Why is institutional religion declining in the West? There are several complex reasons of course, but one of the significant causes of decline, it seems to me, is the loss of reverence which has arisen from the secularizing of faith. We live in a very secular, materialist, individualistic culture- all of which is the very opposite of the Scriptural story of God blessing and working through communities. These powerful cultural forces have come to influence our interpretation of Christianity.

In the previous century there was the demythologizing of Christianity – trying to make Christianity appeal more to the rational intellect. Now, while I firmly believe Christianity is rational (that is another blog) it is also supernatural. Yet culture keeps us focused on ourselves as the controllers of our fate, it tries to keep us focused on living up to the cultural markers of success – money, status, attractiveness, independent competency. It takes us away from realizing, in true humility, that we are all interdependent and all dependent on the Creator God. Churches can become groups of people efficiently managed, but out of touch with the fundamental reality: God alone is creator of all life.

And Christianity can become hollowed out, where church becomes a social club, a friendship group, maybe raising money for mission elsewhere, but not encouraging the day-to-day awareness of the supernatural God in the material present.

Added to that is the pervasive belief in a magician God: if I pray in the right way he will make things happen for me. But this sort of God, whom we seek to manipulate to our will, is not a present God but someone “up there, out there” but not, as Jesus so vividly puts it: “within you and near you’” (Luke 17.21)

This distant God, separate to the reality of my life and my thinking, disempowers Christians. And this is not true to the Scriptures. God is a God active in the world, in both the Old Testament and the New.

This activity of God in the world, the intersection of the divine and the human, is seen primarily in the Scriptures, for instance in how God connects and speaks to the Prophets who then speak the reality of God into the lives of others and, of course, most fully in the life of Jesus Christ, both God and Human . This intersection of divine and human is also seen in the way that Scripture is written.

The Scriptures re a collection of stories about people and how God is involved, or not, in their lives. These stories are not straightforward instruction manuals. They are stories which have several layers of meaning. There is the literal meaning, or the surface level, but there is also a spiritual level (and other levels too, but let’s focus on the literal and the spiritual at the moment).

If we read about Jonah and the Whale, which has a literal meaning, which we learned at Sunday school, then it is easy to dismiss the story as fantastic and impossible. People don’t live for 3 days in the belly of whales. On the surface, it is a story about what happened to a person who was called ot God, tried to run away from God, grumped with God. Ho hum.

But the story is not about someone else, it is also, as any Scripture story, a way to help the reader/listener hear the call of God into their own lives. The spiritual level of reading is not a purely ratiocinative reading, a purely human thinking and comprehending; the spiritual level wants to connect the reader/listener to God himself so that, in the connecting with the divine, the human may be in some way transformed.

How does this happen? It is not through our human powers alone, but through the power of the Word of God.

The Word is co-creator of the universe (see John 1). He is the outward expression of the inner heart of -the Trinity. The Trinity is the eternal love song, the self-sacrificing love for the other. That form of active love, interdependent desire for the well-being of the other, is the creative dynamic that makes all life. It bursts out of itself in the Big Bang to share this phenomenal love with more and more.

And the Word comes too, in Jesus Christ, the outward expression of the love of God for humanity. He is both human and divine. He ascends to heaven in his glorified humanity, he sits at the right hand of the Father, where the Son of Man, the human race, was meant to sit.

So the Word invites us to sit with the Father, to help him bring the new creation into reality in this life.

We are created in his image to reflect his image. But we cannot reflect him without the help of the Word (both Jesus himself and the Word of Scripture).

The Word breathes through the writings of humans, and the Word is the presence of God communicating to the individual who is reading, what God wants the person to hear so that the person can make active, in his or her life, the will of God.

The Word pricks the conscience when we read, the Word touches us briefly with the kiss of the Father to console us, the Word inspires us to acts beyond our human limits of courage, grace or forgiveness. The Word surprises us, brings us thoughts we would not have thought, and the Word shows us that there is more to our life and this life than the material.

The Word speaks to our spirit and we have to learn to listen to the Spirit speaking to our Spirit. The Word teaches us more as we are ready to hear and receive him, which is why our reading of Scripture can (and should) change over the years.

I have found, as I have aged, that the words of the Story have changed, and how I hear the story now is very different from how I heard it before. The heart learns to listen to the Word below the words, and when I hear the Word, in some words, the heart sings and there is something I know to be true. But the words we use, judgment, salvation, redemption, faith, I had formerly heard only in the head, and so I knew it, but I didn’t hear it; I didn’t understand it really because I need to hear with the Word to hear the meaning in my life.

We can only hear and know the story when, in some part we are part of the Story, when we are already listening to God out of love for him.

Reading isn’t enough. Scripture needs to be comprehended. John says that the darkness cannot comprehend the Word. The word comprehend is a translation of the Greek katelaben which has a literal and metaphorical meaning: it means both to take hold of/ grasp but also apprehend, understand, realise (an idea).

 Herein is the very duality and the problem of holy living. The human wants to take hold of, grasp, seize, control. Some things we can grasp and use – the times table, we learn and use them, skills etc. But there is another dimension to living life that is intimated by the metaphorical realise, understand. It means we have perceived the truth of things, the depth, the reality of it. To realise is to make something real.

The darkness cannot realise the light of God. The darkness is that force of chaos existing before the beginning, that separates and breaks down the order and harmony that God creates.

Sin separates us from God, one another and our true selves. It drives the false ego to self-justification, to seeing ourselves as victims in an unfair world, and so powerless, or as prima donnas in a stage play that is simply about us, with others as mere walk on parts. Both of these positions stop us seeing the reality of other people. The self-focus and judgment from that position of self as sole arbiter of what is right and wrong, is actually a blindness to reality.

Scripture reading helps us realise (make real) God in the world, when we are prepared to activate the Word, the Spirit, into our lives and our relationships. When we don’t want to participate in the will of God then, unsurprisingly, God seems very absent and unreal.