Sunday November 14 Pentecost 25
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Psalm 19
The first half of this psalm imagines each day telling the next day and each night telling the next night about God’s glory, and of the sun rising out of the sea praising God and running around the sky like an athletic sprinter showing off. The second half of the psalm says that goodness and integrity are as sure and powerful as the sun.
Psalm 46
Neither storms of water or storms of war will shake me because I know that God is behind all the world. Like a river flowing through the city, God is always in our midst.
1 Maccabees 2: 29-50 What’s Maccabees about?
Many Jews who resisted the demand to worship the Greek king as a god retreated to hiding places in the wilderness, likely around Qumran, used for the same purpose against the Roman occupation two hundred years later. Their refusal to fight the Greek army on a sabbath results in their wholesale slaughter. But after their deaths Mattathias temporarily sets aside the sabbath prohibition against working on the sabbath and raises an army which fights on the Sabbath, defeats the Greeks, and enforces adherence to Jewish practice. When Mattathias is old, he commands his sons to be ready to die for the purity of Israel.
Luke 16: 1-13 What’s Luke about?
Jesus tells a story about a financial manager who has been caught misappropriating funds. The manager then redoubles his fraud by instructing his friends how to falsify their purchase contracts so they will be obligated to assist him in return when he is fired. The owner, astonishingly, praises the administrator for his ingenuity.
It may be that Jesus is suggesting that his followers should be equally committed to act with determination, but it is more likely that Jesus is using this story to condemn widespread affirmation of clever deceit rather than adherence to honesty, a mistaken priority that is no less popular in our day.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
you sent your Son Jesus Christ
to be the light of the world.
Free us from all that darkens and ensnares us,
and bring us to eternal light and joy;
through the power of him
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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