Colin Semper St Peter & St Paul, Godalming 22/10/06

By kind permission of the Rector, I have permission to extend Bible Sunday by a week – it's really next week. I do this because I am deeply worried by how we use our sacred writings. In One World Week, put crudely, millions of people do not have a clue about whether or what their pet parrot thinks but they are absolutely certain that they know, definitively, what God thinks about everything, from human sexuality to the public service borrowing requirement. Here is danger, chaos, schism and according to Professor Richard Dawkins, (whose book I stood reading in a bookshop in Bournemouth yesterday) violence, bigotry and the harm of little children.

In one small part of the religious scene – the Anglican Communion – there isn't the danger or prospect of schism, there is schism. For example, in the little town in North Carolina from which our daughter-in-law comes, there are two churches like this one – they are in vicious conflict. One says, from Leviticus – man shall not lie with man. The other says – that was for an ancient, nomadic people; our God is a dynamic God and we know differently.

Now, we sometimes refer to ourselves – with the Muslims and the Jews – as The People of the Book. This is wrong. We are not. Muslims are – the Holy Koran is divine. Jews are with the Law. Christians are the people of the Word of God. In other words, we are the people of Jesus.

Incidentally, Muslims have the same characteristic as we do – you may not alter or interpret the Koran. Oh yes, you may, say others. And the Jews also. You are familiar with Orthodox even ultra Orthodox Hassidic Jews, Reformed and Liberal and Progressive wings.

For many, many years of my life I have read 4 or 6 socking great passages of the Bible every day. So I wondered if you would allow me to speak some common sense, well, commonsense to me, about the Bible, albeit in rather extreme language.

There are a lot of reasons for not reading the Bible at all. It can look like a railway timetable. It can be a cure for insomnia – monumentally boring. Like "Just a Minute" on the radio, it deviates, hesitates and repeats itself – often.

The Bible is full of barbarity, fanaticism, crassness. It is utter bliss set alongside merciless cruelty. For example, "By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Zion." Beautiful longing.

"Blessed shall he be that takes thy children and throws them against the stones." Horrible. But the same Psalm.

So the Bible is a disorderly collection of books often tedious, barbaric, obscure, full of contradictions and inconsistencies, and composed of poetry and propaganda, myth and murk, history and hysteria. Over the years, the Bible has been hopelessly associated with tub-thumping evangelism, dreamy loveless piety, super-charged superstition and sniffy moralising. With crippling authoritarianism and a mind numbing literalism.

So, what is the point of it? I'll tell you. Because the Bible is about the way life really is. It is about the sweep of history, of how people came to believe, from primitive to sophisticated. It's about people who don't believe and people who do. It's about the blameless, the righteous, the saintly. It's about the guilty, the conmen, the crooked. It's about hope and despair which together always walk with us. It's our story. It's about the way our lives are. It's about God doing impossible things with impossible people. About people as they struggle to catch God's compelling, dangerous, living word. Over the years, all of us, I guess, have had such joy, such fury, such stimulus, such humour, such challenge from the Bible.

From Abraham and Sarah with tears of laughter streaming down their faces when they hear from God that, at a great age, they'll have the son they always wanted.

From David dancing almost naked in front of the Ark.

From the great and wonderful Paul – scholar, arguer, preacher, traveller, toughie with a bruised back and a cauliflower ear and a split lip, the vulnerable loving pastor with his own problem – the man they kissed as he left Miletus. They cried for him.

And Jesus, stretched between two crooks. Some say he cleared away the mystery of God. I say he deepened it. He was at his most active when he was giving his life away.

Now – a final word. My common sense about the Bible. The way to see it is through a window. If you look at the window you'll see the fly specks and the marks where the football has hit it. If you look through the window, you'll see a world beyond. This is the difference between those who see the Bible as a holy bore – and those of us who see it as the Word of God which speaks out of depths of an almost unimaginable past into the depths of you and me. I ask you, what more can any one of us want?