Author: Harold

Friday August 30          Pentecost 14

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

Psalm 22
This psalm is one of the most dramatic expressions of extreme fear, moving into trust in God. God acted in the past, but is doing so no longer. Jesus quotes from this psalm while he is on the cross, (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). It is appropriately read on Fridays, mini-anniversaries of the day Jesus was crucified.

Many elements in this psalm may have influenced the early Christians’ understanding of Jesus: the taunt that Jesus should save himself and since he didn’t he can’t be God, Jesus being God’s in Mary’s womb, Jesus’ thirst on the cross, his garments divided and dice cast for them, his hands and feet pierced, and packs of dogs which likely gathered at crucifixions. The second half of the psalm proclaims God’s faithfulness.

Job 9.1-15, 32-35                           What’s Job about?
Job replies to Bildad that God is so powerful nobody can resist God, so it is not possible for Job to challenge God’s injustice to him because how can you argue against God who is utterly powerful? If God would stop threatening Job with overwhelming power, then Job could insist that he is innocent and doesn’t deserve this suffering. He could then call God to account and to fairness. But there is no neutral third person, no umpire to listen to both sides, so God holds all the cards and terrifies Job so Job cannot require God to explain why God is mistreating him.

John 7.37-52                           What’s John about?
At the end of the festival, Jesus extends the image of his being food, and offers himself as drink. Then there is a brief return to the topic of people not knowing where Jesus comes from, a favourite theme of John’s—not about geographical uncertainty but about people not being aware of God who is Jesus’ source. The religious leaders pressure dissenters who have begun to take Jesus seriously.

Again, we may be hearing conversations going on at the time John was writing, and which continue today as world leaders reject those who take seriously Jesus’ call to inclusion and justice for all.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
we are taught by your word
that all our doings without love are worth nothing.
Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts
that most excellent gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtue;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Thursday August 29          Pentecost 14

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

Psalm 18 Part 2
The first half of this long psalm used images from the escape through the Red Sea to celebrate God’s rescue of us. This second half speaks of our faithfulness (understood to be a way of doing justice) which has been made possible because of our being rescued. The psalm goes on to use the imagery of total military victory as a symbol of the victory that God’s justice will have and how deeply we rejoice in that victory.

Job 8.1-10, 20-22                           What’s Job about?
Job’s second friend, Bildad, argues that God is the God of justice and has always defended the poor and mistreated. If Job repents and is faithful to God, then God will restore him to his previous security. Bildad believes the traditional religious stance that God rewards good people and punishes evil people, so Job’s misery proves he has done something very wrong. The author is writing the book to disagree with that traditional assumption.

John 7.14-36                           What’s John about?
Jesus responds to several critiques, perhaps issues that were being raised with the early Christians in John’s time.

In response to the accusation that he is not educated, Jesus says that anyone who knows God will recognize that is where his teaching comes from.

In response to the accusation that he encourages work on the sabbath, Jesus points out that Moses required circumcision on the Sabbath.

In response to the accusation that nobody will know where the real messiah came from and therefore Jesus cannot be the messiah because it is known where he comes from, Jesus responds that he comes from God but because people don’t know God from whom Jesus comes, so he can be the genuine messiah because people don’t know God, which is where he comes from!

Opposition among the religious leaders grows and Jesus says they cannot come where he will be—with the Father in heaven—but they interpret this as meaning he will travel to other parts of the empire. As is so often John’s technique, we are being led to grasp ever deeper levels of meaning in these conversations even if the specific arguments aren’t persuasive to us.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
we are taught by your word
that all our doings without love are worth nothing.
Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts
that most excellent gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtue;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Wednesday August 28          Pentecost 14

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

Psalm 12
Everyone has abandoned truth and justice. I stand alone against this injustice. It is when God sees injustice that God acts. Save us, God, evil is prevailing.

Psalm 13
God seems to be absent, and not helping, but I long that God will. Then I will rejoice!

Psalm 14
Everybody has abandoned the God of justice. When God acts there will be great rejoicing.

Job 6.1, 7.1-21                           What’s Job about?
Job complains that God is implacable in abandoning us and subjecting humanity to forces we cannot possibly resist. Could God not just look away and let us die? God could just forgive us and have done with it. Any sin people commit cannot hurt God, and so even if we sin, that is no reason for God to treat us so callously since we will all be dead soon anyway. Since we are of such short life, and worth so little compared to God, it’s not fair that God should prolong our misery. We’ve done nothing to deserve that.

John 7.1-13                           What’s John about?
Jesus’ brothers, who do not believe him, urge him to attend a major festival in Jerusalem. That way he can prove to them that he is who he says he is. Jesus refuses, demonstrating that he is not controlled by other people’s expectations. But then he attends secretly, showing that he is free to voluntarily move towards his death which will happen in Jerusalem. Twice, Jesus says that his time had not yet come—meaning that he and his Father are in charge of history and how events transpire, and his brothers and the religious leaders are not. Controversy about him is growing, some believing he is genuine, others that he is a charlatan, just as was the case for the early Christians when John was writing.
John often uses phrases such as “…for fear of the Jews.” At the time, Jesus’ execution was arranged by Jewish leaders who owed their position to the Roman governor, but when John wrote his gospel perhaps a hundred years later and Judaism was widely rejecting the followers of Jesus, John uses the term “the Jews” in a way that can be misleading for us. We would be better to understand the phrase as “…the Jewish religious leaders” whenever John writes about “the Jews.”

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
we are taught by your word
that all our doings without love are worth nothing.
Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts
that most excellent gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtue;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Tuesday August 27          Pentecost 14

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

Psalm 10
A plea to God to act to help the poor and a complaint that God is not acting. Trust that God will act.

Psalm 11
People tell me to run away, but I trust in God and I am sure that God will act to save me.

Job 6.1-4, 8-15, 21                           What’s Job about?
Job insists that his suffering is beyond bearing and wishes that God would kill him and thus prove that he has been the object of undeserved suffering. Job points out that his friends have abandoned him by insisting that he has caused his own suffering, because they are afraid of the implications of humans suffering without reason and of God allowing that. 

John 6.60-71                           What’s John about?
Jesus insists that he is food. Some disciples leave because of this, and Jesus responds that some are called by God to respond. The opposition, in the form of Judas Iscariot, continues, foreshadowing Jesus’ crucifixion. The twelve remain with him because there is nobody who makes more sense than Jesus.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
we are taught by your word
that all our doings without love are worth nothing.
Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts
that most excellent gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtue;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Monday August 26          Pentecost 14

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

Psalm 4
So much of the world trusts in “dumb idols” and “false gods”—those seductive priorities which do nothing to bring goodness and justice. But the true God can still do wonders and we can trust God to care of us and so we can fall asleep peacefully.

Psalm 7
I am pursued by evil. This would make sense if I had done something terribly wrong, but I haven’t. God, sit like a supreme judge, and make that evil self-destruct. I will then proclaim that God is indeed just.

Job 4.1, 5.1-11, 17-21, 26-27                           What’s Job about?
Eliphaz continues to argue that it is faithless people who suffer but that God is reliable and will set things right and lift Job up and heal him. In the end, God will ensure that all will be well for Job. Job should trust in God because it is only humans who give rise to evil.

The author is putting in the mouth of Eliphaz, as clearly as possible, the traditional arguments that God ultimately makes everything fair. But tomorrow Job will refute this, and insist that God is not fair and that the traditional religious beliefs don’t work. The fact that such arguments against God were kept in the scriptures indicates the profound insights that the ancient Jews had in opposing superficial religious belief.

John 6.52-59                           What’s John about?
Jesus insists, in face of opposition, that he is the real bread of life, and even more starkly that his flesh must be eaten. As always in John, there are at least two levels of meaning. All of us are reluctant to be told we must die with Christ in order to live fully, and John deliberately faces us with our reluctance by focusing on the disturbing image of eating Jesus’ flesh—it was Jesus’ flesh that died and rose again. Jesus also insists that we must drink his blood—an image that was abhorrent to Jews for whom blood was sacred and had to be removed from meat before it is eaten, as is still the case for kosher Jewish food. Jesus is challenging all our assumptions about what is normal so that his death and resurrection can be the foundational reality of our lives.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
we are taught by your word
that all our doings without love are worth nothing.
Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts
that most excellent gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtue;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Sunday August 25          Pentecost 14

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

Psalm 146
Joy in God’s victorious justice for the oppressed, the blind, the strangers and the orphans—that justice for all is built into God’s magnificent creation. Appropriate for a Sunday, which is the anniversary of the resurrection—God’s victory over all evil.

Psalm 147
God’s wondrous creation and God’s commitment to justice are intertwined. Other cultures are not aware of this. What a helpful insight in our day!

Job 4.1-6, 12-21                           What’s Job about?
The first friend, Eliphaz, points out the inconsistency that Job has been so good at helping other people in difficulties, but loses hope when troubles come to him. Eliphaz explains that the reason for Job’s disaster is that no human can be completely good, so humans, being imperfect, can’t help bringing disaster on themselves. Eliphaz quakes at the horror of this discovery because it means there is ultimately no hope for humanity.

Mark 6.1-6a                           What’s Mark about?
For the last several chapters in Mark, Jesus has been telling parables about the coming of the kingdom, and has been enacting that kingdom in healings, feedings, and calming a storm. But when he comes to his home town he is rejected for being an ordinary person and he cannot do many miracles there. Shortly things will get much worse as opposition grows: his cousin, John the Baptist, will be executed. Mark is beginning his account of how opposition grows to Jesus and the kingdom.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
we are taught by your word
that all our doings without love are worth nothing.
Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts
that most excellent gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtue;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Saturday August 24          Pentecost 13

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

Psalm 137
Another psalm expressing terrible grief that the nation had been abandoned. When the people were captured and taken to Babylon about 700 years before Jesus, they were asked to amuse their captors with funny songs, and were horrified to have to entertain those who had destroyed their land and the glorious temple dedicated to justice.

The concluding couple of verses of this psalm are disturbingly violent. We sometimes also feel violent when we are abused, so there is an honest recognition of that truth here. Or we can think of this part as a commitment to ensuring that all evil should be completely removed from the world.

Psalm 144
This psalm expresses the feeling that we are not very strong in face of terrible forces, but that God can act to save us, and the end result will be unimaginable prosperity and happiness.

These two psalms are chosen for a Saturday when Jesus lies dead in the grave, destroyed by evil as was Jerusalem. Yet Jesus and Jerusalem were to hear a call to new and glorious life.

Job 3.1-26                           What’s Job about?
The Satan had told God that if he were allowed to hurt Job physically Job would curse God. And now it happens. Job curses the day he was born and the night he was conceived—since God knitted together his bones in the womb this is equivalent to cursing God. At least in the grave he would have company. This passage is perhaps the most searing expression of despair and defiance in the Bible.

The rest of the book explores how Job’s friends offer a variety of explanations by which God’s bringing disaster would make sense. But Job insists that their explanations don’t make sense because he hasn’t done anything wrong.

By refusing to accept the explanation that an act on his part caused his disaster, Job calls into question the whole religious concept of a cosmic moral cause-and-effect process by which being good always has positive results for us. The author is asking us not to settle for imagining our relationship with God is about receiving rewards and punishments for our behaviour—instead there must be something deeper.

Job’s strong objection to God is the foundation of the Jewish spiritual tradition of arguing with God and demanding God explain God’s actions.

John 6.41-51                           What’s John about?
Jesus insists more emphatically that he is from God and that people who disagree haven’t known God. He then presses more deeply into the image that he is food and that his flesh is bread for the world. This forceful and disturbing image will provoke forceful objections.
We may be overhearing controversies about Jesus that were going on in John’s time between the Jewish Christians who had seen in Jesus an entirely new way of understanding God, and those who saw that interpretation of Jesus as a sacrilegious attack on their faith.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
you have broken the tyranny of sin
and sent into our hearts the Spirit of your Son.
Give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service,
that all people may know the glorious liberty
of the children of God;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Friday August 23          Pentecost 13

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

Psalm 140
A cry to God for help against enemies who are strong and trust that God will help the poor and needy.

Psalm 142
A cry to God to help when there is no hope. If God acts to save me, I will then be able to praise God again.

These two psalms are appropriate for Fridays, a mini-anniversary of Christ’s crucifixion.

Job 2.1-13                           What’s Job about?
When the divine beings are again in council with God, God claims vindication—Job has remained faithful despite his successes having become disasters. But the Satan challenges God, proposing that if Job’s life is threatened he will become faithless. God trusts Job’s faithfulness and so gives permission for the experiment to proceed.

Job finds his life in danger from an incurable disease and sits in a garbage dump scraping his skin. His wife insists the old way of understanding God was right—he must have done something terrible. Job’s three friends arrive to support him and are appalled and deeply caring. Job stills blesses God and accepts his fate. But after a week of the friends sitting in silence with him, tomorrow we will read how Job will no longer patiently accept his disaster.

John 6.27-40                           What’s John about?
Crowds have tracked Jesus down following his feeding of five thousand people. As often in John’s gospel, Jesus uses an event to start a conversation about its deeper meaning. Jesus asks that people understand that for one’s life to be deeply fed is more than eating physical food—we must be fed by Jesus in the same way that the Israelites were fed with manna—he is the real bread. He means that his life of self-offering love is the only way to be truly alive and we can only do that by taking his life into ours—that’s how he feeds us with himself.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
you have broken the tyranny of sin
and sent into our hearts the Spirit of your Son.
Give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service,
that all people may know the glorious liberty
of the children of God;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Thursday August 22          Pentecost 13

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

Psalm 131
God is like a mother on whom I rest in complete confidence.

Psalm 132
The psalm reminds God that David was committed to finding a permanent place for the ark to stay in Jerusalem and that God swore an oath that God would never abandon David or Jerusalem.

In our time we can understand this oath to be God’s absolute commitment to creation and to our rescue which is accomplished in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Psalm 133
Another short psalm expressing joy in the abundance we experience when humanity lives in unity—that is, in justice and inclusion of all.

Job 1.1-22                           What’s Job about?
We now begin reading through the book of Job. Like the book of Ecclesiastes, this book is written to critique the common religious assumption in the Bible as well as in our own time, that if life goes well it is because God is rewarding you for being a good person, but if your life goes badly it is because you are being punished for being a bad person. This book has the courage to explore what it means if that assumption isn’t true. Because often it isn’t.

As the book opens, God is very impressed with Job’s faithfulness. However, at a sort of cosmic council of divine beings, the Satan challenges God, proposing that Job is only faithful because his life has been such a success. God gives the Satan permission to bring disaster upon Job’s success and upon those important to Job, but not to hurt Job himself. So, suddenly things go very badly for Job. He loses all his possessions to raiders and his family are all killed in a windstorm that destroys the house they were feasting in. Nevertheless, Job, being a good and faithful person does not blame God, and puts his trust in God who gave with generosity and now takes away.

Job’s friends explain that he must have done something terrible and that he should own up to his evil act, but Job insists he hasn’t done anything wrong. By refusing to pretend he did something bad to cause all this suffering, Job calls into question the whole idea of an automatic moral cause-and-effect process by which being good has positive results for us and being bad has negative results. Somehow our relationship with God is more than just receiving rewards and punishments for our behaviour. Something much deeper must be going on.

John 6.16-27                           What’s John about?
As happened with the healing of the man on the Sabbath, opposition will arise as the kingdom arrives. A storm is brewing within the disciples and Jesus calms their storm and brings them instantly to their destination. Crowds have tracked Jesus down following his feeding of five thousand people. As often in John’s gospel, Jesus uses an event to start a conversation about its deeper meaning. For the next entire chapter Jesus explores the implications of being fed by him.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
you have broken the tyranny of sin
and sent into our hearts the Spirit of your Son.
Give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service,
that all people may know the glorious liberty
of the children of God;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Wednesday, August 21        Pentecost 13

Psalm 119 Part 7
Psalm 119 is a meditation on responding to God’s call to justice. Each of the 176 verses is a variation on the theme of what it means to follow God’s call to justice, using terms such as “command”,”law”, “word”, “statute”, and the like. The psalm is arranged in 22 groups of eight verses—one group for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Within a group, each of the eight verses starts with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the groups are in Hebrew alphabetical order. So the first group of eight verses all start with A, the second group all start with B and so on. The first seven verses mirror the seven days of creation, with the eighth sometimes pointing to the next group. This very careful construction mirrors God’s creating the universe by overcoming chaos with order.

In the human world, justice, dignity and fulfilment – the outcomes of justice—are the human expressions of order. Thus the human world and the rest of creation are united in the same foundation. Today’s three sections begin with the letters Q, R, S, and T, the final letters of the Hebrew alphabet. As you read them, imagine the effect of each line in today’s first section beginning with “Q” and so on.

Judges 18.16-31                           What’s Judges about?
The owner of the idol objects to the theft of his idol and his priest but is threatened with violence. The tribe of Dan destroy a peaceful and prosperous city and retain the idol and the illegitimate priest until they are much later conquered as punishment. We can see the story-teller explaining the origin of several anomalous situations that were taking place in his own time.

This is the last of the stories of these temporary leaders, each given victory through the spirit of God. Nevertheless, as in this final story, the people abandon God and God’s justice and revert to violence and terrorism and trust gods that are worthless, with predictable consequences.

Tomorrow we start reading Job, a very different kind of book, with a radically different approach to how we experience of God.

John 6.1-15                           What’s John about?
Jesus feeds 5,000 people—again the heavenly banquet is coming to pass. Jesus refuses to be made a king.

John is interested in the meanings lying behind the events in Jesus’ life. The other three gospel focus on the events and what “actually” happened, but John’s gospel focuses on the meanings. So most events in this gospel have several levels of meanings which are often described through conversations which Jesus has with various people. Because of these conversations there are fewer events, but they are each of immense significance.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
you have broken the tyranny of sin
and sent into our hearts the Spirit of your Son.
Give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service,
that all people may know the glorious liberty
of the children of God;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.