Contributing your verse on Bible Sunday

‘That we might contribute a verse’: Celebrating Bible Sunday 2025 at Evensong Readings: 1. Jeremiah 36.9-end, in which King Jehoiakim attempts to silence Jeremiah’s warning of defeat by Babylon by burning the scroll of the prophecy; and Jeremiah dictates another scroll, with much additional material. 2. Romans 10.5-17: ‘Faith comes through what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ. Although in the Book of Common Prayer we are only up to Trinity XIX, in the Common Worship Calendar today is the Last Sunday after Trinity, which we are also permitted to observe as Bible Sunday, giving thanks, first, that the Scriptures exist at all. We don’t know much about how these manuscripts were formed and gathered into a collection of agreed texts, from around six hundred years before Christ’s birth to three-or-four hundred years after it. So we are grateful to God for all the poets, prophets, scribes and scholars, without whose loving labour we would not have these 66 books that occupy a central place ‘on our lips and in our hearts’. Obviously, they are important to us because they offer a crucial account of the Jewish and Christian portion of the everlasting conversation between God and humanity. They tell us something of who God is; and in telling that story, they tell us who we are; that we are more, much more, than (as someone said) ‘a certain type of ape on a small planet, circling an insignificant star.’ Scripture first expresses our human dignity by insisting that we are made in the image and likeness of God. For Christians, this idea is developed chiefly through the events of Christmas and Easter: in becoming flesh and dwelling among us, the Word of God dignifies our human nature, subsequently exalting us with him in his Resurrection and Ascension. This does not mean that we should call ourselves ‘people of the book’. We are, rather, people of a Person: Jesus Christ. We move from words to the Living Word; and so to God the Father, Source of the Word. This does not diminish Scripture, whose words, we read, cannot be destroyed even by fire. They are sacred, and a sort of Sacrament —a sign of the thing, but not the thing itself; a beginning, though not an end; not the destination, but a road on which Christ travels towards us. This is further emphasised by our Anglican insistence that any understanding of God rests on a three-legged stool of Scripture, Reason and Tradition. We are never required to believe anything at which our intellect and conscience rebel. Neither are we left to fathom things for ourselves: we always approach Scripture traditionally, as members of a catholic and apostolic church. We read in company with those who have gone before us, and with those on the other side of the world. We therefore come to Scripture with care and humility, knowing that we read alongside those from whom we have much to learn, and whom it would be foolish to drown out with the clamour of our own opinions, especially if we find ourselves hurling them like missiles, or engaging in pointless games of quotation ping-pong. Our reference to other people reminds us that there is one book of the Bible that is not yet finished: the Acts of the Apostles will continue to be written as long as there is Christian life on earth. As we give thanks on Bible Sunday for all that has come down to us from the past, we commit ourselves afresh to this present time, and to our own unknowable future; in order that, as Walt Whitman has put it, ‘the powerful play [might go on, and that we might] contribute a verse.’ What, will our verses be? And how will we play our part in the great drama of salvation? ‘The Faith that comes to us through what is heard in the word of Christ’ does not lie fallow, but works in the world and bears fruit. Glory be to God for that fruit; and for the word of God ‘which never returns to him empty, but accomplishes that which he purposes’ (Isaiah 55.11).