Amanda and I popped into Abbey Church in North Berwick for a browse around and when I picked up the newsletter, I noticed that it had the winning entry in a national competition to summarize the Bible in 750 words. The winning entry was written by Robin Stockitt and here it is:
"At the centre of creation lies a heart beat: tick...tick...tick...tick. At times the beat quickens, during moments of high anticipation, but then it returns to its steady rhythm, without pause, without hesitation, day after day, year after year, unending. It is the pulsing life blood of love flowing from the heart of God towards all that he has made. One day this God will visit his creation in person. He himself will go and participate in the life of humanity. He will laugh and cry, encourage and admonish, educate and confuse, suffer and die, and rise again to the surprise, delight and dismay of the people with whom he lived. But this is to rush ahead to the end of the story.
At the heart of the Bible is a struggle. It is the story of a great drama in which humanity tries to keep in step with the heartbeat of love. Occasionally God and his people walk in harmony, shoulder to shoulder in sweet communion in the cool of the day. It was like this at the beginning for Adam and his wife given paradise to enjoy and guard. And there were holy moments of great intimacy too for Abram, Moses, Elijah, David, Isaiah, John and Peter. These were ordinary humans who felt the pull and tug of the heart beat of love upon their souls and responded to it. And yet the struggle to hear and to heed god's voice was often lost by those very same people who, last week, had followed God's insistent call so carefully.
At times the struggle was lost by a whole nation, God's chosen nation, Israel, despite the pleas and warnings of the prophets, God's spokespeople, who bravely stood up in his name. "These people, whom I love to bless", announced God one day, "will be a vehicle for blessing to spread to the whole world. They are blessed, not because they are more loved, but simply so that others might, through them, discern and enjoy me too".
God took these people, a rag-tag collection of unknown tribes, and through an extraordinary tale of enslavement in Egypt, rescue and deliverance across a harsh and forbidding desert, shaped them into a people that belonged to him. But alas, all to often, the blessing was kept to themselves and thereby it began to decay. The prophets came to call them out of their stupor and stubborn rebelliousness. 'Trust' called out Jeremiah in the heat of political turmoil. To no avail. 'Be merciful' declared Micah when the temptation was to be harsh and unyielding. But no-one heard.
And so it continued year after year, king after king, prophet after prophet until one day all God's chosen people were taken away to a distant land - the land of Babylon - where they remained for 70 years, in order that they might learn that mercy is better than sacrifice - and love, for God and neighbour, is more important than anything else in the whole world. Those who heard the heart beat and remembered from whence it came wrote down their struggles and heartaches, as well as their joys and times of jubilant thanksgiving. Their prayers and poems were collected together in the Psalms and became a treasured library.
And so God's time drew near. It was the time for his appearing, for his coming to his own people. He called himself Emmanuel, God with us or Jesus, God the Saviour made flesh. He chose to come in disguise, as an infant in an unknown village to a simple peasant girl. He came to those who had lost their way, who had become deaf to the pulsing beat of love, who were blind to the yearning of God for them. This Jesus, God's own Son, would enter their darkness to find them. He would even enter death for them, in order that they might know, that in God's great drama, forgiveness, reconciliation, and a new beginning were available for all. When Jesus rose again after three days, everything became new. God's people were no longer those who simply named themselves, 'Israel'. Jesus had flung the doors of the kingdom of heaven open wide for all to enter. The community that gladly walked through those doors of welcome, called themselves the 'called out ones' or the 'ekklesia' or 'the church' made up entirely of people.
The remainder of the Bible concerns the struggle of this new community to understand itself, its relationship to Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth who had come to reveal God to them and to tell them all about the heartbeat that never stops. It is an unfinished story. tick...tick...tick...tick."
