Thursday October 17 Pentecost 21
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Psalm 18 Part 1
A meditation on God’s immense power to save:—a poetic imaginative recounting of the crossing of the Red Sea and God’s rescue of the people from their slave masters. The psalm can be read as if it were the experience of one person being rescued or as if the nation is speaking with a single voice.
Jonah 3.1-4.11 What’s Jonah about?
Jonah proclaims to the city of Nineveh that they must change their ways. Their king repents and so God decides not to punish them. Jonah objects to this forgiveness because the people are not Jews and so don’t know God. God provides a bush for shade for Jonah and points out that if God can care about a bush, God can certainly care about an entire city in which there are totally uneducated people and also animals. For Jews living under pagan Greek rule when the story was written, this understanding of God would have challenged all their ideas about religious faith.
This concludes the book of Jonah in which we are challenged to take seriously God’s profound care for people of other faiths.
Luke 9.18-27 What’s Luke about?
Peter declares that Jesus is the messiah, the image of God bringing the kingdom. But Jesus insists that he must die for that to happen. His followers must also die if they are to bring in the kingdom, but the kingdom of God will arrive regardless of whether some refuse to accept it.
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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