Meditations of the Heart

Brand New

Happy New Year! I hope that you all had an incredible Christmas and a safe New Year last night. It’s good to spend the first day of the year together. I think that we are going to have a great year, regardless of what gets thrown our way.

While the calendar rolling over to Jan 1 doesn’t really change anything for us, it is a marking of a new season, a new era so to speak. The general culture likes to mark this as a time to do something different. We commit to new practices, gym memberships, healthy eating, actually using a budget when planning our finances, etc.

And I think thats all really good stuff because it’s important to look at what’s not working in our lives and make meaningful changes and rearrangements if there is a gap between who we are and who we want to be. So I think that as a church we should embrace this as a time for reflection on our own practices. Where can we as individuals and as a community improve? Where is there a gap between who we are and who we want to be? And then what are we going to do in order to close that gap?

Notice I didn’t say what are we willing to do… because will power, I have found, is not good enough. We have to actually do things, and we do things that actually bring change by establishing habits. Habits protect us from our failing human will. Habits are what actually produce behaviors.

So for the next 5 weeks we are going to be in a sermon series called “Brand New” and it’s called that appropriately because it’s not only a new series, but it’s a new year, and more importantly it is going to revolve around developing 5 spiritual disciplines this year that will ignite your passion for Jesus, stretch your love for your neighbors, and transform your spiritual journey.

Today we are going to talk about one of the most fundamental but least practiced spiritual disciplines: Scripture Meditation.

Jewish Meditation Literature

Reading the Bible is hard. I know that it is, it’s not an easy book to understand. Sure parts of it seem pretty straightforward, but we are dealing with an ancient book that is beyond the scope of how our modern American minds have been trained to digest literature and information. First of all, it’s a collection of many different literary styles. It’s got narrative, law code, poetry, rhetorical letters, and prophetic writings. And even though we have some sense of how to read these types of literature because they have modern iterations, what we have to realize is that there is a time and culture gap that we are still trying to understand.

I say all of that because we simply can’t just sit down, read the Bible in one shot and know all of the information. The Bible is not a history book or a straight forward step by step user manual for how to have a happy life. It certainly can teach us history and teach us how to have a happy life, but to treat the Bible in a simplistic fashion is to miss out on what the Bible actually is, and usually causes harm to be done, because if we take everything literally in the Bible then we would be owning slaves and stoning our own children amongst other unthinkable practices in our modern age.

What we need to understand is that the Bible is Jewish Meditation Literature. And what I mean by that is that your Bible, well 64 of its 66 books were written by Jewish people. And the 2 that weren’t (Luke and Acts) were written by a Gentile man who was so deeply steeped in Jewish culture and the Hebrew Bible that even those 2 books qualify under the genre of “Jewish Literature.”

What I mean by meditation literature is that it is not meant to be something that is read once, or infrequently. The Bible is written in a way that it requires us to meditate on it, which simply means to digest and redigest and discuss and discover and reread in an attempt to come to a deeper understanding of what it is teaching us about God and how we are called to live in our modern world based on what was written to an ancient world.

The Bible came to be over a period of thousands of years, and in its earliest forms it was transmitted through oral tradition, meaning that it was memorized and recited. The psalms in particular paint a picture for us about how our ancient Israelite ancestors meditated on scripture.

These words come from Psalm 119:9-19

Psalm 119:9–19 NRSV

How can young people keep their way pure? By guarding it according to your word. With my whole heart I seek you; do not let me stray from your commandments. I treasure your word in my heart, so that I may not sin against you. Blessed are you, O Lord; teach me your statutes. With my lips I declare all the ordinances of your mouth. I delight in the way of your decrees as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts, and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word. Deal bountifully with your servant, so that I may live and observe your word. Open my eyes, so that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. I live as an alien in the land; do not hide your commandments from me.

I want us to just take a look at these verbs that relate humans to God’s word:

guard, seek, treasure, teach, declare, delight, meditate, fix, not forget, live, observe, behold

What all of these show us is that the attitude of the original benefactors of scripture towards those scriptures was one of loving action. They viewed it as something that was meant to take the main stage in their lives, to be of highest priority -- Breathed in and out, lived, cherished, and sought after.

Now this is idealistic, and likely Israel had periods where the people truly lived this out, and as we know from scripture itself, there were periods of time that they totally neglected this practice. So if you’re like… man I do not like the Bible that much… you are in good company.

But there is an astonishing trend within even very fundamentalist denominations of Christianity of neglecting Bible reading. I mean sure we go to church and the preacher reads the Bible to us. And we find inspirational bible verses on facebook and instagram. But people generally read their Bible less and less as time goes on. And maybe that’s because it’s weird and hard to understand in places. But that’s not a good reason not to read it. But perhaps it’s more important that we focus on why we should read our Bibles.

Operation Bernard

In the spring of 1945, an Austrian farm girl named Ida Weisenbacher was awoken by Nazi Soldiers knocking on her door. She was ordered to hitch up her horse and wagon, and they began loading crates onto it. Then they had her drag the crates to a nearby lake that was not accessible by truck. Wagon load after wagon load went to and then into the lake. Ida knew better than to ask what was within the crates.

By the time this occurred, World War 2 was coming to an end. Hitler was dead, and Allied forces from the US and Britain were barreling into Germany from the West while hoards of Russians were bearing down on Berlin from the east. Nazi leadership knew that they would soon be forced to surrender, and so they began to hide the treasure that they had amassed in mountain caves, and possibly even lakes. This fact became quite well known, and folks began looking for this wealth that Hitler had stolen from holocaust victims and the rest of the world as he barreled across Europe.

In 1999 a recovery crew went to the lake near Ida’s home, and after days of searching found what appeared to be remnants of the crates. Upon further inspection, they found that they were filled with paper, which began to disintegrate as soon as they were touched. But some were brought carefully to the surface, where their true nature, and the Nazi’s biggest secret was revealed.

Those crates were filled with counterfeit British currency. Hundreds of Millions of British pounds, which the Nazi’s had planned to airdrop over the UK in order to flood the British system with fake currency and cripple its economy.

A mass influx of fake currency into an economic system is disastrous. It not only devalues actual real currency, but it creates panic which in turn lowers both consumer and seller confidence. What if what I’m being paid in is worthless? What if its fake? How could they trust any bill being given? The British pound would have been rendered useless. Un-trustable. Completely counterfeit, even if it was a real bank note.

I spent some time early in my vocational career working at a mall retail store called American Eagle as a cashier, and next to each register was a book of commonly used counterfeit US bills. What’s important to know is that for a counterfeit bill to be useful, it only has to be good enough. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and so this book was a means of helping us to identify some of the flaws that were noticeable to the naked eye. But let’s be honest, what 20 year old is going to memorize all of that.

In fact, before modern technology, the best practice for identifying counterfeit currency was not to study all of the fakes… it was to study the real stuff. If you know what a real bill looks like, it’s much easier to spot what’s bogus.

And this is the point for telling you all of this… we live in a world where there’s a lot of people writing and preaching in ways that are easily accessible. The internet has connected us to information in an incredible way. But when we relinquish ourselves of the responsibility of studying, reading, and meditating on the scriptures, then we are turning over that responsibility to other people. Which can be ok, but it does not allow us to critically engage in recognizing what is from God and what is not. It allows us to be manipulated, to accept a counterfeit interpretation of scripture that can really cause harm to us and to the world around us.

And a counterfeit interpretation of Scripture, a false Gospel being spread, harmful practices done in the name of God and the Bible make everything that we are trying to accomplish as Christians suspect to the greater world. Our witness is compromised by counterfeit teaching, and it is on us as individuals to study the real thing so that we can spot the fakes, reject them, and raise consumer confidence in the message of Christ.

Now I’m not saying that we shouldn’t listen to others, actually quite the opposite. Scripture is meant to be discussed and discovered in community. But what we need is to be aware of and comfortable with the contents of our Bibles for ourselves so that we can ask questions when the person on the internet or in the pulpit says something that just doesn’t seem right.

Seeking Truth

Today we celebrate the Epiphany, which is the revelation of Jesus Christ to 3 pagan astronomers, who dropped everything to come and find this Christ Child. I think that their story has a rather deep connection to this discussion. They were likely meditating on prophetic Israelite literature from the book of Micah which talked of a new king coming, the same book which King Herod had his scribes verify.

These men were led to meet the savior through their curiosity and knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures.

And I believe that this is very much the point of the Bible. It is a collection of writings that invite us to seek and come face to face with Jesus of Nazareth, this baby who was born in a manger and who grew up to be the savior of the world. This Jesus was and is the central hope of the entire Biblical story, which was realized in the manger in Bethlehem and on the Cross in Golgatha.

So the invitation to read the Bible is an invitation to seek out the truth of this man Jesus and how giving up everything to follow him is the ultimate goal of this strange collection of Jewish Meditation Literature that we call “The Holy Scriptures.”

It is an invitation that does not expire, and it is an invitation that does not only ask you to come once or twice, but continually for the entirety of your life as you continue on your journey to become more and more like Jesus.

Read Scripture

So this year, I’m inviting you to read scripture. And not just to have the willingness to read scripture, but for you to actually create a habit of it. As a church we are going to follow a scripture reading plan that is posted on our church website, that will come to you each week in the news blast, and will be posted on facebook. It’s a commitment of 15-20 minutes a day, reading about 3 chapters and often watching a short explainer video that will help you not only read but understand what’s happening.

I can’t stress enough how much this is going to help you. Especially when you come to a grinding halt in some of the very difficult parts of the Bible. But I also want to invite you to ask questions. Ask me questions, talk about it with one another. Do whatever you’ve got to do to keep moving forward through when it gets weird.

As believers we believe that this strange book is breathed out and inspired by God, that it contains everything necessary for salvation, that it leads us to Jesus, and that it does introduce us to God’s wisdom for how humans are called to conduct themselves in this world.

Reading it, meditating on it, and allowing it to guide us as we travel along this journey of discipleship is the greatest gift that we can give to ourselves this year.