Tag: Lectionary

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

July 16th 2014: Luke 18:15-30

Read Luke 18:15-30 here

“Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the Kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” says Jesus. Does this mean leaving our brains at the door or coming unthinkingly to Jesus? I don’t think so at all. A lot of the children and young people I know are highly discerning about the people they “let in” or trust. They are not indiscriminate and without sophistication. Rather it is what flows out of their hard-won trust; loyalty, obedience when necessary, willingness to learn, to be stretched and challenged, which marks a child-like faith. Are we willing to be obedient, to learn, to be stretched and challenged, or do we want to argue every point of our lives, circumstances and theology tooth and nail with Jesus until we are satisfied He has met our conditions of acceptance? We should remember we have already met His, as He welcomed us as adoptees in to His family.

What we have received, however much or however little it may have been, will pale in to the insignificance of a speck of dust compared to the inheritance we are promised in the age to come. Hold on to that, whether you love your stuff and your wealth, or you struggle to put food on the table every single day. the life, the world, the circumstances we have now, will surely all be changed at the coming of the next age. All of us will be and have the same, we’ll have God, who is love, physically in our midst as we are physically in His. Unimaginable joy. Let it be something of a fuel for us to get through the coming day.

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

July 15th 2014: Luke 18:1-14

Read Luke 18:1-14 here

There are two parables today. I have to admit that I have never really understood the Parable of the Persistent Widow, so if anyone can enlighten me I’d be glad of the help! I think it is instructive that Luke feels the need to explain the parable in verse 1, as being to ensure that the disciples pray continually and don’t give up. It is quite rare for the parables to be explained, either by Jesus or the gospel writers. This must have been a particularly hard message! God’s justice will be brought to bear through persistent trust and prayer, trust and obedience, perhaps. It is for us to learn as we live what God’s justice looks like in each situation in which we find ourselves.

The parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector which closes out today’s reading would be easy to gloss over as being far more simplistic and straightforward. The Pharisee is caught being proud of himself and his righteousness under the law, whereas the Tax Collector understands what it is to desperately require the grace of God. That is an important message in itself. We need to remain aware that we are who we are because God has called us and loved us. That might well be enough but I think something else has jumped out at me on this reading: that is that it is easy for us to think that we are living with God as the Tax Collector does: full of actual humility, contrition and thankfulness, but actually living more like the Pharisee, comparing and contrasting ourselves with others, scoring our righteousness higher than that of others. Sure, we might be doing all the right things, but what does our heart look like? As Bill Hybels asked once, who are when no-one’s looking? I can be both arrogant and conceited on the one hand and downtrodden and “woe is me” on the other, however I might come across in public. I think we are called to be the same person behind closed doors and from atop whatever platform we are given. Again, this is a hard thing to do, but God’s challenge to us today is to flee from arrogant righteousness and fling ourselves afresh upon His mercy.

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

July 14th 2014: Luke 17:20-end

Read Luke 17:20-end here

Continuing our ramble through Luke 17, we begin the working week with a look at the coming of the Kingdom of God. “The Kingdom of God is in your midst!” says Jesus in verse 21. Is he referring to Himself as the embodiment of the Kingdom? Perhaps, as He spoke He was right in front of them. So too, the Kingdom of God is in our midst today as Jesus lives within and amongst us by the Holy Spirit. It is not enough for us to spend our lives seeking “signs of the kingdom”, as tantalising and sometimes helpful as those might be. Jesus, in whom all the fullness of God was and is, has inaugurated the Kingdom through His victorious life, death, resurrection and ascension. The Kingdom of God is not (just) miracles, signs and wonders, captives set free, caring for the poor, it is Jesus, Himself, who through the kind of love and mercy I will never understand calls us to draw near this morning and every day. We are to keep looking to Him, not being distracted by the shiny “new” appearances of the Kingdom over here and over there. Love and relationship between God, us and one another is the ultimate goal and outworking of the Kingdom, so that God is glorified and given His rightful due in worship.

33-36 is another fairly well-known passage. Again, as in other parts of Luke, it seems to me that Jesus is fairly cantankerous here. I often wonder what kind of tone of voice these words were delivered in. “Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it”. What? What are we to hold on to? All this metaphor and hyperbole hurts my brain on a Monday morning (sorry Lord). I think though, that it might be a continuation of a verse we looked at last week, Luke 16:13, where Jesus tells His hearers that we cannot have two masters. So too, here I think, Jesus is uncompromising in His rhetoric and call. Do we love our life and our stuff more than we love God? Do we love ourself more than we were meant to? Conversely, do we love ourselves too little to see the true value we have in the eyes of God and to trust Him to bring through His desire and plan for us? Much easier in words than in practice, let’s try and trust God more today than we did yesterday and be thankful for the life, love and hope of Jesus.

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

July 13th 2014: Acts 28:17-31

Read Acts 28:17-31 here

“Therefore I want you to know that God’s salvation has been sent to the Gentiles, and they will listen!”

The Good News of the Gospel is for everyone. The cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, the Scriptures tell us, but nevertheless, the victory of Jesus on the Cross, and in the resurrection and the ascension is sufficient, once and for all, to open the offer of life, hope, peace, freedom and a future to all, wherever they come from. Paul preached under guard in Rome after having been arrested, trying to make it clear that there is no limitation on who can hear and respond to the message of the love of God. So it is for us. It is not for us to choose who is allowed in, or to be kept out of Church. God has opened the way for all through Jesus Christ, lavishing the full abundance of His love on the whole world. Let us live in such a way as to make sure that we ourselves put up no barriers between God and man that have already been torn down. Let’s be people of love and peace.

Have a wonderful Sunday!

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

July 12th 2014: Luke 17:11-19

Read Luke 17:11-19 here

Today’s lectionary reading from the Gospel of Luke is the well-known healing of the ten lepers. “Jesus, Master, have pity on us” say the ten lepers in verse 13, as Jesus is on His way to Jerusalem. In this they are acknowledging Jesus’ authority. Were they asking for healing? Attention? Cleansing? Cure? Jesus sends them, quite rightly according to Mosaic law, to show themselves to the Priest, and they are cleaned. But was the purpose of the cleansing mere cleansing? It seems perhaps not. When the one returns, a Samaritan, foreigner, enemy of Israel “loudly giving thanks to God” it is this, and the lack of thanks to God from others, that Jesus remarks upon. We can almost here his shoulders being shrugged as he notes that none of the lepers who may have been Jewish have acknowledged God’s part in their cure. As they are restored to the potential of inclusion in community and life itself, it seems that Jesus intervenes in compassion, but also to draw those who have been cured into a living relationship with God.

A pause for thought: Are we seeking an intervention or an interaction with God just to get past a problem or issue, or are we seeking an ongoing living relationship with God? Are we seeking just to be made how we want to be, using the power of God for our own ends, or are we willing to worship God primarily with our lives?

Jesus can heal or cure anyone who asks if it is the right moment for their healing. Ultimate healing is salvation. We all have weaknesses and sicknesses, most of which we would like to see removed. However this is not all of life, or the whole point of meeting with Jesus. The good that can result from meeting with Jesus is to come into the relationship with God that we were made for.

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

July 11th 2014: Luke 17:1-10

Read Luke 17:1-10 here

Today’s reading is yet another stark message from Jesus. Woe to us if we cause another to stumble. We’re also called to rebuke those who sin against us, but to forgive if those who sin against us turn from what they have previously done which has caused us or the community to stumble. Some of us in Churches are a little too good at rebuking. Others of us are a little too good at appearing to repent, and then proving that our repentance isn’t true repentance, because we continue to live/do/say just what we did before.  We’re called to be a forgiving people, including (especially) being forgiving of ourselves. At the same time, it is our responsibility to seek to do all we can to avoid causing another to stumble. Ultimately forgiveness is God’s and we are to seek His help in living a grace-filled life. We’re not to become puffed up or conceited in our righteousness, our forgivingness or the amount of work we do for the Kingdom. We’re not special because we work for the Kingdom, we’re special because we are called, and known by name from before the foundation of the world, by God. Let us not become puffed up in the success of our Christian life, or despondent about our failures. Let us instead be balanced, and continually thankful in the perspective that the glory is not ours, but God’s.

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings

July 7th 2014: Luke 15:1-10

Luke 15:1-10 can be found here

Today’s reading begins with “the Pharisees” complaining that “the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around Jesus”. Notice Luke denotes those gathering around Jesus as “tax collectors and sinners”, a narrative device to get us to sympathise with the Pharisees perhaps? It’s easy for us to jump straight on in this story to the beauty of Jesus seeking after the 1 whilst trusting the safety of the 99 to His Father, for us to be made to feel special as the ones that Jesus would seek for, and we should. What I find fascinating though as I read this today is that one of the things that a lot of us like so much about Jesus, that He associated with sinners, tax collectors and all, was, according to Mosaic law, rightly called in to question by the Pharisees. In a sense they were right to grumble. Jesus was proving that He was unsuitable to be who He claimed to be because of His associations, and yet, ultimately it was these associations and His willingness to die, rise and ascend that gave us hope. I suppose I feel a bit sorry for the Pharisees. They were trying to keep order, and honour God, as they had been taught, and Jesus made it increasingly difficult for them to do so. It is interesting to me that they got close enough to Him to find out what He was doing too.

So, a couple of questions: Are there things about how we live our life of faith that actually hold us back? Are we more interested in doing things right than keeping in step with what God is doing? How are we doing at keeping the balance between growing relationships and honouring tradition?