Author: Harold

Psalm 124
We would have been destroyed in Egypt if God hadn’t been acting on our behalf. A beautiful short psalm of appreciation.

Psalm 125
A prayer that God will continue to protect God’s people by being like the protective hills around Jerusalem. God’s protection included ensuring that good people don’t turn to selfishness under pressure.

Psalm 126
Joyful memories of when they escaped from captivity by God’s act, and returned to their land. A prayer that God will do it again.

Psalm 127
It is useless to trust your own hard work—it is God who makes your household succeed.

Nahum 1: 1-13 What’s Nahum about?
We continue to read a selection of prophecies that express trust in God’s power to remove oppressive regimes. Here the poet imagines God’s power in storms and great waters and mountains being used to release Israel from captivity. As we celebrate the reign of Christ this week, we see how God’s victory has been experienced in other times.

Matthew 19: 13-22 What’s Matthew about?
The implications of taking Jesus seriously are that one’s whole life will change. We will give great dignity to “children” who are people without much power. The poor, who are perhaps also “children” in another sense, are to be our priority, but the rich young man refuses. Sometimes we are not ready to make that commitment even though it will give us full life.

This week’s collect:

Almighty and everlasting God,
whose will it is to restore all things
in your well-beloved Son, our Lord and King,
grant that the peoples of the earth,
now divided and enslaved by sin,
may be freed and brought together
under his gentle and loving rule;
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings for Monday November 22

Monday November 22 Reign of Christ

Psalm 106 Part 2
In the wilderness the people repeatedly betrayed God, and then joined horrible religions when they entered the promised land, and there were terrible consequences. Even so, God took mercy on them when they were captured and influenced their captors to let them return.

Joel 3: 1-2, 9-17 What’s Joel about?
The poet imagines a time when God will judge all the great nations for oppressing God’s people. Are we able to anticipate a time when God will stop all evil in the world? We read this passage because the early Christians understood that process had begun to be underway with the birth of Jesus.

Matthew 19: 1-12 What’s Matthew about?
As often in his gospel, Matthew recalls Jesus being especially concerned about how Christians relate to each other. In this account Jesus is challenged about the relationships between married couples. Scripture said that a man could divorce his wife at any time by saying a simple formula “I dismiss you,” and the wife would be left destitute. Jesus, however, insists that such an action, even if based on scripture, is unjust and that the man who does such a thing is guilty.

A higher standard of commitment is required of Christians if they are to follow God’s intentions and live full lives. We can glimpse the new equality between husbands and wives that was happening among the early Christians. The saying about eunuchs may mean that the deep commitment to faithfulness can also be followed by those whose genital surgery prevented them from worshipping the God of justice in the temple—which was forbidden by the scriptures.

Jesus is requiring of Christians a deep inclusivity embracing both wives and those physically disabled.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Sunday November 21

Sunday November 21 Reign of Christ

Psalm 145
Praise to God because God cares for the oppressed and feeds all creation—God is praised everywhere.

Isaiah 19: 19-25 What’s Isaiah about?
The poet is writing about seven hundred years before Jesus at the time Assyria conquered the northern half of the land. He imagines an incredible event—that Egypt will abandon the religion of the pyramids and follow the true God of justice, the God of Israel, and that Assyria will do the same, and that Israel will be the link-pin binding these super-powers together under God’s leadership.

Can we imagine God utterly transforming the relationships between nations of our day so the nations act together for justice for the world, its creatures and the least important people? Do we dare hold that vision as possible? On this week of the Reign of Christ whose reign do we long for?

The poet’s vision of countries coming to Jerusalem to worship may have given rise to Matthew’s story of the wise men coming from the east to worship Jesus at his birth.

Luke 19: 11-27 What’s Luke about?
Jesus tells this parable about the talents immediately before entering Jerusalem, a few days before he is crucified. The parable is about how slaves who invested much money are doubly rewarded and a slave who simply saved the money is punished. The story seems to suggest that God rewards those who are given lots of money, and punishes the poor for not investing, and slaughters those who reject God. It doesn’t seem to express the care Jesus usually expresses for the poor.

But notice that what happens in the parable is exactly what the Roman empire is doing—rewarding the rich and crushing the poor; much as happens today. The parable is alerting the disciples to what the Roman empire is about to do to Jesus. Shortly Jesus will enter Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey—he is so poor he doesn’t even own a donkey. Jesus is the poor servant in the parable who refused to take part in profiteering and is slaughtered for not participating in exploitation. Those who said they didn’t want the oppressive rule of Rome are the disciples who will soon have to decide which emperor they wish to serve—the reign of Christ or the reign of violent Caesar.

The choice of which empire we serve remains the same in our time: is it the reign of Christ?

This week’s collect:

Readings for Saturday November 20

Saturday November 20 Pentecost 25

Psalm 33
A psalm of praise for God creating the earth, and for being equally in charge of the nations and for rescuing us. We rejoice in this God!

Isaiah 65: 17-25 What’s Isaiah about?
The readings for the next couple of weeks now focus on the anticipation of the birth of Christ and prepare us for Advent. One of the themes of Advent is that for God to come to the earth, much will have to change. These readings ask us if we are ready to change. This famous poem was written to encourage people to hope when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians about 600 years before Jesus. The early Christians interpreted this passage to be a prophecy about a new world being created in the birth of Jesus.

Matthew 18: 21-35 What’s Matthew about?
Peter has realised that an expectation of extreme generosity is the norm in Jesus’ new society but Peter (like us) is sure there have to be limits.

In response, Jesus makes the expectation of generosity virtually infinite. He illustrates this with a story about a slave who is the Chief Financial Officer of the owner’s business, and who has embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars. When he is caught and pleads for mercy, his owner cancels the whole amount as if it were a trifle. But the same slave is merciless to a poor slave and his family who owe him a trifling amount of money and imprisons him.

Peter is right, Jesus is saying, there are limits. Just not in the way Peter imagined. If we do not enact without limit the forgiveness we have received, then we put ourselves outside the kingdom of Jesus’ new society, the kingdom of life. That’s how serious Jesus is about enacting inclusion of all—including those who have hurt us.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
you sent your Son Jesus Christ
to be the light of the world.
Free us from all that darkens and ensnares us,
and bring us to eternal light and joy;
through the power of him
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings for Friday November 19

Friday November 19 Pentecost 25

Psalm 107 Part 1
The first part of this psalm sings about how faithfully God has rescued people on many occasions: from slavery, from their own foolishness and rebellion against God, and from the dangers of travelling on the ocean. The ocean was a terrifying place for the Israelites, and the reference to God calming the storm and bringing them to harbour may have influenced the stories of Jesus calming storms.

1 Maccabees 4: 36-59 What’s Maccabees about?
After Judas and his army have liberated Jerusalem they cleanse and rebuild the desecrated parts of the temple and begin the proper sacrifices and rejoice that they are again worshipping God properly. We are being shown how totally committed Judas and his brothers were to serving God. The writer intended that their courage and commitment would inspire Jews of the time to also remain faithful under the pressure of pagan Greek culture. This restoration of the temple is the origin of the festival of Hanukkah.

We end our readings from Maccabees today, but the book continues with detailed and fairly accurate descriptions of various battles with the Greek armies but in the end all the brothers are killed defending the temple and the Jewish faith in battles with Greece. Their faithful allegiance to the God of justice in opposition to Greek barbarity became famous, and they became known as the Maccabean martyrs.

The deaths of these faithful brothers raised the important question about whether God is really just—if they gave their lives as young men, it wouldn’t be fair if God did nothing to make up for the injustice of their deaths. Some Jewish thinkers proposed that God would provide additional life in some way to those who had had their life cut short for being faithful—they would be returned to life here on earth to live out the full long lives they should have had. This idea was still under discussion at the time of Jesus and the early Christians may have applied that idea as a way of understanding Jesus’ resurrection from his unjust execution as well as the resurrection of all humanity.

Matthew 18: 10-20 What’s Matthew about?
Matthew understands Jesus to have been deeply concerned about loyalty among Christians. The story of the shepherd abandoning a hundred sheep for the sake of finding one is intended to tell early Christians how deeply they are to care about a Christian who has wandered away from the faith. Such a person is never to be abandoned. The same is true if someone has done something wrong—the rest of the community is to go to great length to continue to include the person. But that isn’t to allow the community to be controlled by wrong-doing. Neither does God abandon the community—even if there are only two or three, God is still there, just as with the single sheep.
This week’s collect:

Readings for Thursday November 18

Thursday November 18 Pentecost 25

Psalm 105 Part 2
The first half of this psalm sang about how God cared for the people up to the time of their becoming slaves in Egypt. This second half sings about how God forced the Egyptians to release the Israelites so God could bring them to their own land. God is being praised for consistently enacting justice in history.

1 Maccabees 4: 1-25 What’s Maccabees about?
The Greeks attack Jerusalem, but Judas leads his smaller and ill-equipped army against their staging-camp and defeats them and the force that had been sent against Jerusalem. They capture great wealth and give thanks to God for this victory over the pagan Greeks.

Matthew 18: 1-9 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus calls disciples to a level of trust that is normally only expressed in children who aren’t aware of dangers. As often in his gospel Matthew then moves to warnings. The warning about not hurting a child has a double meaning—a ‘child’ also meant an adult disciple. Warnings about cutting off our hand or plucking out our eye were never intended to be taken literally—exaggeration was a normal method of emphasizing the importance of the point being made—Jesus is saying we are to be as committed to integrity and care for justice as if we were going to amputate our hand or foot or eye for being unjust. People were meant to chuckle and agree.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Wednesday November 17

Wednesday November 17 Pentecost 25

Psalm 119 Part 6
Psalm 119 is a meditation on responding to God’s call to justice. Each of the 178 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 groups of eight verses. 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 expressions of order in the human world. Thus the human world and the rest of creation are united in the same foundation. Today’s sections are based on the letters Ayin (which is not pronounced but which looks like o, or an eye), P, and Z (in Hebrew alphabetical order). As you read them, imagine the effect of each line in today’s first section beginning with a silent letter that looks like an eye and so on.

1 Maccabees 3: 42-60 What’s Maccabees about?
Judas Maccabeus gathers the people at an ancient site of prayer near Jerusalem, organizes the people into battle formation, sends home those who are fainthearted or preoccupied (thus trusting in God rather than in superior military power), and encourages the people to face death the next day rather than see the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

Matthew 17:22-27 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus announces his coming execution. He is then challenged about paying the hated tax for the temple (which was enforced by the Roman empire which then took most of it). Jesus says that rulers do not tax their own families, so therefore the family of the temple (the ordinary people) should not pay taxes to the temple because they are family. Jesus has just predicted his own death and now we see why—it is sacrilegious to propose not paying temple tax and treasonous to propose not paying tax to the Roman empire. Jesus then arranges for their temple tax to be paid through this strange story of the temple tax coin being found in a fish. Finding the coin in a fish’s mouth must have originally had some special meaning which is no longer known to us.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Tuesday November 16

Tuesday November 16 Pentecost 25

Psalm 94
Those who oppress and abuse think that God does not care. How wrong they are! God created us, do they think God doesn’t know what is going on? God will act to remove the evil and support us. Some of the feelings in this psalm sound vindictive, but the underlying intention is that God should restore order in the world of human relationships. If oppression has full reign, there will be chaos.

Note that “just deserts” means “what is deserved,” not miles of sand or miss-spelled sweet food at the end of a meal!

Psalm 95
The daily office uses the first half of this psalm every morning. We praise God for God’s creation of the world and for our safety in God. Notice that the psalm assumes there are many gods, but that our God (of justice) is in charge of all of them. The second half is a warning that abandoning God by following evil ways, as the people did in the wilderness, will have consequences.

1 Maccabees 3: 25-41 What’s Maccabees about?
Following the successful revolt by the Maccabean brothers, King Antiochus of Greece is detained by financial issues and chooses Lysias to to lead half the Greek army to crush the rebellion. Lysias leads enormous forces to destroy the temple and enslave the Jews.

Notice the sophistication of the writer—living under Greek rule 200 years before Jesus, he is aware of the impact of international finance on political and military decisions. Earlier writers would have attributed Antiochus’ absence to God’s direct action. Perhaps this writer sees God working even through international finance to achieve protection for the Jewish people.

Matthew 17: 14-21 What’s Matthew about?
Following the revelation of Jesus’ glory the disciples are unable to throw out a demon. Jesus uses the incident to indicate that even the smallest amount of trust is more than sufficient for God to accomplish through us what otherwise seems impossible. Moving mountains is not to be taken as a geological prediction—the mountains to be moved are those of our world’s oppressive policies—the tiniest amount of trust in God’s victory is enough to accomplish more than we could have imagined.

Mark, in his gospel, remembers in this incident Jesus simply saying that the disciples couldn’t throw out the demon because prayer was required. But in Matthew’s time the Christian community is under pressure and feeling helpless, so Matthew remembers Jesus reassuring the community of God’s immense power—enough to move mountains—working through them despite their tiny faith which makes them unable to throw out a demon.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Monday November 15

Monday November 15 Pentecost 25

Psalm 89 Part 2
The poet accuses God of breaking God’s commitment. God, the poet says in the first part of this psalm, you chose David as king and promised to protect him forever with the same amazing power with which you created the universe. In this second part of the psalm he says to God, You said you would be his father and he would be your son. But now you have broken your promise and have allowed him to be humiliated and his enemies rejoice in his defeat. God, you are faithless. Yet we can only trust in you. There is nothing more to say.

1 Maccabees 3: 1-24 What’s Maccabees about?
The priest Mattathias has died in old age, and his sons, known as the Maccabean brothers, inherit his role of resisting the godless Greek culture. Judas Maccabeus is zealous for Jewish faithfulness and goes throughout the country insisting upon traditional observances. In spite of smaller numbers he defeats the Greeks in battle by trusting only in God’s help.

Matthew 17: 1-13 What’s Matthew about?
After Jesus announces his determination to go to Jerusalem and die, three of the disciples see him in his transfigured glory. This is the glory that will shown in his loving act of making us his absolute priority.

As often in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus uses an Old Testament reference to provide background—Elijah was expected to return at the end of the world. Jesus says that has already happened in the form of John the Baptist, and so the end is near. But Jesus continues his insistence on moving toward his own death bcause just as Elijah was rejected, so John the Baptist, the returned Elijah, was also rejected by the authorities of his time and executed, as will Jesus himself.

The reference to six days later at the start of this passage may indicate that the disciples are about to see the new creation of humanity—parallel to the six days of creation in Genesis—but now they are seeing the world being re-created through Jesus’ death and resurrection.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Sunday November 14

Sunday November 14 Pentecost 25

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.

1 Maccabees 2: 29-50 What’s Maccabees about?
Many Jews who resisted the demand to worship the Greek king as a god retreated to hiding places in the wilderness, likely around Qumran, used for the same purpose against the Roman occupation two hundred years later. Their refusal to fight the Greek army on a sabbath results in their wholesale slaughter. But after their deaths Mattathias temporarily sets aside the sabbath prohibition against working on the sabbath and raises an army which fights on the Sabbath, defeats the Greeks, and enforces adherence to Jewish practice. When Mattathias is old, he commands his sons to be ready to die for the purity of Israel.

Luke 16: 1-13 What’s Luke about?
Jesus tells a story about a financial manager who has been caught misappropriating funds. The manager then redoubles his fraud by instructing his friends how to falsify their purchase contracts so they will be obligated to assist him in return when he is fired. The owner, astonishingly, praises the administrator for his ingenuity.

It may be that Jesus is suggesting that his followers should be equally committed to act with determination, but it is more likely that Jesus is using this story to condemn widespread affirmation of clever deceit rather than adherence to honesty, a mistaken priority that is no less popular in our day.

This week’s collect: