For Wilshire Baptist Church
LeAnn and I canceled the daily newspaper. We talked about it for months and then finally did it.
We were slow to move because we both grew up with newspapers thrown onto our front lawns every day. It was a family tradition and a lifestyle choice and for me it was part of my heritage and career. My grandfather was a newspaper man, my father had a paper route and so did my brother and me. My degree in journalism put me in the newspaper business for a few years.
But the morning tradition of walking out into the damp grass and bringing in the news has been replaced by sitting down at a computer or grabbing a smart phone or tablet and getting the news around the clock whenever you want and wherever you are. What’s more, the local newspaper has been supplanted by news sources from around the globe. For the record, we still get the printed paper on Sunday, a daily epaper and multiple daily email reports with headlines and links to stories.
We live in a perpetual cloud of news and information, and instead of having to work to bring it in and look at it, we have to fight to turn it off. And mostly that fight is with ourselves, because we are the ones who control what we consume and it’s easy to be out of control.
Quitting the newspaper almost feels like quitting the Bible, and that’s a real thing too, because if you look closely, you’ll notice the number of people carrying Bibles to church has declined substantially. It was a joke at first in our Epiphany class at Wilshire when a teacher would say, “Turn in your Bible — or scroll on your digital device — to our verses for today,” but now it’s just a matter of fact.
But the Bible is not just the printed, bound book, is it? The Bible is the wordsprinted on the pages in that book, and before that the Bible was the words that were spoken and shared through oral traditions. Perhaps that’s why some years ago in the Catholic mass they stopped holding up the book and saying, “This is the word of the Lord” and instead they say, “The word of the Lord.” The words cannot be confined in a book; when spoken and heard they are alive and moving freely in the air.
Like with the newspaper, there’s nothing really wrong with not toting around a Bible. The internet is chock full of great sites that provide the Bible in every translation possible and often side-by-side for comparison and with concordances and search features and various other notes. My favorite site is BibleGateway.com.
A downside of a digital Bible is that while a printed book sitting on the bedside table may prompt a scripture reading before going to bed, an iPad on the table more likely tempts a quick read of a news story or a pointless Twitter thread. Or worse, something that raises a worry or doubt or even anger. Not a good thing before turning off the lights.
Another downside: I’ve been to many funerals where the ministers base their homilies on the favorite scriptures that the dearly departed underlined in their Bible, often with some personal notes and perspectives written in the margins. That won’t happen when my time comes because I have a lifelong aversion to writing in books, probably because it was forbidden in Texas schools. Instead, someone will have to crack the security code on my computer or iPhone and search my internet browser history for the times when I visited BibleGateway.com. And maybe the day of the week will provide a hint of whether I was doing research for a blog or sitting in Epiphany class on Sunday morning. But they’ll have to scroll through the history of all the other garbage I viewed to find the Bible searches, and that’s a truly scary thought.
Maybe I better dust off my Bible, find a good pen, and start making notes.