Monday October 14 Pentecost 21
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Psalm 1
Those who live in righteousness—which means with justice to all—will be as strong as healthy trees planted near water. Injustice will be blown away like chaff.
Psalm 2
Other nations scorn God and God’s people, but God has chosen this people and their king, and God will have the final word.
Christians may understand this to be a way of saying that God has made self-offering love and justice in the death and resurrection of Christ to be the ultimate reality. All other attempts at finding full life through pursuing self-interest are laughable and doomed to fail.
Psalm 3
Because of God’s protection, I have nothing to fear.
Micah 7.1-7 What’s Micah about?
As disappointed as someone in the fall who cannot find a single delicious fruit to eat, Micah cannot find a single good person left. The powerful exploit everyone and even family relationships are full of betrayal. But even so Micah will continue to hope in God. The following chapter, the last in the book, continues this theme that God will forgive and rescue the people from their injustice.
This concludes our readings from the book of Micah. Tomorrow we begin reading the book of Jonah.
Luke 8.26-39 What’s Luke about?
Jesus has illustrated the arrival of the kingdom through the parable of the seeds becoming a great harvest, and now the kingdom is arriving through a series of dramatic healings. The first is the healing of a man who has so many demons he is called “Legion”—the Roman term for a five-thousand man unit of the Roman army. Jesus allows the demons to go into a herd of pigs which then go wild and drown themselves. However, the pig-farmers, who are all Jews and thus violating a fundamental Jewish law by the deliberate contact with pigs, reject Jesus for disrupting their business.
Perhaps Luke, following a story originally told by Mark, is pointing out that the justice and inclusion and healing typical of God’s kingdom, will mean profound change for everyone, and that there will be resistance to God’s love and new life.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
in our baptism you adopted us for your own.
Quicken, we pray, your Spirit within us,
that we, being renewed both in body and mind,
may worship you in sincerity and truth;
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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