Daily Lectionary: Need we say more?

Morning Ps. 104, 149
Gen. 6:9–22
Heb. 4:1–13
John 2:13–22
Evening Ps. 138, 98

Children do not always easily sit still. As it is my ambition to introduce reading and literature into the lives of my children and grandchildren, it has long been my custom to take advantage of the natural sedentarity of meal times in order to read to them.* Each morning now, after reading to him from the Bible, I read Chaim Potok to my sixteen-year-old son while he slumps sleepily over his Cheerios. I mean to follow The Chosen with Leo Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. When I first read Tolstoy in college I thought, "How does he know me?!" It was exhilarating. For the last 30 years I have been having an immeasurably more profound version of the same experience almost every day reading God's word, which, as we are reminded in today's text, "is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart." (Hebrews 4:12) Anyone who reads the Bible expecting to meet there the Holy Spirit, the Surgeon who wields this terrifyingly tender scalpel, can attest to the veracity of that claim.

Let us not say more about the Bible than it says about itself. It's claims are more than enough (2 Timothy 3:16). We needn't add to them and we do so at our peril. (Revelations 22:18-19)

* This is a relatively mild form of child abuse, but it does have its consequences: there is a young woman in Lisbon, a banker, who can even today be spotted making her way about the medieval streets with her nose in a book, an idiosyncrasy that warms her daddy's heart.