Guidance for the Journey

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so 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; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

This is one of my favorite collects. It is classically Anglican, written for the original 1549 Book of Common Prayer. “All” holy Scriptures is an echo of that book’s preface, which lamented how the medieval accretion of liturgical rules and saints’ days had chopped up the readings so much “that commonly when any book of the Bible was begun, before three or four chapters were read out, all the rest were unread…There was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.” By contrast, that first prayer book provided an orderly reading of nearly the entire Bible each year at Morning and Evening Prayer.

It is quite a challenge to understand all Scripture as written for our instruction. Some passages are just plain boring (especially in Leviticus). Others are guaranteed to create an upset stomach as they are “inwardly digested.” Take Sunday’s reading from Zephaniah, for instance. It proclaims the day of the Lord, “a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom.” This does not sound like good news – at least not to those who are well off. But what about those who suffer under tyrannical government, or the many who can’t afford food while the few are fabulously wealthy? For them, this is a promise that God will right the wrongs. It is a warning to those who rely on silver and gold more than God, those who buy yet another Lexus when their neighbors are in want, those who pass by the Occupy protesters in the street, en route to their multimillion dollar jobs.

Paul takes up the warning against complacency in his first letter to the Thessalonians. Christ will return unexpectedly like a thief in the night, he says. Christ will come as inescapably as a child is born to a woman in labor. Yet Paul provides hope where Zephaniah does not. “God has not destined us for wrath,” he writes, “but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is not God’s will that anyone should perish; it is we who we bring disaster on ourselves by our own actions, by the choices we freely make.

Jesus says as much in his parable of the talents. Like the master in the story who goes on a journey, God has given us talents, gifts, for us to use in his service. When we use them as God intends, they multiply. Not only are we able to return to God more than we have been given, God gives us even more. But if we hoard what we have been given, keeping it only for ourselves and not others, we both forfeit the blessing and lose what we already have. The most remarkable part of this passage is that God come to us just as we expect him to be. If we believe that God is generous, we see God’s generosity. If we believe that God is harsh and judgmental, we experience God’s judgment. Would that more Christians would read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest that passage!

And so Scripture provides just what the collect says: learning, instruction, guidance for the journey, a journey made in the blessed hope of everlasting life. Whether it is the wrath of Zephaniah, the warning of Paul, or the use of our talents in Jesus’ parable, we can find wisdom in the lessons that are read day by day, week after week, if only we search for it.


[Pentecost 22: Zephaniah1:7, 12-18; Psalm 90; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 5:14-30. The information about the collect is from Marion Hatchett’s Commentary on the American Prayer Book. The wonderful preface to the 1549 prayer book can be found in the current 1979 book on p. 866.]