It’s an old book. An old, old book – the Bible! The oldest stories were first being told about 6,000 years ago, while the content of the stories describe happenings back to the beginning of time. So why bother reading a book that is so old and has stories about people who lived 2,000 to 6,000 or more years ago? What can anything in the Bible have to say to us today? The Bible was written in pre-pre-industrial times, maybe not cave-dwelling times, but almost. So what can it say to us who live in the midst of a technological boom? Isn’t the Bible obsolete, with a few nice phrases?
Yet the truth is that you can pick up this old, old, old book and be moved by what it says, be changed by what is recorded in these pages. People’s lives, not only in past generations but in our present generation as well, have been transformed by this book. That is the power of the Bible.
I love reading the Bible, even the stories that at first are difficult or hard to understand. There is something wonderfully mysterious about coming back to a story I’ve read hundreds of times before, and suddenly seeing something new – a word or a turn of phrase or a nuance that I hadn’t noticed on previous readings. Suddenly the story takes on new meaning and new power in my life.
I don’t always try to make sense of what I read – sometimes I just can’t. I may not get what the words mean, but I read them and let them float around me. I trust that sometime, when the time is right, I will understand what they mean for me and my life, and for our congregation.
There is peace for me in reading scripture.