The Daily Lectionary, Pentecost 3A

The Daily Lectionary, Pentecost 3A

Readings for the Week of the Third Sunday of Pentecost, Year A

Join us for Morning Prayer in the chapel, Monday through Friday* at 8:30am, where we read and discuss these Scriptures and pray together. We do the same during Vespers in the parsonage Sunday evenings at 6pm. Join us! The parsonage is across the street from the church. 

Our readings for the week of the Third Sunday after Pentecost are listed below. Each verse is linked. Click the link to read online or read in your Bible. The additional reading each day speaks to the common conversation between the three readings.

Sunday: Ecclesiastes 1:1–11; Acts 8:26–40; Luke 11:1–13

"...mankind naturally do[es] not feel and acknowledge their dependence upon their Maker. The language of the natural heart is that which is rebuked by the Apostle: “To-day, or to-morrow, I will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain.” God is not spontaneously in the thoughts and plans of men, and human enterprises have little reference to the sustaining and controlling power of the Almighty... 

We shall find this practical atheism, whether we scrutinize the narrow life of the individual, or the broader life of the nation or the race. How rare it is to meet a man imbued with the Old Testament spirit, saying, with Moses, in the outset of every undertaking, “If thy presence go not with me, carry me not up hence.” How few possess the spirit of the patriarchs, who were bold as lions provided that God led the way, but timid as lambs when they could not see his footsteps. Many men rely upon second causes, and never fall back upon the great First Cause." 

William G. T. Shedd, Sermons to the Spiritual Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884), 117. 

Monday: Ecclesiastes 2:1–15; Galatians 1:1–17; Matthew 13:44–52

What is, however, on the contrary, the kingdom of God, or of the Lord Christ? Count that up for yourself, and say, what is the creature in comparison with the Creator, and the world in comparison with God? For if all heaven and earth were mine alone, what would I have as over against God? Not as much as a little drop of water or a particle of dust in comparison with the entire ocean; besides, it is such a treasure as cannot cease or diminish and become smaller; so that both as to its greatness and durability it cannot be measured or comprehended by any human heart or senses; and shall I so shamefully reject and give up God and his kingdom, that I may take this dirty, deadly belly-kingdom in preference to that divine, imperishable one that gives me eternal life, righteousness, peace, joy and salvation?

Martin Luther, Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, trans. Charles A. Hay (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1892), 350–351.

Tuesday: Ecclesiastes 2:16–26; Galatians 1:18–2:10; Matthew 13:53–58

Even now, in the midst of all their pursuits, we would ask the ungodly. Whether they have ever found any solid satisfaction in the vanities of time and sense? and has not the creature invariably proved to them “a broken cistern, that could hold no water?” Yes assuredly, they have “spent their money for that which is not bread, and laboured for that which satisfieth not” or rather, as it is well expressed, “Have sought to fill their belly with the east wind.” And this is what God has repeatedly forewarned them of in his blessed word: “Let not him that is deceived trust in vanity; for vanity shall be his recompence.” And if even now, “in the time of their sufficiency, they be in straits,” how much move, when they come into trouble, may it be asked, “What fruit have ye of these things whereof ye are now ashamed?” Will their pleasures, their riches, or their honours, which they once sought with such avidity, then comfort them? Alas! how little can such things do to assuage even the pains of a diseased body, and much more to pacify a guilty conscience, and to compose the mind, in the prospect of death and judgment! Truly, “miserable comforters are they all.” Yet to them will God leave us in the day of our calamity, if we will persist in making them our idols during the season of our health.

Charles Simeon, Horae Homileticae: Jeremiah to Daniel, vol. 9 (London: Holdsworth and Ball, 1832), 25.

Wednesday: Ecclesiastes 3:1–15; Galatians 2:11–21; Matthew 14:1–12

We are the victims of a mental or moral astigmatism, which sees a single point of truth as two. We see God and man, divine sovereignty and human freedom, Christ’s divine nature and Christ’s human nature, the natural and the supernatural, respectively, as two disconnected facts, when perhaps deeper insight would see but one. Astronomy has its centripetal and centrifugal forces, yet they are doubtless one force. The child cannot hold two oranges at once in its little hand. Negro preacher: “You can’t carry two watermelons under one arm.” Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 1:2 — “In nature’s infinite book of secresy, A little I can read.” Cooke, Credentials of Science, 34 — “Man’s progress in knowledge has been so constantly and rapidly accelerated that more has been gained during the lifetime of men still living than during all human history before.” And yet we may say with D’Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 248 — “Man’s position in the universe is eccentric. God alone is at the centre. To him alone is the orbit of truth completely displayed.… There are circumstances in which to us the onward movement of truth may seem a retrogression.” William Watson, Collected Poems, 271—“Think not thy wisdom can illume away /  The ancient tanglement of night and day. / Enough to acknowledge both, and both revere: / They see not clearliest who see all things clear.”

Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1907), 34–35.

Thursday: Ecclesiastes 3:16–4:3; Galatians 3:1–14; Matthew 14:13–21

The atheist has no refuge from such observations and reflections as those recorded in Ecclesiastes 3:16. But the godly man turns from earth to heaven, and rests in the conviction that there is a Divine and righteous Judge, to whose tribunal all men must come, and by whose just decisions every destiny must be decided. 1. All characters, the righteous and the wicked alike, will be judged by the Lord of all. Has the unjust escaped the penalty due from a human tribunal? He shall not escape the righteous judgment of God. Has the innocent been unjustly sentenced by an earthly and perhaps corrupt judge? There is for him a court of appeal, and his righteousness shall shine as the noonday. 2. All kinds of works shall meet with retribution; not only the acts of private life, but also acts of a judicial and governmental kind. The unjust judge shall meet with his recompense, and the wronged and persecuted shall not be unavenged.

H. D. M. Spence-Jones, ed., Ecclesiastes, The Pulpit Commentary (London; New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1909), 77.

Friday: Ecclesiastes 5:1–7; Galatians 3:15–22; Matthew 14:22–36

Luther defended Wyclif’s definition at the Leipsic Disputation of 1519, in spite of its condemnation by the Council of Constance. But his own idea was that the real nature of the church was defined by the words following its mention in the creed — “the communion of saints,” taking the word “saints” in its Pauline sense. These (although sin may still cling to them) are sanctified by God through his word and sacraments — sacraments not depending upon an organized, episcopally ordained clergy, but committed to the church as a whole; it is their faith, called forth by the word of God, which makes them righteous and accepted members of Christ and heirs of eternal life. 

Samuel Macauley Jackson, ed., The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (New York; London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1908–1914), 83.

Saturday: Ecclesiastes 5:8–20; Galatians 3:23–4:11; Matthew 15:1–20

God forbid that I should glory. In nothing external would St. Paul glory. The cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; i.e. “the death and passion which Christ underwent for me.” “In the atoning death, as the means of my reconcilement with God.” “Not in my suffering for Christ, but in His sufferings for me.” The Apostle is proud of the Cross of Christ as the ground of his salvation and of his hope for eternal life and a blessed immortality. All this would be but the raving of a maniac, unless Jesus truly were the Son of God, the Saviour of mankind. 

Henry Eyster Jacobs, George Frederick Spieker, and Carl A. Swensson, Annotations on the Epistles of Paul to 1 Corinthians 7–16, 2 Corinthians and Galatians, ed. Henry Eyster Jacobs, vol. VIII, The Lutheran Commentary (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1897), 403.

*We do not meet in the chapel on Saturdays. On Sundays, we meet in the parsonage at 6pm to discuss the readings.

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