This blog provides a meditation on the Episcopal daily readings along with a headline from world news:
South African Police kill 30 miners 
Psalm 102
Prayer to the Eternal King for Help
A prayer of one afflicted, when faint and pleading before the Lord.
1 Hear my prayer, O Lord; let my cry come to you.
2 Do not hide your face from me on the day of my distress.
Incline your ear to me; answer me speedily on the day when I call.
3 For my days pass away like smoke, and my bones burn like a furnace.
4 My heart is stricken and withered like grass; I am too wasted to eat my bread.
5 Because of my loud groaning my bones cling to my skin.
6 I am like an owl of the wilderness, like a little owl of the waste places.
7 I lie awake; I am like a lonely bird on the housetop.
8 All day long my enemies taunt me; those who deride me use my name for a curse.
9 For I eat ashes like bread, and mingle tears with my drink,
10 because of your indignation and anger; for you have lifted me up and thrown me aside.
11 My days are like an evening shadow; I wither away like grass.
12 But you, O Lord, are enthroned for ever; your name endures to all generations.
13 You will rise up and have compassion on Zion, for it is time to favour it; the appointed time has come.
14 For your servants hold its stones dear, and have pity on its dust.
15 The nations will fear the name of the Lord, and all the kings of the earth your glory.
16 For the Lord will build up Zion; he will appear in his glory.
17 He will regard the prayer of the destitute, and will not despise their prayer.
18 Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet unborn may praise the Lord:
19 that he looked down from his holy height, from heaven the Lord looked at the earth,
20 to hear the groans of the prisoners, to set free those who were doomed to die;
21 so that the name of the Lord may be declared in Zion, and his praise in Jerusalem,
22 when peoples gather together, and kingdoms, to worship the Lord.
23 He has broken my strength in mid-course; he has shortened my days.
24 ‘O my God,’ I say, ‘do not take me away at the mid-point of my life,
you whose years endure throughout all generations.’
25 Long ago you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.
26 They will perish, but you endure; they will all wear out like a garment.
You change them like clothing, and they pass away;
27 but you are the same, and your years have no end.
28 The children of your servants shall live secure; their offspring shall be established in your presence.
This is not a comfortable psalm. Its images of weakness and desolation are powerful; its expressions of trust in God’s rescue are, at best, hopeful. At first it seems clear that this is an individual prayer, directed to God by someone suffering a life-threatening illness. But then the affirmation of God’s help to Zion, his holy city, which stands for the whole people of Israel, makes us wonder if the apparently personal details of weakness are to be applied to the nation in its destruction by the Babylonians. At any rate, the individual sufferer unites his personal need with the need of his nation. “Let this be rccorded to give faith to new generations that the Lord looked down…” But does the psalm record that the Lord did so? No, it does not, and by this fact leaves the implication that the generations to come will have the same difficulty in trusting the Lord as the psalmist does.
The faith of the psalmist in the being of God does not falter-he is the high and holy One who lives eternally- but he questions what God does for the poor creatures who perish while God endures.
It’s good to have this searching prayer in our bible. Honest believers who suffer personal or communal disaster will identify with its pain and its plea to God. Certainly the Christian believer will want to answer that God has done more than “looked down”: he has come down in Jesus Christ to share the world’s weakness and woe, and to lift up his creatures by the gift of life which conquers evil, suffering and death. About this orthodox faith, I have a question which I think the psalmist would also have asked: is “eternal life” simply a metaphor for a courageous and hopeful attitude to life or does it have substance, the kind of substance the scholars call “eschatological”-judgement, reward, punishment, hell and especially heaven. Of course these concepts are themselves metaphors for things that are beyond our understanding, but that’s just the point: is my faith a relationship with a love which is beyond my understanding and my universe, or is it a specially complicated way of whistling in the dark?
The story of Jesus encourages me to trust the love that moves the sun and the other stars, in the hope that it’s real.
John 4:43-54
Jesus Heals an Official’s Son
46 Then he came again to Cana in Galilee where he had changed the water into wine. Now there was a royal official whose son lay ill in Capernaum.47When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death.48Then Jesus said to him, ‘Unless you* see signs and wonders you will not believe.’49The official said to him, ‘Sir, come down before my little boy dies.’50Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your son will live.’ The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and started on his way.51As he was going down, his slaves met him and told him that his child was alive.52So he asked them the hour when he began to recover, and they said to him, ‘Yesterday at one in the afternoon the fever left him.’53The father realized that this was the hour when Jesus had said to him, ‘Your son will live.’ So he himself believed, along with his whole household.54Now this was the second sign that Jesus did after coming from Judea to Galilee. 
The official has heard that Jesus is a man of God and accordingly asks him to come and heal his son. Jesus warns him that he gives no proof of his identity. The official insists he’s not asking for proof, just for help. Jesus responds by telling him that help has already been given and challenges him to act on that word. When the man does so he discovers the truth of Jesus’ word. The author wants us to see this story as a parable of faith: the only way of testing our trust in Jesus is to act upon it. Like the official we know good things about Jesus but the only way of knowing that he’s the resurrection and the life is to take him at his word.
Both of today’s passages raise questions about faith, to which I’ve tried to give the biblical answer. The truth of God cannot be proven, but this does not mean it is unreasonable; rather it goes beyond reason. The Zen masters compare reason to a hundred- foot pole and ask the question, “Where do you go beyond the top of the hundred- foot pole? (Into the emptiness, they suggest, the emptiness which is also the truth; but you have to GO to find out!)
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