This series began because I was recruited by my church board to pinch hit while our leader was busy. In more detail if you need it, the Vestry (the church board) of Saint Stephens-in-the-Field Episcopal Church (the church right up the street from my house in San Jose, and on whose board I still sit) asked its Vestry members to contribute “reflections” to our church newsletter (the Friday Journal) while our leader (Janet, the “Senior Warden”) was busy teaching summer swimming classes.
SO! I wrote some things. And, now, present them to you! Please enjoy these thinkerly ruminations …
A Red-Letter Reading from a Red-Letter Bible
This June began with a red-letter day: June 1st, the Seventh Sunday of Easter … where the entire Gospel reading would have been printed in red in a “red-letter” Bible.
In a movie, that red text would be foreshadowing: Sunday’s Gospel was Jesus’s farewell address to his disciples, immediately prior to his arrest and execution. And perhaps that red text is foreshadowing for us as well, as all of us will face trials and tribulations in our lives.
But in a Bible, that red text draws our attention to Jesus’s words. And Jesus’s farewell draws our attention not to trials and tribulations, but to love. Jesus reveals the Father’s name so that the Father’s love for Jesus may live in his disciples, and the disciples may live in Jesus.
I inherited my red-letter Bible from my parents. It’s a big, heavy Catholic Bible, with a somewhat intimidating picture of Pope Paul VI staring intently out of the frontispiece, and is copyrighted the year after my birth, so I often like to think that my parents probably bought this Bible for me.
But they forgot to fill in the page titled “This Bible Is Presented To,” and I like to think that’s another kind of foreshadowing. The Bible is presented to everyone, and its red letter text draws our attention to the words of Jesus, which culminate in a message of love in the face of death.
Earlier in the readings, Paul is jailed for curing a woman of demonic possession, then sings hymns to his fellow prisoners. When an earthquake frees them, the jailor is so distressed he wants to kill himself; but rather than escape, Paul ministers to the jailor so he can be saved.
We often think we need to rescue ourselves from the situations we find ourselves in. But the Psalm in Sunday’s reading reminds us that God saves his faithful from the wicked … and Paul reminds us that God can even help us save the wicked from themselves, with God’s help.
In this world, we all face trials and tribulations. But Jesus’s red-letter words help us focus on what’s important: not our immediate challenges, but our relationships with each other, and how those relationships should be not aligned with the world, but in mutual love guided by God.
-Anthony
Pictured: The third edition of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, which is my favorite Bible, even though it is not the version of the Bible that my parents got me as a kid. But I’d rather post this post with a related, if not completely on-point image, than wait for a picture of the right Bible, which, no sacrilege intended, only God knows when I would actually get around to taking.
