Author: Harold

Psalm 41
Just as we care for the poor and needy, so God cares for us. I am needy in that I have sinned and my enemies and even my friends are all conspiring against me and hoping that I will die. All I can do is trust that God will protect me.

When we, or our world, seem to have little hope, we ground ourselves in knowing God holds us fast.

Psalm 52
Cruel powerful people seem to run the world, but we trust that God will enable the world to be as fertile as a green olive tree and evil will be ended.

Isaiah 48: 1-11
God insists that the act of bringing Cyrus to defeat the Assyrians and so allow the Israelites to return to Jerusalem, is God’s own free act. Some Israelites may have been opposing Isaiah by saying that nothing like this was ever predicted in the scriptures, but Isaiah turns that argument on its head: if Cyrus letting them go was never predicted in scripture, that proves that God does completely new things that nobody could have anticipated! That was as revolutionary a claim then as it is now: God can ignore what’s in the Bible – keeping the covenant and implementing justice for all now is more important than ancient acts recorded or prophesied in scripture.

Mark 5: 21-43
Jesus has calmed a storm on a lake, then inside a person, and now calms storms inside two women. The first woman was an outcast because of her constant menstrual bleeding and could never have children and was socially ostracized being considered highly infectious. She would be considered a failure and hardly even an adult because in that culture having a child is what made a woman a full adult. Jesus then heals a little girl, whose illness at age 12 almost prevented her from ever becoming an adult. This little girl had been born at the same time as the adult woman first became ill. Obviously there are several layers of meaning in these two stories which are intertwined around each other.

Jesus is healing all the things that keep us from being our full selves and coming into maturity, and particularly those who are oppressed – such as women in the ancient world. These healings are more than just of individual bodies – Jesus is healing the body of society from being prejudiced, stunted and unfulfilled. The kingdom of God really is arriving.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
by grace alone you call us
and accept us in your service.
Strengthen us by your Spirit,
and make us worthy of your call;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings for Sunday January 24

Sunday January 24 Epiphany 3

Psalm 63
I delight in the certainty of God’s protection and victory over evil. The violence in verses 9 and 10 can be understood as an expression of our intense desire that all evil will come to an end.

Psalm 98
The people, the nations, and the whole of creation delight in God’s victory and rejoice when God comes to put all creation right. This psalm is used at Easter, and is often used on Sundays, mini-anniversaries of Easter. There is some lovely imagery of the sea deliberately making a noise with its waves and rivers doing the same by clapping their hands.

Isaiah 47: 1-15
The Babylonians, who had enslaved the Israelites and deported them to Babylon, are about to be conquered by Cyrus. Isaiah interprets this as God controlling history and punishing the Babylonians for having treated God’s people cruelly. No matter how great is the enormous power of such a country, God can change everything and bring their power to nought.

Notice the careful construction of these stanzas: the first two about wealthy Babylon’s shame of being stripped bare, the second two about the loss of husband and children which leads to destitution for a woman in the ancient world, and the third two about the powerlessness of experts in predicting the future through astronomy and research. Isaiah is ringing the changes on his theme of God’s power being able to turn super-powers to nothing in order to bring justice and dignity to the oppressed.

John 5: 2-18
We continue to read from John’s gospel on Sundays.

Jesus heals someone who is too weak to take advantage of a magic pool. Even though it is the Sabbath, Jesus heals, and tells the healed man to celebrate his health by carrying his mat, both of which are a breaking of the Sabbath. The healed man betrays Jesus to the religious authorities and their opposition to him grows. Perhaps the early Christians were so filled with joy at God’s victory in the resurrection that everything else – even the weekly celebrations of God’s completion of creation on the Sabbath – seemed secondary.

When we are conscious of God’s victory over all evil, new priorities and new decisive actions emerge for us. However, there will be opposition from those in power, and even some who have been superficially healed, to whose advantage it is that nothing change.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Saturday January 23

Saturday January 23 Epiphany 2

Psalm 30
Joy that God has rescued us. “His wrath endures but the twinkling of an eye” – it’s not that God is losing God’s temper, but that God made the world so that actions have consequences – anything else would produce total chaos. It’s inevitable that evil selfish actions on our part have consequences. Even though God made the world so that consequences have to happen, the psalm proclaims that God’s goodness acts to overcome the evils that we have caused. In Jesus’ dying and rising Christians see the process by which God accomplishes this.

Psalm 32
When I acknowledged my sin, I received immense joy. When we acknowledge our participation in oppressive policies, we know God will overcome those, and we can also be in joy instead of living in denial or guilt. Then we will have the energy to act against those oppressions.

Isaiah 46: 1-13
Isaiah uses an extraordinary set of images: the powerless idols of Babylon whose technology so impressed the Israelites weigh down the weary animals that have to carry them, and the true God acts like an animal carrying the weary Israelites from their birth to old age. This God laughs at the idols – only this God can change the future and see what will happen, and direct King Cyrus like a falconer controls a falcon to rescue the people. It was a stroke of genius to re-interpret history in this way.

Mark 5: 1-20
Jesus calms another kind of storm—this time inside someone who has been overcome with evil. Notice that the demons are called “Legion”—it is no coincidence that that is the name of the military force oppressing the country—the Roman empire is being experienced as a herd of demons driving the people crazy. Notice that the Jews who are raising pigs— which are disgusting in Judaism—want Jesus to leave so they can continue with their disgusting business—many Jews were cooperating with Roman oppression. Today our society’s priorities are often driven by the gods of profit regardless of how damaging the outcomes are.

Like Jesus, we also may be asked to leave if we challenge our society’s selfish priorities, but the good news is that God’s justice will prevail regardless as it did with this man who Jesus made same. Trust in that enables us to be active disciples.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ
is the light of the world.
May your people,
illumined by your word and sacraments,
shine with the radiance of his glory,
that he may be known, worshipped, and obeyed
to the ends of the earth;
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings for Friday January 22

Friday January 22 Epiphany 2

Psalm 31
I am being attacked from all sides but trust that God will rescue me. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus quotes from this psalm as he is dying. Appropriate for Friday as the weekly mini-anniversary of the crucifixion.

Isaiah 45: 18-25
God created the world, triumphing over chaos and in the same way will end the chaos of the nations attacking Israel. Only God could know this would happen – the idols of the nations attacking know nothing and are worse than useless. Only the God of righteousness can bring justice and that justice will be unstoppable. Can we cultivate such an expectation for our day?

In this passage we also hear one of Isaiah’s themes, that God’s power in creating the universe is now being experienced as God’s power to bring justice and restoration to those who are being crushed. (Here and throughout the Hebrew Bible “righteousness” connotes bringing fairness and respect and dignity to the downtrodden. In Isaiah’s time the downtrodden were the entire country in exile.)

Mark 4: 35-41
Like many miracles, the significance of this miracle of the calming of a storm lies in its meaning. To people of Jesus’ time the waves swamping the boat would have meant the return of the original chaos in Genesis 1 which the Spirit had overcome at the beginning of creation, and the storm would have been understood as the Roman empire threatening to drown Judaism, which of course happened a couple of decades later when Rome destroyed the temple. Jesus calming the storm would have meant that God was re-enacting the original wholeness and goodness of creation against the worst the world can do.

We can apply this miracle to the storms inside us or in the wider world as being ultimately under God’s control. In tomorrow’s reading, Jesus calms the storm inside a person overwhelmed by evil. Good news indeed—God’s kingdom really is emerging!

This week’s collect:

Readings for Thursday January 21

Thursday January 21 Epiphany 2

Psalm 37 Part 1
It’s tempting to want to be as successful as evil people, but seeking God’s justice will fulfill us, and God will defeat evil completely.

Isaiah 45: 5-17
God’s is speaking to Cyrus, “I arm you” – even though Cyrus has never heard of God. God decides Cyrus will return the people to their home in Jerusalem, as surely as a potter makes a clay pot. A pot never criticizes the potter who is shaping its clay, and so Cyrus never resists God. God is like a potter, or a father, or a woman in labour – they create and give birth and nobody asks if it is really happening. God’s control of the super-powers is that complete. Isaiah continues with his claim that God was not only active in the past, at the Red Sea, but is even more powerful now. God will even place the super-powers of the time under the leadership of Israel.

History also seems out of control in our time. If we really thought God is in control of history now, what images would we use to re-interpret what is going on?

Mark 4: 21-34
Jesus continues with more images of hope: a lamp that lights the room – no matter how dark the room, even the smallest light is not extinguished by darkness. Just as a small light is not extinguished by darkness, so neither can we extinguish the consequences of actions, good or bad—both are utterly reliable. Jesus tells a short version of the sower and the seeds—but this time the emphasis is on the earth’s ability to bring life without reference to us. Even the tiniest seed—mustard—grows into incomparably larger than its beginnings.

In our personal lives, as well as in international politics, we need that kind of hope and confidence. Jesus is inviting us to allow the little seeds of hope and confidence in us and our world to grow.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Wednesday January 20

Wednesday January 20 Epiphany 2

Psalm 38
I have caused my own downfall, people take advantage of me, and even friends have abandoned me. I remain silent because I hope in God. Help me, God!

Isaiah 44: 24 – 45: 7
God, who created the world, can easily take the conqueror Cyrus by the hand, and guide him to return the people back to Jerusalem. It is God who has given the godless Cyrus his world power and who even gives him his name. This was an astonishing re-interpretation of history by Isaiah, and challenges us to imagine how it might be true in our time.

Mark 4: 1-20
Jesus’ famous parable about the sower and the seeds. Originally Jesus probably meant to use an obvious common experience (wonderful harvests happen even though most of the seeds which are planted never grow) to say that no matter how much opposition his followers, or the kingdom, encounters, God’s generous plenty in the form of the emerging kingdom overcomes every setback. It is a very effective image. The subsequent explanation that each example has some special meaning was probably added later by an early Christian dealing with the puzzle of why some disciples were abandoning the faith. So Jesus’ examples of overcoming opposition to the kingdom were re-interpreted as illustrations of what drew people away from their early faith.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Tuesday January 19

Tuesday January 19 Epiphany 2

Psalm 26
I do not sit down with the wicked: this gives us words to say how we wish to live, that deep in our heart we really are such people as keep God’s commands to love and do justice. “My foot stands on level ground” because we ground our lives on the solid base of justice.

Psalm 28
Like many psalms, this asks that the wicked be punished: “give them their just deserts.” (“Deserts” is “What is deserved,” not miles of sand or misspelled sweets!) This desire for evil people to be destroyed seems very unlike Jesus’ request that we forgive our enemies and love them, but it is really giving us words to express our own intense desire that oppressive and violent policies should come to an end. We might pray, “May any international trade agreements that make the poor even poorer, be utterly done away with.” The violent images in many psalms are not to ask God to be violent, but to ask that all evil actions and policies be completely defeated so the world can live in peace and fulfilment. The second half of the psalm gives thanks that God has indeed been victorious over oppression.

Isaiah 44: 9-20
A relentless attack on the uselessness of idols people carve and worship in order to change history, but they can do nothing. Notice the detailed description of the complex technology involved—the creation of constructed idols was a sophisticated art form and would have impressed the Israelites suddenly transported to Babylon. But despite the technological sophistication involved in the creation of idols, Isaiah is clear that the God of justice is the only one that can actually act to care for people and change history and return the people to their homes.

In our day there are all sorts of powerless idols in the form of priorities to which society gives loyalty, but those priorities, no matter how sophisticated, are impotent to accomplish new life. Only justice (that all are valued and are given dignity) brings us to our centre and our home.

Mark 3: 19b-35
Criticism of Jesus increases – because his priorities are so out of sync with his society’s, his family thinks he is mentally ill, and the religious leaders accuse him of being the incarnation of evil. Jesus responds to the accusation that he can cast out evil only because he is a stronger evil, by pointing out the inconsistency – how can it be evil to heal people? If that is what evil is doing, more power to it – then evil has destroyed itself! We can almost hear his laughter at the preposterous criticism that by doing good he proves himself to be evil! He goes on to say that to deliberately reject something you know is good and to call it evil—that is the unforgivable sin, unforgivable because to do so is to destroy one’s own self. Returning to his family’s criticism that he is mentally ill, Jesus says that all who are connected to God’s justice are his family—so if he is mentally ill, then all his followers must also be mentally ill! He is turning all our assumptions about what makes sense, upside down.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Monday January 18

Monday January 18 Epiphany 2

Psalm 25
I desperately need God’s support both from those who attack me, and from actions that are my own fault, and I know God is always generous to those in such a situation.

Isaiah 44: 6-8, 21-23
There is no other God like this God who can actually do things. God dares the other gods to say they knew what God would do, but they cannot. God has expunged all Israel’s evil, and all creation will rejoice that God has brought the people home!

Mark 3: 7-19a
This passage is a summary of the kingdom’s arrival: people press in to be cured, evil spirits announce who Jesus is – they are subject to him – and God’s new society emerges in the form of a new community built around Jesus. There are 12 apostles because this is the symbolic number of the complete Jewish community with 12 tribes descended from Jacob’s 12 sons.

Christians could understand this to be the formation of a new global community. Jesus calls us, like the original disciples, to proclaim that the kingdom is breaking in now, and to exercise God’s power to overcome evil.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Sunday January 17

Sunday January 17 Epiphany 2

Psalm 148
These three psalms are especially appropriate on Sundays, the mini-anniversary of the resurrection. All creation praises God—the heavens, the earth—including fog, sea monsters, and “creeping things” (perhaps even insects or worms)—and humanity—rulers, young people and old people—all things without exception praise God together. Notice that the sequence is taken from the first creation story in Genesis: first the heavens, then creatures of the water, then creatures of the land, and finally people.

Psalm 149
Songs of joy at God’s victory. The joy of military victories toward the end of the psalm was their way of saying that God has conquered all injustice.

Psalm 150
A scene of riotous joy as every conceivable instrument and every creature praises God.

Isaiah 43: 14 – 44: 5
Amazingly, God will do something completely new – whereas God once made a dry path in the sea for God’s people to escape from Egypt, now God will reverse that miracle and this time fill the dry desert with water so the people can return to Jerusalem across the Syrian desert from slavery in Babylon. It is almost as if Isaiah is telling people to forget about the Bible and how God rescued them long ago from Egypt because God does not have to repeat the past, but can control and change the future. Thus God will have no problem directing Cyrus and rebuilding Jerusalem. Even though the people abandoned God, God does not abandon them.

John 4: 27-42
On Sundays we continue to read highlights from John’s gospel.

In this second half of the story, in which Jesus does the unthinkable by having an intimate conversation alone with a woman whose religion was anathema, we find that the woman is thirsty for a deep relationship, and thirsty for a deep understanding of God. She and her community (which was abhorrent to the Jerusalem form of Judaism) find both in Jesus.

This is another example of one of John’s themes: religiously faithful people reject Jesus and the unfaithful receive him and are fulfilled. John doesn’t mean we should not be loyal in our faith, but that our religion must enable, and not prevent, us growing in God’s justice and inclusion through knowing Jesus.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Saturday January 16

Saturday January 16 Epiphany 1

Psalm 20
We delight that God upholds us with strength far greater than military technology.

Psalm 21
Joy at how with great power God has blessed the king and removed the threats against him. This psalm would originally have been sung to the king, as God’s blessed one, but it is equally applicable to us and can be read with ourselves as the subject of the psalm.

Isaiah 43: 1-13
Don’t worry, says God, to the Israelites who have been enslaved by the Babylonians. I can easily exchange entire super-powers for you, and will command your return from the four corners of the earth. It is true nobody ever predicted this – so you, my people, will be the ones to certify that it has happened. No other god can change history the way I, the real God, can.

An extraordinary insight and powerful images by Isaiah. Equally applicable to our time when evil seems so embedded in our world.

Mark 2: 23-3: 6
The Sabbath was originally intended as a weekly re-enactment of the joy of the completed creation when every part of creation had dignity and fulfilment. Jesus picks grain to eat on a sabbath and heals a man on the sabbath—both are life-giving acts, but Jesus is accused of desecrating the Sabbath by doing work. Jesus responds by quoting an Old Testament text in which David allowed his companions to eat the equivalent of consecrated wafers when they were hungry. Jesus is claiming to be equivalent of the great King David and to be be able to give permission to break Biblical rules because the kingdom breaking in is more important than anything else. The religious leaders cannot bear to have their power taken away by this new equality and fulfilment of the kingdom that is breaking in. They plot to remove this kingdom even though it would have brought freedom to them, the powerful, too.

This week’s collect:

Eternal Father,
who at the baptism of Jesus
revealed him to be your Son,
anointing him with the Holy Spirit,
keep your children, born of water and the Spirit,
faithful to their calling;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.