THEY seemed like your typical rowdy mob of young adults, catching up over pizza and beer at a pub in South Brisbane and talking about uni exams and music and jobs, but they were all about to do something counter-cultural.
They were going to study the Bible.
The group of 88 young adults set off on their Bible-crawl to a homeless drop-in centre and, while social-distancing and masked-up, watched eagerly as Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge made his way to the stage holding a bible he had lugged from country to country for 40 years.
The group is called Reclaim and their mission is to create a space for young adults to meet other like-minded people and journey towards Jesus together.
Archbishop Coleridge was the first speaker in a four-part Scripture series hosted by Reclaim and he was posed with the question – “Why should young people read the Bible?”
Archbishop Coleridge, who has years teaching university-level Sacred Scripture under his belt, said to understand the Bible you first had to know what the Bible was.
“There’s a lot of rubble to be cleared before you can come up with a right answer to that question,” he said.
Ultimately, the Bible was born out of two catastrophes, he said.
The first catastrophe was the Babylonian exile, where Babylon came in with their “own unique combination of brutality and efficiency” and put Jerusalem to the torch, he said.
“This was a crisis of the most radical kind when the (Israelites) were taken off into exile,” he said.
“They didn’t despair, they rummaged through their sacred texts they’d taken with them, and they started to put the texts together in a way that built a hope for the future.”
When the texts were assembled in those “new and brilliant ways”, they discovered “a tiny little spark – an ember in the ashes” which became the Old Testament.
“But it is born of failure,” Archbishop Coleridge said.
“One thing you have to bring to (the Bible) is your own experience of failure.”
The second catastrophe hit when the New Testament was put together – the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
In AD 70, the Romans came in and “absolutely flattened Jerusalem”, he said.
But this time it was not just Judaism that was hit but Christianity too, because until then the mother Church had been in Jerusalem.
“The two destructions – 587 BC, the Babylonians; 70 AD, the Romans – give us this book which rubs your nose in disaster,” he said.
“It takes you where you’d rather not go.”
He said the whole story of God begins in Genesis with the “dark and empty and chaotic” not to leave you there, but because it is “precisely there that you can find something you can call joy”.
“The Bible is the saddest and most jubilant book I have ever read,” he said.
Reclaim co-ordinator Steph Rogers said it was amazing to have Archbishop Coleridge open the Scripture series.
“I think because he has authority and so much wisdom it really felt like a commissioning,” she said.
“The way he opened up the story of the Bible and why we should be biblical Catholics, was a perfect introduction.”
Mrs Rogers said the Scripture series was born out of a desire from the young adults who come to Reclaim.
“Archbishop Mark said that when reading Scripture, we need to swim in it – take our time and meditate slowly,” she said.
“This Scripture series, we hope to be able to swim in Scripture.
“If young adults are able to walk away from our Scripture series with a greater desire to dive into Scripture and take away some practical skills to help them in their daily prayer life, that’s a win.”
Reclaim runs on the first Tuesday of every month at Emmanuel City Mission in South Brisbane and is open to all young adults – school leavers, uni students, young professionals, young parents and anyone in between.
You can keep up with what is happening through Facebook and Instagram at @reclaimbne.
