Jumping into the Bible with both feet

A friend of mine told me this would happen that when I became a grandparent, it would be life-changing, life-challenging and an awful lot of fun. And one of the things I love to do the most with my grands is to read out loud to them. My wife and I like to take the kiddos to the library or the bookstore, and along the way we’ve built a pretty good little children’s library of our own. We keep the books at kid level, so they can freely pick out a book and either look at it themselves or ask one of us to read to them.

Now we come by this naturally. My wife’s parents were both teachers, and my mom was a librarian, and I still remember my father reading aloud to me and my brother when I was small.

And you know what? Children’s literature is amazing! Stories written for kids contain a lot of truth about life, the world, and what it means to be human. Adults would do well to read more children’s literature, because you never know what a rabbit, a stuffed bear, a dragon, a magical school bus, or a kid on a cosmic adventure might teach us!

Do you have a favorite children’s book? While we all have our favorites, there are two, that are favorites of mine and I think speak to our life as Christians hinted at in the collect and readings assigned for today.

The first is an oldie. The Monster at the End of This Book stars Grover of Sesame Street fame. Grover has read the title of the book and tries very hard to convince the reader to stop reading. Grover does not want us to get to the end of the book. From the very beginning, Grover “breaks the fourth wall” and talks to the reader directly. [And, for some reason, when I read this aloud to the Grands, my voice changes to become very Grover-like!] 

Of course, the book can’t go on without the reader reading, which makes Grover try even harder to stop us; and, I don’t want to give anything away, but the monster at the end of the book turns out to be Grover himself! 

Another wonderful children’s book is one you might never have heard of. It was written by Nancy Patz and is called Pumpernickel Tickle and Mean Green Cheese. In that story, Mom asks her son to go to the corner store and buy one loaf of pumpernickel bread, one pound of cheese, and one very fresh, very green, very big dill pickle. As the boy and his friend (a very silly stuffed elephant) walk through their Baltimore neighborhood, trying to remember the list and of course mixing it up into something very silly – of course, they forget what they were going to the store for! Still in the end, they finish their journey, get what they are after, and bring it home, where they have a nice lunch with Mom.

This is wonderful, I hear you say, but what’s this got to do with today’s readings? Well... Everything!  A few minutes ago we prayed, to God “who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning” that we’d have the grace “to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ....”

This is the only collect in the whole Book of Common Prayer that explicitly refers to the Scriptures themselves. It claims that God is the one who is the source and cause of the writing of Scripture. It does not get into the mechanics of how that happened; it simply says that God is the cause of Scripture. 

Episcopal priest Fr. Joshua Bowron suggests that we are encouraged to engage in Scripture in four ways:

First, we are invited to simply hear the Scriptures. Hearing is a funny thing because we can’t hear more with effort, it is just something we have to allow. We also cannot unhear things, can we? A lot of these stories are familiar, so put aside what you think you know and just listen! If we can hear with new ears, then we’ll be awakened to the newness and wonder of what God is doing. 

Next, the collect encourages us to read the Scriptures. How often do you read Scripture? Sunday mornings we get a great deal of Scripture, both from the lessons and in the liturgy, but how about Monday through Saturday? The Church has long given testimony to the transformative power of daily Bible reading. Forward Day-by-Day and The Daily Office are good places to start!

The collect now gives us a very funny word. What does it mean to “mark” the Scriptures? This prayer was written way before highlighters or even pens were invented, so it doesn’t mean that we mark up our Bibles literally, though doing that might be useful. (There is no prohibition against underlining or making notes in your Bible… I have an old Bible that is like an old friend to me because it has over fifty years of highlights, underlines, and notes in it!) But what “marking” means is that we stop from to time to time and see the gravity of a particular passage and then take the time to reflect and ponder it. We are invited to ask what it is saying to us. What was going on when it was first written? How have faithful people interpreted this passage over time? And in interrogating the passage in that way, we mark its power; mark how it makes us wonder; so we can ponder what God is saying to the people of God and then act on it.

We are encouraged to learn the Scriptures. For too long, Episcopalians have ceded knowledge of the Bible to other groups. I don’t know about you, but for a long time, I always felt kind of beat up by people who could quote chapter and verse at me, usually to tell me that I, or my tradition, was wrong about something—especially something I was passionate about! We should not be ashamed of what the Scriptures say and instead should know them well enough to live by them. This leads us to the last way of engagement described in today’s collect.

How do we inwardly digest the Scriptures? Now, isn’t that a strange image? Or maybe not! There is a rabbinic tradition that a small dab of honey is placed on a scroll of the Torah for children to lick to understand the sweetness of the word of God. St. Benedict urged his monks to ruminate upon Scripture throughout the day. Do you know what a ruminant animal is? It’s an animal that digests food in stages— you know, like a cow, chewing the cud. And maybe like one of those animals, we need to come back to Scripture time and time again in order to digest it properly. 

In other words, instead of keeping the Bible at a respectful distance, we are encouraged to jump into Scripture with both feet!

Very often, we simply accept what a particular passage says without much thought. That’s like stopping one’s ears and singing “la la la.” Instead, allow a passage to settle into your very being. Let it reside there. And while it’s there, allow it to inform your experience. Ask where you agree or disagree, where it causes a pinch, and where it challenges you to grow.  Go ahead and turn it over in your mind. See what happens. This kind of reading and rumination will keep the Scripture with you like a pebble in your pocket.

However you do it, jumping into the Bible with both feet will change you! This kind of conversation with Scripture, and Tradition and Reason is the launchpad for a new, dynamic relationship with God. Without this give and take, then the Bible simply becomes an idol ... or, worse, a dust-magnet. 

Remember, the Bible just didn’t pop out of the air fully formed and edited, but it was gathered over a long period of time… first in the Hebrew Scriptures and then in the early Church. In fact, it was the same Church council that gave us the Nicene Creed that finalized what would be in the Christian Bible…and that was 400 years after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension!

So how did the Church get along for four centuries without a finalized Bible in their homes and churches? Well, in much the same way we get along with the Scriptures that we have today… by simply being the Church! Like those early Christians, we are followers of Jesus Christ. We are his friends and apprentices who are learning and doing the work of Jesus every single day!

Today’s collect invites us to jump into the Bible with both feet because we are kind of like the “monster at the end of the book!” We are part of the community that wrote that book we call the Bible, the Church. It is fairly mind-bending to consider that the New Testament was written by people who gathered in their congregations just as we do every Sunday. And just like us, they told the story of Jesus and his followers. And just like us, they asked questions and worked out what it means to follow Jesus and how to faithfully live in community serving the people around us. They (and we!) imagined what God is up to in the world and where God is taking us! We are not only people of the book; we are experiencing what that book talks about every day!

Reading the Bible can be a solemn thing. Our lectors work hard to read it well (and they do!). But sometimes I like to imagine myself reading the Bible the way I read a story to my Grandkids, with voices, whimsey, and weight. And that’s how the Bible was remembered long before they wrote in scrolls or printed it in books… by telling the story together! So I invite you to imagine yourself, when you are reading the Bible, to go ahead and “be the monster at the end of the book” and find all the ways to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the text so that we will engage Scripture, and be transformed by it, and more and more live it. Because, as we do that, we become more and more the Gospel Story for a world that’s so desperate for hope, love, and Good News.

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Scripture for the Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 28, Year C, November 16, 2025

Website for St. Chad's Episcopal Church, Tampa, Florida

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Here is the bulletin for the Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, November 16, 2025, St Chad's Episcopal Church, Tampa, Florida.