Depending on our age and circumstance there may be a special person in our life. In the Peanuts comic strip, Charlie Brown always hopes to get a Valentine from the cute little redheaded girl he has a crush on. But Charlie never gets the card. Poor guy. We feel for Charlie Brown because we know how powerful it can be to get a card or letter from someone we deeply love. In fact, some people have kept every letter from their beloved, holding on to them as personal treasures. For when we read and re-read the beloved’s words, it’s like some of those scenes in movies: we are reading, but there’s a "voice-over" as in our minds and hearts, we can hear their voice. We recognize and treasure their "presence" in the words.

The Church has a collection of such written treasures—a whole volume of love letters, let us say, from God. It is called the Bible. And the real reason we have this collection is to hear the voice Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd in and through and behind the words. Remember what Jesus said in the gospel? The sheep know their shepherd's voice…and they follow, because they know his voice. Thus we find our theme for today: We learn Jesus—hear his voice, which means, we begin to sense and be grasped by his merciful, loving, life-giving presence and power—in the words, poetry, themes, and stories of the Scriptures, the Holy Bible.

Oops, but now maybe I sense some guilt rising in this church, like an embarrassed blush. How many of us read the Bible faithfully, eagerly? There is great lack of familiarity with the Bible in the church these days. Maybe it’s because we’ve come to believe that only a few people have enough smarts or interest or time to really study and understand the Bible. The neglect of the Scriptures is so common that there is even humor about how when the pastor is going to come over for a visit, you have to find the family Bible, dust it off, and place it prominently on the coffee table. But I wonder if all this has happened because we mistakenly come to believe that the Bible is primarily ancient history and information about God, doctrines, with some weird dreams and visions thrown into the mix. It’s hard to see how ancient history has anything to do with us. But our theme is about learning Jesus, not merely learning about Jesus. If we begin to appreciate the Scriptures, from beginning to end, as being like a collection of love letters from him, in which we may still hear, so to speak, his living, loving voice, things change.

Consider this analogy. A radio is an almost magic thing. You turn it on and voices and music are heard. That’s the point of a radio, right?! To hear something from it. Of course, it takes a lot of knowledge on the part of many in order for that radio to play the voices and the music you want to hear. There is a vast pool of technological knowledge standing behind that radio. Designers and engineers know all about how it works and how to put it together. There is a huge industry built to support and develop radios and radio stations and the content to be broadcast. But for you to get what you need, you don’t have to know all that. You just have to turn it on and listen.

So it is with the Bible. There is a lot to learn about it. There are many layers of knowledge within it. There are the historical books, the prophets books, the poetry and books, the genre of the gospels, the letters of Paul and the letters of others, and even about those wild and confusing apocalyptic books, like Daniel and Revelation. There are several strong traditions of Biblical interpretation, stretching all the way from literalism to liberalism. And there is the whole area of the study Hebrew and Greek, the ancient languages in which the books of the Bible were originally written. All this kind of knowledge and more is important to the task of working with the Scriptures is in the Church, but like the radio, we don’t need to know all that stuff in order to learn Jesus. You only need to open the Bible, pray to the Spirit to open the ears of your soul, and start reading. Our goal, therefore, is not to learn about the Bible, or learn historical things about Jesus, but is to learn Jesus: to enter into his wonderful mercy and life. Christ came into our world, he said, so that everyone would have life, and have it in its fullest.

This is no small point! Martin Luther began his career as Biblical scholar and university professor. As such, Luther was trained in Greek and Hebrew so as to be able to read the scriptures in their original languages. He was schooled in the best of the church’s interpretative traditions. He could hold his own in any debate over the Scriptures. But while of great use to him, all of that expertise was not what finally mattered. For one day, in one stunning moment, he heard the living voice of Christ in the Scriptures, speaking of forgiveness and mercy and the promises of God. And both his life and the church were changed forever.

Luther coined a phrase to identify his re-discovery of that living voice in the Scriptures: was Christum treibet. That’s a German phrase, and means, literally, "what drives Christ", or "what pushes Christ." Those are not very elegant ways to translate what Luther was trying to say in the German, but we at least catch the power of the words. Like a good salesman, the Bible every where promotes the cause of Christ. I think that what Luther was getting at is very much like our idea of the Bible as a collection of love letters in which we hear the passionate voice of Christ, calling out to us and to all: I love you! All is forgiven! Come and follow me.

But there’s something more. While reading the Bible faithfully at home is vital for our spiritual well being, in fact, as the body of Christ on earth, hearing the voice of Christ is something we also share in together, an ongoing, life-long, centuries-long process of listening to what the Lord has to say to his people today. Though our many understandings and sense of what the Scriptures have to say to us, we begin to understand and learn Jesus. No one person or church body has a monopoly on what the Lord is saying to us now.

A pastor told me the story of the time he and a group of his classmates at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago heard a lecture by the world-renowned theological, Paul Tillich. Problem was, in spite of his brilliance, Tillich was originally from Germany and spoke with a heaven German brogue. None of them were sure just what they had heard. So after the lecture, the group went to the Seminary coffee shop and sat around and compared notes. What did you hear? they asked one another, and by each sharing with the others, they were able to arrive at what the voice of the great one had been saying. They had a lot of fun, too.

Back to poor old Charlie Brown who never seems to have much fun: how his life would change if he ever got that Valentine from the cute little red-haired girl. Well, the good news is this: we have received our Valentine! We confess the Scriptures to be the treasured collection of Christ’s love letters to humanity. We read them over and over again, longing to hear in, with, and under the ancient words the living voice of Christ the Good Shepherd, the lover of us all. Reading the Scriptures faithfully and guided by the Holy Spirit we learn Jesus, the One who speaks your name and mine and calls us to follow him down the road of Gospel adventure—his everlasting, joyous mission to seek and to save the lost. Amen.