I’ll get to our readings in a moment. But I want to start today with our collect, because it might be my favorite. Collect is a funny word. We pronounce it differently from the more familiar word collect but it is essentially the same word. A collect – at the beginning of the Eucharistic liturgy, towards the end of Morning or Evening Prayer – collects or gathers the prayers and intentions and concerns and perhaps the wandering thoughts of the assembly, into the prayer of the church. Our prayer book contains one for every Sunday of the year, and there are others elsewhere. This collect is always used on the second to last Sunday of the church year – two Sundays before Advent, when a new year starts for the church – and it might be my favorite. Would ____ read it again for us? …
This collect – like some of the wonderful Advent collects that we’ll read in coming weeks – goes all the way back to the origins of our way of faith, to Thomas Cranmer’s work creating the first English prayerbook, published in 1549. Reading Scripture was important to Cranmer and to the English Reformation. Before the Reformation, only certain parts of the Bible were read aloud in church, and generally in Latin, which most people did not understand. In the preface for that 1549 prayer book, Cranmer wrote about his hope that in this new pattern of worship, clergy will read “the whole Bible (or the greatest part thereof)” every year and thereby “be stirred up to godliness and.. more able to exhort others by wholesome doctrine,” and also that the people, “by daily hearing of holy Scripture read in the church,” should “continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of true religion.”
I love the four verbs Cranmer offers us here: read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. They map out a process for receiving Scripture that works just as well 500 years later. Read is straightforward enough. That’s usually the first step. Just read your passage of Scripture, maybe a couple of times – or listen to it read. But that’s just the beginning.
Then we get mark. This is an archaic way to use the word, but it’s related to things we still say – like Mark my words! Or, Remarkable! It means something like notice or pay attention to. When we study a text together here in Zoom Compline or elsewhere, we often start by just listening for a word or phrase that catches your attention. I think that’s close to what mark means, here. What seizes you about this passage? What makes you pause and wonder? What do you want to underline, or write a star next to… or maybe a question mark?
Then we get to learn! I’m not sure exactly what Cranmer had in mind here, but for me this is a great shorthand for doing a little study, a little research. Maybe it’s reading the footnotes in your study Bible, or looking at what comes before and after your passage, for context. I often glance at good old Wikipedia to remind me of what I learned in seminary about that particular book of the Bible, its major themes, when and where it might have been written, what scholars think about it. There are lots of other websites that offer simple study and commentary tools. I literally just learned this week that the Episcopal Church, our denomination, has a simple Bible study online for the readings for every Sunday of the church year. Doing a little study like this can help us understand a Scriptural text better, and sometimes that helps us receive what the text has for us. But I like that it comes third, here, after our own unfiltered experience of reading, noticing, and beginning to reflect on the text.
Finally, inwardly digest. It’s a funny phrase, but also a meaningful one. When we digest food, in the literal sense, our digestive system takes what it can use and builds it into our body and our functioning. Digesting Scripture is much the same – we take in things that become part of us, who we are, how we operate. We encounter things that shape our worldview and how we think and live. Usually that is cumulative, over months and years, but now and then a text hits you just so and really gets in there right away!
We’ve been talking in both our Confirmation class and our New Members class about how Episcopalians read the Bible, so let me say a tiny bit about that here too. We encourage both personal and shared reading and study of the Bible, and look for meaning together, especially with people whose experiences differ from our own. We are interested in the complexity of the Bible, rather than pretending that it’s simple. We are interested in the humanness of the Bible – seeking to understand the people, times and cultures behind these texts – both as a tool for understanding Scripture itself, and as a way of coming closer to those faith-ancestors and their walks with God. We are interested, too, in the God-ness of the Bible. Where, in this very human text, we can catch glimpses of something more than human? Where does it read against the grain of what people tend to do, left to ourselves? What are the big, overarching themes and core values that feel challenging and compelling?
Early on in the formation of the Church of England, our mother church, leaders developed a document called the Thirty-Nine Articles, a summary of the teachings of the church. (They’re in the back of the prayer book – as is Cranmer’s preface to the first English prayer book – if you want to take a look sometime.) Article VI begins, “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation.” But the great foundational theologian of Anglicanism, Richard Hooker, writing just a few years later, seems to have found this wanting; he writes that the Bible “contains everything needed for salvation that is not apparent to reason.” For Hooker, our capacity to observe, reflect, question and analyze is a holy gift that God intends us to use. We read Scripture with active minds, wondering and seeking. And we don’t expect the Bible to speak to everything, or to settle everything. Hooker was clear that the Bible didn’t cover all the matters on which a Christian might seek guidance, and that even some things it does cover – like matters of worship and church structure – might rightly change with the times. All of that is woven into how Episcopalians engage with Scripture.
With that: let’s look – briefly! – at today’s texts from late in the book of the prophet Isaiah, and the Gospel of Luke. You’ve heard them once; you may want to pull out your supplement and take another look. We have read them; what might we mark, on a second reading? In the Isaiah text, you might mark the vision of human flourishing – every baby healthy, every elder living to 100, stability and peace and plenty – a vision that three thousand years of human “progress” has still not brought to fulfillment. You might notice the zoologically surprising images: the lion eating straw like a cow; the wolf and the lamb sharing a meal, instead of the wolf making the lamb into a meal. In the Gospel text, I wouldn’t be surprised if what caught your attention was the list of disasters – plagues, wars, persecutions – that might make you wonder if Jesus was reading the news in 2025.
What about learn? There’s plenty we might study and explore about each text. With the Isaiah passage, you might find out that the (very long!) book of Isaiah was likely written by the original prophet Isaiah and then one or two later prophets, building on his words and reinterpreting them in new contexts and seasons, a generation or two later. Maybe you think, Weren’t there more animals?, and you dig around and discover that this passage – Isaiah 65 – is quoting Isaiah chapter 11, the more complete “Peaceable Kingdom” passage, which we’ll hear in a few weeks. With the text from the Gospel of Luke, maybe you’ll learn that Jesus’ scary words here came to fruition in the decades after his death, when a revolt led the Roman army to destroy the Great Temple, in an attempt to subdue those rowdy Judeans – and that many of Jesus’ followers were arrested, jailed, tried and executed for their faith. Maybe you’ll visit the excellent website Working Preacher, and read pastor and scholar Kendra Mohn’s words about this passage: “The text is not meant to be predictive as much as meaning-making, for those who experienced [those events] and for those who come after… There is really no such thing as getting through unscathed. The question is how people of faith are to respond, and where we find our refuge.”
With either or both texts, you might stumble on the wonderful, difficult word eschatology. Meaning, literally: Reflection on last things. Christians have spent two thousand years wondering about the teaching that Jesus Christ will return to establish God’s kingdom of righteousness and mercy on earth. Some pre-Christian texts also point towards ultimate renewal. In these late chapters of Isaiah, we move beyond the promise of return from exile and rebuilding Jerusalem to a more cosmic restoration: not just how things were before conquest, but how things were meant to be in the beginning, the fulfillment of God’s dream for creation. It’s a sharp turn from that vision to this Gospel passage. But destruction, loss, renewal and hope, are all bound up in eschatology, in our thinking and wondering about… where it’s all going, and how it all ends. In Advent, which begins two weeks from today, our readings often point towards last things as well, inviting us to prepare to celebrate Jesus’ coming as the babe in Bethlehem, AND Jesus coming again in great glory to judge both the living and the dead.
How do we inwardly digest this beautiful, complicated tension between witnessing and anticipating the destruction of much that we have trusted in and held dear, and imagining a future of extravagant peace, wellbeing and joy? For me that tension, that paradox, feels strangely familiar; it resonates with the way the world feels right now – the dynamics of loss and restoration, terror and hope, grief and possibility, in a time that truly feels epochal, a pivot point in human history.
Looking for a short reading for the beginning of 10AM worship today, I remembered a quotation from the very strange but oddly insightful podcast Welcome to Night Vale: “Beware the unraveling of all things, and support your local farmer.” Then – Googling “quotations about the end of the world,” as one does – I found this line from the great Protestant reformer Martin Luther: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
Maybe we bridge the tension between dread and hope in choosing to plant the apple tree – metaphorically or literally; we did in fact plant a couple of baby apple trees on our grounds this summer! Even in the face of the unraveling of all things, the world going to pieces, we prepare for better futures. We support our local farmers. We build community, grow food, share skills, work and rest and laugh together. We develop the root structure, the mycelial web, that may help us endure hard times, and be ready to grow fast and strong and fruitful when the season for flourishing arrives.
Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Cranmer’s version of the collect was a little longer; he wrote, “that by patience and comfort of thy holy word, we may embrace and ever hold fast…” and so on. By patience and comfort of thy holy word. Cranmer’s prayer was that Scripture, inwardly digested, might give us patience with the seasons of our lives and our world, and comfort in difficult and frightening times. May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Bosco Peters offers some background on this collect:
https://liturgy.co.nz/reflections/ordinary33
Kendra Mohn on WorkingPreacher: