Patrick Comerford
Next Sunday, 21 June 2020, is the Second Sunday after Trinity (Trinity II). Sunday is also Father’s Day
The readings in the Revised Common Lectionary, as adapted for use in the Church of Ireland, are in two sets, the Continuous Readings and the Paired Readings:
The Continuous Readings: Genesis 21: 8-21; Psalm 86: 1-10, 16-17; Romans 6: 1b-11; Matthew 10: 24-39.
There is a link to the continuous readings HERE
The Paired Readings: Jeremiah 20: 7-13; Psalm 69: 8-11 [12-17], 18-20; Romans 6: 1b-11; Matthew 10: 24-39.
Introducing the readings:
Two weeks ago, we had a very lengthy Old Testament reading, describing God’s work of creation and telling us how God saw all of creation to be good (Genesis 1: 1 to 2: 4a). It was followed that Sunday by a Gospel reading telling us to go out into that beautiful world in mission with the message and mission of God’s love for all creation (Matthew 28: 16-20).
On the following Sunday (14 June 2020), we heard how Sarah laughs when she hears from the messengers who visit Abraham at Mamre that she is going to be pregnant and give birth to a child within a year.
But the joy and laughter of those readings is in sharp contrast to what seem to be very sad and gloomy readings, filled with tears, next Sunday. Although it is Father’s Day, these readings may seem more appropriate for a Sorrowful Mother’s Day.
In the Old Testament reading (Genesis 21: 8-21), Hagar and her son are abandoned in the wilderness. It appears to be a story of cruel marginalisation and exclusion of a young mother and her helpless child. In the Gospel reading (Matthew 10: 24-39), family divisions and the cruelty that only family members can inflict on one another are brought to the fore again. Where do we find the love of God in these Bible readings, and where is the love of God to be found in the Church today?
Genesis 21: 8-21:
Following the visit to Abraham, and the promise to Abraham and Sarah of a child, which we read about last week (Genesis 18: 1-15, 21: 1-7, 14 June 2020, Trinity I), Isaac has been born to Abraham and Sarah, in their old age, and the child has been circumcised, as sign of being one of God’s people.
Sarah has said, ‘God has brought laughter for me’ (verse 6), and the name Isaac means ‘he laughs.’
Now, at the age of three, Isaac is weaned, and a religious feast is called for.
Earlier passages (16: 11 and 16: 16) identify Ishmael as ‘the son of Hagar’ (verse 9). The name Ishmael means ‘God harkens,’ but Ishmael is not named in this reading – an indication that he ranks lower than Isaac. We might recall that when Sarah did not bear a son for Abraham, he exercised the legal option of producing an heir through a slave woman.
At the feast, Sarah sees Ishmael playing or laughing with Isaac. She sees this as a real threat to her own life, so she asks Abraham to cast out’ Hagar and Ishmael (verses 9-10).
Abraham hesitates, for he loves Ishmael and is forbidden by law to do this. But Abraham hears God telling him to do as Sarah asks, promising Abraham’s line of descent will continue through Isaac, but that Ishmael too will also become father of a nation (verses 12-13). Abraham gives Hagar bread and water and sends her and her son out into the wilderness of Beer-sheba (verses 14-15).
When the water runs out, Hagar realises death is near, and fears for her child’s survival (verses 15-16). God hears Ishmael’s cry and Hagar sees a well. God is with the boy, he grows up, lives in the wilderness of Paran, in northern Sinai, and marries an Egyptian woman (verses 17-21). All this is seen as his exclusion from God’s plan, and Genesis continues with the story of Isaac.
I imagine this story is going to be heard with shock, dismay and a sense of cruelty by many women throughout Ireland, as they think of their children and wonder what has happened to them.
Sarah is an old woman, worried that her husband Abraham has no children to inherit his name and his wealth. So, at Sarah’s own suggestion, Abraham has a child with Hagar.
Ishmael is Abraham’s first-born child, and is somewhat older than Sarah’s own son, Isaac. Sarah is not jealous of Abraham and Hagar. But when she sees Ishmael playing with Isaac, she worries about Isaac’s future and inheritance.
At Sarah’s demand, Abraham takes Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness and abandons them, leaving only a small supply of water, not knowing what is going to happen to them, but believing he is doing what God has told him to.
Imagine the plight of this abandoned woman. The man she once had a child for has cast her aside, left her and her child, apparently not caring whether they live or die.
How often have similar things happened, even in recent years, in Irish society?
Until recent decades, Irish families, worried about the way a woman in the family conceived, sent her away. But, unlike Hagar, they were often sent away even before they gave birth. They were abandoned in so-called ‘Mother and Baby’ homes, county homes and Magdalene laundries in every county in this land.
So often not just the Church but society at large moralised about these women and sent them into isolation, not worrying how they would survive or about the future facing their children.
Families often remained silent in the face of these great and grave injustices. But silence did not always mean acceptance or acquiescence. It was a shameful time, where shame was transferred unto young and vulnerable women, when the real shame lay with those who exercised control in this way on behalf of all society.
Silently, many sisters, mothers, and to be honest, fathers and brothers too, grieved in their hearts at this harsh judgment, this immoral moralising.
And even today, to speak out about what has happened divides families, communities and societies. A deep, searing division that makes it easy to understand Christ’s apocalyptic warning in the Gospel reading: ‘For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household’ (Matthew 10: 34-36).
In the history of Judaism and of Christianity, there have been complicated, tortuous efforts to justify Abraham’s gross injustice towards Hagar.
The Apostle Paul makes Hagar’s experience an allegory of the difference between law and grace (see Galatians 4: 21-31). But he is not passing judgment on either Hagar or Sarah; he is simply using them as examples to illustrate a point he is making about law and grace, whether we should live by the letter or live by the spirit of our spiritual and religious values.
Later, Saint Augustine said Hagar symbolises an ‘earthly city,’ or the sinful condition of humanity (see Augustine, City of God 15: 2).
Yet Hagar committed no sin, did nothing wrong, for she only did what Sarah and Abraham had suggested. Certainly, her child Ishmael was innocent beyond doubt when they were both abandoned to seemingly certain death.
Augustine’s view was built on by Thomas Aquinas and by John Wycliffe, who compared the children of Sarah to the redeemed, and those of Hagar to the unredeemed, who are ‘carnal by nature and mere exiles.’
Surely if Hagar was ‘carnal by nature’ then so too were Abraham and Sarah; yet they go without any condemnation.
The rabbis were much kinder when it came to commenting on Hagar, and often describe her as Pharaoh’s daughter.
The Midrash Genesis Rabbah says Hagar was Pharaoh’s daughter but that Sarah treated her harshly, imposing heavy work on her and striking her. It sounds like a shocking analysis in The Irish Times some years ago by Dr Seán Lucey of the forced labour conditions imposed on hundreds if not thousands of women in county homes the length and breadth of Ireland from the 1920s on.
Some rabbinical commentators identify Hagar with Keturah, the woman Abraham marries after Sarah’s death, saying Abraham seeks her out after Sarah’s death. One great mediaeval rabbi suggests Hagar is given the name Keturah to signify that her deeds are as beautiful as incense and that she remains chaste from the time she Abraham abandons her until he returns for her.
So even Abraham can get things wrong, and think that when his family puts pressure on him he is listening to the voice of God.
Two of the most boring passages in the New Testament must be the genealogies of Jesus in the Gospels (see Matthew 1: 1-17; Luke 3: 23-38). Archbishop Rowan Williams reminded a conference in Cambridge six years ago (June 2014) that these genealogies tell us that God cares for each generation, including individuals who are marginalised or forgotten, as part of God’s plans for the future.
Both genealogies are almost exclusively male. But, unlike Saint Luke, Saint Matthew includes five women among the ancestors of Jesus.
Saint Matthew is anxious to prove the royal ancestry and lineage of Christ, so we might expect his choice of women to include queens, princesses, or the daughters of mighty warriors or great prophets. Instead, he names five women on the margins of society. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and Mary are seen as prostitutes, foreigners, adulterers or single mothers – certainly not the sort of women one might want to boast about in a family tree in some Biblical version of Burke’s Peerage or Burke’s Landed Gentry.
But Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and Mary challenge the Jewish restrictions on marriage to Gentiles, on socially acceptable marriages and the very definition of Jewish-ness which depends on a mother’s Jewish identity. By those definitions, Perez, Boaz, or Solomon, or for that matter David and the whole line of kings of Israel and Judah could never be acceptable.
God still looks lovingly on the women we would push aside and marginalise in our families and in our society. God ignores the moralising, narrow-minded judgmentalism of society, of the religious authorities of our day, or even in our own families.
Hagar, when she is abandoned in the wilderness and when the water she is left with dries up, expects her child to die, and even begins to mourn his death. Like many unmarried mothers in Ireland must have done, she lifts up her voice and weeps, crying out: ‘Do not let me look on the death of the child’ (verse 16).
But God hears the voice of the boy; and the angel of God asks his abandoned mother: ‘What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.’ Then God opens her eyes, and she sees a well of water. She fetches fresh water, and gives the child a drink. She realises now, in that almost baptismal-like moment, that God is with the boy (verses 17-20).
Hagar thirsts not just for water but for justice, truth and mercy. Her parallel in the New Testament is not Mary Magdalene, for there is not a shred of evidence to identify Mary Magdalene with a prostitute or the woman about to be stoned for adultery. Indeed, the Magdalene laundries are not only a shameful blot on our history but, ironically, they were misnamed.
Hagar’s parallel in the Gospels is the Samaritan woman at the well of Sychar (John 4: 5-42), who is also seen as living an immoral life. While the disciples refuse to engage with her or to talk with her, Christ reveals himself to her as the Living Water, and in yet another baptismal-like moment she comes to a fullness of faith that they have yet to mature into, and becomes one of the first great missionaries.
How is God working through the horrific narrative of the abandoned mothers and the babies left to die from malnutrition and curable diseases, the unloved women used as slave labour in the Magdalene laundries, Mother and Baby Homes and County Homes across this land, even in my own lifetime, in my generation?
The voice of the Church needs to be heard – not defensively but speaking out for them. We may have abandoned them as a society, but God never abandons them.
We may have misread the Bible to provide justification for society’s sins, but God never sees them as sinners. And the whole Church, irrespective of denominational boundaries, must speak with one voice saying this was never God’s judgment on these women. This was wrong, it always was, and always will be.
Psalm 86: 1-10, 16-17:
Psalm 86 is subtitled ‘a prayer of David.’ In this prayer, David gives glory to God (verse 8-10, 12, 13), seeks grace and favour from God, that God would hear his prayers (verses 1, 6, 7), preserve and save him, and be merciful to him (verses 2, 3, 16), and that he would give him joy, grace, strength and honour (verses 4, 11, 17). He pleads for God’s goodness (verse 5, 15) and speaks of the malice of his enemies (verse 14).
Perhaps Psalm 86 has many resonances with the cry of the abandoned Hagar in the wilderness, and the references to a child born to a slave woman.
The speaker is ‘poor and needy,’ which suggests not his poverty but that he is a king, for such repetition is found in royal inscriptions in the ancient Near East. He cries or prays continually for God to preserve his life (verse 2). He presents his soul to God (verse 4), who is ‘good and forgiving’ (verse 5) and is generous and abundant in his love to all who call on him. He is confident that God will hear him in his present troubles (verses 6-7).
Verses 8-10 include a vision that ‘all the nations’ will come to God’s ways, realising that God is greater and more powerful than any god they may have.
The vision in verse 9, ‘All the nations you have made shall come and bow down before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name,’ is quoted in the Book of Revelation: ‘All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgment has been revealed’ (Revelation 15: 4).
In the verses that are missing from this reading in the lectionary, he prays that God will ‘teach me your way … that I may walk in your truth’ (verse 11). In verses 13-15, he contrasts God’s love for him (as seen in rescuing him from grave illness) with his enemies’ attitude towards God: one of insolence, of ignoring God’s ways. He confesses his faith in words God has spoken to Moses (verse 15; see Exodus 34: 6).
He seeks God’s support, considering himself without any right to ask. A girl born of a slave had no rights of any kind (verse 16). He prays for a sign of God’s continuing favour and comfort, so that those who hate him are put to shame (verse 17).
Romans 6: 1b-11:
This passage from the Letter to the Romans is in the form of a diatribe, and at times it is difficult to know who is the speaker and who is the respondent. A diatribe was a Socratic rheotorical technique involving questions and answers, changing voices from singular to plural, and from first to second and third person. Saint Paul uses this technique, for example, in Romans 2.
The Apostle Paul has written in the previous chapter of life before Christ, when death was final, and ‘where sin increased, grace abounded all the more’ (5: 20). Now he returns to the using the philosophical approach of diatribe as he asks rhetorically whether we are to go on sinning in order to receive even more grace. ‘By no means!’
He then asks a second question: How can we who have died to sin go on living in it? Do we not realise that Baptism makes everything different for Christians? In Baptism, we die to sin. We are baptised into Christ’s death and into his resurrection. We too are raised from death by the Father, so that we may walk in this shared new life.
Saint Paul appears to be dealing with Gentiles who have become Christians, and in saying they are not subject to Jewish law or the Torah, they are prey to living a life that fails to recognise the reality of sin in all lives. In Baptism, we share in Christ’s death and resurrection. No longer can sin have any place in our lives. But we are responsible for our decisions and our actions. As Christ is the model for our lives, and we must consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Matthew 10: 24-39:
In the Gospel reading on the previous Sunday (Matthew 9: 35 to 10: 8 or 10: 23, Sunday 14 June 2020), Christ calls the Twelve together to prepare them for their ministry and mission.
In this reading, Christ continues to prepare the Twelve for this mission, as both their teacher and their master. They are his students, and they are to be like him.
In the past, Christ, says, his enemies have called him Beelzebul (verse 25). This may refer back to an earlier incident, when Christ heals a demoniac who is mute and some Pharisees say, ‘By the ruler of the demons he casts out the demons’ (Matthew 9: 34; see Mark 3: 22, Luke 11: 15), or forward to a subsequent episode when Christ heals a demoniac who is blind and mute and some Pharisees say: ‘It is only by Beelzebul … that this fellow casts out his demons’ (Matthew 12: 24).
Beelzebul was a Canaanite god whose name means ‘lord of the final judgment,’ but in a pejorative pun he was referred to as ‘Beelzebub,’ meaning ‘lord of the flies’ (see II Kings 1: 2-3, 6, 16), and he was associated with the demonic in early Jewish and Christian writing.
If Christ is called Beelzebul, then his disciples can expect to be called worse. But they should not be intimidated. At the end of the era, all ungodly and godly behaviour, now hidden, will be made known (verse 26). Now is the time to proclaim all that Christ has told his disciples privately (verse 27). They are not to fear their persecutors for they can only end your physical life. Instead, they should hold God in awe, for he can destroy those who do not do his will (verse 28).
God cares for the life of even a sparrow, a small bird sold as cheap food for a few coins in the markets of the poor (verse 29), This means we should not be afraid of losing the real life (verse 31). Honest and forthright witness – and outright refusal to do so –have eternal consequences (verses 32-33).
At the Last Day, Christ will speak out on behalf of those who are his faithful witnesses faithfully, but will deny those who deny him
In verses 34-36, Christ gives a new interpretation to the apocalyptic vision in Micah 7: 6, a verse thought to foretell the breakdown of society as the end-times approach (see also Ezekiel 38: 21). Spreading the gospel will have unfortunate consequences. There will be tension and division, even within families, between those who accept Christ’s message and the demands it makes, and those who oppose it.
Christians must put loyalty to Christ above family loyalties (verse 37). Following Christ involves the risk of death, and involves taking up the cross, a sure and certain death for those who rebel against the rulers of the day (verse 38).
Finally, we are presented with a paradox: those who try to save their own earthly lives will lose all, but those who die for Christ will find eternal life (verse 39).
A quilt by Hollis Chatelain showing Archbishop Desmond Tutu surrounded by childrenA reflection on the Gospel reading
Many years ago (2008), I was reading through some insightful essays submitted as part of an adult education course in theology. I was excited so many thinking people were engaging with their Christian faith in a challenging, questioning way, seeking to explore and deepen their understanding of how relevant Christianity and the Church are to the world and its problems.
These were not raw, naïve students. They displayed a wide variety of age, experience, and background, and came with a variety of experiences that challenge our stereotypical image of the Church of Ireland. Yes, there were suburban housewives and businessmen, and young people from rectory families. And they brought amazing, often unconventional, questions and insights to the discussions.
But they sat side-by-side – and sat comfortably side-by-side – with the other students: the single mother with teenage sons; the refugee who had seen horrific outrages, only to find herself marginalised by the cold Irish system; the farmer who travelled a round trip of hundreds of miles just to learn more, and to be challenged more deeply by the Christian faith.
Well, no-one said it was going to be easy, did they?
The Christian faith should be challenging. Our reflections on it should be challenging and should challenge us. And, as we integrate that reflection, our discipleship should be challenging to the world … even when that means that there is a price to pay.
How free do you feel you are to express your faith today?
What inhibits us when it comes to talking about your core values and beliefs today?
It may not be fear of persecution and death; it may simply be the prospect of being embarrassed, or of embarrassing others.
How often have you heard people declining to stand up for Christianity in a discussion, saying something like: ‘Well all religions are the same anyway, aren’t they?’
But if we are unwilling to speak up about our beliefs in time of plenty, how difficult will it be to speak up for Christian values, the Christian point of view, when things are difficult, when things are tough?
Some of the greatest people I have known who have spoken up for Christian values and the Christian faith, knowing the consequences but not fearing them, included Church leaders in South Africa during the apartheid era.
As a young adult who had recently come to experience the love of God and started to explore the challenges of Christian discipleship, I was deeply challenged by the witness of the Dean of Johannesburg, who opened the doors of his cathedral and offered sanctuary to black protesters who were being beaten on the cathedral steps by white police using rhino whips.
Dean Gonville ffrench-Beytagh knew the consequences. He was jailed, and eventually exiled from South Africa. To us the words of the German martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he bore the ‘Cost of Discipleship.’
Some years later, while apartheid was still in force, I was privileged to interview Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He too had been Dean of Saint Mary’s in Johannesburg, and when I first met him he was secretary general of the South African Council of Churches.
I was worried about the many death threats he was receiving, and I asked him how he lived with those threats? Was he worried about them? Did he ever consider modifying what he had to say because of them?
He gave me an answer similar to one he gave when he was facing tough questioning before the regime’s Eloff Commission. He told that inquiry:
‘There is nothing the government can do to me that will stop me from being involved in what I believe God wants me to do. I do not do it because I like doing it. I do it because I am under what I believe to be the influence of God’s hand. I cannot help it. When I see injustice, I cannot keep quiet, for, as Jeremiah says, when I try to keep quiet, God’s Word burns like a fire in my breast. But what is it that they can ultimately do? The most awful thing that they can do is to kill me, and death is not the worst thing that could happen to a Christian.’
Staying quiet when I should speak out will deal a death blow to my morals and my morale. Silence in the face of injustice and suffering is a silent denial of my faith, and of Christ.
I am sure that while they spoke out against the injustices of apartheid and Nazism, those great Church leaders over the past century, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gonville ffrench-Beytagh and Desmond Tutu, were not without fear. They were not that stupid. They knew there were consequences. But they took up their cross and followed Christ, and are worthy of the name Christian (Matthew 10: 38).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was jailed, tortured and died in a concentration camp 75 years ago on 9 April 1945; Gonville ffrench-Beytagh was jailed, tortured and exiled, and for years afterwards continued to suffer from bouts of depression until he died on 10 May 1991; and Desmond Tutu was persecuted, and his home and offices bombed.
But they knew that despite their physical fears were, and the fears they had for the families, who would also suffer socially and physically, that they had little to fear spiritually.
For, as the Apostle Paul challenges us in the Epistle reading on Sunday morning, we have already gone through death with Christ because of our baptism. We are now called to live a new life with him. We are no longer slaves to the old ways of doing things, we are now citizens of the Kingdom of God. Death no longer has dominion (see Romans 6: 3-11).
Being alive to Christ allows the great Christians of our time to speak up when their voice needs to be heard, to take risks even when there is a price to pay. And do it knowing that there is nothing to fear spiritually, even if the consequences are dreadful and frightening by other people’s standards.
How often do we take the easy option out? How often do we give nice names to the bad things we do? How often do we pretend that we are doing the wrong thing for the right reasons? Or simply because we are doing what is expected of us, what were told to do?
How often good labels have been hijacked to disguise the dreadful. The slogan on the gates outside Auschwitz, Dachau and other Nazi death camps was: Arbeit mach frei – ‘Work makes you free.’
The word ‘apartheid’ does not mean racism. It actually means ‘separate development,’ which sounds good except there were no hopes of development and opportunity for anyone but the white people in South Africa.
As he was leading the United States further-and-further along in the nuclear arms race, developing new nuclear missiles that would eventually contribute to economic recession, President Ronald Reagan declared in his Second Inaugural address in 1984: ‘Peace is our highest aspiration. The record is clear, Americans resort to force only when they must. We have never been aggressors.’ They even named one new nuclear weapon ‘Peacemaker’ and named a nuclear warship Corpus Christi.
But it was always so throughout history. In an oft-quoted passage in De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae, the Roman orator and historian Tacitus, at the end of chapter 30, quotes a speech by a British chieftain Calgacus addressing assembled warriors about Rome’s insatiable appetite for conquest and plunder: ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant (‘where they make a desert, they call it peace,’ Oxford Revised Translation).
This British chieftain’s sentiment was meant as an ironic contrast with the slogan, ‘Peace given to the world,’ frequently inscribed on Roman medals.
This phrase from Tacitus is often quoted alone. The poet Lord Byron, for instance adapts the phrase in Bride of Abydos (1813):
Mark where his carnage and his conquests cease!
He makes a solitude, and calls it – peace.
The same irony is found when Christ says to his disciples in this Gospel reading: ‘Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have come not to bring peace, but the sword’ (Matthew 10: 34).
It is not that Christ is encouraging his disciples to be warmongers – what a gross misreading of his teachings that would be. Nor is he encouraging family rows, encouraging sons to storm out on their fathers, mothers to nag and niggle at their daughters (Matthew 10: 35).
But he is warning his disciples it is not going to be easy. They are not going to have a quiet time. Those who want a quiet life as Christians can forget about it. And their hopes of a quiet life as passive Christians will vanish quickly.
Are we prepared to stand up for our faith and its values even at the risk of being ridiculed? Even when this upsets the peace of our families, our communities, our society and our land?
Some of those essays I was reading from those students on that adult education course encourage me when it comes to worrying whether people prefer peace at any price or taking a costly stand, even when it challenges prevailing values in our society today.
Many of them had looked at the way we treat immigrants, migrants and refugees in our society. Yes, they observed the rising levels of racism in our society. Yes, they noticed the inadequate welfare and support payments they receive.
But they were even more challenging about the way they thought the Church was too comfortable about the problems we are facing in Irish society today. We are too inward-looking, most of them said in their essays. We are too much of a club.
They had stopped and looked at ordinary, everyday parishes. There is no fear of fathers being set against their sons, mothers against their daughters, daughters-in-law against mothers-in-law, or of finding foes within the household (Matthew 10: 35-37).
Most of them found our parishes were too like comfortable families or clubs, not open to the worries, concerns and fears of the outsider.
Do we love the clubbish atmosphere in the Church of Ireland more than we love the Church, the Gospel and Christ?
Or are we prepared to speak out, not worrying about the consequences, knowing that ‘whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it’ (Matthew 10: 39).
Matthew 10: 24-39 (NRSVA):
[Jesus said:] 24 ‘A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; 25 it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household!
26 ‘So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. 27 What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. 28 Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father. 30 And even the hairs of your head are all counted. 31 So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.
32 ‘Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; 33 but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.
34 ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
35 For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
36 and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; 38 and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.’
Liturgical Resources:
Liturgical Colour: Green (Ordinary time, Year A)
The Collect of the Day:
Lord, you have taught us
that all our doings without love are nothing worth:
Send your Holy Spirit
and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtues,
without which whoever lives is counted dead before you.
Grant this for your only Son Jesus Christ’s sake.
The Collect of the Word (with the Continuous Readings):
Gracious God,
we who are baptised into Christ Jesus
were baptised into his death:
we pray that, as you raised him from death,
so by the power of the Holy Spirit
we may live the new life to your glory,
knowing ourselves to be dead in sin
but alive for you in Jesus Christ;
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
Loving Father,
we thank you for feeding us at the supper of your Son.
Sustain us with your Spirit,
that we may serve you here on earth
until our joy is complete in heaven,
and we share in the eternal banquet
with Jesus Christ our Lord.
Suggested Hymns:
Genesis 21: 8-21:
545, Sing of Eve and sing of Adam
323, The God of Abraham praise
Psalm 86: 1-10, 16-17:
620, O Lord, hear my prayer
140, The Lord will come and not be slow
372, Through all the changing scenes of life
627, What a friend we have in Jesus
Jeremiah 20: 7-13:
No suggested hymns
Psalm 69: 8-11 (12-17), 18-20:
No suggested hymns
Romans 6: 1b-11:
389, All who believe and are baptized
84, Alleluia! raise the anthem
403, Bread of the world in mercy broken
81, Lord, for the years your love has kept and guided
392, Now is eternal life
436, Now let us from this table rise
703, Now lives the Lamb of God
638, O for a heart to praise my God
286, The strife is o’er, the battle done
661, Through the night of doubt and sorrow
Matthew 10: 24-39:
588, Light of the minds that know him
108, Praise to the Holiest in the height
599, ‘Take up thy cross’, the Saviour said
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
The hymns suggestions are provided in Sing to the Word (2000), edited by Bishop Edward Darling. The hymn numbers refer to the Church of Ireland’s Church Hymnal (5th edition, Oxford: OUP, 2000)
Material from the Book of Common Prayer is copyright © 2004, Representative Body of the Church of Ireland.
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