Wednesday 15 June

2 Samuel 23:8-24:25

These three mighty men must have had some stories don’t you think?  I can just imagine myself chewing on some roasted goat’s meat while sat next to them at a campfire, watching them in the flickering darkness as they each try to out-do the other with their outlandish claims of heroism and daring.  I imagine them with tremendous beards, wearing hulking animal skins across their shoulders, glints in their eyes and scars across their cheeks.  This is real boys-own stuff.  Real band-of-brothers stuff.  And yet they sat alongside Israel’s singer of songs.  They were aligned to the cause of David the tender-hearted lover of the weak.  David’s household is an extraordinary picture of the kingdom.  The dispossessed and the weak flocked to him.  The cripple had pride of place.  And yet the brutish and the audacious felt equally at home.  If ever there was a diverse bunch surely this was it.  If ever there was an illustration of how God has made all sorts of people to desire all sorts of things and yet be united in him then surely this is it.  God has a place for all.  Do we?  Are we as keen to welcome and nurture the Josheb-Basshebeths as the Mephibosheths? Our call is to empower all types to be filled with the whole fullness of Christ.

Acts 9:32-10:23a

It’s interesting that a lot of the incidental characters in Acts are described as being generous towards the poor and needy.  It seems like that was a way Luke showed that they were people who ‘got it’.  It is also interesting how miraculous acts were about as rare in the early church as expletives are in Snoop Dogg’s albums.  These sorts of insights are invaluable for setting our expectations of what normal church life should look like.  We should expect to continually come across people who always help the poor (which I think we do!! yipee) and we should also expect to continually see God doing things that are so shocking they are more likely to provoke an expletive than anything said-rapper could muster.  We should be a hub of wonder and compassion.  Jesus is the one who can make us so.

Psalm 74:1-9

Why does the editor of bible-in-a-year keep cutting these psalms like this?  It makes this section even more depressing than when I’d lost my TV remote and then discovered that the next programme on was “What Katie did next”.