Author: Harold

Thursday January 23          Epiphany 2

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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                            What’s Isaiah about?
God 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                            What’s Mark about?
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:

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.

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Wednesday January 22          Epiphany 2

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Psalm 38
I have caused my own downfall, people take advantage of me, and even friends have abandoned me. I remain silent because there is nothing left to do but to hope in God. Help me, God!

Isaiah 44: 24—45: 7                            What’s Isaiah about?
God, who created the world, can easily take the conqueror Cyrus by the hand, turn him into a shepherd, 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                            What’s Mark about?
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:

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.

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Tuesday January 21          Epiphany 2

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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 people around 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                            What’s Isaiah about?
This is a relentless attack by Isaiah on the uselessness of idols that people carve and worship in order to change history. But lifeless idols can do nothing. Notice the detailed description of the complex technology involved—the creation of constructed idols was a sophisticated art and would have impressed the Israelites suddenly encountering these technologies for the first time in Babylon. And some of the Israelites would have been so impressed that they transferred their loyalty to the religion that produced such sophisticated images. (Is that what happened when Christianity converted people around the world?) But despite the technological sophistication involved in the creation of idols, Isaiah is clear that enacting justice is the only one that can actually act to care for people and change history and return the people to their homes. That is to follow the only true God.

In our day there are all sorts of idols—society’s priorities—created using sophisticated technologies to which society gives loyalty and to which even Christians are attracted. But those priorities, no matter how sophisticated, are impotent to accomplish new life. That’s why there is so much death in the world. Only justice, that everyone is valued and is given dignity, which is the form of the real God, can change the future and bring us to our centre and our home and to real life.

Mark 3: 19b-35                            What’s Mark about?
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 deepest truth and then there’s no possibility of understanding that one has offended and needs forgiveness.

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, and right side up.

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.

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Monday January 20          Epiphany 2

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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                            What’s Isaiah about?
There is no other God like this God who can actually do things now and in the future. God dares the other gods to say they knew what God would do before God did it, but the other gods cannot. They do not control history, neither in the past nor in the future. But the true God has expunged all Israel’s evil, and all creation will rejoice that God has brought the people home!

Mark 3: 7-19a                            What’s Mark about?
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. Jesus calls 12 disciples because this is the symbolic number of the complete Jewish community—12 tribes descended from Jacob’s 12 sons. The kingdom has truly arrived!
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:

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,

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Sunday January 19          Epiphany 2

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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 light, then 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 ended all injustice.

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

Isaiah 43: 14—44: 5                           What’s Isaiah about?
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 escape from Babylon and return to Jerusalem across the Syrian desert.

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 is not constrained to repeat the past, but can control and change the future. Thus God will have no problem directing Cyrus to allow the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Even though the people abandoned God, God does not abandon them.

How might we experience this in our time?

John 4: 27-42                            What’s John about?
On Sundays we continue to read highlights from John’s gospel.
This is the second half of the story about the Samaritan woman, in which Jesus has done the unthinkable by having an intimate conversation alone with a woman whose religion was abhorrent to the Jerusalem form of Judaism. The woman had been thirsty for a deep relationship, and thirsty for a deep understanding of God. She and her community 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 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:

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,

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Saturday January 18          Epiphany 1

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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.

These psalms are often used on Saturdays to suggest the power God is about to use to raise Jesus and us from death.

Isaiah 43: 1-13                            What’s Isaiah about?
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. What would it take for us to develop that kind of trust, and how would it change us?

Mark 2: 23-3: 6                            What’s Mark about?
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 by 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.

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Friday January 17          Epiphany 1

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Psalm 16
I have been loyal to the God of justice, save me from the grave and I will have joy.

Psalm 17
I am innocent, but the evil people surround me—save me and I will be fulfilled.

Both these psalms are appropriate for Fridays, the weekly mini-anniversary of the crucifixion and both conclude with hope for new life.

Isaiah 42: 1-17                            What’s Isaiah about?
God will provide a new leader for the people who will enact justice. Only God has the future in control, and God will ensure that future is wonderful for the people. Like a woman in labour, God said nothing for a long time, but now is the time for God to give birth to a new history. This is an an astonishing image for a tradition in which God was always male. All idols will look ridiculous in comparison to the real God of creation who enacts justice, and creates light and a level path through the Syrian desert for the people to return to Jerusalem.

Mark 2: 13-22                            What’s Mark about?
Jesus calls a tax extortioner, working for the Roman empire, to follow him and then eats at his home with other criminals. The religious leaders are incensed—if we affirm criminals, what use is religion? Jesus responds that God, the eternal doctor, makes healing the priority.
At another meal, when Jesus and his disciples are criticized for not joining in ritual fasting, Jesus points out that the kingdom has arrived, so fasting is no longer needed: everything has changed and life is filled with joy.

Can this experience be true in our own time? That we experience joy when all around us people are in the “fasting” of worry and anxiety and dread of the future?

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.

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Thursday January 16          Epiphany 1

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Psalm 18 Part 1
A meditation on God’s immense power to save:—a poetic imaginative recounting of the crossing of the Red Sea and God’s rescue of the people from their slave masters. The psalm can be read as if it were the experience of one person being rescued or as if the nation is speaking with a single voice.

Isaiah 41: 17-29                            What’s Isaiah about?
God is so powerful that God can make the immense Syrian desert, which separates the people from their home in Jerusalem, be filled with water and food and trees. Isaiah has a clever argument to counter those who point out that such a rescue was never prophesied in the Bible and so can’t be due to God: if you doubt that God is making Cyrus let you go, the absence of prophesy about this only proves that the God of justice can change the future—that’s why nobody ever predicted this! Everyone who thought they knew what would happen turn out to be wrong because God can act beyond the prophesies of scripture and can change the future!

What would such confidence look like in our time?

Mark 2: 1-12                            What’s Mark about?
Four friends are so desperate that their paralyzed friend be healed that they jump the queue by getting on the roof and lowering the sick man on ropes to get him in front of Jesus. As they understood it, some terrible sin the man had done must have caused his paralysis, but his friends are determined he will be healed from that and so his body will also be healed. So Jesus enacts the kingdom in a new way—the man is welcomed into the community of the holy even though he says not a word—hadn’t repented or even asked for anything. The religious leaders are appalled—religion will be worth nothing if everyone can enter heaven that easily, but Jesus insists the kingdom is breaking in and that rule-breaking generosity is typical of God.

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.

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Wednesday January 15          Epiphany 1

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Psalm 119 Part 1
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 twenty-two 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 this order. Thus the human world and the rest of creation are united in the same foundation. Today’s three sections begin with the letters A, B and G (in Hebrew alphabetical order). As you read them, imagine the effect of each line in today’s first section beginning with A” and so on.

Isaiah 41: 1-16                            What’s Isaiah about?
King Cyrus has defeated the Babylonians and has a policy of allowing enslaved people to return to their lands. He probably had in mind they would grow crops that his armies could then appropriate in further conquests—it wasn’t likely out of the kindness of his heart! But Isaiah attributes this policy to God working behind the scenes of history. Isaiah claims that God “…has roused a victor from the east, and summoned him to his service” i.e. that God has roused the infidel Cyrus to do God’s work. To claim that God could use non-believing super-powers to accomplish God’s covenant with tiny insignificant Israel and return them to the land was a revolutionary concept. Isaiah was a theological genius to identify how God works, and this insight became foundational to Hebrew and later Christian understandings of God.

While today’s introductory passage focuses on the renewed power of Israel, we will encounter Isaiah in the next couple of months continuing to develop illustrations of how God works in the wider world to accomplish God’s covenant with Israel.

Mark 1: 29-45                            What’s Mark about?
After Jesus’ first healing, throwing out the demons who know him, the kingdom continues to break in with overwhelming power. A woman, Peter’s mother-in-law, is the first person who experiences the kingdom happening and her dignity restored. The oppressed—a leper, socially an outcast, is restored to community. Both healings are about social restoration as well as physical. Jesus refuses to stay in one place and allow the healings to set him up as the centre of a new cult—his priority is to ensure the kingdom breaks in everywhere.

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.

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Tuesday January 14          Epiphany 1

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Psalm 5
There is evil all around, but I will go into your presence, O God, and know that you are more powerful than all evil and will protect us.

Psalm 6
I have been hounded almost to death, help me, God. Thanks be to God that God heard me and the evil people will be overcome.

Isaiah 40: 25-31                            What’s Isaiah about?
Isaiah continues the image of God as hugely powerful behind the universe, and therefore entirely able to rescue the people from Babylon. “Lift up your eyes and see…” in this context means “Look at the stars…”

Mark 1: 14-28                            What’s Mark about?
John is arrested, and Jesus appears and proclaims that the kingdom is very close. He has discovered how the kingdom arrives: his first words in Mark’s gospel insist that the kingdom is not only coming sometime in the future, but is on the verge of breaking in right now. This is a whole new approach to how God’s kingdom arrives, and on that basis he calls his first disciples. All are fisher people whose lives have been crushed by the Roman taxation on all fish caught in the lake.
Jesus encounters evil in the form of an “unclean” evil spirit, and Jesus enables the kingdom to actually take place—evil knows exactly what is going on, and the person overcome by evil is set free from it. It’s clear that the horrors of evil haunting the people are the horrors of being under the heel of the unclean Roman empire, and the empire is  threatened! People are amazed—they see the kingdom actually happening!

 

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.

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