By The Rev. Susan Balfour

Beloved,

Greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ! Your faith and devotion to the gospel are inspirational, and I am grateful for the ways in which you show care for one another and our community.

I’ve once again been reflecting on the nature of Scripture and its role in our lives as people of faith. Scripture is a testament to our history as God’s people, again and again posing and wrestling with the persistent questions of human nature, God’s providence, why things happen as they do, and how we live into our relationship with a loving and gracious God who goes to such great lengths to reconcile with us. The Bible is a chronicle of how our ancestors in the faith have wrestled with and attempted to provide answers to these timeless conversations with God and one another.

God has created us in God’s own image, as individuals and as members of a collective; when God speaks it is almost always in the second-person plural. The doctrine of the Trinity models our need for one another. If even God exists in the community of Creator, Christ, and Spirit, how much more do we find ourselves inextricably united with every other human being, and every other living thing, for that matter? And how do we live faithfully into that communion, relying on the guidance of Scripture to show us how to do so?

Jesus Christ is the embodiment of that—the fulfillment of the Tanakh: Torah, Prophets (Nav’im), and Wisdom (Khetuv’im). Jesus Christ is the One who teaches us the kind of human symbiosis that recognizes our common humanity, our shared life, and the fact that the God of all Creation imbues each human being with God’s own image and places each human being in a mutual relationship with every other. That mutual relationship renders us responsible to and for one another, calling us to love others as we love ourselves—in other words, we strive to realize for every other human being that which we would wish for ourselves, as though it was for our very own selves. Seen through this lens, it is never “us vs. them.” It is only ever “us”

In high school, my AP literature teacher taught Genesis and Job as literature. She argued that it counts as world literature, and she wasn’t wrong. The Bible is, indeed, a book of worldwide and historical import. What makes it Scripture, however, is our willingness to engage it prayerfully, inviting the Holy Spirit to read it with us, and taking it seriously as a conversation within itself and among the multitude of generations spanning thousands of years, seeking to explore God’s intention, instruction, and example for humanity. That is what makes it sacred—may it ever be so for us.

In Christ,

Rev. Susan