Recently in Reading the Bible Category

Honoured today to have taken the memorial service for a remarkable gentleman whose life spanned many decades of change and whose friends and family remember him with genuine affection and honour. We were hosted kindly by a central London church - a Wren building I'd never been into before.

Writing my talk/sermon, I sat with the second reading chosen by the family - not one I've preached on before in any context...

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Here's what I said (leaving out the gentleman's name) following on from the (very moving and beautifully put) eulogy delivered by a close relative...

"...it's true of all life, looked at a day at a time or a decade at a time: we realise that all of us live through experiences that can plunge us into the deepest darkness and at other times make days sparkle with the brightest of joy. We experience the pleasure of friendship as well as the ache of loneliness, trust alongside betrayal, times when we have felt sick to our stomachs with failure and others when we enjoy the giddy high of success...

It's that roller-coaster ride of life that the writer of Ecclesiastes picks up in the reading we've just had. He recognises that the life we lead - this time we spend "under heaven" - sweeps together the best and the worst: from war to peace, loss to gain, mourning as well as joyful dance.

And I want to suggest that the challenge he places before us is simply this - not to live life in compartments, but to recognise its wholeness before God.

It's a great survival mechanism, isn't it, to box off different areas of our life - family life, work, friendships of different types and depths. We can present ourselves slightly - sometimes radically - different in each one and bottle up emotions from one area that might spill over and damage another.

Hearing this passage, and remembering the book as a whole, I'm struck by the fact that the writer never winces at the thought that all this mess of life is lived before and, in fact, with God. This is no God just of high-days and holidays, of Sunday mornings at church, or Christmas in a Carol Service. The God he speaks of through his writings seems as interested in the darkness we walk through, at times in fear and confusion, as the light we enjoy.

And that's a pattern we see lived out in the life of Jesus: God made flesh - far from finding a pain-free well-insulated life of luxury, but walking the muddy paths and hungry days of a poor carpenter in first century Palestine - knowing deep friendships alongside heart-breaking betrayal; enjoying the sights and sounds of God's created world and weeping at the harshness of death and disease; experiencing the joy of seeing God at work, yet aware even of those times when God seems distance, even absent.

And in all of that, Jesus lived out a life stubbornly refusing to box things in - a life of wholeness before his Heavenly Father - knowing that God was not just interested, but utterly committed to walking with him through it all with a love stronger even than death itself.

As we remember today the richness of this particular long life, lived before the God who made and loves us, let's hear the challenge of the wise writer of Ecclesiastes to recognise the presence and love of God in Jesus, walking with us through the whole of live and hand-in-hand, even through death itself.

Making choices
A real mess and mix of emotions in preparing to preach on Sunday last week...

...excitement, even exhilaration, at digging into Romans and getting the excuse to read some stuff in depth that's arrived on my shelves since I last approached the letter - especially some typically lively and stimulating Tom Wright (Bishop of Durham and one of the foremost biblical scholars writing today),

...but also a growing sense of what can only be described as foreboding as it dawned on me just what an enormous mouthful I'd bitten off to chew in twenty minutes flat!

The problem is that you just can't preach Romans 3:21-26 in isolation. That's true of all scripture, of course (the old saying "A text without a context becomes a pretext" is spot-on here), but peculiarly true of a paragraph so dense in theologically rich terms ("justified", "righteousness") and that connects so thoroughly into the big story of the Old Testament people of God.

There's a controversy surround the interpretation of the big themes and ideas of Paul's letter that's becoming increasingly bad-tempered and is, sadly, between people that I've always looked up to, read with appreciation and identified with: the likes of Don Carson, John Piper on one side and Tom Wright (amongst others) on the other.

Here isn't the place to try and unpack the argument - and I'm hardly the expert to turn to if that's your thing - but it does put the week-by-week preacher in a tough position. It's hard enough to find the time and head/heart-space in a given week to understand scripture, listen to God and prepare something that nourishes and encourages, without having first to wade through books of finely balanced argument before you can even get going...

But that's life - and in the end, the result of the extra reading and thinking is being forced to think more carefully and deeply about things one might have taken for granted before.

For myself, I think Tom Wright's take on Romans is incredibly helpful and fruitful - though whether it bore fruit in my sermon on Sunday is for others to judge! - and connects Paul's Good News about Jesus with the whole sweep of the Bible's story of God loving and rescuing the created order and humanity.

Interested in taking things further?
I promised on Sunday some links you could follow if you'd like to read more about Romans, perhaps working your way through it during Lent...

My first suggestion is to go to Tom Wright's pair of paperbacks aimed at all Christians - part of his New Testament for Everyone series:

• Romans - Part 1
• Romans - Part 2

They are arranged such that the Bible's text (in his own, very readable and accurate translation) is set in manageable chunks followed by just 3 or 4 pages of beautifully crafted comment (mini-sermons effectively) from Bishop Tom. Wonderful stuff, very well applied to life and never pulling punches on the big issues.You can even read a sample before you buy on Amazon.

If you're intrigued by the debate I mentioned earlier, you could do much worse than go to Wright's latest book called, simply, Justification - it's a tour de force in making a case - not entirely without flashes of temper, but he's been pretty well villified by fellow Christians for his approach. It's a very readable book aimed at those who know their Bibles pretty well and want to dig in deeply into the heart of what makes the Gospel good news. If you want to read up the other side of the debate, John Piper's book on Wright is easy to dig out on Amazon too.

Over the next few days, I'm going to take a shot at writing up a few of my notes from the past week about some of the big ideas we touched on so briefly in the sermon itself...