Hearing the Word

On Good Friday back in April of this year, I attended a worship service in the evening at an Episcopal Church. The service had all the moments you would expect to be there. There was some hymn singing and a fine ensemble who sang beautiful arrangements appropriate for the service. There was prayer and communion. The rector gave a very thoughtful, and brief, homily. But most of all, there was the public reading of Scripture.

Lengthy texts from Isaiah, Psalms, Hebrews, and the Gospel of John were read. Every text was read by lay people who clearly had prepared themselves to read Holy Scripture well. One could not have left that service confused about what Good Friday was all about. Scripture was allowed to speak. Again, the rector’s homily was excellent, but I remember thinking, “He is smart enough to know he doesn’t need to compete with Scripture tonight.” 

In contrast to that, I can still remember attending a Sunday morning worship service at a church in Florida that was more from my own faith group’s approach to worship. It was a church with a fine reputation. The Sunday morning service including singing, special music, several baptisms, a communion meditation, an offering meditation, and a sermon from the preacher – not brief enough to call a homily! Nothing heretical was said in the service. The sermon was not bad. But what I remember most about that morning is that from beginning to end, not one word of Scripture was read and identified as being Scripture. 

The absence of any Scripture reading in a Sunday morning worship service in an evangelical church is likely very rare. But I dare say I heard more Scripture read in that Good Friday Service in an Episcopal Church than I’m likely to hear in a whole month in most evangelical worship services. Yet, we are the very people who make a huge issue about “the inspiration of Scripture” and that it is our final word on the practice of our faith. 

I once heard the late Dr. Fred Craddock say that one of the greatest challenges of preaching in the early years of the 21^st century was that there was “an awful lot of ‘almost Bible’ out there.” As he developed that idea, he noted that by “almost Bible,” he didn’t so much mean some sort of blatant heresy, but rather a lot of stuff that sounds like the Bible in our culture, but actually wasn’t biblical. For example, so much of our worship music is focused on the individual, not the community of believers. We sing “I” and “me” far more often than we sing “We” and “us.” But Scripture is pretty much the opposite of that. If we read more Scripture in worship, would it create a kind of dissonance between the very communal nature of Scripture versus the very individualistic nature of our worship culture?

Here’s something to think about. A song I often hear sung in worship – in a variety of contexts and places – includes the phrase “He has never failed me.” Would believers – and guests worshipping with us – hear something different if we sang “He has never failed us“? When we say “me” and not “us,” are we trying to force God into a promise He hasn’t made? My western individualism tells me that the whole Bible is about a Jesus who came to redeem me, an individual. But the Bible I read seems more interested in a Jesus who came to redeem the body of Christ, His bride, the church.

If we did more “public reading of Scripture,” as Paul describes it in 1 Timothy 4:13, would we be less likely to buy in to the hyper-individualism that characterizes so much of evangelical thinking?

In my early years as a preacher, college professor, etc., I often thought that when I was at my desk working on a sermon, a Bible study, a class lecture, God was sitting on the other side of the desk and my study was a conversation with God. I still do that – even as these words are being written. But the more I studied, the more I came to think that God wanted to have that conversation with the community of His people, the church, the body of Christ.                            

You see, the Bible doesn’t belong to me – it belongs to the church. Some of the most insightful things I have ever understood from engaging Scripture came not from my private work in my study with all the great resources available, but in honest and transparent conversations and listening moments with the people of God. 

Last summer, I read an intriguing book by Brent Sandy titled, Hear Ye The Word of the Lord: What We Miss If We Only Read the Bible.”  If anything in these few words has made you think for a moment, I’d encourage you to check out this book. I think he is on to something we shouldn’t ignore.

I would love to hear more public reading of Scripture in church! 

^{Image by stempow from Pixabay}