The Discipline of Reading and Meditating on Scripture

As we near the end of Lent, I’d like to offer a brief reflection on the final discipline mentioned in the Ash Wednesday liturgy, which is “reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.” It’s been pointed out by many that we are “storied” creatures. As the author Joan Didion wrote in her essay “The White Album,” “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” Where does that “narrative line” come from? For Christians, our narrative is rooted in scripture. As Jamie Smith notes in his book Desiring the Kingdom, “the Scriptures provide the story of which we find ourselves a part, and thus the narration and absorption of the story is crucial to give us resources for knowing what we ought to do.”

How is it, then, that we allow the narrative of scripture to become the narrative by which we live? First, we acknowledge the power that stories have to form and shape us, and that, as British rock singer Rod Stewart reminds us, “Every Picture Tells a Story.” We live in a culture that is bombarded by images—not only TV, movies, and billboards, but a constant stream of GIFs, selfies, and YouTube clips—that carry within them implicit narratives about the nature of the world and the good life. We are also bombarded by words—not only printed or sung words, but shouted words from cable news personalities, each attempting to tell a story that will shape the listener into a certain kind of person, the kind of person that will, it is hoped, consume more of their words.

If we hear the words of scripture on Sunday morning, yet all week are accosted with images and words telling rivals stories, which story will, ultimately, become our narrative line? Allowing scripture to become the source of our narrative world requires intentional engagement with scripture, intentional abstention from large quantities of rival stories, and a commitment to hear the stories carried in our culture with ears formed by scripture, so we can separate the metaphorical wheat from the chaff.

I’m concerned that, by and large, our narrative lines as believers today are created not by scripture, but rather by the massive quantity of images and words each of us consume on a daily basis, most of which are created to evoke certain emotions, whether lust, fear or greed, that actually propel us away from the story the Bible tells. I wonder what it would look like for each of us to take some kind of an audit of the images and words that we consume day to day, and ask how often are we reflecting on these images and words in light of the narrative line of scripture—the line that says God created the cosmos in love, marking each human creature with his very image, but the first humans rebelled against God; yet God, who is rich in mercy toward his image-bearing creatures and the entire cosmos, sent Jesus, knowing that through his life, death, and resurrection, the entire cosmos, and especially the image-bearers, might be healed; and now God, through the Spirit, is gathering a community from every “tribe, tongue, and nation” around Jesus, in order to worship, to live in community, and to serve the mission of God—namely reconciling the mortally wounded creation to himself through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

When the words and the images tempt us away from this narrative line, toward a line that seeks to divide people based on race, ethnicity, or gender; toward a line that creates separate classes of people—the good and the evil, the right and the wrong, the just and the unjust; toward a line that renders divine-image-bearing humans as disposable, whether the unborn, the disabled, the elderly or the immigrant; toward the line that teaches us to fear that which looks and sounds different; toward the line that says divine-image-bearing creatures can become objects for our pleasure, whether sexually or through abusive labor—we reject these words and images, and we are drawn back to scripture, always back to scripture.

In order to do this well, though, we need to give ourselves to this practice of reading and meditating on scripture, and we need one another, as my own reading of scripture is inevitably imperfect, so we need each other, gathered around the text, inviting the Spirit to teach us, to form us, to shape us. Not only that, but we need the church throughout time and space, as we are inevitably limited by our own cultural and social and temporal location. In other words, part of what it means to deny ourselves and take up our cross is to say no to the rival stories told about life and give ourselves to the story God is telling in and through the scripture.

Finally, as Jamie Smith notes in the quote above, we find ourselves not only learning the story but actually participating in the story—taking our place within it, finding our unique role. Pastor and author Eugene Peterson once told the story of his grandson sitting on his lap and saying to him, “Grandpa, tell me a story, and put me in it!” Peterson recounts responding to his grandson’s request by realizing that that is exactly what God has done for each one of us. The only question is whether we will, to use the words of Thomas Cranmer in the Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent, “hear, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the words of scripture in such a way that we might find our place in the one, True narrative line that God continues to tell.

Peace,

Chris