Sunday 25 October – Bible Sunday
OT: Nehemiah 8.1-4a [5-6] 8-12
Psalm 119.9-16 – Response “Happy are they who walk in the law of the Lord.”
NT: Colossians 3.12-17
Gospel: Matthew 24.30-35
Today is Bible Sunday — that moment in the year when we, mainly Anglicans, funnily enough, pause and think about the Bible itself. Most of us carry at least one of the various translations, or hear it read week by week, but today we’re invited to notice it again, to pay attention to the gift it is.
And the roots of this day go back a long way. Thomas Cranmer’s 1549 Book of Common Prayer set a special collect for the Second Sunday in Advent — thanking God for Scripture and urging us to learn from it.
Common Worship later moved Bible Sunday to this last Sunday after Trinity, but the collect we pray today is still Cranmer’s.
Cranmer didn’t invent that idea out of thin air. We all build on the shoulders of giants. Cranmer was working from the old Benedictine pattern of prayer, eight times a day, which he reduced to two so ordinary people could actually live it.
Daily Scripture reading and prayer lie at the heart of our faith. They shape how we pray, hear God, and understand ourselves as Christians. As Cranmer wrote in the preface to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, “the people by daily hearing of holy Scripture read in the Church should continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true Religion.”
Bible Sunday reminds us that the Bible is not merely read; it forms us.
So it’s hard to overstate how important Scripture, the daily reading of it, being immersed in it and trying to learn from it is for us Anglicans.
Before the Bible took the form we know today, the faith was passed down through stories later written down.
So Paul’s letters came first and show that people already knew these stories. Paul met Peter, then James, Jesus’ brother, and later John, and, of course, encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus.
Paul’s letters were written about 20 years after Jesus, and the Gospels about 40 to 50.
But remember, by the time Paul picks up his pen, Christians are already breaking bread, baptising, singing hymns to Christ and praying.
The Bible didn’t create that faith. It grew out of a community already living it.
And all of this was written by people like us. Paul’s letters and the Gospels were not written by people turned into robots taking dictation. They were humans like us, powered by the Spirit, telling a story that began long before Jesus and whose ending we still await, living in the now and not yet. They sang Maranatha, meaning “come, Lord Jesus,” and his Spirit did 😊.
But Scripture mattered long before Paul’s letters or the earthly life of Jesus. It told the story of a people groaning through trials and tribulations yet still looking to God in hope and relying on Scripture to show the way.
When the author of today’s Psalm, Psalm 119, says about 450 years before Jesus
How can a young person stay on the path of purity?
By living according to your word.
I seek you with all my heart;
do not let me stray from your commands.
This is the author telling the reader to seek advice and direction from Scripture, as we do today. Especially on Bible Sunday.
The story, of course, is that we, living in the body of Christ as baptised members of the community, are to be helped to clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. And Paul tells us how in the same passage:
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.
So it’s pretty clear.
Scripture isn’t just something we read. It’s how we’re clothed as people.
This is how the transformation of baptism continues, where our baptism service says:
Our Lord Jesus Christ has told us
that to enter the kingdom of heaven
we must be born again of water and the Spirit,
and has given us baptism as the sign and seal of this new birth.
Here we are washed by the Holy Spirit and made clean.
Here we are clothed with Christ,
dying to sin that we may live his risen life.
As children of God, we have a new dignity, and God calls us to fullness of life.
And in a moment we will see that for
Tom, Leon and Ruby.
So in baptism we’re given a new dignity as children of God. And that new life is kept fresh by the Holy Spirit, and by the joy of reading his word, day by day. Until the day our Gospel speaks of, when the Son of Man comes “with power and great glory.”
That’s the whole journey: knowing him, joining his family in baptism, and letting his word and his Spirit go on shaping us.
As Rev. Jane used to say – when you read the Bible, three things are at work: you, his word and his Spirit.
Let them work on you, as much as you can, and remember. Jesus promises: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”
Leave a Reply