Hear, Read, Mark, Learn, Inwardly Digest

by the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow

This sermon is based on Mark 13:1-8 and the Collect for Proper 28. An audio version of this sermon is available here.

Our Gospel reading this morning is taken from the apocalyptic teaching of Jesus, Jesus’ “lifting the veil” on what will happen in the future. Apocalyptic teaching is notoriously difficult in the scriptures: it is dense, highly symbolic, given to hyperbole and dramatic overstatement, charged with ancient political significance, and full of images of suffering and destruction that we tend to find disturbingly out of place in Jesus’ usual teaching of love and compassion and the peace of God. Interpreting Jesus’ apocalyptic teaching is something preachers find distressingly difficult to do.

So I’m not going to preach on this Gospel today.

Instead, I’m going to preach on how we can approach this Gospel today. And to do that, I’m going to turn to the Collect, to our Prayer of the Day, and its reassuringly Episcopal way of connecting with scripture.

In today’s prayer, we give thanks to God for causing all Holy Scripture to be written for our learning. And then we ask God to help us appropriate that learning in a five-point plan: we ask God to empower us to hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the scriptures. And the reason we do this, the Collect says, is so that we can embrace and hold fast the hope of life. When we relate to scripture in this five-point way, the Collect says, then it becomes in us more than just a book, it becomes a living encounter with the living Word of God.

So how do we do that? Well, first, we have to hear scripture. That may come as something of a surprise, since we usually think of scripture as something written, and therefore something that must be read. But the Collect says that in the first place scripture must be heard. And that is because hearing is something you cannot do alone — it is always done in community, even when the community is only you and the person speaking to you. Saying we must hear scripture first is a way of saying we never encounter scripture all on our own, but we always come to it within a community of hearers, a community of interpreters, a community of responders. Hearing scripture is having a dynamic relationship with scripture that we always share with others.

But we must also read scripture. After we have heard it in community, we have to get closer to it, we have to dig deeper into it, we have to read it for ourselves. Reading is an amazing thing, because it doesn’t just dump information into our brains, but it engages our whole selves with what we read. Every time you read a word, any word, you bring with you all the memories and connections and meanings that word has just for you, in your experience. Every time you read a story, you don’t just watch the story outside yourself, but you re-enact the story in your own imagination, in your own act of reading. When we read scripture, we don’t just treat it as something external to ourselves, but we bring it to life in our own mind’s eye.

And then we have to mark what scripture says. The word “mark” here is an old-fashioned and poetic way of saying “pay attention.” When we pay attention to what scripture says, we let it touch us in a deep way; we let it bring up feelings and hopes and dreams and fears and promises; we let the scriptures make our train of thought jump its usual tracks and take us into new possibilities and unexpected places. Sometimes you can read something over and it doesn’t make any impression on you, you can barely remember afterwards what you’ve read. But when we pay attention, when we mark what scripture says, we let it make an impression on us, we let it leave its mark on us, and we begin to be changed by what the scripture tells us.

We begin to be changed — but then we have to make the change a part of who we are. And that’s what it means to learn scripture. I think “learning” here means more than just memorizing Bible verses — although memory exercises can be a great way to get scripture into your mind. But “learning” in this sense means also something deeper: it means incorporating the truths of scripture into the very way we think, it means becoming so familiar with scripture that we can spontaneously see connections between the stories of God’s faithful people and the way we are living here and now. When we learn scripture, we can see that we are not living our lives in a vacuum, but we are continuing the very same story we find in the pages of this book.

Finally, we must inwardly digest scripture, and that means really making the scripture our own. When our bodies digest food, we don’t just leave the food the way we find it, but our bodies incorporate it and assimilate it and transform the food into part of our own living tissues. When we inwardly digest scripture, we don’t just leave it the way we find it, but we interpret it and meditate on it and apply it, so that it is transformed into part of our own living spirits. I was in a guided meditation on a Gospel story once, where we were supposed to reenact the whole story in our imaginations — and then, at the climactic moment, just after Jesus heals the sick man in the story, the meditation leader told us to imagine Jesus turning to each of us, and asking us, “What do you want me to heal in you?” And the imagination was so vivid that each of us heard something different from Jesus, and each of us said something different to Jesus — and the story wasn’t just a story anymore, it was something we took into ourselves and made our own, it was a real, living, spiritual encounter with the Word of God, the same Word incarnate in Jesus, the same Word alive in the Trinity, the same Word addressing us and becoming in us our own. In prayer and meditation and application  we inwardly digest the scriptures and make them a part of the way we live.

And when we do all those things, when we hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest, then I think scripture becomes for us something more than just a book. It becomes something more than a set of moral rules and regulations for how to control lives. It becomes more than a historical fact-book that we must either criticize or defend for how historical or factual it really is. It becomes more than a collection of symbolic stories about some ancient peoples' encounters with God. When we hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it, then the Bible isn’t just literal, and it isn’t just metaphorical, and it isn’t just a text — but it can be the living context where we can encounter the living Word.

When we connect with scripture in this way, we can look at something like our Gospel reading today, this difficult apocalyptic text, and see in it not just disturbing and distressing images of destruction, but see also the word of hope, the promise of the birth of something new, the good news that we do not need to be alarmed but can face the pains of this world with courage and trust in in God. When we connect with scripture in this way, we can hear something like our Hebrews reading today, where it urges us to “provoke one another to love and good deeds” and to “encourage one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching” — we can hear that and realize that is not just talking to some vague people long ago, but is all about how we live out our share of Christ’s mission in our world today, here and now, with love and good deeds and encouragement that are very particular and very personal to us. When we connect with scripture in this way, we can know that our ancient book is a gift we have to share with the world — a world that is increasingly biblically illiterate, by the way — and that we share it best not by hitting people over the head with it, but by inviting people in to hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest with us. We never know what new things we might learn from those who hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest differently from the way we do. And that too is part of our mission in Christ. 

Today we give thanks to God for causing all Holy Scripture to be written for our learning, and we pray that God will help us make the scriptures our own, so that we may embrace and hold fast the hope of life. May it be so for us. Amen.