Dionysus on a Bike

Psalm 100 – 6/11/2026

In third grade, the church of my childhood gave me a Bible. It was long enough ago that it as the Revised Standard Version, not the NRSV I use now. It had many maps and vividly colored pictures of biblical scenes, making it a much-beloved possession to this day. At the worship service where the Bibles were given to us children, we were to memorize Psalm 100 and recite it as a group. I am not particularly good at rote memorization, so I spent a lot of time memorizing this short Psalm. Because I spent so much time with this scripture, it has stuck with me to this day, the words of the first few verses coming to mind unexpectedly these thirty-five years later.

Being reminded of the words of this Psalm highlights one of the often-overlooked functions of Scripture. Through the repetition of scripture and the way its repetition embeds phrases into our memory, Scripture can function as a background vocabulary that structures how we use and understand language. Because so many people in our culture share the Bible as a significant text, this background vocabulary is shared across communities, giving us common ways of using our language. The familiar narratives, turns of phrase, characters, and tropes of the Biblical text integrate with how we use language to the point that for some of us, scripture forms a backdrop that filters and forms all of our uses of language and so our entire experience.

Because the Bible forms this backdrop through which we experience the language of the world, our experience itself is seen through a lens that is formed by Biblical language (among many other things). Believer or not, the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, at least in my own cultural context of contemporary America, condition how we see our shared world. This shared world is under-determined with respect to the deepest questions, questions about how we should live and what our highest values are. This under-determiniation means that across all the differences that are possible between us, understanding is possible across those differences, in part, because of our shared background of Biblical language that conditions how we see the world.

Reflection Questions: What Biblical passages or Biblical language have been particularly significant for how you experience the world? What words, names, narratives, or phrases stick with you to the point of influencing how you interpret your own experience?

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary by Justin Marquis