Working with this week's apocalyptic Gospel text evokes memories of childhood experiences and teachings in a Mennonite congregation with a fundamentalist understanding of Bible and life. Within that setting, however, my family was solidly Anabaptist in outlook and rooted in social justice concerns. My public school was, for a community in the middle of rural Illinois, a virtual hotbed of ecumenicity, with all the major and many of the minor denominations represented. All this made for some interesting tensions, especially in a family with an ethos of discernment rather than rules.

Reflecting on the Benedictus gives us an opportunity to reflect on the place of memorization and repetition in our formation as people who read the Bible as if our lives depended on it. Ellen Davis calls reading the Bible as if our lives depended on it confessional reading. She does not mean reading the Bible in light of a denominational confession. She means reading the Bible as an "indispensible word."