Category: TODAY&#8217;S READING

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 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.

Psalm 99
God’s justice was shown in the way God rescued the people from slavery and cared for them throughout history. Praise the Lord!

Psalm 100
A short hymn of praise that God has remained faithful forever.

Jeremiah 17: 19-27
Jeremiah is told to announce to royalty that if they respect the Sabbath (Saturday) and do no work on that day every week, God will return the country to safety.

The original sabbath was a celebration of the day that creation was completed—no person and no animal was a slave to anyone else. Therefore on that one day a week every person and every animal get to be what they are—not a slave for someone else to make money. God says if the people return to not exploiting each other, then the city will thrive and its rulers will be secure. Otherwise the consequence will be disaster.

John 6: 16-27
Jesus triumphed over hunger in yesterday’s reading and that evening he triumphs over the wind and waves. John is saying that in trusting in Jesus (trusting in his death and resurrection) Jesus is able to bring us where we are going in safety.

John then uses the crowd’s search for Jesus and how Jesus got to the other side of the lake without a boat as the start of another conversation about Jesus’ significance. Jesus says that seeking him isn’t enough if all we want is to eat. We must seek true food, and the conversation about what true food is will continue for the rest of this week.

Almighty God,
through the waters of baptism
your Son has made us children of light.
May we ever walk in his light
and show forth your glory in the world;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings for Monday March 15

Monday March 15 Lent 4

Psalm 89 Part 1
God’s faithfulness in creation is the basis for our trust in God’s justice and care for us. Just as God created order from chaos in creation, so we can rely upon God to create order out of chaos in human society. God’s original goodness intended for humanity and the world, is that everyone have a place and dignity and worth. Accomplishing that is the work of justice, often translated into traditional English as “righteousness.”

Jeremiah 16: 10-21
God continues to insist that there will be terrible consequences for the people having abandoned God’s call to justice and fairness—the “other gods” are gods which stood for various kinds of greed. God will send fishers and hunters to ensure every person is caught and taken into slavery in the north where Babylon was located. Verses 14 and 15 are a short section of hope (possibly originally located in another part of the manuscript) assuring the people that God will rescue them from the disaster they have brought on themselves.

John 6: 1-15
Jesus takes a tiny amount of food and feeds 5,000 people with 12 baskets left over. This feeding happens just before the Passover at which Jesus will be executed—John is saying that Jesus’ gift of himself in his execution is what will feed the world with life because such overflowing power to feed everyone, as at the wedding with which this gospel starts, will be completed in overflowing love on the cross. That overflowing generosity undergirding everything, is what rescues us from despair and desperation. That new life will enable us to embody the maturity we see in Christ.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Sunday March 14

Sunday March 14 Lent 4

Psalm 66
God, you have made the earth wonderfully, and have rescued us from disaster so I will delight in praising you.

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

Jeremiah 14: 1-22
There has been no rain, and famine is decimating the people and even the wild animals. This is a disaster beyond imagining. People cry to God for help, but God refuses. Prophets insist that all will be well, but God replies that the prophets are lying—God never told them to say all would be well, and tells Jeremiah to go weeping in and out of the city about the disaster that is coming. Jeremiah then asks God if God has finally abandoned the people. Jeremiah says they are taking responsibility for what they have done, and only God, and not the idol-gods of Babylon, can bring rain. They are in God’s hands. It is God who has brought this disaster and only God can change it. But as long as the people still think all will be well, they won’t change their behaviour.

It sounds so applicable to the world in our day. If our societies continue to do so little for the poor in other countries and care so little for the fate of the creatures of the world, disaster will happen to us, too. Jeremiah is critiquing the self-serving hope that somehow everything will turn out well. Instead, profound change will be required of us.

Mark 8: 11-21
On Sundays in Lent we continue to read from Mark.

Jesus has fed five thousand people with twelve baskets left over (symbolizing the twelve tribes of Israel), and then has travelled to the non-Jewish region where he has just fed four thousand people with seven baskets left over (symbolizing the seven original tribes that the Jews were told by God to exterminate).

Jesus’ critics insist he do another miracle to prove he is from God, but Jesus refuses. The words ” he sighed deeply” are better translated as “groaned” as in “frustrated and angry.” Jesus has just fed the descendants of the people God had commanded Joshua to exterminate and if the critics don’t see that God is changing the ancient command by including all peoples in God’s care without exception then there’s no point in Jesus performing “proof” miracles.

The Christian eucharist celebrated every Sunday repeats Jesus’ radical act of feeding all people, even those who are considered inferior and unworthy and unbelievers.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Saturday March 13

Saturday March 13 Lent 3

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.

Psalm 90
Our lives are very short, like a breath we are gone, we are so insignificant. Bless us, God.

Jeremiah 13: 1-11
Jeremiah uses an astonishing image: God made the people to be as intimate with God as a person’s underwear is with their body. But the people have abandoned God. So God tells Jeremiah to enact the horror of what the people have done: buy new underwear, wear it but don’t wash it, then leave it under a rock in Babylon until it is rotten. That, Jeremiah says, is what the people have done to themselves. Jeremiah repeatedly uses this technique of enacted images to confront the people.

Our world has deeply abandoned God in so many ways. Following Jeremiah we could say that our world stinks, and we need to face that fact, uncomfortable as it is. Lent is the time for the challenging but necessary task of facing uncomfortable facts about our world’s priorities.

John 8: 47-59
Many Jews suggested the early Christians could rejoin Judaism if Jesus could be understood to be a prophet. However, John, speaking for the early Christians, understands that Jesus is not a prophet like Moses (or, much later, like Mohamed) whose role is to communicate God’s wishes. In contrast, Jesus insists he is the way we see God, and not a prophet or a good person. At the end of this passage John understands Jesus to use the ancient Hebrew name for God: “I am.” This seals his fate, and that of Christianity, in that Jesus is claiming ultimate significance: his death and resurrection are the ultimate experience of God, not the action of a good person.

What’s at stake is whether our experience of Jesus leads us to be astonished at God’s commitment to us in dying and rising for us, or whether we see Jesus as an extremely good person we ought to emulate, but cannot. John is commending the former as the real experience of Christianity.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
whose Son Jesus Christ gives the water of eternal life,
may we always thirst for you,
the spring of life and source of goodness;
through him who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings for Friday March 12

Friday March 12 Lent 3

Psalm 88
A lament that I have been crushed and am beyond hope. When I am dead, there is nothing left, there is no life beyond the grave.

Astonishingly, to be fully with us, Jesus enters completely into such a death. This psalm is appropriately read on a Friday as Jesus is placed in the grave. Only God’s act, on Saturday night—the eve of the resurrection—can reverse death—even Jesus’ death. That’s the only hope there is.

Jeremiah 11: 1-20
In this part of the book Jeremiah repeatedly warns the people about the consequences of their ongoing injustice. In this passage, Jeremiah is asking for an exception to the consequences—he is arguing against God’s insistence there must be consequences, otherwise God wouldn’t be serious about all people being given dignity. But God responds that God made it clear when he rescued the people from Egypt that in return for that generosity, they must practice justice for the poor just as God did for them. God repeatedly taught this. But the people have continued to ignore that truth, and done what was selfish. God tells Jeremiah not to ask for an exception for the people, because that would invalidate God’s command to be just. Jeremiah accepts that the consequences will happen.

We can hear the arguments going on, following the disaster of defeat and enslavement by Babylon, about whether God is just or not, and if so, why God allowed this disaster to happen.

The whole book is like a poem trying to warn people, using a variety of story-telling techniques, that injustice in society has terrible consequences. It applies just as clearly to not caring for the poor in our world.

John 8: 33-47
John continues to develop the theme of Jesus’ parentage. Jesus, although reputed to being caught in the reputation of having no father, proclaims that through his Father he will make people free. The Christians of John’s time were being pressured to think of Jesus as just another prophet. John remembers Jesus arguing that he is not a great leader like Abraham, but that in him the very essence of God can be seen. If people don’t see that, as the religious leaders didn’t, that is because they have not experienced God and therefore aren’t faithful to their own tradition embodied by their father Abraham. Jesus has turned the tables of the argument.

In our time, too, Jesus is often mistakenly thought to be someone who set a great example for us to follow. But if that’s all he is, then nothing has really changed. But if we see in his death and resurrection the depth of God’s love, that gives us and the whole cosmos new hope and new life and freedom from our failures.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Thursday March 11

Thursday March 11 Lent 3

Psalm 83
We are under terrible attack. God, act quickly and utterly defeat them. We can say the same: that our world is under attack from forces of greed and exploitation, and we desperately need to be rescued. We can interpret the almost violent images in this psalm, as an expression of our deep determination that nothing will overcome the work of justice, inclusion and dignity for all. If our culture felt that strongly about dignity of all, what a wonderful world we would live in!

Jeremiah 10: 11-24
It can seem as if Jeremiah has an unending stream of criticisms. But remember that he is critiquing the king and his wealthy advisors—this is a courageous, determined, and dangerous stance against grinding the poor into the ground to increase the rulers’ wealth. Jeremiah is saying that the gods—the priorities—of the rulers are not real and will be utterly destroyed by the real God of justice who creates the universe and is powerful beyond human comprehension. The consequences of abandoning God’s inclusive justice will be terrible and would not be survivable if God did not intervene at the last moment.

John 8: 21-32
Jesus continues his critique that people do not know who he is because they do not know who God is. He uses imagery about them not being able to find him or know who he is. But when Jesus is lifted up—crucified, on display, glorified—then people will experience what God’s love is really like and will experience freedom from the abusive forces of this world.

The same is true today: Jesus only makes sense when we experience God’s utter self-giving love in his death and resurrection. Otherwise he remains an impossible figure from the ancient past to whom we cannot connect.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Wednesday March 10

Wednesday March 10 Lent 3

Psalm 119 Part 5
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 M, N, and S which are in the Hebrew alphabetical order. As you read them, imagine the effect of each line beginning with “M” and so on.

Jeremiah 8: 18—9:6
As the catastrophe of their enslavement comes closer, Jeremiah offers an astonishing image: God is in grief, wailing like a bereaved mother, that the poor have not been cared for and that the people are corrupt and have turned on each other. To imagine God in grief, not about the fate of the impressive powerful king and courtiers but about those without power or respect, is a revolutionary new idea of God, and expresses the ancient Jewish understanding of God’s commitment to justice and inclusion for all.

John 8: 12-20
John continues these conversations which explore the significance of Jesus. Jesus uses a new image about himself—that he is light for the world which otherwise will walk in darkness. The opposition replies that he is saying this to give himself status, his claim about himself is invalid without someone else to corroborate his claim. Jesus responds that if they knew God they would see God in him and that would provide the necessary two witnesses—himself and God. But since his opponents do not know the character of God they don’t take him seriously.

Jesus’ opponents raise, not for the first time, the accusation that Jesus has no father, implying that his mother doesn’t know who his father is, thus throwing at him an insulting implication. John, the gospel writer, uses the insult to insist that Jesus’ true father is God. But an additional possibility is that since this rumour was still circulating nearly a hundred years after his birth, there are extraordinary implications if it were true. What if the “Son of God” was indeed a “bastard?” After we get over the shock of what is being said, we realize that this may be the ultimate act of inclusive justice—those who are insulted and demeaned and without respect or status are raised to glory! This is hope for all whom society disparages.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Tuesday March 9

Tuesday March 9 Lent 3

Psalm 78 Part 1
This poem speaks of how God showered the people with constant protection and generosity as God held the sea back so they could escape from their slavery in Egypt, and continued to protect them and miraculously feed them in the desert. But the people continued to distrust this God of justice and inclusion for all. There are consequences, as always, for unjust exploitative behaviour, but God does not abandon the people, even though they have abandoned God’s call to justice. So God continues to care because God makes care of the weakest a priority.

In effect, this is the basic creed of the ancient Israelites. If it were our basic belief today, what a difference that would make to our personal and international life.

Jeremiah 7: 21-34
Jeremiah can see the disaster of Babylon approaching. Ever since God rescued the people they have followed other gods, even sacrificing their children to them, as was done in other religions. God never commanded this. The consequences will be beyond imagining.

These passages are difficult to read, but the real difficulty is that they apply so well to us, who may be sacrificing our children’s future for our own consumption now. But Jeremiah’s message is not that God is angry, but that we are being warned, and therefore are being offered a way out.

John 7: 37-52
On the last day of the Festival of Booths, celebrating the temporary shelters the people lived in during their time in the wilderness, Jesus offers himself as running water, perhaps claiming he is the modern version of the water God provided miraculously in the wilderness. So can he be the messiah? John seems not to have heard the story of Jesus being born in Bethlehem, where one belief was that the messiah would be born, so some argue that therefore Jesus cannot be the messiah. John may be saying that in Jesus, God is not constrained by religious orthodoxy or by scripture. Because Jesus is breaking the religious expectations, the religious authorities increasingly determine to eliminate him. We can sense Good Friday looming in the background.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Monday March 8

Monday March 8 Lent 3

Psalm 80
After rescuing us from slavery in Egypt, God had planted us in new ground like a well-watered vine, and we grew and filled the whole land. But now we are being attacked by a foreign power and God’s vine is being uprooted. God, rescue us so that we may be a healthy vine again.

Jeremiah 7: 1-15
God tells Jeremiah to stand in the temple and implore the people to act with justice for the poor instead of putting their trust in God without caring about doing God’s justice. If the temple is the centre of violence and oppression, then the temple will be destroyed. Which the Babylonians did. Six hundred years later Jesus quoted this passage about the temple becoming a den of robbers, intending people to recognize the same infidelity was happening again. He was confronting those who had made the temple a centre of greed and exploitation in his day. And the Romans did destroy the temple, permanently.

In Lent Jeremiah challenges us to ask the same uncomfortable questions about our own faith—are there ways in which we make Christianity serve us rather than God’s desire for dignity, justice and inclusion of those without power or respect? If we don’t, Jeremiah’s words suggest, God could abandon Christianity.

John 7: 14-36
As so often in John, Jesus is confronting arguments that attempt to prove he cannot be important. Isn’t he making this all up, since he is uneducated? No, he has this challenging teaching because it comes from God, not from learning. How does he dare break the Sabbath? Because God wishes healing and not just injury (circumcision) on the day of creation’s completion. Even if the authorities trust him, he can’t be from God because the true messiah will appear suddenly out of nowhere and we know Jesus’ ordinary background. Jesus responds that what his critics don’t know is God—if they paid attention to God they would know that God is his source for what he says and does. Many people, however are impressed at what he has done and begin to trust him. The religious authorities fear the popularity of his radical call to justice and seek to arrest him. But Jesus says they won’t be able to come where he is. As usual in John’s gospel, the pieces of these conversations are to be understood on multiple levels.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Sunday March 7

Sunday March 7 Lent 3

Psalm 93
A psalm of praise to God who is forever and who makes the world secure. “The waters lifted up their voice” means that although the raging sea (the original chaos) is threatening to drown everything, God’s voice is stronger. Appropriate for a Sunday when we celebrate God’s victory in the resurrection.

The raging sea can be circumstances in our lives, in our inner life, or in the life of the world.

Psalm 96
Praise to God who really will bring equity (equality) and righteousness (which is the old English translation of dignity and justice) to the whole of humanity.

Jeremiah 6: 9-15
About 600 years before Jesus, Jeremiah interprets the imminent disaster of Babylon’s attack, as God being unable to ignore the terrible consequences of exploiting the poor.

The socially disruptive consequences of extreme poverty both locally and internationally are the way we experience the same thing in our time. In Lent Jeremiah asks us to face the same uncomfortable truths. There is hope for the world if we do.

Mark 5: 1-20
On Sundays in Lent we continue to read from Mark. Jesus has just calmed a storm on a lake and now calms another kind of storm—inside someone. There is hope that the storms of our times can also be calmed through the presence of Jesus’ justice. Notice that the Jews who are raising pigs—which are disgusting—want Jesus to leave so they can continue with their disgusting business.

There are strong forces in our society which want justice to depart in order that more money can be made. The story applies very directly to our world.

Yet, Mark is saying, even that storm can be calmed if we welcome Jesus’ justice—on a Sunday we anticipate God’s final victory in Jesus’ resurrection.

This week’s collect: