Author: Harold

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.

Jeremiah 38: 1-13 What’s Jeremiah about?
Jeremiah continues to insist that Jerusalem will be invaded as the consequence of the kings’ long history of being unfaithful to the God of justice. Court officials who believe they can defeat the Chaldeans (and thus avoid the consequences of abandoning justice) persuade the king to imprison Jeremiah in an underground cistern. But when Jeremiah is in danger of dying there, the king allows him to be rescued. There is still hope that the king may return to the God of justice.

Matthew 10: 34-42 What’s Matthew about?
Following Jesus will set a person into a whole new perspective and life priorities, often in opposition to many things that would be considered normal. This will be painful but the outcome will be to be fully alive. By losing our former inadequate life we will receive full and unending life.

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 Wednesday October 13

Wednesday October 13 Pentecost 20

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.

Jeremiah 37: 3-21 What’s Jeremiah about?
Egypt has gone to war against Babylon (named here as Chaldea), and the king hopes that this means that through the intervention by Egypt God will not allow Jerusalem to be destroyed as the consequence of the injustice of the kings. But Jeremiah insists on telling the truth—the consequences of the destruction of Jerusalem will happen even if every Babylonian soldier were wounded. Hoping for Egypt to rescue them is a false hope against God’s justice. Jeremiah is arrested but the king allows him to live as a prisoner in the palace instead of being executed.

God protects those who tell the truth when they confront the powerful.

Matthew 10: 24-33 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus continues to encourage strength in face of strong opposition that was happening as Matthew was writing this gospel. Good disciples will be like their teacher—they will be treated the same way as the teacher is treated. In other words, if people hate Jesus and call him evil, they will do the same to Jesus’ disciples. But the good news is that the truth will come out—Jesus was not evil and neither are his disciples; God values sparrows, and even individual hairs, so how much more will God value disciples! We are completely safe! In the end all will be put right—faithfulness to God’s care will result in deep life, and abandoning justice will lead to death.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Tuesday October 12

Tuesday October 12 Pentecost 20

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.

Jeremiah 36: 27- 37:2 What’s Jeremiah about?
The Lord commands Jeremiah to write another scroll warning that the King of Babylon will come and destroy the country. This is another opportunity for the king to avert the disaster. But this scroll is also ignored by the king of the north and the king of the south.

Matthew 10: 16-23 What’s Matthew about?
Early Christians were being criticized for their loyalty to a crucified messiah, and Matthew understands that Jesus anticipated how hard that would be for them, and encourages them to remain faithful because God will shortly arrive to put the kingdom into practice.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Monday October 11

Monday October 11 Pentecost 20

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.

Jeremiah 36: 11-26 What’s Jeremiah about?
When the warning that God has sent to persuade the people to change is read to the king, he burns it and orders that Jeremiah be killed, but God hides Jeremiah to keep him safe, and thus makes it possible that with further challenges, the king may repent.

Matthew 10: 5-15 What’s Matthew about?
As typical in Matthew, because he is commending Jesus as restoring true Judaism, Jesus sends his disciples exclusively to Jewish communities to proclaim and enact the kingdom with healings. They are to do this for the sake of the healings, not for pay and to receive from the villagers the kind of generosity that they are proclaiming about the kingdom. But any who do not respond to them have placed themselves outside the kingdom.

In Matthew, Jesus often speaks of the consequences of not following the kingdom. Rather than hearing this as a threat, Matthew probably intends that the early Christians be clear that the gospel of God’s love implies that one must be loving oneself, otherwise one won’t experience God’s kingdom.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Sunday October 10

Sunday October 10 Pentecost 20

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!

Jeremiah 36: 1-10 What’s Jeremiah about?
Jeremiah describes how God makes a second attempt to persuade the people to return to justice. Jeremiah has a list written and read to the people describing the consequences that have descended on them and other nations as a result of injustice. God’s hope is that the people will repent and God can withhold the disaster.

Luke 7: 36-50 What’s Luke about?
We are reading from Luke’s gospel on Sundays, and as is typical of Luke, he emphasizes Jesus’ care for people who are unacceptable. Jesus accepts a formal dinner invitation with a Jewish leader and has his feet bathed by a prostitute. The host complains that Jesus must not be a genuine holy man or he would never allow this to happen. Jesus points out that people respond with great generosity when they have experienced great forgiveness, and proceeds to forgive the woman for her chaotic life. In contrast, the host has not treated Jesus with corresponding generosity, so he must have very little to have been forgiven for! The truth of Jesus’ observation and the biting irony about the host are inescapable.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Saturday October 9

Saturday October 9 Pentecost 19

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.

Jeremiah 35: 1-19 What’s Jeremiah about?
Jeremiah was one of the writers who struggled to interpret the meaning of the disaster of Babylon’s destruction of the country. What was God doing?

For the next week we read Jeremiah’s interpretation of the disaster. Jeremiah had a difficult problem to solve—how can it be that God brought disaster on the people, yet God’s central character is to forgive and be faithful to them? His highly creative solution is that God goes to great lengths to persuade the people to change their behaviour which otherwise will inevitably bring disaster on themselves. This part of his book describes how God tried so hard to change history so the disaster wouldn’t happen.

In today’s passage Jeremiah describes the first of God’s attempts to persuade the people to return to justice. Jeremiah describes how a non-Jewish community, the Rechabites, refuse to abandon their ancient commitment to abstinence from alcohol in spite of great pressure to drink. Jeremiah understands this to be God’s encouragement of the Jewish people not to abandon their ancient commitment to the God of justice who rescued them from Egypt. But they don’t respond.

Matthew 9: 35-10:4 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus is moved by the plight of the poorest and chooses twelve disciples, thus symbolically creating a new Israel, and sends them out to embody that kingdom of care for everyone in their new community.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
you have built your Church
on the foundation of the apostles and prophets,
Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone.
Join us together in unity of spirit by their teaching,
that we may become a holy temple, acceptable to you;
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 8

Friday October 8 Pentecost 19

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.

2 Kings 23: 36—24: 17 What’s Kings about?
The next two kings are evil and abandon the just ways of God. The disaster is now inescapable. We have come to the point which the writers of the books of Kings have been making—that the catastrophe of the temple being destroyed and the people being taken into slavery was caused by the ever-increasing evil of Israel’s kings. Babylon conquers the land. The annihilation of the temple and its ritual contents—the original stone Ten Commandments which described how a just society operates, the jar of manna from the wilderness with which God fed the people in the wilderness, and the place where God met the people in animal sacrifice—was a catastrophic disaster beyond comprehension. It called into question whether there really was a God of justice.

This catastrophic event challenged the leaders to understand what was going on. God had seen fit to dwell in the temple in Jerusalem. So had God finally abandoned them? The explanation that they came up with, and which changed the nature of Judaism and subsequent history, was that even the God of infinite justice and care for the poor couldn’t reverse the consequences of their own greed and oppression of the poor. The writers interpret what we might call a normal military defeat by a super-power over a small nation, as the inevitable consequence of their own injustice. Writing seventy years after the disaster, when King Cyrus had conquered Babylon and released the Jews, these leaders and thinkers interpreted that release to have been a deliberate act of forgiveness by God.

Their creativity in finding ways to see God beneath the international events of their time challenges us to imagine God’s hand behind the international events in our day. How well are we doing that?

Matthew 9: 27-34 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus heals two blind men, and says explicitly that their trust in him is central. Matthew is encouraging his community, under pressure decades later, not to lose faith in Jesus. He then heals a man possessed by a double demon of insanity and inability to speak. Again, Matthew may be responding to the criticisms the early Christians were undergoing of being mad to remain faithful to a crucified saviour and being unable to explain to others why. People are astonished at Jesus, and the criticism is growing—if Jesus throws out demons he must be a demon himself!

This week’s collect:

Readings for Thursday October 7

Thursday October 7 Pentecost 19

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.

2 Kings 23: 4-26 What’s Kings about?
King Josiah continues to remove all the symbols of evil from the land which had been placed there by previous kings and he re-institutes the festival of the Passover which had been neglected. But in the next verse, the consequences of those centuries of evil cannot be magically removed. The country will still be enslaved.

Matthew 9: 18-26 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus heals a woman whose ongoing menstrual bleeding had made her a social outcast and a failure as a woman. By touching Jesus in her desperate search for healing she risks contaminating him and perhaps even being stoned to death for that outrageous insult. Jesus responds by calling her his daughter and she is healed. He then raises a small girl to life. In both cases Jesus is acting far beyond what anybody had thought God would care about. He challenges us to do the same.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Wednesday October 6

Wednesday October 6 Pentecost 19

Psalm 119 Part 7
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 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.

2 Kings 22: 14—23:3 What’s Kings about?
The prophetess Hulda foretells that the Babylonians will conquer and enslave the Israelites, but because king Josiah repented, and led the people back to faithfulness, God will postpone the disaster so Josiah can live to old age, like Hezekiah, and not be humiliated by the approaching destruction.

Matthew 9: 9-17 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus asks a tax collector to join him and then has supper with him. Tax collectors were hated because although being Jews, they had permission and protection from the Roman authorities to extort as much money as they could for their own personal greed after they had collected the Romans’ taxes. No wonder Jesus is criticized for welcoming a violent extortioner as a disciple. Jesus is then criticized for not fasting and being solemn. His response is that new wine is breaking in giving joy even to extortioners and that the old ways of oppressive judgment are no longer the norm in God’s society. How wise and transformative such an attitude would be in our time.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Tuesday October 5

Tuesday October 5 Pentecost 19

Psalm 120
God saved me from those who lie and rely on deceit. Even though I am committed to peace, those around me still seek war.

Psalm 121
Confidence that God will watch over us to protect us from natural calamities and everyday situations.

Psalm 122
Joy at entering Jerusalem to worship in the temple. Prayers for Jerusalem.

Psalm 123
We keep our eyes trained on God’s direction to us, like servants alert to their owner’s slightest hand signal. We are oppressed by the wealthy and we anticipate God’s signal at any moment that God will act.

2 Kings 22: 1-13 What’s Kings about?
The next King, Josiah, orders the temple to be repaired and the workers find a book (the book of Deuteronomy) hidden there. Deuteronomy describes how Moses gave God’s law a “second” time, thus the name of the book. The king realizes how much the country has abandoned God by not keeping the rules in Deuteronomy and how serious the consequences will be. Later in Kings, in response to king Josiah’s faithfulness, God will again postpone the destruction of Jerusalem.

Matthew 9: 1-8 What’s Matthew about?
Jesus cures someone of paralysis and people are amazed. In those times such diseases were believed to be caused by some evil the person had done, so Jesus then removes the underlying cause—that’s the meaning of his forgiving the person’s sins. In doing so Jesus is undermining the religious claim to exclusive control of forgiveness and claiming that God’s forgiveness is present in himself and available immediately to all. This gives immense hope to ordinary people but immense threat to religious leaders.

This week’s collect: