. They were dead and buried in Babylon – but he’d pull them together again. He’d rejoin bone to bone, wrap them in flesh and skin, fill them with the breath of life and bring them back to where they belonged. That was his word to them through Ezekiel.

So in historical terms, this prophesy is spoken, first of all, for Israel.

But there’s a part of me, this morning, that wants to speak those same words over the dry bones of the Church of Scotland.

Numerical decline, increasing marginalisation, internal divisions, financial problems, a dearth of spirituality. This is exile, folks. This is Babylon.

I’ll always remember the damning critique I read in a newspaper a while ago which described our situation as one elderly, decrepit congregation collapsing into the arms of another elderly, decrepit congregation until eventually we’re all gone.

Hard words; and these are hard times we’re in. But if it gets us thinking less like priests and more like prophets it might not be a bad thing. If we stop obsessing about running the institution and start listening for what God is saying to us in the midst of this crisis, I think we have good reason to hope. Something new will rise from the bones of the old.

There are some fantastic things going on in many of our churches – many within our own Presbytery. There is growth and innovation, there are people taking risks. But none of that makes the headlines.

Don’t believe the hype. We have eleven folk joining us as new members today, we had four more just before Christmas. There are others who are ready to think seriously about what it means to be a Christian and to take the step of joining our church. To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, the rumours of our demise have been greatly exaggerated!

But that’s not where we going today.

Today, this isn’t about Israel, or about the Church of Scotland.

It’s about you and me.

“Can these bones live?” God asks Ezekiel.

And the truth is, faced with the half-formed thing I call my life, I ask that question of myself all the time. And I’m pretty sure you do too.

Can these bones of mine live?

You know the echo of that question in your own heart. So where do you go to find an answer?

You’ll get plenty of answers from our culture. You want to live? Have an affair. Have another pint. Gok your wardrobe! Get in shape. Buy more stuff. Take a holiday. Do up the house. Then you’ll be living.

Really?

None of those solutions penetrate below the surface of who we are. None of them give us life in our bones, in the marrow of who we are.

It strikes me that there's no shortage of folk wanting to tell us how to find the life we crave, but precious few who are actually living it.

The author Brian McLaren parodies the way the world tries to pursue life and says “It’s ironic, isn’t it? Our bodies grow fatter, we’re all on diets and our souls, meanwhile, go wispy and anorexic for lack of attention”.

“Can these bones live?”

On the evidence of our eyes, we might be tempted to doubt it; but from today’s reading, the answer God gives is a resounding ‘yes’. Yes, they can.

How?

Through God’s Word and God’s Spirit. It’s the combination of word and spirit acting upon us that brings us to life.

“Prophesy to the bones” God says. “Tell them the truth! Tell them to listen to the word of the Lord”.

“Prophesy to the wind” God says. (wind/spirit same word in Hebrew and Greek) “Tell the wind to come from every direction and breathe life into these bodies”.

Word and spirit together bring life - That's what Ezekiel is telling us this morning.

Let me unpack that for you a little bit.

What is this book that’s carried in and deferred to each Sunday in every act of Christian worship? We call it many things – Bible; Scriptures; Word of God.

Is it a rule book? An instruction manual? Required reading for the entrance exam to heaven?

None of the above. The thing this book is most like is a mirror.

And the thing about a mirror is that you don’t read it. It reads you.
It shows up every blemish and wrinkle; every strong line and beautiful curve. It’s utterly uncompromising and honest, and if you can bear to look in it, you quickly discover the truth about yourself for good and for ill. It tells us how things really are.

The Christian way has always been that we find out the truth of who we are by looking into the mirror that is the word of God; not by listening to the voices of our culture which judge and evaluate us. Those voices don’t speak the truth about you and me. God’s word tells us the truth about who we are, and that’s why our first discipline is to learn to engage with it.

But we all know, those of us who’ve tried to read the Bible, that it’s a hard book to read! If you start in Genesis and try to read through you’ll do fine ‘til you get to Leviticus and Numbers at which point you’ll lose the will to live!

There are lots of ways to read the Bible and some are more ambitious than others, but the most important way is to learn to read devotionally. Don’t try to work your way through the whole thing if you’re just starting out. It’s far better to take a few verses and meditate on them prayerfully. Ask God what they’re saying and how they apply to your life today. How will you live in the light of what you’ve just read?

This is where the Spirit comes in. The word of God comes home when the Spirit takes some insight or some phrase you’ve read, or maybe some experience you’ve had, and makes it come alive for you. Makes it speak into your life with a particular significance. You feel enlightened and empowered by what you’ve realised. In your bones you feel a little bit more alive, not just to God, but to the world, to the people around you and to your own life. You feel stronger and ready for what’s coming next.

That kind of reading, along with prayer, is the basic discipline of the Christian life. Putting yourself under the word of God so that his Spirit can show you the truth about yourself and point you towards life. You’re reading not for information, but to help you find that life that you’re yearning for. And if you learn to read that way, you will find it.

The apostle James says as much in the only letter that bears his name:

“Do not deceive yourselves by just listening to his word; instead, put it into practice. Whoever listens to the word but does not put it into practice is like a man who looks in a mirror and sees himself as he is. He takes a good look at himself and then goes away and at once forgets what he looks like. But those who look closely into the perfect law that sets people free, who keep on paying attention to it and do not simply listen and then forget it, but put it into practice — they will be blessed by God in what they do.”

They will be blessed, says James. They’ll discover how to live.

In a few days time getting church magazines, and there’ll be a colourful leaflet in it like this called E100.

Remember I was saying how hard it can be to get into the Bible, well the geniuses at Scripture Union have made it easy for us because what they’ve done is boil the whole thing down to 100 essential passages that will give you the whole flow of the story from Genesis to Revelation.

Each passage will take about 10 minutes to read and there are 50 from OT and 50 from New. The idea is that you commit to prayerfully reading through them over a time period of your choosing, help you develop the kind of practice I’ve been talking about today.

If you’re a member – you’ll be getting one with your magazine, but there will be some at the door as you leave: if you’re here today as a visitor, please feel free to take one on your way out. It might just help you find more of the life that you’re looking for.

Amen and thanks be to God.