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