Daily Lectionary Readings for November 3, 2010
Psalm 145
Zephaniah 2:1-15
Revelation 16:1-11
Luke 13:10-17
Psalm 145
Several verses quoted out of sequence. First from the second half of the Psalm...
"The Lord upholds all who are falling,
and raises up all who are bowed down.
The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season. (vs.14,15)
A great promise that God will be with us in hard times, particularly when we are most in need, when we are looking to God. An earlier verse from this Psalm gives us a clue how this happens.
"On the glorious splendor of your majesty,
and on your wondrous works, I will meditate."(v.5)
When we take the time to meditate on God's wondrous works and on all the ways God reveals God's majesty to us in our daily lives we find an awesome God for sure, but I believe we find more. We find an awesome God who cares for us. In the midst of all the striking things that God has done when we meditate on God's actions we become aware that God cares deeply about us and is undeniably active and at work in our lives. God is always those things - active and at work in our lives - but we can easily ignore or choose to overlook the presence of God. Being in tune with that work in our regular meditation helps us to experience God at those times of crises, hopelessness and despair in our lives - the times when we are "bowed down".
Luke 13:10-17
Yesterday's Luke passage contained the story of a fig tree that no longer bore fruit. The suggestion was made that we may have some "fig trees" in our lives that are not bearing fruit and perhaps what such a passage might be asking us to do is to evaluate and consider doing away with such trees so that we could put our energy in other, more productive directions. A friend commented that one of the places we may encounter fig trees is in the life of the church. I agree. And believe that it's a good discipline to do as Stan Ott, of the Acts 16:5 Initiative suggests and not simply repeat last years programs again this year because we did them last year. The church can surely be a place where traditions become entrenched and we continue doing things over the years sometimes for little reason than that we've been doing them for a long time. There is certainly nothing wrong with longstanding traditions, but all of them are worthy of examination at least to ask why we are doing them and what purpose we believe is being accomplished in their being done. Today's Luke passage features Jesus healing a woman who has been bent over, unable to stand up straight for many years. Jesus heals her - he frees her from her ailment - and trouble ensues. Jesus has, again, healed on the Sabbath. Some traditionalists are angry with him. Which raises the question how do you get angry with someone for healing someone in any circumstance? Here it is because it runs headlong into a tradition - the Sabbath is a time when no work is to be done. Those who are angry are unable to look past the bottom line of the tradition to examine the content of the action. In a way it is a similar message to yesterday's - we do ourselves no favors when we are so tied to a course of action that we are unable to actually see what the course of action is leading us to do AND what it may be keeping us from doing.
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