Monday September 27 Pentecost 18
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Psalm 89 Part 1
God’s faithfulness in creation is the basis for our trust in God’s justice and care for us. Just as God created order from chaos in creation, so we can rely upon God to create order out of chaos in human society. God’s original goodness intended for humanity and the world, is that everyone have a place and dignity and worth. Accomplishing that is the work of justice, often translated into traditional English as “righteousness.”
2 Kings 17: 24-41 What’s Kings about?
About a hundred years before the Babylonians destroyed the temple in Jerusalem (in the southern part of the country), the king of Assyria sends settlers (people of disgusting religions as the Jews understood them) to live on God’s sacred land in the northern part of the country, in the region of Samaria. God sends lions to punish the people, and the king sends a Jewish priest to teach them God’s ways. Nevertheless, they are not faithful to the God of justice.
The writers, writing about two hundred years after the events they describe, are blaming the disaster of the Babylonian invasion on the Samaritans who used an alternate temple which Jews in Jerusalem, where the writers lived, considered blasphemous. This hatred continued even to Jesus’ day, so his praise of Samaritans and his conversations with them are the more remarkable.
Matthew 6: 26-34 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus encourages us to have the first-hand experience of God’s presence which enables us to function without being driven by anxiety about temporary things. It is that worry about temporary things which drives our self-centredness and prevents us from loving more deeply.
How relevant this is in our time—we are bombarded by messages which encourage our society to buy more and to always be be dissatisfied with what we have, and the result is the destruction of the earth. The antidote is to become aware of God’s call to justice for those who have little and to experience God’s generosity underlying all life.
This week’s collect:
Grant, O merciful God,
that your Church,
being gathered by your Holy Spirit into one,
may show forth your power among all peoples,
to the glory of your name;
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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