Sunday Bible Readings
Mainly Reminiscing ...
As a young Christian going to East Hill Baptist Church (Pensacola) occasionally with my grandfather Gentry, and sometimes going with friends to First Baptist Church here in Panama City when Brother McDaniel was there (Brother Mac was a favorite pastor among local kids back in the late 1940s until he moved from the church to become the executive at Bay Memorial Hospital), it always made a strong positive impression on me that everyone was carrying a Bible. Everyone except me, an Episcopalian.
Why didn’t we carry a Bible to church? Because all of our Sunday Bible readings for the entire year were printed in the Book of Common Prayer. That was before our present 1976/1979 BCP, which gives us a three year lectionary. Three years worth of readings would be too much to print in one book together with all the other, liturgical, teaching, and historical material that’s in the BCP.
Ah, me thinks upon arriving at Trinity Episcopal Church, Apalachicola, now’s the opportunity to teach Episcopalians to bring their Bible to church. Nope. For a while at Trinity, I tried to get everyone to bring a Bible to church on Sunday mornings. As I recall, the only person who did it was Jack Ward, a former Baptist who was our church treasurer for a while. So I bought Bibles and put them in the pew racks, and even printed in the Sunday bulletins the Bible page numbers so folks could easily and quickly find the Readings. As the years went by, I gave those totally brand new, unused, unopened Bibles away to folks who wanted a Bible.
We have four Bible readings every Sunday, usually Old Testament, Psalm, New Testament, and Gospel readings. Nobody in the congregation but me, with a Baptist mother, did “sword drills” as a boy, learning to find Bible verses quickly. So for a while at Trinity we bought Sunday Bulletins with the day’s Lectionary readings printed on the back. Then we started printing or buying Lectionary Sheets with the readings for each Sunday, as Sunday bulletin inserts. At Trinity, I always ordered the Large Print size. It can be risky to say “most,” but probably these days most Episcopal churches do use the Lectionary Sheets.
The three-year Revised Common Lectionary that we use these days, shared with many other Christian denominations, frequently has options. This coming Sunday, for example (which is why and how my mind wandered off track into the above reminiscence), is Pentecost, and the lectionary is Psalm 104:24-35, Acts, either Ezekiel or Romans, and something from John’s gospel. The option becomes annoying if the lectionary sheet company co-opts me by deciding it’s too much to print the whole thing and so leaves out one reading. Especially if it happens to be the reading I would have preached on or taught in my Sunday School class. My hackles are up unnecessarily, because I’m not preaching this Sunday, and there’s no Sunday School this Sunday, and besides I haven’t even looked at the lectionary sheet to see what they printed. Hopefully, they printed Ezekiel instead of Romans, because though the Romans reading is powerful, it would be a crime to leave out the story of Ezekiel and the Dry Bones.
Maybe tomorrow morning my mind will still be on Ezekiel and I’ll go there. For the meantime, there’s no point in getting so exercised about what the lectionary company may or may not have done; so here’s this coming Sunday’s wonderful reading from Psalm 104:
O LORD, how manifold are your works! *
in wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
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26
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Yonder is the great and wide sea
with its living things too many to number, *
creatures both small and great.
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27
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There move the ships,
and there is that Leviathan, *
which you have made for the sport of it.
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28
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All of them look to you *
to give them their food in due season.
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29
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You give it to them; they gather it; *
you open your hand, and they are filled with good things.
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30
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You hide your face, and they are terrified; *
you take away their breath,
and they die and return to their dust.
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31
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You send forth your Spirit, and they are created; *
and so you renew the face of the earth.
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32
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May the glory of the LORD endure for ever; *
may the LORD rejoice in all his works.
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33
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He looks at the earth and it trembles; *
he touches the mountains and they smoke.
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34
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I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; *
I will praise my God while I have my being.
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35
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May these words of mine please him; *
I will rejoice in the LORD.
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36
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Let sinners be consumed out of the earth, *
and the wicked be no more.
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37
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Bless the LORD, O my soul. *
Hallelujah!
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TomW+