Readings: Ezekiel 2:1 – 3:4; Galatians 1:11 – end
Here come I, the death watch beetle
Chewing away at the great cathedral;
Gnawing the medieval beams
And the magnificent carved rood screen
Gorging on gospels and epistles
From the illuminated missals;
As once I ate the odes of Sappho
And the histories of Manetho,
The lost plays of Euripides
And all the thought of Parmenides.
The Sibyl’s leaves which the wind scattered
And all Aunt Delia’s love letters.
Those immortal lines come from a poem called Song of the Death-Watch Beetle . But it seems it isn’t only death-watch beetles that eat books. I have more than once had a nightmare that I was eating some sort of paper or cardboard – and very unpleasant it was too! Our reading from Ezekiel this evening also seems to come from the realm of hallucination or dream. It starts with Ezekiel flat on his face as a result of an extraordinary and somewhat terrifying vision of the glory of God. It ends with him being offered a scroll with writing on it, then told to open his mouth and eat the scroll. Ezekiel reports that “in my mouth it was a sweet as honey” (Ezekiel 3:3).
There are other instances in the Bible of this image of eating the honey-like word of God. The Psalmist writes:
the ordinances of the LORD are true
and righteous altogether.
10 More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey,
and drippings of the honeycomb. (Psalm 19:9b-10)
and again
How sweet are your words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth! (Psalm 119: 103)
And the idea is taken up in the New Testament by the writer of the Book of Revelation, who hears a voice saying:
“Go, take the scroll that is open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.” 9 So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, “Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.” 10 So I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter.
11 Then they said to me, “You must prophesy again about many peoples and nations and languages and kings.” (Revelation 10: 8 – 11)
For John, as for Ezekiel eating the words is a prelude to delivering prophesy. God is literally giving the words to say.
We may not be called to be prophets like Ezekiel and John, although clearly there is a place for speaking out. Our context is very different from theirs. But I wonder what this image of eating the word of God might say to us?
Were you a bookworm as a child? I certainly was. To be a bookworm you have to devour books. I read them rather fast, often not fully understanding what I was reading, but I just kept hoovering up books, so much so that I exhausted the stock of novels in one small public library. I only read stories, facts weren’t interesting.
Now, as an adult I’m a book buyer, with pious hopes that I’ll find time to read them. I buy books because I think they’ll be good for me or useful. They often are! I don’t read so many stories! Rather than being engrossed and reading from cover to cover I tend to dive in and out, often having three or four on the go at the same time. I wish I could devour books in the way I used to do. But to do this takes commitment and time.
This leads me to wonder how our reading habits relate to the way we approach the Bible. All of us, I suspect, have various ways of relating to the Bible. Perhaps we look up a quotation, read a Gospel for Lent, or maybe we take home the service sheet on Sunday morning and read through the lessons again. Perhaps we prefer hearing the Bible read in church, or perhaps we plunge in and read it cover to cover. There are many different ways of approaching the Bible and we may find different methods helpful at different times. I’d like to suggest one or two which might help with that process of chewing over and digestion.
Of course, we can get hold of a commentary or two and study the Bible. That can be very rewarding; some kind of study is probably essential if we are to grow in our understanding of the extraordinary range and variety of writing between Genesis and Revelation. Study can be very illuminating, but on its own it can be very dry. There are other ways in which the Bible can come to life for us and speak into our prayer life.
One of these, and you may already be familiar with it, is Lectio Divina. This is an ancient monastic practice. It’s a prayerful reading of a passage of Scripture. The monks would hear the same passage read several times, continuing to listen until a word or a phrase moved or disturbed them. They would then retire to meditate on those words, allowing themselves to respond to them and turning that response to prayer. Another way of reading is the Ignatian one. This involves entering imaginatively into a scene or narrative. It probably works best with stories from the Gospels. This method probably appeals most to the sort of person who naturally enjoys using their imagination; it can be very illuminating to place yourself as one of the characters or the crowd in a Gospel story, – one of the healings, for example, – and to play out what happens, noticing your own feelings and reactions. Those feelings and reactions can then be turned to prayer.
It’s no coincidence that both Ezekiel and Paul, who featured in our second reading this evening, were students of the Scriptures before they received their commissions from God. Ezekiel was trained as a priest before his calling to became a prophet, and Paul describes himself as “zealous for the traditions of my ancestors”. He was a scholar of Judaism before he discovered Jesus as His Lord. For both of them prayerful immersion in their Scriptures and traditions was followed by new and radical insights. Their new visions and revelations were rooted in and given context by their past study and experience of God.
If we seek to discover new things about God and to grow as Christians, one way of doing this is to become ‘holy bookworms’, to find ways of devouring our Scriptures with enjoyment . As the Psalmist says “O taste and see that the Lord is good!”(Psalm 34:8)