Category: TODAY&#8217;S READING

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
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
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:

God of power and life,
the glory of all who believe in you,
fill the world with your splendour
and show the nations the light of your truth;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings for Sunday January 3

Sunday January 3 Christmas 2

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.

Sirach 3.3-9, 14-17
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
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:

Readings for Saturday January 2

Saturday January 2 Christmas 1

Psalm 34
I will praise God because God rescued me when I was in trouble. God will always support those who live with integrity and the evil people will not get away with it forever.

Genesis 12: 1-7
Yesterday we read the story about God promising to care for Abraham’s descendants forever, the foundational story of the Hebrew Bible. Today God puts that promise into practical effect – God will give a permanent home and land to Abraham, who before this had been only nomadic. For nomads to own land was an unimaginable luxury. We hear the ancient explanation of how the people came to live in Canaan even though they had been nomads. Are we in equal amazement that God has given us this planet for our permanent home?

John 6: 35-42, 48-51
John continues his series of conversations with tightly-packed meanings in the days leading up to Jesus’ arrest and execution. In this conversation, Jesus claims that he has saved everyone, because he is the food which feeds humanity with heavenly nourishment. If heaven is the ability to die for someone—even our enemies—then that experience is to be in heaven. In face of opposition which claims he is nothing special, Jesus responds that his own death for his enemies—his “flesh”—is what will feed humanity and bring all people to heaven because that kind of love becomes our food.

Subsequent Christians, perhaps beginning with John’s community, have interpreted these conversations about Jesus as our food as a way of experiencing the meaning of eucharist.

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.

Readings for Friday January 1

Friday January 1 Naming of Jesus

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!

Genesis 17: 1-16
This is the foundational promise to Abraham in which God commits God’s self to eternal blessing of the Israelite people. In one sense, this is the central story of the entire “Old Testament”, the Hebrew Bible, in which the ancient Jews described their experience of being cared for by God. Their unlikely escape from Egypt, and later from Babylon, were seen as God acting to fulfil this original promise regardless of how the people had rejected God.

Circumcision, a kind of ceremonial sacrifice, is the sign of the people’s response to God’s unilateral generosity. Appropriate for this new year in which God will continue to offer a great future to humanity. To receive that future, our culture may need to make some sacrifices in our way of life.

John 16: 23b-30
In this highly symbolic conversation, Jesus is speaking about his imminent return to the Father following his crucifixion. He is not really talking about a journey back to heaven, but about the fact that he and the Father are one, just as John said at the start of his gospel, “The Word was God.” So, when the disciples ask Jesus for fulfilment, they are really asking God. That’s why Jesus says he won’t ask God anything for them—because in asking him they are already asking God. The disciples affirm that they have begun to experience this.

As Jesus’ physical life receded further and further into the past, it was necessary for the early Christians to become less dependent upon a fading physical relationship with Jesus and to become aware that through Jesus they had been experiencing God. This is a major theme in John’s gospel. That transition remains important for us, too.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Thursday December 31

Thursday December 31 Christmas 1

Psalm 46
Neither storms on 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.

Psalm 48
A song of praise for how Jerusalem has been blessed by God – the forces which would destroy us are overcome.

We might understand this psalm as rejoicing in the beauty of creation, and of our own self as a glorious city, made possible by God’s commitment to justice.

Isaiah 62: 10-12
Isaiah imagines proclaiming to the city of Jerusalem that her people are returning on a glorious highway from their distant exile.

After a couple of days of readings from key Hebrew Bible passages describing God’s rescue of the people, we will continue next week with Isaiah’s radically new idea that God works through all human history regardless of whether God is known or not.

John 8: 12-19
Jesus claims to be the light of the world, but is accused of being untrustworthy because he has nobody to support his claim. Jesus responds that he is not the only one making this claim—God backs him up, and those who do not see light in him will also be unable to experience God. Experiencing Jesus as light depends on us already longing for the light—we already have to be deeply longing for what is good and just and loving. Without that, Jesus doesn’t make any sense, and we won’t have any experience of God.

These are a series of highly symbolic conversations in which John is describing the various ways in which Jesus’ meaning is received or rejected.

This week’s collect:

Almighty God,
you have shed upon us the new light
of your incarnate Word.
May this light, enkindled in our hearts,
shine forth in our lives;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings for Wednesday December 30

Wednesday December 30 Christmas 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 60.19-22
Isaiah imagines what it will be like when God returns the people to their land – their glory, from God, will be so great that other sources of light – the sun and moon – will no longer be needed! Even the least important person will be as significant as an entire nation!

John 7: 53 – 8: 11
Religious leaders dare Jesus to forgive a woman who is clearly guilty. With enormous courage, Jesus refuses to join in the condemnation of the woman, and instead challenges the men to confront their own responsibility for her shame. Alone with the woman (a very suggestive situation in that day) Jesus sends her back into life. We are being called to practice deep acceptance and also acknowledge our participation in excluding people from living full lives.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Tuesday December 29

Tuesday December 29 Christmas 1

Psalm 18 Part 1
A meditation on God’s immense power to save: – a poetic imaginative recounting of the crossing of the Red Sea as if it were the experience of one person being rescued.

Isaiah 60.1-5
The poet is speaking to Jerusalem as if it were a person: when God brings back the people from their distant exile, light will shine, children will be well, abundance will break out, and all the other nations will bring their wealth.

Details in this passage probably influenced the story of the three wise ones visiting Jesus at his birth.

John 7: 37-52
The opposition to Jesus deepens as the Passover approaches. Jesus has claimed to fulfil our greatest thirst. But the religious leaders insist that Jesus cannot be the messiah because he is from Nazareth, whereas scripture says the messiah will come from King David’s town of Bethlehem. Luke’s and Matthew’s very different stories of how someone from Nazareth in the far north came to be born in Bethlehem in the south may be intended to resolve this anomaly of Jesus not having lived anywhere near Bethlehem.

The question posed to us is whether our discipleship of Jesus arises from his fulfilling the expectations of our society, or whether it is the new life we receive, through being included in his death and resurrection, that draws us to him. If we are drawn to him, as was Nicodemus, we may find society critical of us because of the deep challenges that Christ poses to the usual assumptions of what is ‘normal.’

This week’s collect:

Readings for Monday December 28

Monday December 28 Christmas 1

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.

Isaiah 26: 1-9
Isaiah speaks with confidence that God will ensure a safe return to Jerusalem for those who follow the way of justice and care for the poor, and will ensure that those who were oppressors will have no place to live.

Matthew 2: 13-18
Luke had seen Jesus’ significance in repeating the events of Samuel’s birth, but Matthew interprets Jesus as a repetition of Moses’ birth. To escape Herod’s murderous rage Joseph takes Jesus to Egypt thus setting the scene so that Jesus can return from Egypt to the land God promised, just as Moses did when he led the people from Egypt to the promised land.

Can Jesus be for us the route of escape from slavery to the assumptions that oppression and national violence are inevitable, into the promised land where the world is the way God intended?

This week’s collect:

Readings for Sunday December 27

Sunday December 27 Christmas 1

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.

Isaiah 62.6-7, 10-12
Early Christians interpreted this expectation of release from captivity 600 years before Jesus, as a prophecy of the birth of Jesus.

Matthew 1.18-25
Joseph has experienced a disaster in his relationship with Mary in that she is pregnant but not by him. In a dream he is told that this disaster in his most important relationship is about to be turned into an event of enormous importance. Dreams and references to the Old Testament guarantee the validity of this revelation.

Matthew quotes a passage from Isaiah in which, 700 years earlier, Isaiah had given a hopeful image to his besieged king: that his enemies would be defeated within nine months – the time in which it would take a young woman to give birth. Early Christians re-interpreted this verse, as was normal practice at that time, as a prediction of Jesus’ virgin birth.

In our time, just as with the king Isaiah was advising, nations put their trust in their own strength, not the generous self-giving available from God. The result is the desperation we see all around.

This week’s collect:

Readings for Saturday December 26

Saturday December 26 Christmas

Psalm 145
Praise to God because God cares for the oppressed and feeds all creation – God is praised everywhere.

Isaiah 12: 1-6
Praise and thanks to God for restoring Jerusalem to greatness. Christians understand this is what God has done for all humanity in God’s arrival in the form of a human in Jesus.

Luke 2: 22-40
Although this is boxing day, we skip forward a week to Jesus’ circumcision and to the ritual cleansing of Mary. A holy man and a holy woman affirm Jesus’ significance and Jesus is taken home to grow into adulthood in the normal way.

This week’s collect:

O God our Father,
whose Word has come among us
in the Holy Child of Bethlehem,
may the light of faith
illumine our hearts
and shine in our words and deeds;
through him who is Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.