Saturday October 9 Pentecost 19
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Psalm 137
Another psalm expressing terrible grief that the nation had been abandoned. When the people were captured and taken to Babylon about 700 years before Jesus, they were asked to amuse their captors with funny songs, and were horrified to have to entertain those who had destroyed their land and the glorious temple dedicated to justice. The concluding couple of verses of this psalm are disturbingly violent. We sometimes also feel violent when we are abused, so there is an honest recognition of that truth here. Or we can think of this part as a commitment to ensuring that all evil should be completely removed from the world.
Psalm 144
This psalm expresses the feeling that we are not very strong in face of terrible forces, but that God can act to save us, and the end result will be unimaginable prosperity and happiness.
Jeremiah 35: 1-19 What’s Jeremiah about?
Jeremiah was one of the writers who struggled to interpret the meaning of the disaster of Babylon’s destruction of the country. What was God doing?
For the next week we read Jeremiah’s interpretation of the disaster. Jeremiah had a difficult problem to solve—how can it be that God brought disaster on the people, yet God’s central character is to forgive and be faithful to them? His highly creative solution is that God goes to great lengths to persuade the people to change their behaviour which otherwise will inevitably bring disaster on themselves. This part of his book describes how God tried so hard to change history so the disaster wouldn’t happen.
In today’s passage Jeremiah describes the first of God’s attempts to persuade the people to return to justice. Jeremiah describes how a non-Jewish community, the Rechabites, refuse to abandon their ancient commitment to abstinence from alcohol in spite of great pressure to drink. Jeremiah understands this to be God’s encouragement of the Jewish people not to abandon their ancient commitment to the God of justice who rescued them from Egypt. But they don’t respond.
Matthew 9: 35-10:4 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus is moved by the plight of the poorest and chooses twelve disciples, thus symbolically creating a new Israel, and sends them out to embody that kingdom of care for everyone in their new community.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
you have built your Church
on the foundation of the apostles and prophets,
Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone.
Join us together in unity of spirit by their teaching,
that we may become a holy temple, acceptable to you;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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