Dwelling in the Word

In college I quickly settled into a major in Politics (political science). I think it was the theory that captured me, about human nature and how we construct institutions and societies together. But I also loved learning international relations, reading extensively about détente, Soviet nuclear arms agreements, and the bipolar alignment of the world in the Cold War, which we were still in. Mind you, I started college in 1989. And then in 1991, Gorbachev became a hero and the Soviet Union fell, and almost overnight, much of what I had learned was irrelevant. I never really caught up to the change. So I have sympathy for the poor data science graduates of the last few years, suddenly made redundant by AI. Sometimes, like it or not, you’ve got to start all over again.

Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? Jesus asks Nicodemus. Ouch, Nicodemus must have thought. He did think he understood these things, quite well indeed. And there he was, being schooled – never easy to take, particularly on something you thought you were an expert in. And yet that seems to be the beginner’s mind God calls us to adopt. Every day can feel like starting all over again. And that is just where we are, in God’s eyes.

And that kind of new beginning happens throughout scripture. In that brief passage from Genesis we heard, Abram, singled out from all the other people on earth, hears God’s voice call him to leave ‘his country and his kindred and his father’s house’ and go to a new land that God would show him – but God won’t tell him much about it ahead of time, apparently. And Abram goes. But he didn’t have to go. He had settled in Haran and had prospered there, acquiring possessions and ‘persons’ and great wealth. Life was good. He had all he needed – except a son and heir, of course. But he started over anyway, because he heard God’s voice and obeyed it, and so he is renamed Abraham, the father of many nations – and salvation history begins. Later the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah respond to God’s call, painful thought it might be; Queen Esther risks everything in response to God’s call to save her people; the disciples drop their nets and follow Jesus when he calls them. Starting over happens over and over in the stories of the Bible.

But Nicodemus struggles with that. He is a teacher of Israel. He understands all these things because he’s studied them his entire life. He knew his Torah inside and out, and he especially knew the oral traditions of the elders, all the commentary on Torah. And here’s this new young rabbi telling him he must be born again and start anew. None of it seemed to make any sense at all.

Jesus shouldn’t have been telling Nicodemus something he didn’t already know. Jesus taught out of that same tradition that Nicodemus knew so well. But somehow Nicodemus had missed this. The life of faith can be like this – the Holy Spirit blows in to upset our assumptions and call us into new things. And sometimes it happens right there in material we think we’ve already mastered. It’s part of why we call scripture the living word of God. No matter how many times you’ve read the Bible, there is always something new to it. As is sometimes said, first you read the Bible, and then the Bible reads you. There is always something fresh in it, because it is a witness to the God who is alive and present right here with us – not just a God of antiquity and tradition. God still speaks to us, even today.

I experienced this many years ago when I went on a silent retreat, using some of the spiritual exercises developed by Ignatius of Loyola – the same fellow who gave us the Prayer of Examen we tried last week. Ignatius encourages using one’s imagination while reading a story of scripture, entering the scene and experiencing how it felt, smelled, sounded. After a dutiful upbringing in the church, after seminary and all the solid learning I took in about the Old and New Testaments, I suddenly found myself face to face with Jesus – not just the Christ of the Trinity, or the one in whose name we pray, but the actual Jesus. I became a Jesus freak for the first time. Everything changed, and it was just because of spending real time reading the scriptures. Jesus was waiting there to call me into a deeper relationship than I’d realized was possible.

So the practice we’re going to try out this week is a way of engaging a little differently with scripture. It’s called lectio divina, or ‘holy reading.’ Lectio divina comes from the earliest days of the church, particularly the monastic tradition. Reciting and ruminating on scripture had long been a part of the rabbinical tradition of Judaism, and in the 3rd century Origen of Alexandria developed the idea that deeply meditating on scripture could lead us into Christ, the Word of God, the Logos. His ideas passed down to Augustine of Hippo, who incorporated them into the early rule of life for monastics. The Desert Fathers and Mothers read and recited scripture in this way; St Benedict taught the method in his monasteries. The 12th c Carthusian monk Guigo formalized the process of lectio divina into four steps – reading, meditating, contemplating, and praying – but lectio has continued to be adapted and practiced by many different people in the centuries since, including a method known as the African Bible Study – something our bishops have used in their international meetings, finding a way to connect to each other across our fractious Anglican Communion. Lectio offers a way to slow down and truly dwell in scripture – not to read it hastily or like we read a textbook, but as words we take into our heart.

The process begins first with our hearts, noticing how the text affects us, how a particular word or phrase sticks out and grabs us – maybe in a good way, or maybe in a challenging way. Then there is time to ponder the text with our minds, figuring out what it’s saying, who wrote it and who it was written to, what centuries of tradition have made of the meaning of the text. And then we go back into our hearts, listening for what God is saying to us with this text, what we’re being prompted to do or see. That leads us into prayer, where we can talk to or just be with God from that deeper place, where we’ve been led to by the word. And then we finish. Instead of inhaling a whole chapter or several chapters, this practice invites us to savor a smaller bite – the passage assigned for the day in the lectionary, perhaps, or a psalm, or a favorite few verses. (If you need help finding passages to read as you try this method, ask me – or look at the link on our website, where I offer a few suggestions.) In other words, this practice offers a way for the Bible to read you.

Again, this is a practice to try out over the course of this week – maybe three times if you can do it, maybe more. If you already have a practice of daily Bible reading, try this method as a way of slowing it down and going deeper. If you don’t, then use this as a way to start. Reading and meditating on God’s holy word is part of the ‘work’ of Lent, after all. So I encourage you to try it, and next week, we’ll make space to check in about how it goes for you, Sunday after church.

One of our ancient church prayers asks God to help us ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest’ the words of scripture – to take them from our heads to our hearts, to our guts and our very beings. We are what we eat, after all. So may we take in the goodness of God, and taste and see; so we may be transformed. Amen.