2025-04-07
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
Psalm 46 has always been one of my favorite psalms, but it was sealed into a special place in my heart while was in seminary and working as a children and family minister.
I had planned a youth service based on this beautiful psalm in which the children and youth did every part of the service from the announcements to the benediction including all the music, prayers and sermon. The service was in September and the high school youth preached about where they had seen God on a variety of mission trips we had taken that summer.
The child who was to read the scripture was an 8-year-old boy and when we rehearsed, he read it exactly as you would expect a child of that age to read it: hesitantly, and sounding a bit intimidated, in part because he could barely see over the pulpit. As we rehearsed, I determined that we needed a taller step so that he could see and be seen and then I coached him on how to read the words. His parents, both physicians, were listening as we worked together.
“You are a good reader,” I told him, “and you don’t need to be afraid to read this nice and loudly, pronouncing each word individually so that everyone can understand you. But when you get to verse ten, those are the really important words that the older kids will be talking about, so make sure you really emphasize that line.”
The next week, when it was time for the scripture to be read, Keenan, looking very professional in his Sunday best, walked confidently to the pulpit, disappeared for just a moment behind the lectern, then climbed up onto the steps we had placed there and began reading in a clear voice. When he came to verse 10, his voice deepened about a half an octave and his volume rose as he declared, “Be STILL. And KNOW that I am GOD!” Everyone sat up just a little bit straighter after that!
Throughout this Lenten season, we’ve been working to get still and listen for God, and to aid us in this endeavor, we have been reading the text each week in a lectio divina format, praying the scriptures. I wonder how that has worked for you? Are you hearing the text any differently? I understand if you are struggling because we all tend to hear in a text what we expect to hear. This is why I love to take the extra time to use lectio divina, hoping that by praying the scriptures, we can search for some new truth in the words.
This may come as a shock to many of you, but I can understand why so many people want to read the bible as the literal, inerrant word of God. While I don’t share that point of view, it does make things much easier when we think we can read the words on the page and have a clear black and white truth. The bible then becomes an answer machine: we put in a question and get back a nicely packaged answer.
And yet, even as this kind of reading may make things easier, it just doesn’t make any sense to me to understand the bible in that way. Why? Well, first, the bible didn’t always exist. The first five books, the Pentateuch or Torah, were not accepted as sacred writing until around 400 years before Jesus’ birth, long after those stories were first told.
The prophetic books like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah and Amos, were not codified until about 200 years later and the wisdom literature, including the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Job and Proverbs, were added 100 years after that. And while it may surprise many of you to hear this, the books of the New Testament weren’t added to the cannon until a series of councils that took place in the middle of the fourth century . . . more than 400 years after Jesus died.
Even after all that time, there was still much debate over which books should be included in the bible. A number of them were left out of the canon but are valued by scholars even today including the gospels of Thomas, Peter and Mary.
The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches include in their Old Testament number of books not included in our bibles, like Sirach, Maccabees and Tobit, while many Protestant bibles include an intertestamental section of 14 books call the Apocrypha. These books are deemed useful for instruction but are considered non-canonical or not sanctioned. Of course, this failure to agree on which books are part of the bible begs the question of the book actually being “God’s Word,” doesn’t it?
Interestingly, ancient Christians considered scripture as pointing the way to God but did not consider it as a substitute for a direct encounter with the Divine. They believed not in the words written on a page, but rather those that were written on one’s heart.
Many people worry that if we don’t consider the bible as the inerrant words of God, then aren’t we picking and choosing what to believe and what to cast out? But in the postmodern world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, our focus on experience, relativism and religious pluralism enable us to understand biblical stories as metaphorical, true without being factual. Most people in progressive mainline churches view the bible as a collection of stories that describe how people understood God rather than direct accounts of how God sees things.
As we are so fond of saying in the UCC, God is Stillspeaking. I love this tagline that suggests that the scriptures are to be read in dialogue with our lives so that we can hear what God is saying today, in our current contexts. This perspective enables the text to shape us even as we bring our intelligence to the conversation, listening closely to hear what God is saying in this time and place. Failure to engage in that close listening makes it too likely that we will just absorb the text into what we already believe.
This is exactly what makes Lectio Divina so powerful: it makes space for listening for God’s still, small voice so that we can hear unexpected things. When we take time to listen well, we enable the stories to shape our vision of God and in turn our identities as people of faith.
“God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble with its tumult.
“Be still, and know that I am God!
Friends, may we always hear the wonderful words that God is saying so that as the Psalmist says, God utters the Divine voice and the earth melts. May we always listen closely so that we are understand how those sacred words speak to us today, not literally but metaphorically so that we can always know God’s presence with us. May it be so. Amen.