Author: Harold

Monday January 13          Epiphany 1

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Psalm 1
Those who live in righteousness—which means with justice to all—will be as strong as healthy trees planted near water. Injustice will be blown away like chaff.

Psalm 2
Other nations scorn God and God’s people, but God has chosen this people and their king, and God will have the final word.

Christians may understand this to be a way of saying that God has made self-offering love and justice in the death and resurrection of Christ to be the ultimate reality. All other attempts at finding full life through pursuing self-interest are laughable and doomed to fail.

Psalm 3
Because of God’s protection, I have nothing to fear.

Isaiah 40:12-23                            What’s Isaiah about?
If the people doubted God’s ability to return them home to Jerusalem, Isaiah describes God as so great that all the super powers are but a pinch of dust in comparison to the God who spreads out the stars as effortlessly as if they were a mere piece of cloth. Such a God can easily act to return the people to their home. This global power of God related to God’s power over the entire universe is a new perspective developed by the author of this second section of Isaiah.

Mark 1: 1-13                            What’s Mark about?
We have concluded the Epiphany focus on the coming of Jesus into the world and today we start reading through Mark’s gospel.
Mark begins his gospel with a quotation from Isaiah about the people being returned to Jerusalem—Mark will demonstrate that is happening again in Jesus. Jesus commits himself to John’s call to enact the kingdom by crossing the Jordan river, as Joshua did long ago, and Jesus is immediately affirmed.

But then he is driven into a wilderness, perhaps of terrible doubt. He may be aware that John is about to be executed and may wonder if Isaiah’s and John’s prophecies of the kingdom are impossible after all. But something happens to him in the wilderness of doubt and we see the astonishing outcome tomorrow.

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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Sunday January 12          Baptism of the Lord

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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!

Isaiah 40: 1-11                           What’s Isaiah about?
This middle section of Isaiah (written by Second Isaiah) begins with the traditional interpretation—that the nation’s injustice to its poor is what caused the country to be exiled to Babylon and enslaved there. But then more of God’s character shows through—God is tender, gentle, holding the people in God’s bosom, gently leading the female sheep, and at the same time full of might—a great highway will appear across the Syrian desert on which the people will easily travel back to Jerusalem.

Second Isaiah is pushing the limits of his new interpretation—God can’t ignore injustice, but in spite of the nation’s injustice to the poor and its faithfulness being like parched grass or fading flowers, God is more powerful and compassionate than had been imagined.

#VALUE!
For the next six weeks or so we will read from John’s gospel on Sundays.
This beginning of John’s gospel focuses on Jesus’ cosmic significance—Jesus (the process of love through death and resurrection) was central to the creation of the universe. John the Baptist asserts that process is becoming complete in human history in the person of Jesus.

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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Saturday January 11          Epiphany

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

Isaiah 65:13-16                            What’s Isaiah about?
God has ensured that the injustice perpetrated by the people will have consequences, nevertheless God will save all who decide to be faithful to the God of justice.

John 6: 15-27                           What’s John about?
Jesus triumphed over hunger in yesterday’s reading and today he triumphs over the wind and waves. Jesus is able to bring us where we are going in safety. Jesus then says not to become focused on the miracles themselves to sustain us, but to learn that it is incorporating Jesus (meaning his death and resurrection) that feeds us deeply.

This week’s collect:

Eternal God,
who by a star
led wise ones to the worship of your Son.
Guide by your light the nations of the earth,
that the whole world may know your glory;
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 10          Epiphany

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Psalm 138
I praise God because God helped me, even though I am one of the lowly.

Psalm 139
God, you know everything about me, even when I was still in my mother’s womb, and I am amazed at your knowledge. Help me to remove all evil from the world.

Isaiah 65:1-9                            What’s Isaiah about?
Even though the people were faithless, God constantly waited for them to return. Even though God ought to have repaid them for their evil, and there were consequences for their evil, God ensured they were not destroyed.

John 6: 1-14                           What’s John about?
Jesus takes a tiny amount of food and feeds 5,000 people with 12 baskets left over. However small the gift we have, God is able to do enormous things when we allow Jesus to use it in God’s generosity.
Even today Christianity struggles, as the disciples did, to take seriously such radical generosity, and not be seduced by the lure of power.

This week’s collect:

Eternal God,
who by a star
led wise ones to the worship of your Son.
Guide by your light the nations of the earth,
that the whole world may know your glory;
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 9          Epiphany

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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.

Isaiah 63:1-5                            What’s Isaiah about?
A set of violent images expressing God’s absolute determination that injustice and oppression will be eliminated from the earth and that God’s power is sufficient to protect the people.

John 5: 1-15                           What’s John about?
Jesus heals a paralyzed man on the Sabbath—the day that allowed everyone to be completely free from all obligations and thus humanity could weekly re-experience the joy of the fully completed creation. Following today’s excerpt, Jesus claims that God never stops working for the healing of the world, even on sabbaths, and thus God breaks the ten commandments! Jesus is asking for a revolution in the meaning of religious faith—it’s about celebrating God’s triumph over illness. No wonder opposition to Jesus arises from the religious leaders.
Notice that Jesus has not done any work in this healing, he doesn’t carry the man to the water as the man hopes. Instead, Jesus explicitly instructs the man to carry his mat, thus celebrating God’s total victory over his paralysis. Jesus is insisting that not just he, but the whole of humanity, is to participate in God’s victory. Like the formerly paralyzed man, we may also be subject to criticism for rejoicing in God’s victory regardless of social expectations.

This week’s collect:

Eternal God,
who by a star
led wise ones to the worship of your Son.
Guide by your light the nations of the earth,
that the whole world may know your glory;
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 8          Epiphany

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

Psalm 118
An enthusiastic song of thanksgiving for everything God has done for us—God has protected us from evil forces, and we give praise in the temple and in processions. Appropriate for a Sunday as an anniversary of the triumph of Easter Day.

Portions of the second half of this psalm are traditionally sung on Easter Day.

Isaiah 59:15-21                            What’s Isaiah about?
God sees there is oppression everywhere and acts with great power to release the people from their oppressors just as God had promised in the covenant. Those who return to Jerusalem after long oppression will know God’s justice and their descendants will know and speak of it forever.

John 4: 46-54                           What’s John about?
Immediately after spending two days with the hated Samaritans and with the woman at the well, Jesus returns to Cana of Galilee where he had provided 180 gallons of the best wine after everyone had already had too much. The royal official will have been one of those colluding with the Roman oppression, yet he, too, drinks of the abundant wine when his child is cured.
Do we expect that those opposed to faith may be the very people who experience Jesus most clearly?

This week’s collect:

Eternal God,
who by a star
led wise ones to the worship of your Son.
Guide by your light the nations of the earth,
that the whole world may know your glory;
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 7          Epiphany

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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!

Isaiah 52: 3-6                            What’s Isaiah about?
God sees the people oppressed again, just as they had been long ago in Egypt, and despite the sabre-rattling (“howling”) of their captors, God is really in charge and will act to rescue them.

Isaiah is setting up the expectation that God controls history. Not a bad expectation for our time. No wonder Isaiah has to ring the changes on this idea since for the ancient Jews, no less than for us, this idea of God acting for humanity seems fanciful. Isaiah insists it is real: “Here am I,” states God.

John 2: 1-11                            What’s John about?
John’s gospel opens with Jesus as an adult performing his first miracle at a wedding reception. From water he provides 180 gallons of the very best wine after everyone had already had too much to drink! A foretaste (literally!) of the delights—more than we can ask or imagine—for which we have been created.
John sets the story of the wedding “on the third day” and thus suggests this event is a way of understanding the resurrection, which happened on the third day—the resurrection, says John, is the ultimate wedding feast!

This week’s collect:

Eternal God,
who by a star
led wise ones to the worship of your Son.
Guide by your light the nations of the earth,
that the whole world may know your glory;
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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Monday January 6          Epiphany

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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. The refrain, “The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold.” expresses this confidence over and over.

Psalm 97
God’s power in creation is an expression of God’s commitment to justice—righteousness and justice are the foundations of God’s throne (the same image is used in Psalm 89) and therefore of all creation. We can count on God to uphold those who are without power as surely as we experience enormous power in creation.

A wonderful image for our age when science shows us so much power in creation – dignity and justice are equally embedded in the way God has put the world together.

Isaiah 52: 7-10                            What’s Isaiah about?
We now return to Isaiah, and read from the middle section of the book, written by another person, known as Second Isaiah who lived 100 years later than when the first section of the book was written. The Jews have been enslaved in Babylon for a generation and are losing their identity as a separate people, when King Cyrus of Persia conquers the Babylonians and allows the Jews to return to Jerusalem.

Because Cyrus had never heard of, and could care less about, and did not believe in, the Jewish God, and because there were no prophecies in the Jewish scriptures about such a major event, it could look as if God had nothing to do with this happy outcome—that it was just an historical accident. So Isaiah is faced with two problems—that there are no prophecies about this rescue of the people, and that Cyrus has no interest in doing the will have the God of Israel: so is this the will have God or is it pure accident? Second Isaiah solves the two problems at one stroke with a new idea about how God exercises rules the world. Isaiah’s new idea is that God has power over foreign unbelieving kings without them even knowing, and that God could do something totally new and completely outside the scriptures. This radical new approach to understanding how God works in human history could be a template for how we think in new ways about how God acts in our modern world.

This passage is a hymn of joy at the people’s imminent return to Jerusalem, and at the same time an affirmation of God’s ability to act beyond all expectations.

Over the next month we will see Isaiah using a variety of images to repeatedly present his revolutionary argument for a whole new way of understanding how God is present on a global scale.

Matthew 12: 14-21                            What’s Matthew about?
The religious leaders have just rejected Jesus for “working” on the Sabbath by healing someone’s hand. Matthew contrasts their rejection of God’s generosity in Jesus with God’s openness to non-Jews. He quotes Isaiah who understood God as being interested in non-Jews, and this revolutionary attitude may lie behind some of the story about the arrival of the non-Jewish wise ones from the distant pagan East.
The quotation from Isaiah contains several elements that influenced the early Christians’ description of the baptism of Jesus which is celebrated today, the Feast of the Epiphany.

This week’s collect:

Eternal God,
who by a star
led wise ones to the worship of your Son.
Guide by your light the nations of the earth,
that the whole world may know your glory;
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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Sunday January 5          Christmas 2

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Psalm 66
God, everyone praises you because you have rescued us from disaster so I will delight in praising you.

Psalm 67
Because of God’s blessings to all the nations we will all sing God’s praises.

Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 3.3–9, 14–17                            What’s Ecclesiasticus about?
The book of Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus) was written about two hundred years before Jesus and consists mostly of a series of pithy admonitions about how to live well. This passage is chosen, no doubt, to draw our attention to home life in which Jesus grew up.

The challenge to us, perhaps, is to be astonished at God’s commitment not only to be born, but to live decades in obscurity within a human family. What would be the point, other than to have been driven by love and commitment without limit to be one with us ?

John 6.41–47                            What’s John about?
Jesus has just claimed to be food for humanity, and to be more important food than the famous manna which God provided for the Israelites in the wilderness when they doubted that God could feed them. Jesus is describing himself as a new and far better kind of manna, given as food for humanity in the desert of a world that does not trust God’s care. He is thus claiming to be more important than the Old Testament. Opposition grows and Jesus responds by saying that people who know God see the truth of his claim, and those who don’t know God don’t.
The passage may be chosen for Christmas because Bethlehem, Jesus’ birthplace, means “House of Bread,” and early Christians may have made the connection between his birthplace and his claim to be the bread of life.

This week’s collect:

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Saturday January 4          Christmas 1

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Psalm 85
Trust that God will save us, despite what we have done, and will fill us with plenty and fill the land with justice.

Psalm 87
A vision of Jerusalem as the source of life for all the world, as if every nation and every beautiful thing originated there. Christians might interpret this as Jesus’ death and resurrection in Jerusalem being the source of life and beauty for the whole world.

Exodus 3: 1-12                            What’s Exodus about?
God’s eternal promise is in doubt when the people are enslaved in Egypt. God appears to Moses to reaffirm God’s eternal commitment to the people, and chooses Moses to lead them back to the land God had promised to Abraham.

John 14: 6-14                            What’s John about?
John understands that Jesus is the way in which we experience God—if we have seen his death and resurrection as the only way to live, the truth about how we become mature, and the essence of full life, then we have seen God. To have known this central character of Jesus is to have experienced God. Those who live in that character will do even greater acts than Jesus.
John understands that Jesus is passing his own life on to his disciples. As Jesus’ earthly life recedes into the past, this is how he remains present—through the life of the Christian community.

This week’s collect:

Eternal Father,
we give thanks for your incarnate Son,
whose name is our salvation.
Plant in every heart, we pray,
the love of him who is the Saviour of the world,
our Lord Jesus Christ;
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

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