Bible Sunday and Give A Bible

Members of St John's Seven Kings took part today in the 'Give A Bible' Bible Year 2011 initiative in the Diocese of Chelmsford to encourage Church members in the Diocese to bring a Bible to church on Bible Sunday with the intention of subsequently giving it to a neighbour, work colleague or friend. This initiative was inspired by a 90-year-old lady in the Havering area who, when she was given a Bible by her parish church, said: “It's been too long since a Bible was in this home.” It is hoped that this 'Give a Bible' initiative might place a Bible back in many other homes.

At St John's, members chose a range of different translations and versions of the Bible to give away to work colleagues, grandchildren, relatives and friends. These included a Polish translation for one work colleague. Several St John's members also bought a children's storyteller version of the Bible to give to Downshall Primary School for future use in their RE lessons.

All these different versions of the Bible were brought to St John's for Bible Sunday where the following prayer was prayed before the Bibles were given away:

This is a Bible – filled with stories of people who have encountered God. Those people are our people. Their stories are our stories. We share these stories so that others will live in these stories with us. We read these stories because we want to remember who God is, who we are and what we believe, so that we will know how to live today. May God’s abundance uphold us and those to whom we give Bibles. May God’s love instruct us and those to whom we give Bibles. May God’s dream motivate us and those to whom we give Bibles. May the Scriptures be made real in our lives and theirs today and in the days to come. God is with us. Amen.

Our other Bible Year 2011 activities have included an Art Competition for children and young people illustrating Bible stories on the theme of hope and HISstory, a session led by Redbridge Area Dean Paul Harcourt, which outlined the big story of salvation told by the Bible. These events and activities have underlined the significance of the Bible for us and for our culture and have inspired us to share the Bible, and the story it tells, more fully with others.

Here is the sermon I preached for Bible Sunday (which makes use of Bible Society materials):

Storytelling has been around as long as human language. Storytelling is what makes us human. Our ancestors probably gathered around the evening fires and expressed their fears, their beliefs and their heroism through oral narratives. This long tradition of storytelling is still evident in ancient cultures such as the Australian Aborigines. Community storytelling offered the security of explanation; how life and its many forms began and why things happen, as well as entertainment and enchantment. Communities were strengthened and maintained through stories that connected the present, the past and the future.

So, from earliest times human beings have told stories and the stories we tell commonly seek, either explicitly or implicitly, to answer questions such as, “How did we get here?”, “Where are we going?”, and “What is the meaning of our existence?” We call these overarching stories metanarratives or worldviews and we live within the meanings which they provide.

For example, a humanist may tell a story of a universe which comes into being by chance leaving human beings free to create their own meanings for life and society. To give another example, the theologian Stanley Hauerwas says: “The story of modernity is the story that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story. We call that freedom. But as Christians we believe that we are creatures born into a story that we haven’t chosen.”

Christians are “a people who have been formed by a story that provides them with the skills for negotiating the danger of this existence, trusting in God’s promise of redemption.” In other words, the Church is founded on the premise that the creator God decisively calls and forms a people to serve him through the history of Israel and through the work of Jesus Christ to bring about the redemption of the creation.

We must constantly remember that we are a story formed community and that story is what defines our existence as Christians. This is something that we can see occurring in Nehemiah 8. 1-12, which is one of the rare and exciting public readings of the Scriptures found in the Bible. It shows how inseparable the Bible was from the lifeline of the people. In Nehemiah 8 the people of Israel recognise that the scripture is central to their lifeline and their identity. In fact, it is inseparable from their story. It is their story. The New Testament then shows us that this is true for all of us, Jew or Gentile, who choose to live in relationship with God.

The people in Nehemiah’s day would usually have been very reluctant to have men and women gathering together in an act of worship. Even more so children – even those old enough to understand were likely to have been excluded. But what happened in the square that day was a remarkable and radical worship event. Men, women and children all recognised that, through the Scriptures, God had something transforming to say to them. No one should read the Bible without finding themselves in it. The Bible speaks to all kinds of people, whatever their status, and in all types of situations. If we allow God to speak, he will do – whoever we are! The Bible speaks across gender – to men and women, to everyone old enough to understand – to children too!

What is the story of which we are part? Tom Wright has described the Bible as being like a five act play containing the first four acts in full (i.e. Act 1. Creation, Act 2. Fall, Act 3. Israel, and Act 4. Jesus): "The writing of the New Testament ... would then form the first scene in the fifth act, and would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end ...”

“The church would then live under the 'authority' of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion ... the task of Act 5 ... is to reflect on, draw out, and implement the significance of the first four Acts, more specifically, of Act 4 in the light of Acts 1-3 ... Faithful improvisation in the present time requires patient and careful puzzling over what has gone before, including the attempt to understand what the nature of the claims made in, and for, the fourth Act really amount to."

Wright concludes that he is proposing "a notion of "authority" which is ... vested ... in the creator god himself, and this god's story with the world, seen as focused on the story of Israel and thence on the story of Jesus, as told and retold in the Old and New Testaments, and as still requiring completion."

The book of Nehemiah is the story of the people of Israel returning to Jerusalem following exile. After some 70 years of exile in Babylon, many of the people had returned to Jerusalem but all was not well. Nehemiah returned to Jerusalem to lead the people in rebuilding of the walls of the city; dealing with corruption and inequality; boosting morale; carrying out a meticulous census; reforming and re-establishing the priesthood and completing the settlement of land. Scripture was deeply at work driving these reforms. Nehemiah’s social and economic reforms, for example, were guided by the book of Deuteronomy’s restrictions on usury and his anger about indentured slavery was based firmly on the Levitical Laws. God’s Word had so shaped the minds and standards of Nehemiah and Ezra that its deep influence became a basis for social and economic reform.

All this led up to the public reading of God’s Word in our passage today. Despite all that had been achieved, the people knew that something was still missing. It was as though all their efforts for a better society, and the relative stability and prosperity they were starting to experience, revealed a gaping spiritual void which still existed. So when they met in the public square, they asked Ezra to read God’s Word.

Having achieved so much, they could easily have rested on their laurels. But amazingly, they – not Nehemiah – asked for the scriptures to be read. Nehemiah had enforced many reforms, but the people themselves felt the need to hear God’s Word.

It seems clear from our text that more is needed in a nation than real or relative wealth and security. We still need spiritual values guiding all aspects of our lives. This was the challenge for William Wilberforce. Years after Wesley’s great revival in Britain, Wilberforce

was still moved in 1797 to write and distribute his book, A Practical View of Real Christianity, to revive Christian values in all areas of life – in what he described as a ‘reformation of manners’. In the same way, our commitment to God’s Word should lead us to apply ourselves to ways in which we may prayerfully lead people to revive or discover a thirst for the Bible and how it applies to our lives today.

That is how we live in the story today. Let’s end with a story as a practical example. At a trauma workshop in the Democratic Republic of Congo, people displaced by civil war listened to a dramatised reading of Lamentations 5. As they heard the story of the Israelites’

invasion by the Babylonians, they said, ‘This is our story! We had a beautiful land and we lost it. Now we can’t get to our fields. It’s too dangerous.’ A Bible Society trainer who helped lead the programme said these Congolese people ‘felt so similar to the people of Jerusalem’ and realised for the first time that it was acceptable to cry out to God in their pain and grief.

The Bible was never meant to be an alternative telephone directory. It’s far more interested in transformation than in passing on important information. But in order to transform, it really needs to be understood. It is the comprehension that makes all the difference so that we are able to see how we can be part of and live in the big story that the Bible tells.

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