Bibles open please.

      If going by the FaceBook page of my elementary school is an accurate representation, growing up and attending a Roman Catholic grammar school was quite an experience.  We had Nuns with rulers and paddles galore. Nuns that drove huge land yachts far exceeding posted speed limits, candy sold from a supply closet and stories way too numerous to even mention - or perhaps believed for that matter. One thing we did not do and we were never taught - how to read the Bible. That was a no-no for Catholics in my youth.

       While evangelicals and Bible-belters were learning to quote scripture as if their lives depended on it, cherub faced little Catholics were reciting the Rosary with hands at precisely the right angle for our prayers to reach God. We were Bible ignorant by way of absence. The Evangelicals were ignorant by way of slanted interpretations and cherry-picking scriptures to suit their own agendas

       The solution is not to throw out the Bible. You don't throw out the baby with the bath water. What is needed is a refreshing and  enlightening resumption of earnest biblical scholarship. As elder teen Catholics we would call upon a Study Bible, an official Catholic translation with commentaries.  What is needed is even more than that though. I have an entire set of books in my office that rivals the encyclopedia Britannica, each volume on a single book of the New Testament.  We need to study all those texts, plus originals and more to discover new and hidden truths that lay in the words that are at our finger tips.  While it is true you can read scripture at different points in your life and get a different message, there is certainly the need to have accurate translations.  

        Where is all this coming from?  In today's passage it speaks of putting a lamp on a lamp stand. The days are long gone ( I pray ) when the 'family bible' as it was called is kept on a bottom shelf of an end table or worse, in a cabinet with other family heirlooms. We need to elevate Scripture and with it good scholarship which reveals even more than we might imagine, the light and love of God for each ad every one of us. 

          Elevate Scripture, bibles open please.

Luke 11:27-36

 While he was saying this, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!’ But he said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!’

 When the crowds were increasing, he began to say, ‘This generation is an evil generation; it asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah. For just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this generation. The queen of the South will rise at the judgement with the people of this generation and condemn them, because she came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon, and see, something greater than Solomon is here! The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgement with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and see, something greater than Jonah is here!

 ‘No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar, but on the lampstand so that those who enter may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light; but if it is not healthy, your body is full of darkness. Therefore consider whether the light in you is not darkness. If then your whole body is full of light, with no part of it in darkness, it will be as full of light as when a lamp gives you light with its rays.’