TRUSTING THE BIBLE A LITTLE MORE
                 and OURSELVES A LITTLE LESS
 
     We gather on Sunday, the Scriptures are opened  to the church, we
say, "Let's all believe that this ancient book - written  in a time and a
language quite different for our own, by a people in many ways different
from us - knows more than we."  Bending our lives toward the text that
reaches out  to us in deep words of truth.
     The main question is not simply, "What does this text mean?' but
rather, "How is this text asking me to change?"  The Bible wants to give
us new experiences, to create a new reality that would have been un-
available to us without the Bible.  The Bible does not simple want to speak
to the modern world.  The Bible wants to change the world, to create for us
a world, through words, that would have been in accessible to us without
openness to the text called Scripture.  This is not some imaginary world.
This is the real world, a world more real than today's newspaper headlines
or government press releases.
     And so I read in the newspaper of a woman. I think in Louisiana, who has
raised more than a dozen foster children, despite her meager income as
a domestic worker.   Why did she do it?  She replied, I saw a new world a
commin."
     We keep trusting the Bible because we keep meeting God in the Bible.
We call the Bible "inspired" because the Bible keeps reaching out to us,
keeps striking us with its strange truth, keeps truthfully depiciting God.  God
keeps truthfully speaking to us through Scripture as in no other medium.  In
the reading of Scripture, The Creator is at work, something is made out of
nothing, the church takes form around the words of the WORD.  The
truthfulness of Scripture is in the lives it is able to produce.
 
                                                        Pastor Al Schoonover