Red letter notice

I have driven past the same church notice board several times this week it cautions,
"Read the black, live the red."

Hmmm. Isn't that like putting parentheses around the bits of the Psalms where they get a bit negative - well very negative? (Try Psalm 137 v 9 if you wonder what I am on about - that seems to condone all sorts of nastiness).

I was taught never to highlight a Bible - for the simple reason that what God was saying through the text one time I read it might not be the same as what God was saying the next time I read it - even in Seminary we were encourage not to mark the actual text - not because it was somehow to remain inviolate like the Quran but because even in an academic setting the Holy Spirit might still open new avenues of understanding which would be harder to explore through lines of brightly colored marker.

With this background my reaction to the "red letter text" is understandable. It is simply to easy to skip from red word to red word and miss out the rest. And who chose what is red anyway? Greek is notoriously hard to punctuate when it goes into English and what are and are not the words of Jesus are sometimes down to convention.

The next step too often seems to be to select from an already redddened text only those things which lean towards certain theologies - prosperity theology, millenial chrisitianity you name it the Bible CAN say it.

I prefer to think that God knew what God was doing when we were given Holy Scripture. Jesus takes his detail down to one iota (Matt 5:18) - the plan for God's world is a careful one. We have to treat the Bible as if it was given with care and love and deliberation by a God who wants to us to read it all - not all at once, perhaps not even all of it very often, but with an open mind not clouded by preconceived ideas of which parts we are going to find important before we even open the book - before we ask the Spirit to enliven our reading and show us the places we are meant to see and teach us what we need to learn.