This room has a rose window. You can’t see it now unless you turn and look up behind you. Maybe on your way out today, you’ll give it a closer look. A rose window, as you may know, takes its name from its shape: it is circular, most often with lovely petal-shaped figures extending outward to the perimeter from a central circle. Great cathedrals have them; many smaller churches have them too.
The rose window in our church is unlike any I know. It has lovely colors but not the thrilling, royal colors usually seen on such windows. Most unique is the design of the central circle. Typically the core circle of a rose window has the most dazzling design. Often it contains some depiction of the exalted Christ. Not so our window; the center of the rose is a simple blue circle on which is spread an open Bible. That is all.
I’ve asked around and no one seems to have any story about that window. It must have been part of this building’s original design – which means that someone in this church back in 1880 wanted the center of the great window to be the Bible, opened up. And ever since the day that window was set in place, light has entered this room through the glass with the opened Bible on it. Through the pages of this book a steady light is shining. Time after time, presenting ourselves to the scriptures we discover a luminous word.
Someone said as much in the text we’ve read and sung today: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” That line comes from Psalm 119, which is an amazing piece of writing. It’s an acrostic of impressive proportions. All eight lines of the first stanza begin with the Hebrew letter for A. All eight lines of the second stanza start with the Hebrew letter for B. There are twenty-two stanzas following this pattern, one for each letter of that alphabet. It’s an ABC times eight. And all of it is a meditation on the value of scripture. The same message marches through the alphabet in 176 variations. The result is like a kaleidoscope: turn it, turn it, turn it; the pattern keeps shifting while staying continuous. In its every turn Psalm 119 makes a new claim for scripture. Today’s verse is its most famous: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” It comes from the stanza where all the lines start with the Hebrew letter for N. If I were preaching today from that whole stanza, I’d have to say, like the folks from Sesame Street, “The sermon today is brought to you by the letter N.” But the first line is enough for now.
I’m drawn to it because what it claims, so far as I can tell, is not claimed much at all by the likes of us. I want to speak very plainly about this, especially to you who, like me, have had a home in the mainline churches or in what is called the liberal wing of the church. To us has been given, among other things, the findings of critical scholarship on scripture. We’ve learned some things our grandparents didn’t know about the ancient cultures, worldviews and prejudices, about the ordinary people behind this book. What’s more, we’re aware of how people have used this book as a weapon, in the past to oppress people of color and still to oppress women, homosexuals, and the poor. Doing this, they wave Bibles. Opposing them, and having a more complicated sense of what the Bible is, people like us typically back away from the Bible, regarding it from a distance that is either critical and cool or bewildered and confused.
Maybe we’ve spent so much energy saying what the Bible is not that we’ve left no room for what it is. I’ll make the first part easy now. Here is what the bible is not. It is not God. It is not a pure and perfect disclosure of God. It is not without the contingencies of certain cultures and times. It’s not without the real limits of human knowledge, and speech, and imagination. It is not a science book. It is not a monolithic code of belief and behavior whose every sentence carries the same weight.
But having said all that to people who mostly already agree, I should hasten to add: So what? Does anyone actually think that such knowledge amounts to an achievement that’s worth much of anything? Does anyone actually think that knowing what the Bible isn’t makes us superior to it, makes us finished with it, and it finished with us? All that stuff I said is nothing but preamble. It doesn’t close the book but opens it, opens it wider for our serious and reverent entry into it. If we engage this book, reading and reflecting with humility and with openness and with even the slenderest, most tentative receptivity, it does bear to us the living Word of God. Light shines from it, necessary light, light shining from the One who is perfect love and who is all truth.
To say the Word of God is light is to suggest that our situation amounts to something like darkness, and so it does. Our present darkness affects us in many ways. It keeps us, for example, from rightly seeing who we are, but scripture shines reliable light on the subject of our identity. The stories in the Bible give us back our memory, show us an image of who we were meant to be. The same light also reveals our faults, sweeps across the ruins we’ve made of things. The Bible is our critic, a fierce critic of me and of you, of the church, and of nations, of all who abuse and distort God’s gracious intent. So scripture shines the light of good memory and it shines a keen critical light. And it spotlights how the wrongs may be righted by the turning of life, the power of grace to create mercy and justice, new life. And the light we have longed for most of all is found also in scripture, though not in the full exposures we might have wished for. I mean that through these pages shine glimmers and flashes of our ultimate hope. For the darkest realities we face – grief, death, the victory of arrogant violence in this world – in that darkness a light shines, and that light, however dimly we see it from here, holds the face of Christ, our hope. God’s future and our future look like Christ.
But according to our text, the light of scripture isn’t scanning ahead for a face so much as it’s aimed downward to the feet. “Your word is lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Whoever wrote this has movement in mind, a life moving through the dark. For many of us, life does not move. We’re stuck where we are, paralyzed by uncertainty or fear or the fact that nothing we can see is compelling enough to draw us. Others of us are being pushed forward in ways we don’t want to go and are so afraid of what we cannot see. But here for the feet is a lamp and for the path a light – maybe not as bright as we wanted, but light enough, light enough to move by. Light enough to move toward more light, light enough to move toward Christ, and light enough to know that Christ already walks with us.
The psalm says, and all the saints agree, that this light emerges from attending seriously and deeply to scripture’s word. It’s a journey we’d all do well to undertake. At one level we’re doing it now. Worship at this church includes a real commitment to hearing scripture. Stacey and I mean for our sermons to be serious attempts at helping biblical texts have their say with us all. So being here, if you wish, is a chance to discover some light from the book. And we offer other opportunities. There are “second-hour” classes after worship which include discussion and study of scripture. There are small groups meeting at other times, part of whose mission is to read and discuss and act upon scripture together. Such a group might well be good for your soul. As would something else: on your own, taking time to open this book, to read, to reflect, to ask for light, and as it is given, to walk by it.
There are people in this room who used to read and consider some portion of scripture every day and for whatever reason have long let go of the habit. What might it mean for you, what might it give you, to take it up again? Others here most likely have never known the habit. You’d be doing a favor to yourself and most certainly to others in your world if you were to take it up.
A certain rabbi told his people that they must read and reflect on scripture until it was on their hearts. Someone asked about his choice of words. “Why do you say we should put the texts on our hearts? Shouldn’t they be in our hearts?” The rabbi said, “Only God can put the Word inside your heart. Our task is to hear it until it is on our hearts so that when our hearts break the holy word will fall inside.”
Into our dark and breaking hearts, a word would fall, a luminous word to light up our way. So may we lay that Word on our hearts: sing the praises that it sings and ask the questions that it asks and risk the faith that it invites and do the work that it requires. Those who do so become the light that God sets upon the world’s dark and breaking heart. They shine in the world’s darkest places. Let us be among them. Let the Word burn like a torch in our faith and our hope and our love. Living in the light of the luminous word, we’ll shine.
