The Bible is Christian Scripture, but what does it mean for something to be a community’s “Scripture”? The Bible is our holy book, God’s word to us in writing, a sacred text in which we find the presence of something beyond and beneath and behind and above us. We honor the Bible in our liturgy by having nice, large copies of it on the lectern or by the priest holding it up above their head as they process down into the congregation to read it. A friend of mine once say that the Bible is, for Christians, really the only book that he would read every day. It is the book we focus on the most, in whatever way we are acting at the moment.

In my ordination vows as a priest, I promised to “be diligent in the reading and study of Holy Scripture.” I don’t read the Bible every day like my friend and many of my other siblings in Christ, and every now and again I worry that I’m going back on this promise. Then I remember that the best way to know a book isn’t to read it a lot but to read it well. And reading the Bible well depends on the person reading it and the context in which they’re in.

Who are you as a reader of the Bible? It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? It’s similar to the question: who are you as someone who prays? If you reading this post right now are a Christian, then you have an automatic relationship with the Bible, and relationships involve not just two parties but two living parties. The Bible is the living word of God; who are you as a living party in your relationship with the living word of God? Think about it for a bit.

When I went to the Bible as a young man, I found a bunch of precepts and rules that I had to follow. I think this came from my upbringing, which was Reformed and stressed the Bible as a guidebook for living. I stopped reading the Bible for a long time, because I didn’t find its guidance very helpful – or, to put it better, I didn’t hear in its precepts and rules any sort of guidance that helped me out as a young man. I sought guidance elsewhere, often in literature or non-verbal experiences of God in nature. I thought that the Bible had “failed” me, and, being taught that the Bible was the most important and possibly only way to commune with God, I found very little use for religion.

My interest in Christianity grew through an academic interest in Japanese religions and in my experiences of the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist. I hesitated in returning to the Bible even as I grew more and more interested in Christianity and my relationship with God. I chaffed at having to read the Bible, and I worried how, as a priest, I could preach on a book that I didn’t really enjoy.

This all changed when I started preaching every week. In the beginning, I would read commentaries first and find a topic, then write on it. Then, at the encouragement of my professor of homiletics in seminary, I read the Bible readings first, then prayed, and only then read commentaries. And what rose from the pages of Scripture were not, for me, precepts and rules, but people. I wondered how Peter sounded when he denied Christ. I wondered how Jesus gestured to the disciples on the shore to come and follow him. I wondered if there was any sarcasm in the way God asked Adam and Eve, “Who told you that you were naked?” I began to imagine the scenes around the sometimes stark descriptions of what is going on around the important words of our Savior and the saints (and not so saintly people) who we meet in the Bible. The world of the Bible suddenly became full.

This approach is, of course, not at all new in the history of Christianity. It’s how St. Paul taught about the patriarchs, it’s how early Christianity discerned Jesus’ nature as in unity with God the Father, and its present in all the literature that I had been reading when studying literature (and especially medieval literature) in college and graduate school. There’s also a healthy tradition of Jewish wondering about Scripture. I had read about all these approaches, but I hadn’t actually experienced the power of reading the Bible in this way until I faced a Sunday deadline each and every week.

All this is a very long example of how I came to read the Bible in a way that fit into my needs, my training, my experiences, and my desires to be closer to God in Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit. This type of reading Scripture has entered into my preaching, too, and I hope that my parishioners get something out of wondering about the mental states of Sts. John and James at the Transfiguration or whether Jesus ever smirked. The real question is: how do you read Scripture?

In order to learn this about yourself, you need to actually encounter Scripture, which might take you just sitting down and opening up to a page to read it. It might take you listening to Scripture read in church differently than how you usually read it, or to bring your bulletin home with you and read the lessons on Tuesday or Wednesday, or even to look up the Sunday readings beforehand and give them a read (at Christ Church and many others, we print the following week’s readings at the end of our bulletins, so try checking there). When I co-led a high school Bible club in Oregon, we gave the students a single verse of Scripture each week. Some monks contemplate on a single verse or even a single word of Scripture, sometimes for a whole year (doesn’t that sound magnificent?).

Whatever the case, encountering Scripture teaches you something about yourself and who you are in regards to Scripture itself. You may find out that the way that you read Scripture isn’t the way your part of the Church reads it – though don’t worry if this is the case, there are always saints to be found or other Christians who read like you do if you need the support or companionship.