Psalm 19:7-14
Proper 21 (26) - Year B
Who can detect their errors? Probably no one as long as unintended consequences are alive and well.
It is helpful to remember that the errors here go back to "unintentional sin" rather than simply being wrong choices.
As you reflect on this remember also the flip side of the individual is the community and vice versa. Our hidden faults as a community are as powerful as those of ourselves as individuals. How would you read this if it ended with community language instead of individual language. Can you hear a whole congregation or nation desiring their words to be congruent with their hearts and their hands to reflect both their minds and their intentions.
So, as individuals and as communities my we be kept alert to our proud thoughts that keep us from being alert to the consequences of our omissions as keenly as we are to our commissions.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/september2003.html
Psalm 19:7-14 or Psalm 124
Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22 or Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50
We have, all of us, been sold. We have sold ourselves and those dear to us. Pottage is that cheap. We have sold the children into the hands of boredom and violence. Our willingness to sell is that great. We have sold our enemies to death and hurried them on their way that we might get our bargain.
In our buying and selling of self and others we lose track of where deeds of power reside - outside of market economies. When we see a deed of power beyond our control we get jealous and covetous. It is so easy to forget that whoever is not against us is for us and when a deed of power is accomplished, not mater to whom it is directed or through whom it comes, we are benefited.
- - -
anyone sick
anyone anyone
its time for a day off
we will wander
and it will save our soul
a multitude of sins
will be blessed
and grown from[* With thanks to Ferris Buhller]