Sermon: Economic Crisis

This being Bible Sunday congregations across the land will be turning their full attention to the foundational document of the universal Church. And in different places, bible teachers, preachers, priests, bishops, pioneer ministers, evangelists...they will all be approaching the Bible in a variety of ways,  each one a living tradition, following in the footsteps of those who have gone before them.

 From the fiery evangelical preachers of moral and social reform such as John Wesley of the late 19th Century. To the scholarly and politically skilled theologians of the 16th Century such as Richard Hooker, the Anglican apologist whose commemoration is coming up on the 3rd November.

T he word “bible” (or biblos) itself meaning an historical record; how we approach the bible says a lot about our need to make some order and sense out of the chaos and randomness of events occurring within the passage of time.

The Bible is also a drama, or story; how we approach the bible says a lot about how we tell our own story: The story of our own lives, who we are and how we came to be ourselves.

 The Bible also stands for authority, a defined body of authoritative texts – a canon (or measure) of Scripture; how we approach the bible says a lot about how we measure and define authority. What are we willing to invest authority within?

 The Bible is also a book. (It hasn’t always been a book.) Before it ever was a book it was a collection of scrolls and before that it was an oral tradition – stories told and passed on around the fireside. It will be interesting to see what will happen to the Bible in the age of technology when more and more people are now reading things online with computers.

 My own approach to the bible is to try to expand from its solidity, its bookishness. To expand from the solidity of the book into the the biblical concept of the Word of God, the notion that God speaks and has voice – the voice of God. The Bible means that God can be heard. My own approach is to expand from there into the spiritual reality that as we read any text – any set of words – we have a reaction to it, we relate to it, we interpret it for ourselves. From there I would like to expand into silence. For as many religious traditions have taught silence speaks loudest of all.

 [After all, when all has been said, what’s in a word?

 Words of wisdom...A word in your ear...Never a true word said?..Words spoken in haste in anger...Her first words...His last words...(any more?) 

Sticks and stones can break  my bones but words will never hurt me (or is it names will never hurt me?) A rhyme designed to convince ourselves that words have no power over us – precisely because they actually do!

 The pen is mightier than the sword...

 The words spoken to us, as well as the words we say, have tremendous power. Our words claim to define what is, what is real, what is truth, what is to be acknowledged. That which can be said.

 “My Word will not return to me fruitless,” says the Lord God.

 In what ways do our words return to us?

 There is a purposefulness revealed in this line about God’s word returning to God. What is of God has a purposefulness. Not a word lost in the world but one with purpose to return.]

" The Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote this:

 On the most westerly blasket,

in a ry stone hut,

he got this air out of the night.

Strange noises were heard

by others who followed.

Bits of a tune coming in on loud weather, though nothing like melody."

 He blamed their finger

and ear as unpracticed.

Their fidling easy.

For he had gone alone into the island

and brought back the whole thing.

The house throbbed like his full violin.

 So whether he calls it spirit music,

or not, I don’t care.

He took it out of the wind

off mid-Atlantic.

Still he maintans from nowhere.

It comes off the bow gravely

rephrasing itself into the air.

 The Word of God is, after all, a metaphor for that intuitive comprehension of the incomprehensible. Like other biblical metaphors for God, such as wind, spirit, fire and water, bread and wine, the Word (or the voice) is something fundamental to human life – elemental. That which is closest to us, that which is most basic turns out to be the perfect “vehicle” for God.