Hearing the Word
Third Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C
Just before the season of “COVID-tide,” my congregation engaged in a little experiment. For Lent, we gave up bulletins. Mine is a liturgical tradition, and though every pew has ample copies of the Book of Common Prayer, our practice has been to print the full liturgy along with the day’s scripture readings. Other than a hymnal, the bulletin is all anyone needs to participate in the service. The argument is that this is a more user friendly approach. Whether that is true or not, it all adds up to a lot of paper dumped in the recycling bin each week. What would happen if we gave all that up for a while?
The experiment didn’t last long, soon we were worshiping through screens, but for the few Sundays we were without bulletins the experience of worship was changed in an unanticipated way: for the first time in years we were hearing scripture together. Of course, in the days of bulletins, scripture was read aloud. Lay readers would take to the lectern and read a passage from the Old Testament and an “Epistle” reading from the New. Then one of the clergy would process the Gospel book forward and read the day’s selection. But if one looked out at the congregation one would be met with eyes turned down, reading the printed page, rather than hearing the word of God together.
The difference between the experiences is subtle but significant, and I think it offers a way into our readings for today. Our scriptures from Nehemiah and Luke are both about the experience of hearing scripture as a collective action, an action by which God’s spirit moved and the Word become flesh among us. By words being spoken and ears hearing, the Law of God and the prophetic hope were Incarnated through the breath, embodied in human presence, and made manifest in community. It is possible that these realities could happen if everyone had been reading along, but I do wonder if the Spirit could have shown up so readily. There is something different about everyone listening to one voice together than reading individually, side by side.
In a wonderful essay, L.M. Sacasas (who spoke at last year’s EP Gathering), reflects on the way that certain technologies change how we experience the world. To do that he reflects on Ivan Illich’s insight that even before the invention of the printing press there was a shift in how Western literate people read. The earlier habit of reading, what Illich calls “monkish reading,” saw the book more as a recording and a score than a “text.” A book was the record of spoken words and was meant to be read aloud, and even a person reading alone, usually spoke the words she was reading. So it was that in book 6 of his Confessions, Augustine marvels when he finds Ambrose reading silently. It was an act so strange that Augustine remembered it all those years later.
But, as Illich traces it, during the scholastic period reading changed. It became a record of thoughts rather than speech. As such, the habits of reading shifted. This, Illich argues, was the revolution in reading that preceded the printing press. As Sacasas articulates it, “What Illich is picking up on here is the estrangement of the self from the community that was analogous in his view to the estrangement of the text from the book.” Instead of the book being a window to reality, a record of bodily life rooted in community, it becomes a form of access to internal thoughts and narratives—reading becomes the act of individuals rather than communities.
I am not suggesting from this that we should all start reading aloud like sixth century monks. Yet, I think it is critical as we engage with scriptures like those we will hear this Sunday, that we recognize that the experience of listening to God’s word was strikingly different for those listening to Ezra or those standing in the synagogue where Jesus served as lector. And we must recognize that there is something we have lost by not listening to the word together; something we could reclaim by learning to practice this art once again. What awaits us if we recover that art is a feast.
Our reading from Nehemia ends with a call for the people to respond to the hearing of the Word not with the weeping of repentance, but with the feast of deliverance: “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our Lord; and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
This feasting brought forth from the word is the ultimate invitation of hearing scripture. While our initial responses may be weeping and repentance, those are only steps along the way toward the feast of joy. At a time when collective eating has diminished as much as collective listening to the word, there is a need to recover this invitation. What if our common listening were truly a prelude to the common table that we share? What if in this time when collective eating is difficult because of the pandemic, collective listening can be a way of feasting together nonetheless?
The calling for a feast has always been a sacramental sign of the coming of God’s reign. We see this echoed in our reading from Luke, where Jesus proclaims the “year of the Lord’s favor,” stopping mid-sentence before getting to God’s judgement. What he has come to do is to proclaim Jubilee and his speaking those verses into the room for all to hear was an inauguration of that reality. It is, of course, a reality that not everyone wants to embrace. By the end of the chapter those in the synagogue will have realized that Jesus intends to spread this Jubilee even to gentiles and they are not willing to accept such an extension of the table. Hearing is an invitation that can be rejected.
So what are we to do with the invitation our scriptures this Sunday offer? Are we ready to feast together on God’s word and receive it together as we listen in community? Reading the Word alone is a good act, and we shouldn’t discourage it, but God’s living Word is offered not to any one of us alone, but to the whole of creation. The Word is proclaiming the coming of God’s liberation and it is inviting us all to the feast of that salvation. May we look up from the page, hear the good Word speaking to all the word, and take our seat at the table.
