All this past week as I have been living with this gospel story we just heard, this is the line that kept jumping out to me: “All in the crowd were trying to touch him.”
Today, we are in Luke’s version of what is commonly known as the Sermon on the Mount. Luke locates the sermon being delivered on a level place below one of the mountain ridges that surround the Sea of Galilee. Practically overnight, Jesus’ reputation has spread far beyond Galilee like wildfire. A great multitude of people have come from Judea to the south and from what is today the coast of Lebanon to the north.
And they come not just to hear a good sermon. We are told they come to get close to Jesus, to be near him. There are tangible signs that coming near Jesus is to be healed, made whole again. But more: it is to be brought into a new kind of life altogether. “All in the crowd were trying to touch him.”
Would we do the same had we been there? Would we have pressed forward to touch Jesus, to get close, too?
I wonder if we can see how this is precisely what we mimic in our liturgical movements every Sunday as we come forward to the altar rail to touch Jesus in the sacrament of Holy Communion. Is it not that same yearning those people in Luke’s gospel have for coming near Jesus, who offers a new kind of life we can touch? I always want us to see and appreciate these associations and parallels. I also want us to see that there is another movement toward nearness to Jesus that we also enact every Sunday.
Just minutes ago, we sat here in hushed reverence and listened to readings of Scripture. Christians are members of a centuries and centuries old community who belong to a book, a community who is given capacity to get near Jesus through Sacred Scripture.
I have been at this business a good while now. As I get older, perhaps even a tad wiser, what I think I learn tends toward greater simplicity rather than greater complexity. At this point in my ministry, as I consider what I’ve learned, my most important pastoral responsibilities, I think I’ve figured out it boils down to two simple things:
- To help you to learn to pray for yourselves.
- To help you to learn to read the Bible for yourselves.
If you learn to do these, if we learn to do these things from each other, the abundant life for which we yearn will overflow to bless all our other personal desires and church goals. If you learn to do those two things, the wind of the Holy Spirit will blow away the chaff of every false hope and promise and fear, leaving only the pure wheat that forms the Bread of Life.
But the human default is to want someone else to do for us what we ourselves may feel incompetent or ill-prepared to do for ourselves. For example, it is easier to listen to someone else lead a Bible teaching than to read the Bible for ourselves.
Years ago, at another Episcopal parish, I co-led an Advent Sunday School class: “How to talk to your children about the real meaning of Christmas.” A woman came rushing up as soon as the class ended and said, “That was so helpful, would you mind if I called to set up an appointment for you to share that with my kids?”
So let me get this out of the way: I am tired of what I have long-perceived to be an Episcopalian’s greatest fear: to be accused of being a biblical fundamentalist. Many Episcopalians arrive in this denomination disenchanted or wounded from other, far more strongly conservative biblical traditions. I am grateful for that migration. But I worry sometimes that one might throw the baby out with the bath water. To be Christian has always been to be a Bible-believing follower of Jesus.
But phrases like “Bible-believing” go against the grain of our proud self-identification as an enlightened church that treasures reason and intellectual curiosity and modern critical methods, as if these values somehow trump simple trust of Scripture. This can become a conceit. It can also mask what is in fact simple ignorance of Scripture. We do not look like the intellectual branch of Christendom when we look for Jonah in the New Testament or the Letters of Paul in the Old.
This happened at our very own diocesan convention several years ago. We had this big service of Holy Eucharist. A visiting bishop was present, as well as our own bishop of course, as well as delegates from every congregation in the diocese. A lay person came forward to read a lesson and announced, “A reading from the Letter of Paul to the Gallatins.” I suppose the delegation from The Church of our Savior in Gallatin paid particular attention. But the rest of us were merely embarrassed.
We hear from Psalm 1 today in worship: “Happy is the one. . . [who] delights in the law of the Lord, and meditates on his law, day and night.”
Psalm 1 may or may not be the most important of all the Psalms, but coming first, it is foundational. It is about living in right relationship with God and a living a life that reflects that relationship. What is characteristic of this kind of life? The blessed, the happy, the righteous, are those who delight in endless meditation of such a life lived in right relationship to God given in the Torah.
The Hebrew word translated here as “meditate” literally has the sense of chewing on something, savoring something in the mouth, a slow and ruminative, growling delight. Christians have always heard in this Psalm a call to mediation on Scripture as a practice of loving devotion rather than religious duty.
Listen, I get that the Bible is difficult and complicated and old! The earliest portions were written down 3,000 years ago. The popular psychiatrist M. Scott Peck once said: “The good life consists of a lifelong dedication to the pursuit of reality, at all costs.” And for me and generations of Christians, the Bible tells the story of definitive reality about our world because its entire narrative arc, from beginning to end, leads us to Jesus the Christ.
It is an understatement saying it is worth the cost to dedicate one’s self to Scripture. The Bible is not the only place to come near Jesus. But you will not fully recognize him anywhere else if you do not know him through Scripture.
Rather than offer at this point some practical Bible reading tips as I would in a Sunday school class or an article, I want to offer something far more personal. For my testimony is simply this: years and years of getting up and spending time in the Bible as the first thing I do every day has only increased my deep curiosity to know this God who sent his only Son not to condemn the world, but to save the world.
The more time I spend in Scripture, the less I doubt that the will and the ways and the aspirations of the God revealed there are contrary to what is best for me, even if they are far from what I would have chosen for myself if left to my own desires.
Our doctrine of Scripture flows from our doctrine of God. God does not wish to remain opaque or a puzzle or some capricious Deity from the ancient world. God wants to be known and trusted, and the Bible is the church’s primary place where God chose to make that happen. It is always where Christians come to touch Jesus.
My mother is in the process of selling the home I grew up in and moving to a more suitable smaller residence in a lovely retirement community. It is the right thing, to be sure. But the sale of the home I grew up in is like another death in the family. I cannot tell you how deeply I have been shaped by — and my own children have been shaped by —our family experiences in that lovely home on a river in Virginia.
I will be going up in two weeks to help Mom move out, a process that is well underway. We were all up there right after Christmas. It is not the furniture lying out in plain view that represents the hard work. It’s all the stuff in the closets and the attic and the basement and the garage — decades of accumulation.
My mother came up to me over Christmas and said, “I need you to clean out Bill’s closet; everything is still in there. I just cannot do it. You have to do it. Would you please?” This is the closet in my brother Bill’s bedroom. Bill died from his alcohol addiction in 2010.
I said, “Of course I will, Mom.” I underestimated how hard that would be.
I spent about three hours one afternoon this past late December going through old boxes of Bill’s memorabilia and personal effects as varied as the books of the Bible.
- Photographs and certificates and report cards from grade school
- Letters from camp and ribbons and trophies from tennis and baseball; an old photo of the both of us standing side by side in our little league football uniforms, squinting menacingly against the sun, our combined weight probably not a hundred pounds.
- An old chess set; a magic show kit — Bill loved to entertain us.
- High school reports, letters, and pictures… old cassette tapes of his favorite music.
- Letters to friends during and after college, including an old girlfriend.
- A diary that I knew nothing about from his early 20s. There were also quite a lot of creative writing and sketches that he had done. Bill was artistic in ways I am not.
- An old VHS tape of a low-budget short film, a dark comedy, he starred in living in New York City, back when he wanted to be an actor. He did not hit the big time, but his friend and co-star in that short film did: John C. Reilly.
- Later, a couple of letters to my parents written in the throes of his addiction; he was a beautiful writer, a beautiful young man.
It was all laid out there in his room now. What to do with all of this testimony to the life and wonder who was my brother? I decided to throw most of it away, actually. I kept a few items for me. But the best of it, the bits and pieces that best told his story, I carefully packed away into a single box. I packed it for his daughter, my niece, Ella.
She was only 9 then when it happened. But this spring she graduates from high school. Now it is she who is the beautiful young adult with her whole life ahead. And she is doing very well.
But she doesn’t know her father very well. There are childhood memories that must linger, but it’s been a long time for her now. She also doesn’t ask questions, at least not of me. I have wondered what she would like to know of her father. And so I wondered if she might like to have this box of things that would help tell his story.
Eventually I came down the stairs from Bill’s bedroom holding the box in my arms. As it happened, Ella was standing in the hallway right there as I did. I said to her, “Ella, this is a box of things that belonged to your Dad. I am confident he would want you to have them because he loved you and wanted you to know who he was, who he really was. You may not care to open it now and go through all of this, but why don’t you at least hold on to this box. One day you will be glad you have it.”
I laid it on the floor before Ella. Perhaps I figured she would merely thank me politely or simply stare at it silently or perhaps even walk away from the box, unable to process it just then. Instead, she did what I least expected: she immediately stooped down, ripped open the box, and eagerly started looking through it.
She wants to know her father. We want to know our Father. Our Father wants to be known.
Behold, I set before you this box that tells you his story. Behold, I set before you this Holy Scripture, that you may know me as you are already fully known, an all-surpassing love revealed in Jesus Christ our Lord, on whom we can meditate day and night and never grow weary of learning more and more of who I am and how much I love you.
And that is why I read the Bible.