Diary of a Theologian

Does God Speak to You in the Bible?

God speaks to people who turn to him. One of the assured ways we can hear God’s voice is to read the Bible, which has been rightly called “God’s Word written.” But how might one hear God speaking through the Bible?

    It begins, as so many important things do, simply with showing up. You start reading the Bible. Maybe you read a little bit each day; maybe you follow some sort of plan for reading the Bible; maybe you follow a lectionary; maybe you read a part of the Bible that a friend or priest recommended to you. The scheme you have for Bible reading doesn’t matter very much, provided it is something you are able to incorporate into your life. (It won’t do, for instance, to say you’ll read ten chapters every day, and then for you to rush through the chapters because you have this guilt about not being able to keep up. It might be better, in such a case, to be satisfied with ten verses—or even less!) 

    What one seeks is to make some sort of regular, probably daily, encounter with God’s Word written. We have, as it were, a guarantee that the Bible is God speaking to us. So we read the Bible, expectantly and in a sense lovingly, knowing that God preserved these words for his people to hear and treasure.

    What then? Sometimes it happens that, as you are reading the Bible, you sense that God is saying something particular to you. What God is telling you may not be the exact words on the page, but they are related, they make sense. I think if I give two contrasting examples it will become clear what I mean.

    You might be reading the Bible and think God is telling you to take your elderly grandfather, who is living with you, and thrust him, shivering in his pyjamas, out of your house into a snowdrift. No: God is not telling you to do that! No matter what you might have been reading, such a deed would run counter to the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ commandment to love one another. What we hear God saying to us will be consonant with his written Word.

    But perhaps you’re reading one of the parables of Jesus and a situation at work comes to mind, and you feel God is telling you to make an effort to speak with someone there, someone you’ve been having a hard time with. Those particular words were not in the Bible (“Go talk with Georgette and try to overcome your dislike of her”), but they are words consonant with what is written in the Bible. 

    God can, of course, speak to any person at any time; it is his pleasure to be a speaking God! Nonetheless, it is a great help to us, who want to love and trust him, to open ourselves to his written Word. Through his written Word we can indeed hear his voice.

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    Out & About. This Sunday, Feb. 15, I get to visit the geographical center of the diocese of Dallas: St. Phillip’s Church in Sulphur Springs, Tex. I will preach at the 11am service and then, afterwards, talk about how believing in God is the beginning of an adventure.

    Upcoming book seminar: At St. Matthew’s in Dallas, Sunday, March 1, 5pm, we’ll discuss The Little Princesses by Marion Crawford, who was the governess to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret for some 17 years. The royal family, not without reason, took the publication of this book as a violation of trust, though readers have been grateful for its sympathetic insight into the girls’ education and life.

The Eucharist Prayer as a Story

 It begins with the invitation to lift up our hearts and give thanks to God, which is why it can rightly be called the Great Thanksgiving. It then unfolds as a story masterfully told. We read it (and hear it) as a coherent story that runs from the beginning of the universe to its end, a story that catches us up with all things in giving thanks to God.

    The shape of the story is like an hourglass. It begins with giving thanks in the broadest sense and it concludes with the longing that all history end in praise of God. At the opening we affirm it is “meet and right” or “right and just” for human beings to give thanks to God. We do so because he is the creator of all things. We do so also because he has given us salvation in Jesus Christ. And we do so by means of the action of the Holy Spirit. From the beginning, our thanksgiving is grounded in the Trinity. At the end the prayer wraps up everything that has been said, all the thanks and all the particular requests and desires and hopes that underlie the thanks. It turns all this—truly, all the longings of the universe—into praise of the vision of God, again identified trinitarianly. So it begins and ends with great breadth, the “everything” that God created at the beginning and the “everything” that is the substance of praise of God in the end.

    In between the prayer narrows, because it is only in Jesus Christ that this prayer is possible, and Jesus is a human being with his own story. That is to say, the story of Jesus is nestled at the heart of the story of the whole universe. This leads to a further narrowing of the hourglass. First we recall the entirety of Jesus’ life as, incarnate of the Virgin Mary, he lived and died as one of us, to reconcile us to his Father. Then we narrow to his death, to the cross on which, stretching out his arms of love, he offered himself as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. 

    The narrowest part of the hourglass comes next. We go to the night before he died, to the intimate space of his last supper with his friends. Even that is not our ultimate focus, because we bear down upon two moments in that final meal, the moments pertaining to the bread and the wine. Here the prayer moves in for a close-up that is almost, as we say, “in real time.” He takes bread. He breaks it. He gives thanks for it. He tells what the bread—this bread—really is: “This is my body, which is given for you.” Likewise with the cup: “This is my blood of the New Covenant, shed for you and for many.” And with each comes his command: to take, to eat, to drink.

    A story of such great, cosmic stretch—from the beginning of creation to the consummation of all things, which has at the middle this close-in focus on particular words over particular foods and the command given at that meal: such a story is not something to be rattled off casually or quickly. The story begins and ends big, and so should be the telling. But in the middle the voice should change, probably by slowing down a bit, probably by lowering volume a bit. In the middle it’s a “you are there” moment, going through particular actions and particular words that were done and said on that one particular night at the center of this story of everything.

    I once had a priest tell me just to clip through the prayer like it was a single story. I agree that it is a single story but disagree that that means we should clip through it. This priest was opposed to the idea that something “special” happens at the words over the bread and wine; he didn’t want any special attention paid to the middle of the prayer; he wanted the whole prayer to be said crisply without variation. This was because he opposed the “western” idea that something special happens when the words “This is my body [or blood]” are spoken.

    I am myself agnostic about when the transformation of the bread and the wine occurs; and nothing that I am saying requires the belief that the moment of change is at any particular place in the prayer. There are good theological arguments in favor of a variety of views. My point is not theological so much as literary. Rather than being read through crisply and without variation, the eucharistic prayer calls for a reading that brings out its inherent structure. To do so requires that we treat the special narrative, and especially the words Jesus said, differently than the rest of the prayer. A priest who does that is helping all of us take hold of the structure of the cosmic story, with its awesome pivot point in the midst of a supper with friends. And I think, moreover, to read it that way is simply good reading.

    I said above that, probably, this is accomplished by a small lowering of voice and slowing of pace. But it needn’t be done that way, nor need we have uniformity. What we priests should try to convey, however, is that we believe this really is the pivot point on which the world’s history has turned.

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    Out & About. This weekend, Feb. 7/8, I am to preach at All Souls’ Church in Oklahoma City; the services are at 5:30pm Sat., and on Sunday at 8 and 10am and 5pm.

    Sunday, Feb. 15, I get to visit the geographical center of the diocese of Dallas: St. Phillip’s Church, Sulphur Springs, Tex. I will preach at the 11am service and then, afterwards, talk about how believing in God is the beginning of an adventure.

    Upcoming book seminar: At St. Matthew’s in Dallas, Sunday, March 1, 5pm, we’ll discuss The Little Princesses by Marion Crawford, who was the governess to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret for some 17 years. The royal family, not without reason, took the publication of this book as a violation of trust, though readers have been grateful for its sympathetic insight into the girls’ education and life.