Sunnyside Mennonite Church

Sunnyside Mennonite Church completed a Bible Reading Marathon (see photos) last weekend.  The marathon began on Thursday morning, May 8 and was completed on Sunday morning, May 11.  Over 60 participants representing over 40 households participated.  Beginning in Genesis and continuing through the last chapter in Revelation, readers took a turn reading for one hour. 

It is hard to explain the sense of unity generated from the commitment to read chapter after chapter and then hand off to the next reader.  Like many rituals, the mystery is greater than the integral pieces.  Words to describe what happened are hard to find, but we are left with a sense of something holy, something beyond our ability to grasp.   

The marathon made visible that we are a community that finds the meaning for our stories within a larger Story.  Although it involved a particular task of reading text on page, the three day event around the clock made visible a deeper mystery.  That our congregation is living into a Story that finds its orienting framework in Scripture.  Anabaptist theologian, James McClendon, says this so well. 

We participate in the ongoing biblical story, being formed and informed by it (thus narrative generates character), discovering the world of the Bible to be our own real world (thus narrative provides a setting), and finding its great signs and lesser signs significant episodes not only of the great story it tells but also of our own stories therein contained (thus narrative issues in event).  It is a story in which, though we supposed ourselves to be seekers, we found we were in reality the sought; not hounds, but the hares. 

The Bible is for us the word of God written; it is that text in which the One who lays claim to our lives by the act of his life makes that claim afresh in acts of speech; it is for us God speaking; it is the word of God. 

The story you are living out now is the story related in the text.  History is real, history matters, exactly because in God’s mysterious way the past is present.  So the church of the New Testament is the church now; time, though not abolished, is in this manner transcended, and the church that reclaims its past stands today before the great final Judge as well.  “This is that” and “then is now.” 

(McClendon, Ethics)

We do not just read to gain a greater level of encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible.  We do not just read as an exercise in religious piety.  We read because this is that and then is now.  We believe that what is unfolding in history is understood through the interpretive framework of Scripture.  We read to find our identity, place and calling within that overarching Story. 

We read in the solitary hours of night.  We read as the sun rises.  We read as the world moves through another day.  We read that there is nothing new under the sun.  Tragedy and joy, toil and pain, birth and death.

We read in solitude.  We read as a community.  We read the Creation story.  The fall.  We read about the call of Abraham, the formation of a chosen people-Israel.  We read again about the captivity of Egypt, the plagues, the Exodus, wandering in the wilderness.  The language, the literary conventions are many and varied.  Some archaic.  We read the parts that are included in the lectionary and those that are not.  The material suitable for Sunday School and some that is often passed over.  We read the graphic sections--the vexing accounts of divinely sanctioned violence. 

We read of Moses, Saul, David, Esther, Ruth, Mary.  We press through the endless levitical codes.  We read the sometimes monotonous repetition in the history narratives.  We read through seemingly endless geneologies.  Psalms.  Proverbs.  Song of Solomon.  Ecclesiastes.  Lamentations. 

We read the prophetic tradition in the Hebrew scriptures--the major and minor prophets.  We don't reach the New Testament until Saturday evening.  We wonder if the pace is adequate to finish before the worship service is to begin.  It is.  There is even time for re-reading Revelation so as to finish at the appointed time.

As we read, there is something both mundane and holy about the narrative we read and the setting and events surrounding the reading marathon.  We cannot explain all that is happening, but we ponder the way in which this experience is forming us and orienting us to live into the unfolding Story of God.