Memorising the Bible - how?

I've given myself the task of committing 2400 words to memory. If I was an actor, that would be nothing compared to learning my lines for a whole play.
But how am I actually going to do it?
I asked Google, and got the following advice for memorising a speech:
1. Write it out
2. Rehearse it with your script in front of you.
3. Memorise, big to small. Start with big chunks, then smaller paragraphs and phrases
4. Start with the biggest chunks - write out headings for each section
5. Move to smaller points
6. Memorise the delivery - think about how you are going to say each sentence for maximum effect.

Ok, thanks for that, Google. That makes it feel a bit more intimidating. But I appreciate the point about understanding the big structure, I think I'll try that.

What else could I do? Well, I'm a fan of biblegateway.com. It has, for instance, the whole of the NIV read aloud by Max McLean. On my phone I have youversion.com, which has similar resources available. So I can listen to the words as often as I like.

Let's see how I go.

The Sermon on the Mount: which version shall I learn?

Before I begin to memorise the Sermon on the Mount, I need to decide which translation to use. (A colleague cheekily asked me if I was going to learn it in the original Greek - I said no way!)
I've got 14 different translations sitting on my bookshelf next to me as I type, but I quickly narrowed it down to four.
Here they are, with their pros and cons.
New Revised Standard Version
Dating to 1989, this is an accurate but still readable translation. Famously the first mainstream translation to use inclusive language rather than masculine nouns and pronouns wherever possible.
New International Version
First published in 1978, and twice updated, most recently in 2011, this is the Bible we have in our church.
New Living Translation
Using an approach called "dynamic equivalence," this version tries to render the sense of the original into easily understood idiomatic English. It has the strength of being vivid and easy to read, at the risk of sacrificing some accuracy of meaning.
The Message
The work of one remarkable man, Eugene Peterson, The Message takes the idea of dynamic equivalence to a new and poetic level.

And here's how the four of them deal with one part of the Sermon on the Mount - the Lord's Prayer from Matthew 6:9-13.
New Revised Standard Version
Our Father in heaven, 
hallowed be your name, 
your kingdom come, 
your will be done, 
 on earth as it is in heaven. 
Give us today our daily bread. 
And forgive us our debts, 
 as we also have forgiven our debtors. 
And lead us not into temptation, 
 but deliver us from the evil one. 
New International Version
Our Father in heaven, 
 hallowed be your name. 
 Your kingdom come. 
 Your will be done, 
 on earth as it is in heaven. 
 Give us this day our daily bread. 
 And forgive us our debts, 
as we also have forgiven our debtors. 
And do not bring us to the time of trial, 
 but rescue us from the evil one. 
New Living Translation
Our Father in heaven, 
 may your name be kept holy. 
May your Kingdom come soon. 
May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. 
Give us today the food we need, 
and forgive us our sins, 
 as we have forgiven those who sin against us. 
And don’t let us yield to temptation, 
 but rescue us from the evil one. 
The Message
Our Father in heaven, 
Reveal who you are. 
Set the world right; 
Do what’s best— as above, so below. 
Keep us alive with three square meals. 
Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. 
Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil. 
You’re in charge! 
You can do anything you want! 
You’re ablaze in beauty! 
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Which one have I chosen? Well, I've chosen the New International Version.
But the Message - oh wonderful! I would urge anybody who feels bored with the Sermon on the Mount to read what Eugene Peterson has made of it.
So why not choose the Message? There are two reasons, one which makes life easy for me, one which makes it hard, that have made me choose the NIV.
Easy, because many of the phrases are familiar to me - I've already half learned them over the years.
Hard, because people will be able to follow in their church Bibles, and notice my every mistake.

No pressure!!

Hearing the Bible

Someone asked me what I thought the point of doing this was.

When I was a young Christian, I went along to an event at the Christian Union of Coventry University (then Lanchester Polytechnic). It has stuck with me for many years, and what was remarkable about it was that a post-graduate student simply stood up and read out John's gospel, all of it, from start to finish.
People sat and listened, or wandered around getting a coffee or standing in front of different prayer installations.
When Brendan finished his long reading, we all went home. No discussion, no explanation, just those immortal words ringing in our ears.
It was a profoundly moving experience.
So I hope in time to repeat it in a small way by reciting the Sermon on the Mount to my church family, and it will be interesting to see what they make of the experience. I'm not naive enough to expect they'll be remembering it in 30 years' time, but maybe it will encourage people a little, maybe it will help some for whom one of my usual sermons doesn't really hit the spot.

But first, I've got to learn it, and I've given myself until Easter to do it.

The first part of the sermon is the best known, and the most memorable, so I don't anticipate too many difficulties in getting this first bit under my belt.
It consists of eight couplets, each starting with the same word in Greek: makarioi, which is usually translated "blessed" or "happy." So Jesus lists 8 qualities, and ascribes blessings to them: poor in spirit, the mourning, meek, those who hunger & thirst for righteousness, the merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, and those who are persecuted.
Blessings to these people.
Luke's version follows it up with woes - woe to those who are the opposite of the above. Matthew stays positive, just talking about the blessings. It echoes some of the blessings that Moses promised in Deuteronomy for those who followed the Law.
But to qualify for these blessings, you don't need to do anything, just be something, or suffer something. This is about what's in your heart, not about what shows on the surface.
And what are the blessings? They're comfort, peace, satisfaction, mercy, belonging to God's family and to his kingdom, seeing God face to face.
These are the sort of people, Jesus seems to be saying, that God is looking out for. Not necessarily the ones you'd expect.
No mention of holiness, of obedience or even of faith.
Strange?

A different way to read the Bible

I love the Bible.
I can't get enough of this wonderful, unique book. I like to read something of it every day, and strive to understand it more as time goes by.
And I'm always excited to find new and different ways to encounter it.
21st century Christians are used to a couple of particular ways of engaging with the Bible. Usually, they involve taking a very small chunk, and either listening to it in church and hearing a sermon about it, or reading it at home, perhaps with the aid of some notes that try to explain it.
There's nothing wrong with this, but sometimes just taking tiny bites doesn't satisfy. I want to have a square meal.

The ancient church did things differently. They used to meet to hear the Bible read aloud, without a sermon following, just great chunks of unadulterated scripture.
So I thought maybe I could try that with my church.

This Lent, I've set myself a challenge.
I'm going to memorise the Sermon on the Mount - I should be able to manage that in 40 days - and then sometime soon after Easter I won't preach a sermon, I'll just speak it out, as if we were hearing it straight from the lips of Jesus himself.
Just an experiment.
I'll be interested to hear what people think.

It's been a while since I posted a sermon.

We're having a series on sustainability at the moment, called Now the Green Blade Riseth. That's the first line of an Easter hymn, whose mournful tune belies the optimism of its words, so I thought it was a good match for a series which address the mess we've made of the world, but the optimistic thought that God hasn't finished with us yet, and there's still much that we can do.

So this is what I said as I kicked off the series, looking at the Creation Story from Genesis Chapter 1.

Today I am going to be talking about 4 C's.

Chaos 

Genesis says that in the beginning the earth was formless & empty. I didn’t get to learn much Hebrew at theological college, but I did learn this. Our Hebrew teacher just began at the beginning, with Genesis 1 verse 1, and she worked her way through from there. So I know that the Hebrew phrase that’s translated formless & empty is actually tohu va vohu. She described that as being like her son’s bedroom. He was a teenager at the time, and I leave the rest to your imagination.

The point being – it wasn’t that there was nothing there, but what was there, was chaos. The creation story is all about God bringing order out of chaos. So the first C is chaos.

Ian as a physicist will be pleased to hear this, because it’s all about the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It’s all about entropy. If you don’t really know what I’m talking about, please ask Ian afterwards, and he’ll be delighted to explain. Any excuse to talk about physics is always welcome, isn’t that right, Ian? God was reversing entropy in creation, he was putting order in place instead of chaos.

This is a theme that runs all through the Bible. The Jewish people had a fear, a loathing of chaos, and a love of order. Chaos would be represented to them by lawlessness, or, in meteorological terms, by a storm. So watch out for a story that’s coming later in this series that involves a storm. A storm represents chaos, and God was bringing order out of chaos.

People who suffer from anxiety fear chaos. We can see this in something like the condition called OCD – Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. People develop a fear about forgetting to lock the doors or turn the gas off, and have to devise a ritual of checking tat everything is safe. People can develop a fear that their actions or inactions will lead to harm, and need to find ways to keep a tight grip on their behaviour to avoid the danger of things sliding into chaos. Chaos is the ancient enemy that many of us fear more than anything else.

But God has brought order out of chaos.

Cycles 

The second thing I want to say about creation is that it runs in cycles. There is a beautiful perfect symmetry about the way that the raw materials of creation travel round in cycles. It’s self-renewing, self-correcting, it’s balanced, it’s healthy.

I’ll give you an example that I remember learning about at school: the water cycle. If you imagine any drop of water anywhere on earth, and imagine following it wherever it goes. Let’s imagine a drop of water in a river. It travels down the river into the sea, spends quite a bit of time in the sea until one day it finds itself near the surface, heated by the sun, where it evaporates, and goes into the atmosphere. It buzzes about in the atmosphere for a while, and as it cools it begins to condense, forms into a cloud, and drops to ground as rain. Then it’s back to a river, back to the sea, and the whole cycle begins again. Sometimes it might get swallowed by an animal, or sucked up by a plant, or spend some time in a puddle. But eventually it will find its way out again, back into the cycle. There are all sorts of cycles, there’s the carbon cycle, the oxygen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, and so on. Nothing ever gets used up in the natural world. What goes around, comes around.

Contrast that were the way that humans work. We consume things, we exploit things, we use them up, spit them out and throw them away. And the raw materials of creation, instead of being recycled, moving on to the next stage of the cycle, get stuck, as plastics in the oceans or toxins in landfill.

So we interfere with these beautiful, self-renewing cycles, and throw the system out of balance. And we’re making our planet ill – it’s running a fever, because we’ve distorted the carbon cycle. The planet is getting thirsty, because we’ve disrupted the water cycle.

Community 

The third C in creation is community. God didn’t create a whole bunch of creatures that live in isolation without reference to each other – he created a living community of beings that interact with each other in all sorts of exciting ways. Some eat others! That seems pretty destructive, but many plants rely on the fact that they get eaten in order to spread their seeds. So God created a community that may look destructive but actually is harmonious. Species rise and fall, they morph into different shapes, taking better advantage of their surroundings, finding new ecological niches to populate. Life (and we’re discovering this more and more) is absolutely everywhere on our planet.

Jesus said to people who were anxious – look! Look at creation. Look at the way the species fit together, look at the beauty of the flowers, look at the way the birds find what they need. Creation, when it works, works beautifully. Don’t strain against it, don’t panic about what you’re going to do. Relax. Fit in to your niche. Do the role you were intended for.

Caretaking 

That leads me neatly into my fourth C. What is the role that God gave us humans beings to do? The role is caretaking. When God had finished creating the world, he turned to the human beings who were his final act of creation and said “It’s all yours. It’s all yours. Use it. Enjoy it. Eat the edible bits – that’s fine, that’s what you’re meant to do. Look after it, take care of it.

I used that phrase this week, to Michael my son. His uncle, who has moved to Denmark, decided very kindly to give his car to Michael, because he doesn’t need a right hand drive car any more. So he stopped off here on his way back to Denmark after Christmas, left his car on my drive and I took him to Stansted to get his flight to Copenhagen. The car was a little tohu va vohu on the inside, because Michael's uncle is even untidier than I am, so my wife cleaned it up a bit, I checked it over, took it to the garage to get it serviced, and then at Easter when Michael came I gave him the keys and said, “It’s all yours.”

Use it. Enjoy it. Get into the driving seat and direct it. It won’t fulfil its purpose unless you do. And that’s exactly what God has said to us. Get into the driving seat of creation. Steer it. Look after it.

Conclusion 

Chaos, cycles, community and caretaking.

That’s how God set up the world. We don’t need to fear chaos, because our beautiful, self-renewing community of creation is ready to use. And we’re meant to take control. Not to exploit it or abuse it. Not to squander its riches. But to fulfil it. In the weeks to come, we will be thinking about how we can do this, on the small scale as well as the large, how those healthy cycles and communities are still there, waiting to spring back into shape as soon as we stop mistreating them, and learn to work with the grain of what God has made.

Isaiah 21:1-17: Darkest before the dawn?

Today we have a couple of oracles. Poetic, metaphorical, allusive and therefore not easy to fully understand.

Again, it's all to do with the political "churn" of rising and falling kingdoms, with that ever-pervading sense that God is behind and beyond all the machinations, grimly watching them fail, all of them.

There is a watchman. Maybe Isaiah is the watchman, maybe he isn't. But he's scared by what he sees. He's not scared by the mighty army coming towards him, he's scared by what is going to happen to them. This war machine is going to be taken apart, brutally, efficiently, ruthlessly.

Watchmen long for the morning. But it is still night, and in the reign of darkness, destruction is king.

Isaiah 19:1-20:6: Egypt, the first enslaver

Isaiah's eyes are still sweeping around his map of the world, and now he lights on Egypt.

Egypt was, of course, the ancient enemy, the enslaver of Israel. So as he begins with prophecies of doom against them, his hearers would have cheered.

But now, Egypt is beginning to have a more complex identity in the hearts and minds of the policy makers. In the light of the threat from Assyria, they are beginning to think of Egypt as an ally. Perhaps its strength can protect them from the might of the new kid on the block.

Egypt apparently thought so too - they engaged in a lot of meddling in the Palestinian states north of their territory, stirring them up against Assyria. From Egypt's point of view, Israel, Philistia, Aram and the rest were buffer states, and if they fell, the Assyrian threat would be on their doorstep.

Their friendly overtures to Israel and Judah were self serving - a bit like Russia cosying up to President Trump, while at the same time using fake news to destabilise and disorientate the people Allegedly.

Into to all this ferment Isaiah speaks in three ways. First, he has a prophecy of doom and destruction for Egypt, centred on the drying up of the Nile. The Nile is everything to Egypt, and if it's waters stopped flowing, Egypt's wealth and power would be cut off.

Second, he speaks about healing, with specific but unfulfilled (yet) prophecies about worship of Yahweh breaking out in Egypt, of blessings not curses emanating from that land.

And then third, he brings his attention back to the events of the present, and acts out a prophecy, as many of the other prophets do. He went around in a state of undress, saying this is what will happen to Egypt. The Assyrian king sent one of his generals to Ashdod, where there had been a rebellion. This general, who was called the Tartan, crushed the rebellion and sent captives stripped and barefoot back to Assyria.

See? said Isaiah. This has come true. Now trust me on the rest.