THE SPIRITUAL PRACTICE OF STUDY
Texts: Luke 1: 1-4 and Psalm 119: 97-103

"O most excellent Theophilus" is how Luke begins his Gospel. "Theophilus" is a Greek name signifying that Luke is writing for the larger Greek-speaking world.

Theophilus means literally "lover," philus, of God, theo. Is this a symbolic name? O you who love God, who wish to love God, once-upon-a-time lover of God, cautious lover, hopeful lover: This gospel is for you!

I

I invite you to a reading together of Luke’s Gospel, verse by verse, day by day from December through April, Advent to Eastertide.

We have mailed you and included in today’s order of worship a brochure with a daily reading schedule. There’s a guide to reading Luke day by day as spiritual practice.

The brochure also includes the corresponding page numbers of a superb new commentary and translation of Luke by N.T. Wright, currently Anglican Bishop of Durham, one of the world’s great New Testament scholars who has been one of our Jesus in the 21^st Century guests.

The book is available for purchase in the church office. It is a handy paperback so that you can carry it with you. Let Luke be your daily companion these five months. Also included is my preaching schedule as it follows the readings.

Normally we read the Bible in church in a method called lectio-selecta: A schedule of selected readings which cover the main texts of a Gospel, but cannot cover them all. This is the basis of the church’s three-year Common Lectionary and of The Bible Workbench.

But the church throughout the centuries has also used the method called lectio-continua, a continuous reading through a book of the Bible so that every word, every verse is read together over a period of time.

If you embark on this journey it will be a strange and exciting one. You will read texts you’ve never read before, or noticed before, meet a side of Jesus you’ve not met before. You will encounter what Karl Barth called "The Strange New World of the Bible."

E. M. Forster wrote at the beginning of one of his novels:

The past is a foreign country.
They do things differently there.

So is a Gospel. The passport is in your hand. You will meet things familiar and unfamiliar. But the Spirit is your guide. The Spirit who inspired these scriptures will open your mind, heart and imagination to the truth meant for you there.

As you read each passage I invite you to keep three questions in mind:

Who am I?
What is God calling me to do, to be?
Who is my neighbor? The one I am commanded to love as myself.

I think Jesus would like these questions.

To read the Bible as sacred scripture is to read it differently than as literature or history or comparative religion. It is to read in hope of personal and communal transformation...in the hope of being formed, changed, rearranged in the reading.

II

The opening verses of Luke tell us why Luke wrote his Gospel.

I am reminded of one of my favorite scenes in a movie, Fahrenheit 451. It is set in a totalitarian regime where reading books is forbidden. Police squads break into houses, confiscate all the books and set them on fire. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns.

There is, however, a community of resistance, a fugitive community hidden deep in the woods who have carried the great books of civilization with them into the woods. There they are memorizing the books and teaching them to their young so that the books will survive.

You see an old man reciting to a young boy: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Another is reciting to a young person: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Now move with me to the first century, forty-fifty years after Jesus’ death. The gospel of Jesus has to this point been carried on by oral transmission. There were the eyewitnesses who actually knew Jesus and followed him. And there were what our text calls "stewards of the word," those N.T. Wright describes as "accredited story-tellers" whom the community trusted as faithful and reliable tellers of the words and stories of Jesus. There were also at the time pamphlets passed around, small collections of Jesus’ sayings and Jesus’ stories.

But now catastrophic times had come upon them. The Jewish rebellion against Rome had brought down upon them the full fury of Roman military power. Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed, along with many Jewish and Christian communities. The first generation of eyewitnesses was passing away.

Maybe we could call this drama "Fahrenheit 98.6." The temperature for sustaining human life was no longer adequate for the passing along of the gospel. The community needed written records which could carry the message of Jesus to the world.

Something more was now needed: The gospel of Jesus put down in written form, not just parts of it but all of it: Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection. It needed to be put down in "orderly" form. Luke twice in these first four verses uses the word "orderly." He must have been a Presbyterian. This was Luke’s holy task: An orderly and reliable account of Jesus’ life so people would know the truth of the gospel.

Luke was chosen by the church in the next few hundred years as one of the four to be the benchmark, the canon, the measuring stick of what the gospel of Jesus was all about. It may be my favorite gospel. Come, let’s read it together.

III

I entitled today’s sermon, the Spiritual Practice of Study. I cannot imagine a more deadening title. Practice? That’s a pretty dreary word. Spiritual? That’s good for a yawn. And Study? Hardly a word to raise your heart beat.

Study. Most of us associate it with the work we have to do to cram for an exam we don’t want to take. Study? No, thanks. Homework for Jesus? I’ll pass.

So the word "study" may not be very inviting. It, frankly, is for me, but I’m in an odd and small population group. I love libraries and studies lined with books. But for some study is like swimming is to me - - which I’d describe as staying alive when you’re in the water! I like the beach and the pool, the sunshine, the relaxation and an occasional swim. But if you told me that part of the description of following Jesus was swimming laps, I’d say, Show me the way to Buddha.

There must be something more to the spiritual practice of study than study! And there is.

Study is the opening of the self - - mind, heart, imagination - - to all the ways God teaches us and comes near to us. We all learn in different ways. Maybe learning is a better word than study. Our curricula for preschoolers, Godly Play; for elementary children, God’s Garden; and for teenagers, Kingdom Quest, recognize the many different intelligences and different ways of learning.

Some of us learn best by beholding with the eyes, others by hearing with the ears, others by reading and writing, others by doing things with the hands, making things.

Some people look at a paragraph the way I do at a lap lane in a swimming pool.

Study as spiritual practice is learning of God in all the ways we learn of God.

There is learning through scripture and through religious tradition. Through worship, liturgy and the arts, and through personal experience.

There is also learning of God through God’s creation. The Celtic Christians said they had two Bibles: the Book of Scripture and the Book of Creation.

Then there’s the learning that comes from within, from what the Quakers call the "inner light," the light of God within all persons because they were created in the image of God.

Study as spiritual practice is the opening of the self - - mind, heart, imagination - - to God in some regular way, for spiritual practices are forms of lived, embodied faith woven into the rhythm of our lives.

As Christians our spiritual practice is centered on the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, he the wisdom and love of God enfleshed, embodied.

"Take my yoke and learn of me," Jesus said, "for I am gentle and lowly of heart, and you will find rest for your souls." Learn of me. Walk with me. Disciple literally means learner.

Dallas Willard says that to be a disciple is to be an apprentice, and an apprentice is someone who has decided to be with another person, under appropriate conditions so that they can do what that person does and be who that person is.

Jesus is teaching us how to live in the kingdom of God.

Psalm 119 is the psalm from which we read from in our opening sentences. It is the longest psalm in the Bible, 176 verses. Its theme is the word of God. It is an acrostic psalm, a section of verses written for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It’s like you writing a psalm, each stanza beginning with a letter of the English alphabet.

Stanza One: Almighty God....
"Stanza Two: Blessed is the one....
Stanza Three: Come unto me....

And one to Zebra:

Zebras are a gift of God
Their stripes always amaze
How dull would our creation be
If everything were beige.

Two images stand out in the passage we read this morning. The first is:

Your word is sweet to my taste sweeter than honey to my mouth.

Can you think of times when the word of God has been sweet to your mouth?

Don Wakefield, a writer, woke up one morning screaming. His life had become a horror to him: alcohol, failed relationships, loneliness. He decided to take a pilgrimage across the country to his parents’ home and visit their graves. One night in a hotel room he opened a Bible and read words which he once knew, words whose meaning and familiar cadences became life to him.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want
Thou makest me to lie down in green pastures
Thou leadest me beside the still waters
Thou restoreth my soul.

The words became sweet like honey to him. This led him to recovery of soul and life.

I remember the first church I pastored in Kentucky tobacco farming country. It was a one-room schoolhouse structure built in the nineteenth century. Somewhere along the line honey bees had made their home in the walls of the church. In the summertime when it was hot you could see honey dripping down the inside walls from ceiling to the wainscoating! What a great image of the church: Hive of the word of God, honey dripping down the walls.

Later in a church improvement campaign they covered the inside walls with paneling from Lowes: Plywood panels with a plasticized surface decorated with a French "toile" design, French village scenes. I liked the honey better.

The second phrase that caught my attention:

Your commandments make me wiser
than my enemies
They always stand by me.

We face many kinds of enemies, inside and out: Persons, circumstances, temptations, challenges. But God’s commandments, God’s teachings, make us wiser than our enemies. "They always stand by me."

It’s like the great 60's song by Ben. E. King also recorded by U-2, Otis Redding and John Lennon:

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only
Light we see.
No I won’t be afraid
No I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand,
Stand by me.