The 32nd Running of the 500 Festival Mini-Marathon is now history. Close to 35,000 runners took to the streets of our city. It is the largest half-marathon in the U.S., and overall, the eighth largest running event in America.

We used to keep track of the church members who ran in the marathon but our congregation has grown too large to know all the names of all of our participants. We have a couple of church members who are serious marathoners, Steve Maves and Christie Owens. Steve ran in the Boston marathon a few years ago and Christie just qualified for the 2009 marathon.  What with the mini this weekend and the Geist half-marathon coming up, I asked them what they eat before a race. Both Steve and Christie load up on high carb pasta dinners the night before. Christie has bananas and a power bar, Steve power gels. I asked them if they considered donuts before a race. Donuts are carbs. I figured that one of the benefits of running 13 miles is eating a box of Krispy Kreme donuts before the race. Christie said it wasn’t a very good idea. I thought, “If I can’t eat donuts before the race, I’m not entering the mini.” Christie did point out that if I finished the race, I’d probably want a box of donuts because the next day, you are really hungry.  

Runners know that diet is important. If you are going to perform your best, you have to manage your diet, not just the night before and during the race. You have to eat the right foods weeks in advance to prepare yourself for the marathon. If you feast on junk food, there is no way you will be able to perform well. The right food needs to be eaten so that your body can metabolize the nutrients into your tissues, giving you the fuel needed to compete. When it comes to running marathons, you are what you eat.

The same can be said about your spiritual life. When it comes to living a spiritual life, you are what you eat. This brings up the question of the day. Are you eating the Word of God? Is the Bible spiritual ingested into your life in such away that it becomes fully metabolized into your system? Are you eating the Book?

Eating a book is an odd phrase unless you are a parent of a preschool child. There is that wonderful time of development when toddlers begin to explore the world. One way toddlers explore is to put things in their mouth, to literally eat the world around them. We have a number of little books that we’ve kept for memory sake. They have the teeth marks of our children. We have a strong, vivid memory of our children gnawing on the corners of the little books, eating those books.  Eat this book sounds odd unless you are going through the oral fixation phase with a toddler or if you are familiar with Ezekiel, Jeremiah or John of Patmos. Eat this book makes sense if you know their stories.[1]

I’m taking liberties, of course, modernizing the phrase “eat this scroll.”  Books didn’t exist in the late first century. The Word of God was written on scrolls. But since we don’t have scrolls, I’ve modernized the image making it eat this book. When you approach the book of Revelation, you have to update the imagery; otherwise, it is difficult to understand.

Of all of the books of the Bible, probably the least approached and most misunderstood is the book of Revelation. The author of this letter to seven churches identifies himself as John. For centuries, many thought he might be John the son of Zebedee or the John who writes the gospels. Most scholars have laid aside those two possibilities and simply call the author, John of Patmos.

Patmos was a Roman prison colony off the coast of Turkey, south of Greece. John is exiled on the island for 18 months, lives in a cave and has a (eschatological) vision of last days which he receives from Jesus through an angel.  “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place; he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John” (Revelation 1:1)  It is highly symbolic and heavily laden with references to Hebrew scripture. It is written during a very difficult time in the life of the church at the end of the first century, what John describes as the persecution which causes him to be on the island. Beginning in the 60’s, Nero instituted a violent persecution of Christians but it was only in Rome. By the time John of Patmos has his vision, the persecution has spread throughout the empire. The emperor Domitian revived and enforced the cult of emperor worship. John pictures the Roman Empire as a seven-headed beast rising out of the sea saying “And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads; and on its horns were ten diadems, and on its heads were blasphemous names (Revelation 13:1).  This vivid image has been often portrayed in art and reinterpreted to depict other repressive regimes. In the Smithsonian Institute there is a sculpture by Viktor Schreckengost titled Apocalypse ’42. He created it a few months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. There is a horse like beast rising from the sea bearing Mussolini, Hirohito, and a figure of Death across the globe[2]. Of course, there are only five heads on this beast, not seven which is why it is best to consider the context of scripture rather than to assume that scripture revealed in the first century was prophetically identifying people 2000 years late.

Our lesson today is just as fantastic. On Sunday morning John is getting his sermon ready, something that I haven’t done since we started Saturday worship. An angel appears and in a loud voice begins to dictate the revelation which he must share with the seven churches. Halfway through these messages, a gigantic angel comes down and roars like a lion and begins to preach like thunder. You don’t sleep through sermons that sound like thunder. John starts to write down what he was saying but he is told not to.  This huge God-messenger is holding a huge scroll. It represents all of the sacred scripture at that time. The gigantic angel said to John “Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth” (Revelation 10:9). John wasn’t the first to be instructed by an angel to eat the word of God. Six hundred years early, an angel appears to Ezekiel and says, “Eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it. Then I ate it; and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey.” (Ezekiel 3:3). Jeremiah eats the book and he said, “…the words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart” (Jeremiah 15:16b). Like Ezekiel and Jeremiah, the angel instructs John to eat the words so that they become assimilated into his heart, they feed his soul, and they become metabolized into the very tissues of their lives.  Read your Bible or eat this book. How do you approach scripture?  Do you know?

Some approach scripture with intellectual curiosity. They have interest in the language, history, culture, ideas, geography and poetry of the bible. A person can spend a lifetime intellectually considering the Bible and never exhaust it.

Others approach the Bible for moral guidance. They want to live well and have their children and neighbors live well. The Bible provides sound counsel, trustworthy direction for living a healthy, wise life. They use the Bible like you might an atlas, charting the course and direction for life, keeping them on the straight and narrow.

Still others turn to scripture for inspiration. There are many beautiful and comforting passages of scripture. Many Bibles are organized around this principle. They provide indexes with bit and pieces of scripture to inspire you when you’re downtrodden or encourage you when you are facing a challenge.

There is nothing wrong in responding to the Bible as an intellectual challenge, or for the moral guidance it offers or for the spiritual life it can provide. I approach the Word of God this way daily. But there is still another way of approaching the scripture that is even more important. It is to eat the book.

Bible study that is eating the book isn’t gnawing on the corner of a leather bound addition like some orally fixated child. It is completely changing your approach so that you enter God’s world so that you become a part of it and it can become a part of you. Think of it something like our state fair crowded with carnival rides and food booths, exhibits of science and farm, children clutching allowance money, farm animals on exhibit and concerts in the coliseum. There are people from every station and every walk of life at the fair. Some are good. You go to the fair and the place is charged with life, human and animal, good and bad, greedy and generous and you can’t capture what it really is by just looking at it from Binford Blvd. To really understand the state fair, it has to be entered, where you can experience the world of the fair, where you can smell the elephant ears and manure, hear the sounds of the midway and children laughing and crying, see the farm equipment and garden tools and eat[3]. We eat our way through the fair and take it inside of us. As people of the book, when enter the book, live in it, take it in, and treat it like food which will nourish our souls.

Eating the Book is different from most modern approaches of Bible study because instead of approaching the word to know more, we seek to become more. Most of the time (and I am as guilty of this as all of us) we approach scripture to come up with explanations or programs which fit our lives.  This is how we treat everything. So much of the way you were reared, so much of the way you were formed and shaped in our modern world, so many of the messages that we receive millions of times everyday are self-centered. In our world, we are told that success is having your needs and wants met and your feelings addressed. It is what Eugene Peterson calls the replacement Holy Trinity, the trinity of my holy needs, my holy wants, and my holy feelings. I know that most people come to church with this mindset and I know my sermons are often shaped by this reality. The new Trinity puts the Bible to personal service, using scripture to meet our need for meaning, our want for an easy life and our feelings of spiritual significance[4].

Eating the Book, seeing scripture as food which will nourish our souls, we embrace the true Holy Trinity. We enter God’s world in scripture where we find the Creator of all that is and will be, discover our Savior Jesus and it shows us the Holy Spirit which inspired the very Word read.  Eating the Book is about becoming something more rather than knowing more. So how are you to do it? Through the practice of something called Lectio Divina.

Lectio Divina was created by a European monk, Guigo the Second in the twelfth century. It has four parts and has been described as "Feasting on the Word." The four parts are first taking a bite (Lectio), then chewing on it (Meditatio). Next is the opportunity to savor the essence of it (Oratio). Finally, the Word is digested and made a part of the body (Contemplatio).  For nearly a millennium, men and women have this way of approaching the Bible as a way to eat the book, to take it in like food that will transform their being and encounter the living presence of God. In fact, Guigo the Second wrote this about lectio divina “ Reading, as it were, puts the solid food into our mouths, mediations chews it and breaks it down, prayer obtains the flavor of it and contemplation is the very sweetness which makes us glad and refreshes us.”[5]  Lectio divina is a developed Bible study which takes practice and a commitment to a regular discipline. The benefit is enormous because instead of seeking to know more, you will become more.

Let me give it to you again. You can jot it down or go to web and reread this sermon. Or for that matter, there are a number of websites which describe lectio divina. First, prepare yourself to enter God’s world, not to seek information for your life in this world. Then, take a bite, read. Read not like you read the newspaper or a book. Read the text several times. Read it carefully. Hear the words. Listen to them. Embrace their power.  Then, chew on them. Consider them, ponder them, meditate on them. Interact with them, considering how they reveal God to you. Step three is to pray over the Word that you have placed in your mouth and chewed on. Pray to the one who has offered you this food. Give thanks for the food which you are about to eat. Pray for it to be metabolized into your life, into your very being. And then, once the Word has been eaten, contemplate the goodness of God who offers such wonderful food. Sit still; sit in silence, sit and enjoy the gift of God’s Word that is as sweet as honey.

Read, meditate, pray and contemplate…four steps. It’s not a marathon, but it’s not a sprint either. It is nothing to rush through but rather something to try, to practice and to discover what the Bible means to be people of the Book. It is food.