Bible Sunday

When I was very little, my father could do no wrong in my eyes. He was the best father in the world, and everything he said was always right, and I would punch anyone who said different. He could answer all my questions. He could mend my Scalectrix when it went wrong. He knew everything. But then, when I was a teenager, I saw him from a different perspective. He seemed so old, so out of touch and so utterly uncool. It was as though he was living in a different century. He couldn't do the simplest problems in my physics homework. He had the most old-fashioned ideas about when I should be home at night. He was incredibly stingy with money and, as for his political views, he made Attilla the Hun look like a woolly Liberal.

But later on, when I had learned a bit more about the world, my view changed again. I began to see my father as a friend, as a man of long experience and mature wisdom, someone to respect and someone to rely on. As Mark Twain put it, 'When I was fourteen I thought my father was an old fool. When I was twenty-one I was amazed what the old man had learned in seven years'.

It occurred to me recently that our attitudes to the Bible probably change in much the same way. When you were little, many of you were taught the chorus The best book to read is the Bible, and that everything in it is absolute, literal fact: 'Gospel truth'. You knew that you should read the Bible every day, and believed that if you did it would help you with everything. But when you grew older, grew thoroughly bored with the dull old volume. Friends told you that it had been 'disproved' by science, and that the Ten Commandments were a waste of time. Increasingly you discovered parts of the Bible that you couldn't help but disagree with. It all seemed a mixture of fairy tale and heavy morality, and you put the wretched tome back on the shelf to gather dust.

Today is Bible Sunday. I don't know why, but there it is. For many years it rested happily on the Second Sunday in Advent, but now the Liturgical Commission have moved it to the Last Sunday after Trinity. No matter. At least it has not been forgotten altogether. And Bible Sunday prompts the question: did we ever get the Bible off the shelf again, or is it still there mouldering away? Have we blown off the dust and read it once more? Have we grown into that maturity ourselves whereby we can see the Bible as a friend, as a story of divine wisdom and human experience, as something to respect and to rely upon?

I do hope that the Bible is not still collecting dust and cobwebs on your shelf, because I have a horrible feeling that, for all the modern translations which sell so well with their lavish photographs and pictures and clear modern English, the Bible is in fact being read less and less by Christians today. And that is a tragedy. For although it does not give us - it does not pretend to give us - the latest scientific knowledge and technical data, it does offer us timeless and changeless insights into what it means to be a human being, and of God's way with men and women. For people still make love and go to war for the same motives and with the same passions as they did in the days of Noah. We still suffer anguish and know heartache just like the psalmist. We still know pain and fear and happiness and hope, just as the people did when they clustered around Jesus. And God, the Most High God, still loves us and cherishes us, yearns for us and weeps for us, sits with us in our sorrows and enters into our joys, as he did throughout all the biblical centuries.

There was a moment in the Coronation Service, immediately after the Queen had been crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, when the Moderator of the Church of Scotland presented a copy of the Bible to Her Majesty with these words: “Receive this Book, the most valuable thing this world affords.” And this Bible Sunday my plea is that we should all blow the dust off this most valuable thing, and read again the lively oracles of God.

Perhaps you need to acquire a modern version, I recommend the NRSV and you can buy one or order one through any bookshop or Christian bookshop. Perhaps we will be helped by a scheme of readings or Bible notes, and a Christian bookshop can help you there too. Perhaps we might even want to talk to the clergy about our spiritual and devotional lives, for that, after all, is what we are here for. But above all, read the Bible, read it carefully and prayerfully, and you will discover the most profound and permanent insights into the foundations of human living; you will discover how God deals with you and me; and in the words and the works of Christ you will discover the true and authentic picture of what God is like and what he has done for us.

As they grows up, there will come a time when my children Joshua and Gwyn are no longer bothered by the discovery that their parents aren't infallible. They will no longer be worried that we do not know the answer to everything and that sometimes we disagree with them. The boys will learn that what is important about their parents is not that we should be some kind of walking encyclopaedia, but people of love and wisdom, of laughter and tears, of comfort and encouragement. And that's what I find in the Bible, too: not dull, encyclopaedic facts about God, but the red-blooded story of his involvement in this one world, his laughter and his tears and his deep, deep love, and the story of men and women touched by the finger of God, whose touch has still its ancient power.

And for that, thanks be to God.