Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Collect of the Day, Proper 28, The Book of Common Prayer

“Hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.” Thomas Cranmer was the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury. He compiled the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, and he composed this amazing prayer.

In the 16th century, the Bible was all the rage. Soon after Gutenburg invented the printing press many were able to read it. What they found there seemed, at times, at odds with late-Medieval Christianity. It was here, at the time of the Reformation, when many Christians rediscovered the Bible as the ultimate source of authority for the church. And so Thomas Cranmer encouraged folks to really hear it, to really read it.

Notice, “marking, learning, and inwardly digesting” is not reading the Bible for information. It’s not pouring over it for things we can use. This kind of reading is different. It involves our whole being. It changes us from the inside-out.

The late-great-Christian spirituality writer Eugene Peterson writes that this kind of reading gets the Scriptures into our being. He uses the metaphor of a dog who’s found a bone. She plays with it, shows it off to her owners, and then goes away into a solitary place to gnaw at it ‘til it’s no more. This concentration with the bone goes on for hours, days even, until it’s essentially been inhaled. According to Peterson, this is the kind of reading Christians bring to their Bibles, and it’s the kind of concentration Cranmer has us pray to God for in this prayer. We ask for the grace to “eat this book” until it gets into our bones, and even then we don’t quit it.

We gnaw at this book, because, as the great 20th century theologian Karl Barth makes clear, “The strange new world within the Bible” is a truer picture of the world and ourselves than anything we’re being fed on the news or by the zeitgeist. Barth resided in Germany when the Nazis came to power. The zeitgeist of the age that the German Church inhabited is, well, you know what it was. For Barth, the Scriptures gave us an understanding of ourselves, others, and the world that is true, while the zeitgeist of that time and of any time is at best an approximation, and at worst, well, Nazi-ish.

So take a leap of faith and pray this prayer with us this week. We can’t manufacture a love for the Scriptures if it isn’t there, but we know one who can. The one who “raises the dead, and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

So by the power of the Holy Spirit, “Eat this book!” And may the Holy Spirit use it to birth “faith, hope, and love” in you and me — giving us a true picture of reality, and most importantly, ourselves.

Grace and Peace,

Ben