Scripture as Sacred Conversation

Welcome to the weekly Dulin Podcast, a ministry of Dulin United Methodist Church in Falls Church, Virginia. Each week, we share a short reflection on faith and life in community, exploring how God's grace moves among us and through us. We're glad you're here.

Hello, Dulin Church. It's me, James Henry, your pastor, here with another reflection. We've been working our way for the last three weeks, and this is our fourth through the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. If this is your first time hearing it, I'll just give you some broad overview. The Wesleyan quadrilateral was not something that John Wesley articulated for himself.

It was a reflection of scholars in the twentieth century, particularly Albert Outler, on his way of approaching faith, the way he came to understand it. Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, he brought all of those to bear. Now, we went in reverse order of the ones I just named it. We began with experience. We moved from experience to reason.

Last week, we talked about tradition. This week, we're ending last but not least, with tradition. Next week, we'll start with something new. But this week it's tradition. Of course, that word, as I was talking about it last week, that this week I'd be talking about tradition, Katie said to me, Katie the office manager and administrator at Doolin said to me, you can't think of that without thinking of Tevye's, you know, tradition.

Exactly. You can't. And now it is pinging in my head, but we're not talking about tradition. This week we're talking about scripture. So as I'm hearing tradition in my head, we're moving towards scripture.

And as we move towards scripture, I want to invite you to think about scripture with me perhaps in a different way than you have before. I want you to see scripture as an opportunity for you to be in dialogue, in conversation, if you will, with God. It's an opportunity to bring your questions, your concerns, your wondering about who and what God is for and to you, and listening for how it might respond. Now, I find one of the most helpful ways to read scripture, a form called Lectio Divina. Latin.

I know it's a Latin phrase, but it's stuck and it's stuck for even English speaking folks in the modern world. It really means essentially divine reading or sacred reading. And when we read the text, in this case it's scripture, but any sacred text you choose, you read it aloud to yourself, very important. The aloud part engages your body, gauges your vocal cords, gauges your hearing, and doesn't let you fall into simple patterns. So, often when we read just with our eyes, just with our mind, we don't feel the vibration.

We don't hear the words echo in a way that speaks. That's why we read scripture aloud in worship on Sunday mornings. If we're being honest, we read it so that as it's heard, the impact of it, the breath, the spirit of it can touch our lives right where we are. So Lectio Divina is reading the text aloud and listening, listening for the word, the phrase, the image that arises in you from the reading of the text. Now, you can do this in groups since one person might read it and then another and then another, and you listen each time to see what seems to echo in your open heart as to what God might be saying.

What questions arise for you in the text that you want to ask of God because those questions, responses can become prayer for you, a way of opening yourself to God and then sinking in more deeply so that you might figure out how this particular passage you're reading fits into your life. That allows scripture to become that kind of conversation partner I talked about. You know, whenever we talk about scripture, you are invited or many people would tell you that it is our primary authority. Even John Wesley seems to have imagined or spoken or written that scripture is the primary authority in your life. I'm not discounting that.

Don't hear me that way. Not saying that at all. I'm simply saying that scripture will speak to us each in different ways. And the authority it bears in part is the way we hear the stories and the poetry and the various the pieces that come to us as rules and laws and the various contexts in which we see faith lived out. Now, there is a way of approaching scripture that's about just over 200 years old.

And that's sort of a proof texting approaching scripture as inerrant. That doesn't trace its roots back to Jesus. It traces its roots back to the 1800s, and particularly in The United States. And that kind of reading it literally for face value and then listening to it, you know, scripture as inerrant, you might, you know, without error, is one way to read the scripture, as the scripture as an authority, an authority that is telling us what to do. What is most interesting to me is there was a period in my own life when that was my approach to Scripture and there were parts of Scripture that I think even people who take scripture literally discount, set aside, pay no attention to whatsoever.

Even when I was younger and did that, that's what I did. So how do you make that decision if it's all the same, if it's all without error? I have come to a place where I see scripture slightly differently. Not that I'm questioning whether or not it has error, that's not what it's about. For me, the way I see scripture is the faithful attempt of people who had a divine encounter to describe that encounter through story, song, prayers, poetry, rules, their divine experience was so inspiring to them that they felt like we needed to hear scripture.

The first thing you need to know about before it was ever written down, the way we get it now in written form translated from its original languages into, for me, English. I don't know what language you read. Most of you probably read English. That the translation before that, it began as an oral tradition. It began as people telling the stories.

They didn't have television. They didn't have screens. They didn't have any they had radio. They had storytellers. And one of the and oftentimes members of the household were storytellers.

As a part of preparation of dinner or after dinner or some other time, they would tell these stories. And there would be master storytellers who were a part of the community who would share these stories that remind people of who they were, where they came from. It's an origin story. It's not as much interested in history as it is in telling us, reminding us where we came from and who we are. And so when I think of scripture, I think of inspired individuals, many of them men and some of them women, who encountered God in ways that inspired them to speak about that encounter, where they saw God in the encounter, how they saw God in that encounter.

And if you've ever had an ecstatic experience of God in your own beyond words kind of way, you know how hard it is to describe. I can remember sitting in my in meditation about five, six years ago in my chair. And as I sat in my chair at that time, just kind of being present, I realized just how big God was, perhaps infinite, beyond words, and I realized I had no way of describing the experience I had. There were no words. I still all I can say to you, there were no words.

Somehow, I suddenly felt a part of something so much larger than myself that I can't even describe it. There are not words, and I'm not a poet. So as a non poet, those superpower, supercharged words of poetry, don't have to share with you. So when people experience that kind of super that overwhelming inspiration, there are moments when the best they can do is tell you a story with in ways that are almost visionary, seem like dreams. Occasionally, there are some stories in the Bible that seem like nightmares if you're reading them closely.

It doesn't sound, but that's the best way those inspired people could describe their experience. And it began in oral stories and then was later written down as they wanted to save those stories. They chose carefully which stories to save and then pass them along to us. So, they're meant to be stories that tell us a little bit about who we are, maybe a lot about who we are, about how human nature doesn't have seemed to have changed over the years, the ways that we express it and all of social media and all those kinds of things have changed. But the human being has someone who is not always kind to the neighbor, who makes judgments based on a variety of criteria that are not God's criteria.

Those kinds of things have always existed apparently. And the writers of scripture and the original storytellers from which they drew their material experience those as very real. And the Bible is a very real book that tells a story about people that sometimes did not get God at all and sometimes did. And we're meant to listen to those stories, to hear those stories, to be inspired by those stories, to ask questions about those stories and let them encounter us because they can help shape us. In many ways, this reflection today was slightly less about what John Wesley thought about scripture.

He probably did see it as a primary text from which to draw an understanding of how we practice our faith, how we are the church, ways to live. Is it authoritative for our lives? How it is authoritative for you is something you're gonna have to decide for yourself. I can't tell you that. I can tell you that I take scripture very seriously.

I look for all the hints, including in the original languages, about what someone was trying to tell us, what they were trying to inspire us to, what they were trying to warn us against. Scripture can be a powerful tool in shaping your faith. I encourage you to take it seriously. I encourage you to look at it, to think about it, to read it, to let it speak to you. And if you have questions to challenge and discuss it with people you know and trust, reach out to your pastor if you want to and talk about it.

These are all possibilities. Scripture is a wonderful tool. It's a wonderful dialogue partner, conversational partner that invites us to know God and ourselves more. And I hope that it will be that for you. Thanks so much for joining me this week.

Next week we'll start something new. It's not clear to me what that is yet. I'm still working on it. But next week we'll start something different about the practicalities of faith. Thanks so much for joining me.

I wish you all of the very best. Until the next time we see one another.