Author: Harold

Psalm 103
God has been so generous to us! God has given us life when death was close, has been generous when we abandoned God’s justice, has cared for us as a doting parent does, and all in spite of our lives being so short. Even angels and creation bless God and we join with them!

Haggai 1: 1- 2:9 What’s Haggai about?
The people are reluctant to start re-building the temple, but Haggai points out that they are looking after building their own houses but don’t care if there is a house honouring God. That is why they are in dire straights. God speaks through the prophet asking the people to re-build the temple and promises that it will be even greater than the first temple.

Luke 10: 25-37 What’s Luke about?
A lawyer wants Jesus to define ‘neighbour’ so he will know who he doesn’t have to love. Jesus responds by describing how the sworn enemies of Judaism (Samaritans) are more loving than loyal Jewish people. This would have been highly insulting and still challenges us to re-think our assumptions about our enemies today.

This week’s collect:

Lord God our redeemer,
who heard the cry of your people
and sent your servant Moses
to lead them out of slavery,
free us from the tyranny of sin and death,
and by the leading of your Spirit
bring us to our promised land;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings for Saturday October 23

Saturday October 23 Pentecost 21

Psalm 42
When I am very discouraged, I will remember to put my trust in God. The refrains in these two psalms are said by many Christian priests before presiding at the Eucharist to confess their own sins and to trust in God.

Psalm 43
This psalm is said by many Christian priests as they prepare to go to the altar to preside at a eucharist.

Ezra 4: 7-24 What’s Ezra about?
Complaints are made to the Persian King that Jerusalem is being re-built and that the country will rebel and leave the empire. The king orders that work on the temple cease. Is it possible that God will abandon Jerusalem after all?

Matthew 12: 33-42 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus continues his condemnation of anyone deliberately describing good to be evil, and says that the most famous evil doers of the Old Testament have seen the truth and will condemn the modern people who call good things evil.

This week’s collect:

Almighty and everliving God,
increase in us your gift of faith,
that forsaking what lies behind
and reaching out to what is before,
we may run the way of your commandments
and win the crown of everlasting joy;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings for Friday October 22

Friday October 22 Pentecost 21

Psalm 35
A demand that God should protect me from evil people who want me to fail. We can read this psalm as applying to our own self, or as a way of experiencing the life of a person or group who are being abused and exploited. In the end we will praise God because God will protect us.

Appropriate for a Friday, the weekly mini-anniversary of Jesus’ crucifixion, in which he underwent ultimate exploitation and abuse in order to love us.

Ezra 3: 1-13 What’s Ezra about?
The priests have now returned to Jerusalem, and they begin the daily rituals in the ruined temple. They begin to re-build the temple and the disaster of being conquered is being replaced by joy. The detailed descriptions of the people involved reinforces the certainty that God is acting to restore justice to Jerusalem.

Matthew 12: 22-32 What’s Matthew about?
When Jesus heals an insane man who is blind and cannot speak, an act of profound love and justice, Jesus is accused of being an ally of the devil. Only people with evil intentions could imagine such a thing, and Jesus points out that if the devil is healing profoundly injured people, then the devil’s rule is about to end. Besides, his accusers also have exorcists who cast out demons, so his accusers must also be in league with the devil! Jesus concludes that to deliberately name as evil something that is deeply good is to reject the character of God, and to do so is to endanger ones own life.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Thursday October 21

Thursday October 21 Pentecost 21

Psalm 37 Part 2
God always rescues and protects those who are just, and the powerful evil people will soon be brought to nothing. There is some daring imagery – evil people are imaged as a field in full harvest and as healthy trees – evil does seem to flourish sometimes.

Ezra 1: 1-11 What’s Ezra about?
For the next three weeks we read from two books, Ezra and Nehemiah, describing how Jerusalem and the temple were re-built, and the issues that arose.

God uses King Cyrus of Persia, a major world power who had probably never heard of the Jewish God of justice, to defeat the Babylonians and allows the Jews to return to Jerusalem. To imagine that the local Jewish God could control a major super-power was an enormous step forward in understanding that the God of justice was the God of the universe.

This was the greatest rescue in the history of Israel and it was on the basis of this event that the Jews then interpreted the whole of world history. It was this intervention by God, despite the people’s long abandonment of God, that gave rise to their understanding of God’s faithfulness. They then looked back in their history and applied that idea of God’s faithfulness despite human unfaithfulness to major events in the past. They saw God’s faithfulness in their escape from Egypt through the Red Sea, in God’s promise of a permanent home and land to Abraham, and in God’s victory over the flood with Noah when God promised humanity would never be destroyed despite human evil.

Matthew 12: 15-21 What’s Matthew about?
In response to the growing plot to kill him, Jesus quotes from the Hebrew Bible, as he often does in Matthew’s gospel, to show that he is truly sent by God to initiate the kingdom of justice far beyond the boarders of God’s ancient people.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Wednesday October 20

Wednesday October 20 Pentecost 21

Psalm 119 Part 2
Psalm 119 is a meditation on responding to God’s call to justice. Every verse contains some synonym for “justice”, such as “word”, “statute”, “commandment” or the like. The psalm is arranged in groups of eight verses. Each verse in the group starts with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet – 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. The human world and the rest of creation are thus united. Today’s three sections begin with the letters D, H and W (in Hebrew alphabetical order). As you read them, imagine the effect of each line in today’s first section beginning with “D” and so on.

Lamentations 2: 8-15 What’s Lamentations about?
A poem about how it feels for the city to have been destroyed. While it is clear that God has done this, at least that provides some implicit hope and meaning whereas to believe that the city was destroyed by a power struggle between the great nations would be utterly meaningless.

The same dilemma is present in our time. Is the posturing of the great countries and is the threat to the planet’s life just the working out of greed? Or is God somehow present in these crises?

This concludes our long reading since spring about the destruction of Jerusalem, and how the ancient authors creatively interpreted how a loving God never abandoned the people despite their sin and consequent destruction. Tomorrow we begin reading about how Jerusalem was restored.

Matthew 12: 1-14 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus responds to the criticism that he is not observing the Sabbath by pointing out that King David once broke the Bible’s rules by eating sacred consecrated bread. When he is criticized for healing on the Sabbath, which was technically work, Jesus again insists that the kingdom breaking in is the true meaning of the Sabbath. This challenge to the Sabbath traditions was inflammatory and shortly a plot to kill him begins.

We may be overhearing an early Christian conversation in which the kingdom of joy and justice that Jesus initiated is being given absolute priority over all other religious concerns. Do we need that conversation in our time?

This week’s collect:

Readings for Tuesday October 19

Tuesday October 19 Pentecost 21

Psalm 36
People who pursue evil are strong and clever. But God’s love and generosity are much greater than they are.

Psalm 39
Our lives are very short, care for us, loving God, in the short time we have.

Lamentations 1: 1-12 What’s Lamentations about?
A poem describing how the city of Jerusalem feels when everyone has been taken away captive.

Matthew 11: 25-30 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus continues his response to the question about who he is— he is known by those who know God, and this knowledge is a relief, not a burden.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Monday October 18

Monday October 18 Pentecost 21

Psalm 9
O God, you have always taken the side of the oppressed and abused to defend them against the powerful. May the oppressors be caught in their own schemes. Don’t forget us now, and don’t let the oppressors succeed and think they have the power.

Psalm 15
We are strong when we act in justice.

Jeremiah 44: 1-14 What’s Jeremiah about?
God reminds the people who have fled to Egypt from the disaster and hope to have safety there, that God had tried over and over again to persuade the people to live in justice, but they refused. So the disaster became inevitable. But those who fled to Egypt have committed themselves to the gods of selfish power, not to the God of justice. Those who fled to Egypt will suffer the same fate as those who were killed by the Babylonians—they will not return to the promised land.

There is no magic or religious way to avoid responsibility for having acted in cooperation with evil. God is faithful by always offering a way to return, but even God cannot magically remove the consequences of evil.

Matthew 11: 16-24 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus critiques those who rejected John and himself as being deliberately resistant—they rejected John because he was too serious, and Jesus because he was too joyful. Deliberately rejecting what is true and good has more terrible implications than simply having done wrong things.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Sunday October 17

Sunday October 17 Pentecost 21

Psalm 114
Praise that God frightened the sea so the people could escape from Egypt and frightened the Jordan river so they could enter the land. Even mountains danced at these wondrous acts! God still does wondrous things.

Psalm 115
God, you are strong, we aren’t. The idols that other people worship are not real, but you are real—so, everyone, worship the real God.

The false idols such as power and wealth are still very much alive today, but only the true God of justice can give us full life.

Jeremiah 29: 1-14 What’s Jeremiah about?
Jeremiah, living in Jerusalem, writes to those who have been captured and exiled to Babylon. He says God encourages them to live as normal and have children there and make the foreign city their home so that in seventy years, when God will allow them to return, there will be a strong community ready to resume life in Jerusalem. In this way they not only survive, but live in expectation of the return to Jerusalem.

This principle of making their home within foreign lands while retaining their sense of identity and connection with their ancient roots served the Jewish people well in the time of the Greeks and Romans and continues to this day.

Luke 7.36-50 What’s Luke about?
Jesus accepts a formal dinner invitation with a Jewish leader and has his feet bathed by a prostitute. The host imagines that Jesus must not be genuine or he would know who the woman was and would refuse her affection. Jesus responds by saying that her passion arises from her sense of freedom of having been forgiven, and that those who have little to be forgiven (like his host who thinks he is upstanding but is full of prejudice) will have little affection for him. No wonder opposition grows to Jesus’ radical reinterpretation of social norms.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Saturday October 16

Saturday October 16 Pentecost 20

Psalm 110
This psalm is written as if God is speaking to King David, the first great king of Israel, assuring David of God’s absolute support in battle.

The violence in the final two verses can be understood as expressing God’s absolute commitment to removing oppression and injustice from the world.

Psalm 116
God rescued me when I was at the point of death, and I give thanks!

Psalm 117
A delightful short two-verse psalm of praise.

2 Kings 25: 8-26 What’s Kings about?
The Babylonian army destroys Jerusalem, ransacks the temple and takes the irreplaceable holy vessels. The king of Babylon executes the religious leaders. This is the major disaster in Israel’s history which forced them to re-think what they understood about God who had promised to be faithful to them.

Their return from Babylon, seventy years later, was interpreted as God’s love never leaving them, even though they could not escape the consequences of their own evil which had led to the disaster. The entire Hebrew Bible was written from the perspective of this new understanding. God had rescued them, a small and insignificant people, so God must have special care for those who are weak both ethically and militarily. We now call that priority “social justice.”

Matthew 11: 7-15 What’s Matthew about?
After John’s imprisonment, Jesus points out that God’s kingdom is actually arising in the new life springing up around him. Jesus says that John was the greatest prophet yet to be part of God’s new kingdom is to be even greater than John the Baptist. Jesus insists that John must be obeyed—when the kingdom comes, if we are to participate, we will have to change our priorities as John proclaimed.

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.

Readings for Friday October 15

Friday October 15 Pentecost 20

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?”) and early Christians applied some details in the psalm in their description of the crucifixion. It is appropriately read on Fridays, mini-anniversaries of the day Jesus was crucified.

Jeremiah 38: 14-28 What’s Jeremiah about?
The king insists that Jeremiah tell him exactly what God has predicted. Jeremiah explains that if the king does not resist the Babylonians, his life will be spared, otherwise the king will be killed by the Babylonians. What God is asking is that the king accept humiliation in order to save the city. So far, almost all the kings have used their power to serve themselves. God is offering true leadership in which the well-being of the people is served. The readers await the king’s decision, on which the future of Jerusalem will depend. The king makes Jeremiah swear he will tell nobody of this conversation.

Matthew 11: 1-6 What’s Matthew about?
John the Baptist sends his disciples to ask if Jesus is the messiah. Jesus responds by showing that only things that could happen at the end of time are happening now—if he is the messiah it’s because he is bringing in God’s kingdom of healing and justice for all.

This week’s collect: