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A faithful presence of love in the absences of our city.

To Listen with Faith and Wonder

One day last week I was sitting in my office using an app to read the Book of Common Prayer morning prayer service to begin my day. One of the readings that day happened to be a familiar passage from Psalm 119, beginning with verse 105: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” It is a familiar verse, one that has been committed to memory since my days in Sunday School. As I read, I found myself skimming down the passage for something unfamiliar, something new that would provoke my thoughts.

As the prayer service came to a close, I read this Collect for that day:

Blessed Lord,

who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning:

help us so to hear them, to read, mark, and inwardly digest them

that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word,

we may embrace and for ever hold fast the hope of eternal life,

which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ,

who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.

Amen.

And just like that, I was stabbed with conviction. I wasn’t reading Scripture…I was browsing it like it was Facebook. “Old meme…political rant…invitation to like friend’s business page, blah blah blah – OOH! Justin Edgar’s in the Virgin Islands!” Or something like that.

This old prayer from the Anglican Church scolds my lazy scrolling and reminds me that hearing the voice of God in Scripture requires patience and humility. Faithfully reading the Bible means that we don’t wait for the text to amaze us. We have to sit with it, attend to it. Like eating meals – some of which are completely forgettable and some which might (might!) deserve to end up on social media – to feed our bodies, so we are to feed on Scripture, giving ourselves to meditation on it with a regularity as un-interesting as digestion.

I also realized in that moment that quite unwittingly my use of the internet was re-training my mind how to read the written word, scanning for links and clickbait. I’ve learned that I need to hold a written, bound, paper Bible because I instinctively read online content in an unhealthy way. What’s not lost on me, though, is how the Holy Spirit broke through my dullness using an app that included a prayer that is hundreds of years old. Maybe you’ve heard it said that “all truth is God’s truth”? Well, even the internet is God’s internet.

Wherever and however God speaks, it is our great privilege to listen with faith and wonder. We learn to be students, to read the text with increasing understanding all the while marveling that the God who speaks hasn’t stopped speaking to us.

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