Sunday August 8 Pentecost 11
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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.
2 Samuel 13: 1-22 What’s Samuel about?
The royal family are consumed by betrayal and abuse as David’s son Amnon who is first in line to the throne, rapes his half-sister (David’s daughter by a different wife) and abuses her even more by having her outcast despite the possibility which Tamar points out that David could sanction their union. Again, we see royal power being used to violate those who have less power.
These were not intended as titillating stories of royal indiscretions but as horrific descriptions of how royal power is used for cruelty and abuse. The heir to the throne gets away with rape, and the king colludes by favouring his son over his daughter.
The God of Israel, who is the God of justice, will not overlook David’s injustice, just as has happened before when David abused his subjects. We anticipate that just as David’s adultery and subsequent murder resulted in the death of his first child, something similar will happen before long in this violation of justice.
John 3: 22-36 What’s John about?
John the Baptist is continuing to baptize people into commitment to God’s kingdom and not to Rome’s, symbolized by their crossing the Jordan river to claim the land for the true God, not the false Roman emperor-god. But more people are responding to Jesus, who (only in John’s gospel) is baptizing in competition with John. John’s disciples complain, and John affirms that Jesus is the one whom God has called.
The writer of the gospel uses this story as the basis of a meditation on what it means to accept or reject God’s call in Jesus. To follow Jesus is to stop making ourselves the centre of everything, just as John the Baptist chooses not to be the centre of attention.
It’s not clear if it is intended to be John the Baptist or the writer of the gospel who continues with a meditation about how there is no real life outside the life of Jesus—that’s not hero worship of Jesus, it’s a simple fact that insisting on being the centre of everything deprives one of deep life. That’s what John the Baptist has just done and what Jesus will be doing at his crucifixion.
This week’s collect:
Almighty God,
you sent your Holy Spirit
to be the life and light of your Church.
Open our hearts to the riches of your grace,
that we may bring forth the fruit of the Spirit
in love, joy, and peace;
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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