Hear what God says to the priests who don’t set their heart to honor his name:
Because of you I will rebuke your descendants, I will spread on your faces the offal from your festival sacrifices, and you will be carried off with it. Malachai Chapter 2 verse 3
We read this at church recently. We read it because we are committed to reading the bible publicly week by week. No one preached on it or commented on it. It bore no relationship to the sermon that was given. We are reading through Malachai over a couple of months. We read it and were richer for it. God spoke. We listened. God spreading offal on a priest’s face is such a graphic image – you can’t listen to that and be unmoved.
Paul urges Timothy to devote himself to the public reading of Scripture (1 Timothy 4.13). Elsewhere we see the church was to hear the pubic reading of apostolic letters (Colossians 4.16, 1 Thessalonians 5.27, Revelation 1.3).
Some churches have gone for Bible Reading Lite. The bible is read, but only as an introduction to the sermon. Do we really believe the Word of God needs to always be mediated through a preacher?
Other churches strip the reading back of squeeze it our altogether because of the time given to songs, sermon, or news.
We need to do better in this area. I’ve seen church done a couple of times where the whole meeting was given over to the public reading of scripture. During the meeting, Mark’s gospel was read. It meant for a week we went without a lot of the other things that normally go into our meeting. But God spoke to us. His Spirit was at work. His people were changed.
July 14, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Yep. Just blogged about this myself. I was recently reading the 1662 BCP order of divine service, and I was stunned at how much scripture it contained.
July 15, 2009 at 10:52 pm
This bugged me, and today I realised why it bugged me. You make it sound like (even if you don’t intend to), that the reading of scripture in public without explanation, contextualisation, or interpretation is somehow a triumph in itself. This sounds to me like the act of reading scripture is somehow important apart from and almost in spite of the meaning.
Or, to come at it from another angle, I would never read Psalm 137 in public without giving some explanation and Christocentric application. Otherwise believer and unbeliever alike are going to stumble on v9. If we proudly decontextualise scripture we run the danger of sacramentalising and ritualising it, not hearing God speaking at all.
(I do apologise if I sound overly harsh, I have tried to convey my reaction to your post though)
July 21, 2009 at 11:16 am
Hey Seumas
my reply is slow as I’ve been away. Thanks for your thoughts.
Do we need to explain everything we read? If we were reading Ps 137 I’d probably explain it too, but part of me says ‘it would be ok to not explain and have people stumble and be unsettled by the word of God’I wonder if sometimes we evacuate the force of the text by too quickly jumping to explain away things?
As to ritual etc. Yes, some of the most liberal churches do 4 readings a Sunday. What do we conclude from that? Do you say – this is empty ritual so lets not read like them? Maybe… then again, I think of the cousin of mine that went to a church like that. The bible reading was the best thing she heard all week – the creeds also helped – but the sermons were consistently woeful. I was grateful she was getting some food.
July 21, 2009 at 5:12 pm
I think there’s a difference between ‘explain’ and ‘explain-away’, one that you’d probably agree with. I’m certainly not trying to knock the public reading of scripture, I just want it well thought-through. So, I think my main point is: No, we don’t need to explain everything we read, but we don’t want to read things without an explanation if in doing so the absence of an explanation promotes a prima facie ‘explanation’ that is actually misleading.
July 22, 2009 at 11:10 am
that sounds reasonable.