
2009. Guilsborough: 1[st]  after Trinity Sunday.

I'll begin as I'll end today with a Psalm, those verses from the end of Psalm 19   "Keep thy servant also from presumptuous sins......Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be alway acceptable in thy sight,  O Lord my strength and my redeemer. " 
Rather than say something about our Bible readings today, I've been thinking about the Church's prescribed texts in general and how they have affected the history of this country and the lives of those who live and have lived here. 
"There never was anything by the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established , which in continuation of time hath not been corrupted".  No, this is not an outpouring of the book of Jeremiah nor, in relation to Parliamentary expenses and allowances,  a quotation from an editorial in the Daily Telegraph.   It comes from the small print of the Book of Common Prayer.  I thought however that it might be interesting to reflect a little on it this morning.  
What the writer of this complaint had in mind as having been corrupted were   " the Common Prayers in the church , commonly called Divine Service"  corrupted that is by too much interference and tinkering with texts,  and as he quaintly put it  " planting in uncertain stories and legends, with multitude of responds, verses, vain repetitions, commemorations and synodals " ( i.e. resolutions of the Synod) 
The Prayer Book  of 1549 was the first  to contain the forms of service for daily and Sunday worship in English and to do so within a single volume; it included morning prayer, evening prayer, the Litany, and Holy Communion.  In short it followed more or less the format that in the little books we have to-day in our pews, combined with  the other occasional services for baptism, confirmation, marriage etc.  
The 1549 book was rapidly succeeded by a reformed revision in 1552 under the same editorial hand, that of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. It never came into use because, on the death of Edward VI in the following year  Mary I restored Roman Catholic worship. On her death, a compromise version, combining elements of the 1549 and the 1552 editions, was published in 1559. That lasted for over 100 years.   Following the turmoil of the Civil War and the attacks on established religion by the Puritans, however,  another major revision was published in 1662 That edition has remained broadly  the official prayer book of the Church of England, although in our own time Common Worship has tended largely to displace the Book of Common Prayer in most English parish churches
The writer of this Preface to the Prayer Book of 1662, which harks back to that of Elizabeth I,  described a time when the whole Bible ( or the greater part of it)  " would be read over the space of a year  first in order that the clergy should, as he put it,  be "stirred up to godliness" and second that their congregations  " "might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God".  
But he went on to complain that what he called the   "order of the ancient fathers"  hath been so altered, broken and neglected  that commonly when any book of the Bible was begun, after three or four chapters were read out all the rest were unread. "  
In other words people got bored.  Worse, "  the service of the Church of England hath these many years been read in Latin to the people which they understand not so they have heard with their ears only,  so that their heart , spirit and mind have not been edified thereby. "  
He then delivers the punchline   " Moreover, ......the manifold changings of the Service was the cause, that to turn to the Book only was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out. " 
More business to find out what should be read.  So what's new?  Some of us who consult the Lectionary of the Church of England to-day are occasionally baffled by its complexities, and by the various forms of service set out in Common Worship.  At one time there was a first and second lesson, from the Old and then New Testaments. Now it seems that the Old Testament could fall into disuse, and the Judaic part of our Christian religion could as a result  be neglected.   Hence my reading from the Book of Samuel this morning a wonderful story of how God , as so often, did the unexpected. 
It's true that the Old Testament contains a good deal of stuff that is mythical, or otherwise hard to take literally, beginning with the story of the Garden of Eden.  But Jesus himself constantly shows that he knew it very well, particularly the Prophets, drawing on its texts to illustrate and justify his own ministry and underline his teaching. .  In to-day's Old Testament reading, for example,  we heard Samuel say to Jesse  "The Lord seeth not as a man seeth; for a man looketh upon the outward appearance , but the Lord looketh on the heart."  -  a sentiment that Jesus echoed on several occasions.  Basic to the way we should think as Christians.  
When we look at the various ways in which we worship, then, it seems important to create a balance between old and new and to ring the changes.   Many of us brought up on the King James Version prefer it to other translations. Fair enough.  Whoever regularly reads or hears the Bible read cannot fail to thrill to the opening of St. John's Gospel in that translation, or more properly from the translation of William Tyndale of 1534, plagiarised wholesale and by the authors of the King James Version  
 " In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God."  Compare that with this  " Before the Word was created, the Word already existed; he was with God and he was the same as God"  
Anything other than the KJV translation does seem less inspiring in comparison.  For that version  has become a supreme example of English literature in its own right.  But the beauty of the language can, one can argue overshadow the message.  The danger is that we cannot see the wood for the beautiful literary trees.   
At the other end of the scale is the jaundiced view of one commentator on Common  Worship  "If the Alternative Prayer Book sometimes seems to have been dreamt up by a Committee, then Common Worship seems to have been written by a breakfast television presenter.  Dreariness has given way to vulgarity.  We are tempted to say " Jesus wept", or as the new service renders it "Christ was moved to tears". 
That seems to me an unnecessary belittling of what after all was a major and no doubt carefully considered, revision of the Prayer Book. But it is surely true, that if we cannot understand, or more important,  be inspired- by what is being said it can only make us less appreciative of the religious message behind the words. . So the answer must be, surely, to pick and choose one's versions of the Bible according to what appeals at different times.  On some occasions it will be traditional language, on others an up to date version.  I would not trade 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 in the KJV for any other version.  Yet some of the epistles are much easier understood in modern English translations.  
And that goes for other parts of the Bible.  Take this from the American Black Bible Chronicles. I ought to have an accent from the Deep South to make it sound more authentic. 
[ Genesis Chapter 2] 
In its own way I find that a quite moving text, not least because it is so very different from what we are used to in the way of a Bible reading.  But to inner city black youth in, say, Mobile, Alabama, it's the word of God  and that by definition deserves respect.  I wonder how it would go down at one of our local schools?  
The most important thing, then, is to read the word of God  and read it in whatever way appeals to us.  But we do need to vary the format,  whether it be Bible readings or the form of a remarks from this pulpit.  It will help us to avoid the corruption of the routine, going through the form without feeling the substance. 
 So I'll end with a commercial for another translation that I've just discovered a new take on a much loved theme  this time of the Psalms   I have found it very stimulating  -  a modern pointer towards wonder and eternity.   I hope that it might inspire us all in our worship, to see new things in every aspect of our Christian lives walking with God and reading his word so that we might  -  as the writer of that preface to the Book of Common Prayer put it,  " Continually profit more and more in knowledge of God". 
[ Psalm 23 in new version] 

