Author: Harold

Monday September 9          Pentecost 16

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

Psalm 44
This is a psalm for times when bad things happen to us when it’s not our fault. The psalm starts off by recounting how God did amazing things for us in the past—God rescued us out of Egypt through the Red Sea. But now God no longer cares for us and terrible things are happening to us, even though we have done nothing wrong. At the end the psalm says there is nothing to do but call on God to put things right.

Job 32.1-10, 19-33.1, 19-28                            What’s Job about?
A young friend of Job has waited out of respect for his seniors. But now he bursts into his explanation for what has happened. He assures Job that if someone pleads for him, God will immediately redeem him and not allow the disaster and death to continue.

The author wants to explore every possible reason that Job might have caused his own suffering, and then show that like Job’s friends we are mistaken—it is God’s fault, not Job’s. This is a highly courageous project—to undermine everything that religious faith assumes to be true about God. A deeper faith will be the outcome, but only if we have exhausted every traditional explanation for the experience of evil.

John 10.19-30                            What’s John about?
Jesus has just said that he has the power to lay down his life and some say he has a demon to say such a thing. He is challenged to claim the role of Messiah, the one to save the people from the disaster of Roman rule. His response is that the restoration of God’s creation, as in the man born blind who now sees, is proof in itself, but that those who don’t see that don’t see because they don’t know God’s desire to restore creation “The Father and I are one.” If you don’t know the character of God as self-sacrificing love, then you won’t see the character of God in Jesus. But those who do see the character of God can never be in danger.

This week’s collect:

Stir up, O Lord,
the wills of your faithful people,
that richly bearing the fruit of good works,
we may by you be richly rewarded;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Sunday September 8          Pentecost 16

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

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!

Job 25.1-6, 27.1-6                           What’s Job about?
The second friend, Bildad, provides his third and final argument for God being just—humans are inevitably imperfect, we are like maggots and before God’s enormity it is no wonder we have offended God. But Job insists he has done nothing wrong. He knows he is innocent and has not offended God. He is insisting that God is unjust, not Job himself.

The author is insisting that we think seriously about the fact that God doesn’t always make life fair. This isn’t just a sad observation—taking the injustice of life seriously, and refusing to imagine there is some deep purpose to human suffering, and demanding that God acknowledge the injustice God has allowed  is the only way to be faithful to God.

Matthew 5.13-20                            What’s Matthew about?
Having given his new version of the Ten Commandments (“Congratulations if you are poor… Congratulations if you are weeping… because you will know God.”) Jesus clarifies that his followers are called to a standard of life that enables the rest of the world to live fully too. As he often does, Matthew encourages loyalty to the Hebrew Bible, saying that Jesus strongly upheld its call to justice for all and that his followers are to become a beacon of justice in their lives like a spotlight so that that rest of the world can see their way forward.

This week’s collect:

Stir up, O Lord,
the wills of your faithful people,
that richly bearing the fruit of good works,
we may by you be richly rewarded;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Saturday September 7          Pentecost 15

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

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.

Job 22.1-4, 21-23.7                            What’s Job about?
Job’s three friends have each tried twice to convince Job that God will treat him with justice. Now they try a third time. Eliphaz argues that God doesn’t need humans, but if we are humble and remain pure from greed, God will save us. But Job insists that if he could speak to God, God would have to provide an explanation for what God had done to Job—in other words, God would have to take responsibility for Job’s disaster.

John 10.1-18                           What’s John about?
Jesus contrasts his care for people with the false shepherds. We can apply this to various false priorities in our world. The proof of Jesus’ claim of being divine is that he is prepared to give up his life for humanity—that is the central nature of God, and so Jesus will be enacting that nature himself.

This week’s collect:

Author and Giver of all good things,
graft in our hearts the love of your name,
increase in us true religion,
nourish us in all goodness,
and of your great mercy keep us in the same;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Friday September 6          Pentecost 15

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

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 no amount of suffering or abuse could compare with the joy of loving us.

Job 19.1-27                            What’s Job about?
Job insists that it is God’s fault that he is so beaten down and humiliated. “God has put me in the wrong.”  Job continues to refuse the easy explanation that he is being punished for something he did when he know he’s done nothing to deserve this abuse. It is God who has done this, not Job.

John 9: 18-41                           What’s John about?
The challenge continues about what our new sight reveals. The religious leaders, opposed to seeing the world differently through new eyes, challenge the man’s parents, but they are afraid of the consequences of the new truth. But the clarity with which the formerly blind man now sees is undeniable and he is not cowed by the authorities.
It may be that we are overhearing arguments about the significance of Jesus that were going on at the time John was writing. The followers of Christ who had never “seen” what the point of life was are suddenly able to “see” and are free from the darkness of being overwhelmed by the evil around. Nothing will deter them from insisting upon the validity of the new “sight” they have received. Not even threats of being expelled from their community will stop them proclaiming this new insight.

This week’s collect:

Author and Giver of all good things,
graft in our hearts the love of your name,
increase in us true religion,
nourish us in all goodness,
and of your great mercy keep us in the same;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Thursday September 5          Pentecost 15

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

Psalm 37 Part 2
God always rescues and protects those who are just, and the powerful evil people will soon be brought to nothing.

Job 16.16-22, 17.1, 13-16                           What’s Job about?
Job insists he is innocent and the only one who can vouch for him is in heaven, but God does nothing. Even a neighbour would vouch for someone, but God does not. Will hope of being proved innocent go down to the grave with him?

John 9.1-17                           What’s John about?
Jesus heals a blind man—obviously, in John’s gospel where everything means something, this man stands for all the blindness around when people do not “see” who Jesus is. Because it was a Sabbath when no work was to be done, Jesus is accused of breaking God’s law, and cannot therefore be the messiah. But some people agree he must be the messiah because nobody else could heal someone who had been blind from birth.
We who were formerly blind to the hope that arises from Jesus’ death and resurrection are able to insist that what we now see is real, even if we are unable to understand it. Jesus’ self-offering death and subsequent resurrection is the lens through which we see life clearly and that makes sense of our lives. We see what is going on.

This week’s collect:

Author and Giver of all good things,
graft in our hearts the love of your name,
increase in us true religion,
nourish us in all goodness,
and of your great mercy keep us in the same;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Wednesday September 4          Pentecost 15

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

Psalm 119 Part 2
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 22 groups of eight verses—one group for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. 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 human expressions of order. Thus the human world and the rest of creation are united in the same foundation. 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.

Job 12.1, 14.1-22                           What’s Job about?
Job argues that even trees have hope of putting out new branches when they are cut down, but humans have no such hope when they die—humans die forever and do not even experience the success of their children after they die. God does not ensure justice happens.

John 8.47-59                           What’s John about?
The religious leaders accuse Jesus of claiming to be greater than Abraham. Jesus claims that Abraham was looking forward to seeing him. They respond that he cannot have personally known Abraham. Jesus responds with the famous “I am” which was the name of God which God told Moses. John is interpreting that Jesus is eternal, and that when people reject that they do so because they choose not to know the eternal God

This week’s collect:

Author and Giver of all good things,
graft in our hearts the love of your name,
increase in us true religion,
nourish us in all goodness,
and of your great mercy keep us in the same;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Tuesday September 3          Pentecost 15

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

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.

Job 12.1, 13.3-17, 21-27                           What’s Job about?
Job longs to accuse God of not being faithful. He accuses his friends of being unfaithful by falsely representing God as being just, and not fearing that God will find out their partiality. He accuses his friends of being worthless helpers because they will not face the truth—that God has acted unjustly. Even if God kills him, Job will insist on telling the truth—that he has done nothing to deserve his disaster. God is so great, why should God bother to terrify someone so insignificant as Job? Job suggests that by doing so, God is simply a bully, but Job will not stop telling the truth about what God has done.

John 8.31-47                           What’s John about?
Jesus continues the discussion about where he comes from. His opponents claim they do not need him because they are already free being descendants of Abraham.  Jesus responds that if they are descended from Abraham they would listen to God and know that that is where Jesus comes from. They repeat the accusation that Jesus has no father, a terrible insult. Jesus responds that their father must be the devil because if they were from God they would know Jesus has not sinned and they would listen to him because they would know that he is from God.
These arguments are convoluted from our perspective but probably reflect the ways in which early Christians were defending the faith from attack. In our day the same controversies still happen—is Jesus a kindly teacher like those of any other faith or of common sense, or is he, especially in his violent execution, the image of God? As traditional faith becomes less and less normative in the West, these alternative ideas about Jesus being of no special significance are ones which contemporary Christians must learn to counter.

This week’s collect:

Author and Giver of all good things,
graft in our hearts the love of your name,
increase in us true religion,
nourish us in all goodness,
and of your great mercy keep us in the same;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Monday September 2          Pentecost 15

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

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.

Job 12.1-6, 13-25                           What’s Job about?
Job responds that his friends’ wisdom has changed nothing about God making him a laughing-stock. God’s power is immense, he says, and God can arbitrarily act with regard to nations and kings, as God has with him. There needs to be no rhyme or reason. That’s just the way God is, without compassion or justice.

John 8.21-30                           What’s John about?
Jesus repeats that the opposition cannot come where he will go. They ask if he means suicide? Perhaps John, the writer, is responding to a critique which might have arisen at his time of writing—maybe a suggestion that Jesus wasn’t being loyal to God by dying, but instead was deliberately engineering his own death to make a point, a type of suicide. Jesus insists that he is speaking what God asks him to, and that it is their fault if they don’t see that. They may come to understand his death after they have “lifted him up” in crucifixion.

This week’s collect:

Author and Giver of all good things,
graft in our hearts the love of your name,
increase in us true religion,
nourish us in all goodness,
and of your great mercy keep us in the same;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Sunday September 1          Pentecost 15

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

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 by which God cares for the people! 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.

Job 11.1-9, 13-20                           What’s Job about?
The third friend, Zophar, points out that God’s ways cannot be understood by humans, but if Job would trust God and put away any evil thoughts, God will welcome him back and make all things well. Zophar insists that Job’s disaster is caused by his own evil.

We, the readers, know that Job will reject this argument, as he rejected the others, because he cannot stop telling the truth—that he has done nothing to deserve what God has done to him. Job is not deluded about himself or conceited, he is simply stating the truth. He is not guilty and insists that God must own up to being responsible for treating him cruelly.

Matthew 5.1-12                           What’s Matthew about?
Jesus’ second important action, after proclaiming the kingdom is coming, is to state a new version of the 10 commandments. He goes up a mountain, like Moses, and says that poor people are to be congratulated, that people in mourning are to be congratulated, that gentle people are to be congratulated. Why? Because they will experience God’s kingdom. Because it is precisely such people who know how much they need God’s kingdom—they long for it, so it arrives. But those who already have everything are not to be congratulated, because they become isolated, thinking they have everything, and have a false sense of their security.

This week’s collect:

Author and Giver of all good things,
graft in our hearts the love of your name,
increase in us true religion,
nourish us in all goodness,
and of your great mercy keep us in the same;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.

 

Saturday August 31          Pentecost 14

Click here for simplified daily office prayers

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 next to last verse 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!

This psalm is often read on Saturdays, the mini-anniversary of Jesus being in the grave and awaiting God’s victory over death.

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

Job 9.1, 10.1-9, 16-22                           What’s Job about?
Job accuses God of being indifferent to him, whom God created in his mother’s womb. At least God could explain why God has treated him so badly when God knows he is innocent. At least God could let him alone for the brief time before he dies forever in eternal darkness.

John 8.12-20                           What’s John about?
Jesus declares himself to be light for life. The religious leaders accuse him of being self-serving by complimenting himself. Jesus responds that it is God who guarantees that he is who he says he is, so he isn’t complimenting himself, and that it’s their fault if they don’t see this. And anyway, he and God provide the two legally required witnesses. The leaders question his origin, perhaps implying that he had no father (an insult that arises in other places and may have been widely suggested at the time), but Jesus turns this critique back on them, saying that the reason they suggest he has no father is that they don’t know God, who is his father.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
we are taught by your word
that all our doings without love are worth nothing.
Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts
that most excellent gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtue;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Click here to share your thoughts on the web site.

Please unsubscribe me.