Sunday September 8 Pentecost 16
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Psalm 103
God has been so generous to us! God has given us life when death was close, has been generous when we abandoned God’s justice, has cared for us as a doting parent does, and all in spite of our lives being so short. Even angels and creation bless God and we join with them!
Job 25.1-6, 27.1-6 What’s Job about?
The second friend, Bildad, provides his third and final argument for God being just—humans are inevitably imperfect, we are like maggots and before God’s enormity it is no wonder we have offended God. But Job insists he has done nothing wrong. He knows he is innocent and has not offended God. He is insisting that God is unjust, not Job himself.
The author is insisting that we think seriously about the fact that God doesn’t always make life fair. This isn’t just a sad observation—taking the injustice of life seriously, and refusing to imagine there is some deep purpose to human suffering, and demanding that God acknowledge the injustice God has allowed is the only way to be faithful to God.
Matthew 5.13-20 What’s Matthew about?
Having given his new version of the Ten Commandments (“Congratulations if you are poor… Congratulations if you are weeping… because you will know God.”) Jesus clarifies that his followers are called to a standard of life that enables the rest of the world to live fully too. As he often does, Matthew encourages loyalty to the Hebrew Bible, saying that Jesus strongly upheld its call to justice for all and that his followers are to become a beacon of justice in their lives like a spotlight so that that rest of the world can see their way forward.
This week’s collect:
Stir up, O Lord,
the wills of your faithful people,
that richly bearing the fruit of good works,
we may by you be richly rewarded;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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