Today we celebrate Bible Sunday: Encouraged this year to regard the Bible as a being about our freedom: God’s love liberating us.

I have felt God prodding me this week to talk to you about my relationship with the bible, and also the significance of the ‘word’ of God and what that means and does in our life.

First, I want to start by introducing you to a few personal friends: My King James Bible with the words of Christ in red and a nice cover. In my late twenties, I started reconnecting with my faith again. I went to buy Bible, and this looked like the most serious, sensible one. I opened it at Genesis and started working through it but found the traditional language was a bit of a struggle. Not to take anything away from KJB – it’s an amazing piece of work - but it didn’t connect with me.

In 2000 I started sensing God’s call and I confessed to my then Parish Priest that I was struggling to get through the bible, so he kindly went to his bookshelf and handed me a slightly battered old Bible – New English Bible. It’s a 1960s translation, with which I got on better. In time the spine fell off an it became a family treasure trove full of pictures and bookmarks by my children, photographs of my family. It has that ‘lived in’ feel, like a pair of comfortable old shoes. It lives always by my bed.

In 2007, I started a theology degree and was told my comfortable old Bible was not up to scratch, that I needed a New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). A wonderfully kind classmate handed me a brand new copy of NRSV as a gift (she had two) and inscribed it for me. This became my serious study companion for three years and lives on my desk.

This is what I was given for my ordination – Moroccan leather, gold edging, crest of Chelmsford diocese. Beautiful – but I’m terrified to get it out of the box in case I spill tea on it. So it stays on the bookshelf for special occasions.

I tell you this to illustrate the need for a personal relationship with our bible. I wonder where does your bible live? How close is it to you? If our Bible going to liberate us it e needs to present in our daily lives. It is a living thing not an inanimate object. It holds the word of God. And the word of God is alive – it acts on us and our world.

Jesus illustrates this perfectly in today’s gospel He takes the scroll of Isaiah 61:1-2 and he reads it and says:

In other words – this is not just a scroll from the book of the prophets. This is real. Jesus is the embodiment of the word in action – what the word means and looks like in human form, in human circumstances.

We hear this also in the opening verses of John’s gospel:

 ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God…and the word became flesh and lived among us.’

It is as if the whole message of the Old Testament – about God’s desire for us to live in relationships characterized by love, faithfulness, righteousness, mercy, justice - steps out of the page and takes on human form. That must have been rather alarming to Jesus’ community.

Our gospel reading was a revolutionary manifesto which threatened to the invert the traditional systems of power and authority - No wonder there was anxiety the synagogue in Nazareth!

This is what the word of God did then, and this is what it does now, not only in our lives, but in our society. If we are going to be connect with the living power of the word, we need to have a personal relationship with our Bible because:

Firstly, reading the bible is a spiritual process – in our reading of the Bible, in the words of our gospel reading today, the spirit of the Lord is upon us.

Secondly, reading the bible acts on us and our lives and in doing so, it liberates and heals us – as in our gospel today, it releases us as captives and promotes recovery of our own sight.

Thirdly, reading the bible announces good news – the word of God shows us an alternative vision, God’s vision, which is so much greater than our own –and in doing so it gives us hope.

How is the bible a spiritual process?

Reading the bible is not primarily an intellectual process – yes there is a lot here to grasp and wrestle with intellectually, and we do need to engage intellectually with scripture, but that is not the purpose. Nor is it primarily a moral process – although regular bible reading might make us feel nice and virtuous, and of course the bible contains plenty of moral wisdom, that is not the point. Engaging with the bible is a spiritual process – through it we tap into that river of eternal life: that ever-flowing undercurrent of divine wisdom, which we also access through Jesus, through prayer, through the sacraments. This is what keeping us in eternal life means – placing ourselves into the divine presence, through which we begin to understand God’s will for our lives. You can tap into that river of wisdom at any point in the bible. It is not dependent on reading the bible from cover to cover but about regular bathing in its waters and refreshing ourselves – it is not for no reason that the bible is full of analogies about water, refreshment, feeding, thirsting, nurturing. For that is what God’s word does.

How does the word act in us and on us, how does it heal and liberate us? It’s not just about reading the bible, but allowing the word to penetrate our lives. We heard a few weeks ago at Carole’s licensing about letting the word of God dwell richly in us. Metaphors about the word of God as ‘seed’ abound in the bible – word as a living organism that is planted within us. It’s like a shoot which sends out spiritual tendrils.

Some years ago, I was going through a challenging time in life, and I picked up my Bible and it randomly opened it at Luke 8:22 which is the story of Jesus calming the storm. Radio 4 car the next day - a programme about freak storms in Loch Neagh in Northern Ireland. A few days later - another revelation about Lake Galilee, and then a sermon by one of our tutors on the same passage. By the end of two weeks I was amazed at how the word of God leads us on its own journey and teaches us. It brought me to a place of calm and understanding in my life at that time. It is never random though it may sometimes seem like that.

At morning prayer beginning of this week – Isaiah 55 – talks about the word being very purposeful:

If we are not open to what the word of God wants to say to us now, we may be missing an important source of nourishment in our lives, of healing and liberation – a way of moving beyond what blocks us from living as God intends. As Thomas Cranmer said:

How does it bring us hope? The reading today from Romans talks about this:

It is sometimes hard when we look at our world – especially this week in the light of the spending cuts, cholera in Haiti and so many other crises. We need the hope that Jesus embodies in Luke’s gospel: a promise of something better. The word represents antidote to cynicism – this is not the way the world is supposed to be; we should not just live with it; we should expect more, and we should live our lives with that hope and expectation. When we do this we influence others – our hopes is infectious.

This week, I came across A Chinese Woman’s Prayer:

The word of God leaves its mark on our lives – as we read our bibles so our lives become part of the word’s action in the world. The word of God in us Gives Light to the World. So as we celebrate the word of God this Bible Sunday, let us recommit ourselves not just to regularly reading our Bible, but to living with it, keeping it close to us. It is not a dead, dusty museum piece. It is spoken by the prophets, alive in Jesus, and from it grows new life within us and new life for the world.