I’ll let you in on a small secret from the associate’s office: I read the Bible for a living, and there are still mornings it baffles me. I take that as a good sign. A book that never puzzled us would be a book we had outgrown.
Somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the idea that there are only two options: take every line literally, or don’t take the book seriously at all. I’d like to offer a third way, which happens to be a very old way. Take it seriously enough to read it the way it asks to be read.
Because the Bible is not a book. It is a library. Between its covers you’ll find poetry and law, letters and love songs, protest literature, family sagas, visions, and at least one exhausted prophet sulking under a broom tree. Genre matters. You don’t read a psalm the way you read a spreadsheet, and you don’t read a vision the way you read a news report. Asking “what kind of writing is this, and what is it trying to do?” is not dodging the text. It is paying attention to it.
Context matters too. These books were written by real people in real trouble: exiles, farmers, fishermen, a church planter writing letters from prison. When we ask who wrote a passage and why, we are not being suspicious of Scripture. We are being courteous to it. Listening to someone on their own terms is what love does.
And questions are not the opposite of faith. Back in April I preached about Thomas, the disciple who wanted evidence before he would believe the resurrection, and I will happily repeat the point: doubt came to dinner, and Jesus set a place for it. He will set one for yours, too.
A shared reading plan, and a library that reads back
At St. Dunstan’s, like many churches, we follow the lectionary. That word simply means a shared reading plan: a calendar of Scripture passages, spread across three years, that congregations around the world read together. I love it for a humbling reason. I don’t get to pick the passages. Some Sundays the appointed reading is exactly the one I would have avoided, which is usually how I know it is the one I need.
That is the strangest and best thing about this library: stay with it long enough and you discover it is reading you. The psalm you skimmed at twenty ambushes you at fifty. Elijah worn out under his tree says nothing for years, and then one weary season it says everything. Scripture doesn’t change. We do, and it keeps meeting us at every new address.
If you would like company for that kind of reading, there are chairs already set out, and no prerequisites for sitting in them. Women’s Bible Study meets Fridays at 10:00 a.m., coffee poured, questions welcome, no experience required. And I am easy to find after worship any Sunday; I am never done talking over the readings, and the Parish Office can always point you my way. Bring your curiosity. Bring your objections. Both are ways of taking the Bible seriously.
And if you are wondering whether a thinking person can still open this old book: yes. Gladly. Grown-ups read poetry as poetry and promises as promises, and find that both are true. There is a place for you here, and the red doors open every Sunday at 10:00 for Holy Eucharist, our name for the communion meal at the heart of worship. The library is waiting. So are we.
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