Church Voices

How sweet are your words to my taste,  
sweeter than honey to my mouth!
Psalm 119.103

If you have ever investigated techniques for losing weight you have come across the advice to slow down when eating your food. Many times the advice includes references to French traditions which turn a meal into a shared experience with friends, that includes savoring your food.  The end result is that you eat less food, and still feel full, and so you eat less calories without having to eat rice cakes and oat bran. 

The march of progress have brought us many excellent advances.  The printing press has brought cheap Bibles to the average person.  An excellent advance that we all applaud. However, what we may not have considered is that this advance fundamentally changed the way we use scripture.

Imagine you are part of the early church.  You have the opportunity to hear pieces of scripture at gatherings of the early church.  You are able to hear pieces of the old testament on the Sabbath at temple if you happen to live near enough to one.  But what you take with you on a regular basis is what you hold in your mind.  Now, everyday for you doesn’t include pen or paper so you’ve become very adept at remembering important information, but what you can remember is far less than what you can carry around with you in a Bible produced on a printing press that will be invented in 1400 years. 

So how do you interact with scripture?  Chances are you won’t be going to Bible studies that methodically parse scripture verse by verse, and you won’t be looking up individual words for study.  Instead you’ll be contemplating small chunks of scripture for days if not weeks at a time.  Savoring each word, examining it from every angle, considering the implications for every facet of life.

Lets say you and I set up a meeting at a coffee shop at 8AM.  How many minutes past 8AM does it take you to pull out your cell phone and tell me to get my late carcass over there?  Five minutes?  Maybe ten if you’re particularly patient.  And what do you do while waiting?  Are you listening to music?  Playing games on your phone?  Working on your laptop? 

On the other hand, if you were living in a world without instant communication, where travel involved using your two legs or riding something with four how much more patient would you be?  Would it be unreasonable to wait hours for an appointment?  Or even days if you were meeting in a distant city?  What would you do while waiting or traveling?  You’ve got time, and you’ve got scripture in your head.  What do you do? Contemplate scripture.

I wonder if we miss out on some of the sweetness of scripture when we take a buffet style approach to it.  So many times I hear about the shallowness of a particular church, or of Christians in general.  It may be just plain old laziness or it may be the entire paradigm that has been created by mass production is the problem.