Daily Bible Reading: Sirach [Ecclesiasticus] 17-18 and Acts 8:25-40

Sirach 17 – “The Lord fashioned man from the earth, to consign him back to it. He gave them so many days’ determined time; he gave them authority over everything on earth. He clothed them with strength like his own, and made them in his own image” (17:1-3).

“He filled them with knowledge and understanding, and revealed to them good and evil. He put his own light in their hearts to show them the magnificence of his works” (17:7-8).

“Their eyes saw his glorious majesty, and their ears heard the glory of his voice” (17:13).

“One day he will rise and reward them, he will pay back their deserts on their own heads. But to those who repent he permits return, and he encourages those who were losing hope” (17:23-24).

Sirach 18 – “He who lives for ever created all the universe. The Lord alone will be found righteous” (18:1).

“What is man, what purpose does he serve? What is the good in him, and what the bad? Take the number of a man’s days; a hundred years is very long. Like a drop of water from the sea, or a grain of sand, such are these few years compared with eternity. For this reason the Lord shows them forbearance, and pours out his mercy on them” (18:8-11).

“Man’s compassion extends to his neighbor, but the compassion of the Lord extends to everything that lives; rebuking, correcting and teaching, bringing them back as a shepherd brings his flock” (18:13-14).

“In a time of plenty, remember times of famine, poverty and want in days of wealth. The time slips by between dawn and dusk, all things pass swiftly in the presence of the Lord” (18:25-26).

Acts 8:25-40 - Peter and John return to Jerusalem. There Philip experiences “the spirit of the Lord” (also referred to as an angel), telling him to get up and go south toward Gaza. On the way, he encounters an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Ethiopian Queen on his way home from worshipping in Jerusalem. He was seated in his chariot reading Isaiah.

The Spirit impels Philip to go and engage him. He asks him if he understands what he is reading, and the man answers, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” (8:31), and he invites Philip into the chariot. The passage he is reading is about the suffering servant: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter . . .” (Is 53:7). Philip, using this scripture, proclaims to the man the good news about Jesus. When they come by some water, the eunuch asks if there is any reason why he may not be baptized.

A Jerusalem Bible note says that there is a verse, verse 37, that is an ancient gloss preserved in the Western Text that says “’If you believe with all your heart, you may.’ And he replied, ‘I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.’” The verse is omitted in the NRSV and in the Jerusalem Bible translation (also the Good News version).

Philip does baptize the man. “When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing” (8:39). Philip finds himself in Azotus (a town right on the Mediterranean in Gaza) and there proclaims the good news to all the towns between there and Caesarea (8:40).

 

Daily Bible Reading: Sirach [Ecclesiasticus] 14 and Acts 7:45-59

Sirach 14 – “Happy the man whose own soul does not accuse him, and who has never given up hope” (14:2).

I can relate to this one very deeply. I have not always been a “believer.” Or, it’s more complicated than that – I have not always felt comfortable with the very deep sense I always seemed to have that there was/is a God. I’ve always had a deep intuition that there must be, but my “reason” has not always been comfortable with that intuition. For some years I just turned my back on religion, but eventually decided it was more “rational” for me to concede that a good deal of what I most deeply “rested on” had to do with an acceptance of the divine, a connection with the “cloud of witnesses” the Judeo-Christian tradition offered me. So I again become a person of “faith” and “hope.” Can I KNOW that there is a God? Can I KNOW that the Christian message is THE TRUTH? I cannot KNOW. But I can live by it; I can rest comfortably in it; I can leave this life knowing that I lived well, lived faithful to a message that raises me to life every day, every minute.

“The eye of the grasping man is not content with his portion, greed shrivels up the soul” (9).

“My son, treat yourself as well as you can afford, and bring worthy offerings to the Lord. . . . Do not refuse yourself the good things of today, do not let your share of what is lawfully desired pass you by” (14:11-14).

“Every living thing grows old like a garment, the age-old law is ‘Death must be’. Like foliage growing on a bushy tree, some leaves falling, others growing, so are the generations of flesh and blood: one dies, another is born” (14:17-18).

Acts 7:45-59 - He tells of the building of the Temple by Solomon, and God’s rejection of the idea of being given a home in anything man-made, but does not connect David to this. He simply repeats the passage from Isaiah (Is 66), which says, “Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool” (7:49-50) The “Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands” (7:48).

                 

Then, to conclude, he calls them a “stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears . . .forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do” (7:51). They become enraged at him.

Suddenly, he has a vision of God’s glory and “Jesus standing at the right hand of God,” (7:55) which he proclaims to the people. At this they rush against him, drag him out of the city and stone him, laying their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. Stephen kneels and cries out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them,” and he dies (7:60).

The interesting thing about Stephens’ preaching to me is his reliance upon a narrative approach to elucidate what it is God wants the people to understand. Stephen’s memory of the details of the story is not perfect—it is as he remembers it, that God calls Abraham out of Mesopotamia (not Haran), that Moses is forty or eighty or one hundred and twenty at different points along the way. He clearly uses the numbers in a schematic kind of way, probably from an extra-biblical tradition. This shows that it is the community’s use of the story that counts as much as the details of the story itself.

The points of the story that seem important to Stephen are the continuity of God’s care for his people and work to redeem them, the tendency of the people to reject his prophets, particularly Moses and by implication Jesus who is for Stephen clearly the prophet God was to raise up “like Moses.” And the particular point Stephen wants the people to hear is that the time of the Temple is over. God does not dwell in it, but in Jesus and in the creation. It is hard to know if the thing that makes the people murderously mad is his accusation of their stiff-necked refusal to be led by God, his denigration of the Temple or his claim to see Jesus at God’s right hand—I rather think it was that.