Daily Lectionary Readings for Friday 3 November 2006

Daily Lectionary Readings for Friday 3 November 2006

Read the full texts at: http://www.pcusa.org/cgi-bin/lectiond.cgi

DAILY LECTIONARY:

Morning: Psalm 84:1-12
Nahum 2:13-3:7
Revelation 13:1-10
Luke 12:13-31
Evening: Psalm 25:1-22


An excerpt from Luke:
¹⁶Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly. ¹⁷And he thought to himself, 'What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?" ¹⁸Then he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. ¹⁹And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' ²⁰But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' ²¹So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God."

I find this passage really compelling; in particular this sentence: "The things you have prepared, whose will they be?" We are gearing up for this year's annual pledge campaign, and I wonder - every time we do the budget - what is a faithful spending plan? What is a faithful distribution of church resources? Are we giving enough away to others as a community? To what extent are all these capital improvements truly faithful, and to what extent are they storing up treasures on earth and not in heaven (even necessary things like fixing plumbing leaks, roof leaks, and water seepage through the basement walls)? What are we worried about in this time of surpluses and budgets that run in the black?

Those kinds of questions are the ones I hope we can talk about in the next few months and years - the kinds of questions that matter.

rpv