Sunday 2 – (March 17, 2019)

An early Christian Hymn: Te Deum Laudamus

We praise you, O God: we acknowledge you to be the Lord. All creation worships you: the Father everlasting. To you all angels cry aloud: with all the powers of heaven, Cherubim and Seraphim: ever sing in endless praise, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of power and might: heaven and earth are full of your glory.

The glorious company of apostles praise you: the goodly fellowship of prophets praise you. The noble army of martyrs praise you:
 through all the world your holy Church acclaims you, Father of majesty unbounded: your true and only Son and the Holy Spirit advocate and guide.

You, Lord Christ, are the King of glory: the eternal Son of the Father. When you became man to set us free: you did not disdain the virgin’s womb. When you overcame the sting of death: you opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers. You are seated at God’s right hand in glory: we believe that you will come to be our judge. Come then, Lord, and help your people: bought with the price of your own blood; and bring us with your saints: to glory everlasting.

Save your people, Lord, and bless your inheritance: govern and uphold them now and always. Day by day, we bless you: we praise your name for ever. Keep us today, Lord, from all sin. Have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy. Lord, show us your love and mercy: for we put our trust in you. In you, Lord, is our hope: let us not be confounded at the last. Amen.

Day 10 – (March 16, 2019)

Read

John 5:19-24

19 Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. 20 The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished. 21 Indeed, just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whomever he wishes. 22 The Father judges no one but has given all judgment to the Son, 23 so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Anyone who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. 24 Very truly, I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgment, but has passed from death to life.

Reflect

How difficult it is to cast our prejudices aside when considering the statements of others or current events. This was very true for the Jewish leaders and their response to Jesus’ words, “My Father is still working, and I also am working” (John 5:17). They correctly concluded that he was claiming to be divine. Yet in their minds his words were not only breathtaking, but blasphemous. In John’s account, Jesus had already performed three signs that pointed to his unique power, a power that could only be described as divine. But like so many today, the Jewish leaders were not prepared to look beyond their personal prejudice to come to a different conclusion.

Now in 5:19-24, he begins to set out how the relationship between God the Father and God the Son works. Nowhere else in the Gospels do we find this stated so clearly. Both God the Father and God the Son are equally and eternally divine, but the Son chooses to do the will of the Father; so much so that in verse 19 Jesus says he does nothing apart from God the Father. He and the Father work together. This is truly significant. It means that everything Jesus said and did perfectly revealed the mind, the words and the actions of God the Father. To see Jesus’ actions, to hear his words is to see God. Later John records Jesus’ words: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). To know Jesus is to know God. How can we be so sure? Well, John is saying to us, ‘Look at what he did’.

Prayer

O God, who by the leading of a star revealed your beloved Son to the Gentiles, mercifully grant that we, who know you now by faith, may after this life enjoy the splendor of your glorious presence; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, Epiphany – adapted)

Daily Reading Plan

 Read John 5:19-47

Day 9 – (March 15, 2019)

Read

John 5:2-9
2 Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. 3 In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed…. 5 One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” 7 The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” 8 Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” 9 At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.

Reflect

To see waiting rooms full of sick people can be heart-wrenching. We long for someone to care for them and to do so quickly. The opening scene in John 5 tells the sorry story of many invalids – blind, lame and paralyzed gathered around a pool in Jerusalem.

Archaeological research suggests that it is a complex of pools with five porticos known as Bethzatha, located today near St. Anne’s Church in the Arab quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. The pool was thought to have miraculous powers.

On the day Jesus was there, John tells us there was a man who had been lame or paralyzed for thirty-eight years. Seeing the man and knowing his plight, Jesus asked a simple question: “Do you want to be made well?” But the man’s response was ambivalent: “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up…” If he was healed he would lose the support and companionship he enjoyed and on which he had come to depend. He’d have to make a new start in life…he’d have to get a job!

Without discussing whether the pool had healing powers or not, Jesus took the initiative and, at a word, cured him. The bed that had carried the man, could now be carried by the man.

The man’s indefinite response reflects the way we sometimes respond to Jesus. He asks us, ‘Do you really want to be changed?’ Often we don’t want him to intrude on our lifestyle. Before his conversion, Augustine who became the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa said: “Lord, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet”. The reality is, if we genuinely turn to Jesus Christ and accept the new life he has initiated and now offers us, we experience a life that we never want to lose.

Prayer

Grant us, Lord, we pray, the spirit to think and do always such things as are right, so that we who cannot do anything that is good without you, may in your strength be able to live according to your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, Trinity 9 – adapted)

Daily Reading Plan

Read John 5:1-18

Day 8 – (March 14, 2019)

Read

John 4:46-54

46 Then he came again to Cana in Galilee where he had changed the water into wine. Now there was a royal official whose son lay ill in Capernaum. 47 When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. 48 Then Jesus said to him, “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” 49 The official said to him, “Sir, come down before my little boy dies.” 50 Jesus said to him, “Go; your son will live.” The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and started on his way. 51 As he was going down, his slaves met him and told him that his child was alive. 52 So he asked them the hour when he began to recover, and they said to him, “Yesterday at one in the afternoon the fever left him.” 53 The father realized that this was the hour when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.’ So he himself believed, along with his whole household. 54 Now this was the second sign that Jesus did after coming from Judea to Galilee.

Reflect

Jesus regularly challenged people with the unexpected. It happened when the father of a boy who was dangerously ill came to him for help. The father lived in Capernaum and was an officer in Herod the Tetrarch’s service. He had heard of Jesus’ previous miracle of turning water into wine in Cana, twenty miles away in the hills. Learning that Jesus was again in Cana, he went in person to see him. What Jesus said to him was startling: “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.”

The official was not put off: “Sir, come down before my little boy dies.” Jesus responded with more unexpected words, “Go; your son will live.” What a test of the father’s faith! Apart from this, Jesus gave the man no assurance. Yet the father believed his word. Going home he learned that his son was completely healed at the hour Jesus had spoken – 1:00PM. Jesus had the extraordinary power to heal a sick boy at a distance. The repetition of “Your son will live” in verses 50 & 53 emphasizes this. Consequently, the whole family believed. For them Jesus was more than a miracle worker.

Here was a second sign pointing to Jesus’ unique power, a power we only associate with God. John has been telling us that Jesus is God in the flesh, glory personified. As such he welcomes anyone whose faith in him is real, small though it may be.

Prayer

Almighty God, you wonderfully created us in your own image and have now more wonderfully rescued and restored us. Grant us, we pray, that as your Son our Lord Jesus Christ was made in our likeness, so may we share his divine nature; we ask this through Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (1978 AAPB, Second Sunday after Christmas – adapted)

Daily Reading Plan

Read John 4:27-54

Day 6 – (March 12, 2019)

Read

John 4:5-15

5 So Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. 7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

Reflect

 We all have regrets – words we have uttered that we would love to take back; opportunities we missed or ones we should never have embraced; relationships we let go and ones that were wrong to have begun. There are so many things in life for which redemption seems impossible. Arthur Miller, the playwright, put it this way, ‘Maybe all one can do, is hope to end up with the right regrets.’

A woman Jesus encountered at a well in Samaria would have agreed. Like most of us, this woman longed for happiness, but it had eluded her. Thinking that love and marriage would give her life meaning and happiness, she had married five times. But each time she found that she had made the same mistake. Her life was a mess: she felt insecure, lonely, and dissatisfied.

Jesus had taken a detour and was traveling back north to Galilee through Samaria. There he showed he was not bothered by social custom or social taboos, for he, a Jewish man started a conversation with a Samaritan woman in public. He spoke then, as he speaks to you and me today, with equal concern and equal respect. Asking for some water, he shifted gears to introduce another level in the conversation – about living water. It gave him the opportunity to touch on the regrets in the woman’s life.

Through this conversation we begin to see that Jesus offers us water of such vitality that it satisfies our deep inner spiritual thirst. He was saying that he is the answer to the regrets and emptiness that gnaw our souls. Most of us aren’t willing to admit such a reality–and the woman that day was no exception. We pretend everything is all right, but if the truth is told, we all live a lot closer to despair than we like to think. So we activate all kinds of defense mechanisms against anything that threatens to expose our inward spiritual poverty. Deep down we all have a real spiritual longing. But, if we are going to find Jesus’ answer to our regrets, we have to be willing to acknowledge our need.

Prayer

Almighty God, grant that we, who justly deserve to be punished for our sinful deeds, may in your mercy and kindness be pardoned and restored; through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. (1662 BCP, Lent 4)

Daily Reading Plan

Read John 4:1-15