Chewing on Scripture

I recently read a study showing that the average Christian family owns nine Bibles. If you stacked all the Bibles sitting in American homes, the tower would rise 29 million feet, nearly 1,000 times the height of Mount Everest. And if you don’t own one, you can take one from just about any hotel or motel room in the country — there are 1.5 billion Gideon Bibles around the world. So very many Bibles, and yet the modern church is remarkably illiterate about Scripture. The Bible is usually an impressive dust catcher on a bookshelf somewhere in the house, but far too few of us are familiar with its contents. Knowledge and intimacy with the Bible has become like a college elective course: an optional addition to our lives, but not one necessary
for graduation.

This coming year, you are invited to do something that will probably strike equal parts excitement and fear in you. This year, as an entire community, St. Peter’s by-the-Sea will read the Bible from start to finish. We will take it down, dust it off, open its pages, and read for ourselves the words that for 3,000 years have offered people a real encounter with the Living God. This is an invitation to make a bold step in your own spiritual maturation and open for yourself the Word of God. The point isn’t to boost our pride or vanity, or just fill our heads with more information. No, this is an exercise of faith in which we will allow ourselves to be brought into the presence of God
for the positive transformation of our lives.

In his book Eat This Book, Eugene Peterson writes about a single Hebrew word, hagah, which appears numerous times in Scripture and is usually translated “meditate.” For example, in Psalm 1 a blessed person is said to delight in the law of the Lord, on which “he meditates (hagah) day and night.” But in Isaiah 31, Peterson points out that hagah receives a different translation: growl (“a lion and young lion growls over its prey”). Peterson writes that the word “growl” better captures the essence of hagah, and the nature of what we’re supposed to be about when we read the Bible. Like a lion growling in delight and contentment, we are meant to savor the words of Scripture slowly and carefully. We are meant to chew on them, to take them and feel them nourish and change us.

For a year, all of us are invited to hagah — chew, growl over, savor — the story of God’s creation, love and redemption of the world. Parts of it will be hard or surprising, parts of it will be comforting, but all of it will be of God, so all of it will be life-giving. I hope you’ll join me.