A Lenten Reading Plan

 

 The season of Lent is a time of deepening our Christian discipleship.  If a Christian wishes to enhance the life of faith, one of the practices that we undertake must surely be reading our Bibles.  John Wesley called it "Searching the Scriptures."  We can crack our Bibles open randomly and read a couple of verses, to be sure.  But that hardly qualifies as "searching."  Searching implies intentionality.  It also strongly suggests an organized approach to the task.

For the season of Lent, our churches are offering a "Forty Day Lenten Reading Plan."  During this season, this resource directs us to daily readings from the Gospel of Matthew.  Over the course of these forty days, the Reading Plan will move us through the entire book in manageable increments.

Besides helping us read the entire gospel, as our congregations use this resource we will be entering into this discipline together.  There is power in understanding that, as we read a section of scripture on a given day, that our family, friends, neighbors and fellow church-members will be centering their thoughts on the same passage.

I hope that you will make use of this offering, and that it is a blessing for you.  The Reading Plan will be available in your worship bulletins on Sunday, February 11` and here.

I pray that this will be a blessing for us all.

The peace of the Lord be with you.

A Living, Breathing Bible

In our church Bible studies this week, we looked at John 8:1-10, which chronicles the story of the woman apprehended "in the very act of adultery."  I'm not going to spend time today dealing with the various curiosities within this pericope.  But I want to make an observation about the entirety of the the narrative.   

That observation is that these verses appear in a variety of formats in the several English translations that I consult.  Some versions have these verses in brackets [ ].  Others present the story in italics.  Some have verses 1-2o in a smaller font.   Yet others omit the reading from the body of the text altogether and include it as a long footnote.  In each case, there is a footnote that says something like "these verses are not contained in the oldest manuscripts" or "some ancient authorities omit these verses."

When these notes are pointed out, that observation confuses some people, and even threatens a few.  Many church folks understand scripture to be static, being written in a particular place and a specific time, then being preserved unchanged forever.  Even a brief look at much of the Old Testament and the New Testament demonstrate that this is just not the case.

I am kind of heartened by such an example.  The idea that scripture has an aspect of being a living, breathing, adapting thing helps accentuate its relevance to me.  It has the exact opposite effect than being threatening or confusing or faith-opposing.

So, thank you, biblical translators, for presenting the content and the intent of The Word of God.

The peace of the Lord be with you.