The Word of God and Paper

I have often entertained this thought but I did so particularly yesterday when preparing a sermon on the appointed Gospel reading in the Lectionary of the Episcopal Church, USA, for September 19, 1999. The reading is Matthew 20:1-16.

What the majority of the million or so Episcopalians, who show up at churches each Sunday, have in their hands are a bulletin, a prayer book, a hymnbook and a piece of thin paper, on which, printed on both sides, are the Collect and Bible Readings for the Eucharist of this day.

Please note two things about the way the words of Holy Scripture are presented.

First of all, the Word of God is printed on cheap paper and at the end of the services the sheets are lying here and there and then put into the garbage. We used to think that high quality paper, India paper, was alone suitable for bearing the Word of God in written & printed form. Now it seems that the Word of God is disposable. Symbolically at least all this speaks volumes!

Then, secondly, because people do not have the whole text of sacred Scripture in front of them but only fragments they cannot get a sense of context. This particular Gospel, for example, is a story told by Jesus and it arises out of what has immediately gone before in and especially the final statement in Chapter 19 - "Many that are first will be last and the last first" (v.30). So the bits and pieces from the Bible printed on the cheap paper weekly provide little or no incentive to treat the printed passages as part of a whole, and as such an urgent, necessary Word from heaven, the Word of Almighty God our heavenly Father. No wonder Episcopalians are not in general a Bible reading and Bible-loving people. They encounter the Word of God in an inappropriate dress.

Much the same experience is found in Roman Catholic parishes where few people have the whole Missal but instead use the Missalette, printed on cheap paper and after the first week or so of the month looking frayed and dirty and torn.

Yet perhaps all this is part of a deeper problem. This century, an amazing period of the proclamation of rights and the expression of opinions, has seen the exercise of the right of anyone to translate and any publisher to publish that translation of the Bible or parts thereof. There are so many so-called versions that at best this ever-increasing variety confuses the truth-seeker and at worst undermines the concept of the Word of God written.

Not only do we now have the supermarket of religions - hundreds, nay thousands of churches and groups to choose from via the yellow pages of the phonebook - but we also have the growing supermarket of translations (many of them on cheap paper because only intended to be useful until the next edition appears).

Thus it would seem to be the case that in a generation where there is technically speaking a tremendous explosion of printing of the Bible there is also a diminishing view of the sacred nature of the holy text.

Maybe we can learn from Muslims about the treatment of our Scriptures. They are taught never to place anything on top of their prized copy of the Koran.

Let us treat our Bibles with great respect. Let us not put anything ever on top of our Bibles or handle them with anything but reverence. And for this discipline, let us acquire a Bible that is well printed on good paper in a sound binding and in a recognized translation. And let us read the Bible, not as an exercise of privatized judgment but as a member of the Body of Christ and thus within the interpretative framework established within Mother Church.