Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

Be Gracious to Your Servants

Psalm 123

¹⁶ “As for you, do not pray for this people. Do not offer any supplication or petition for them, nor entreat Me, because I will not hear you. ¹⁷ Do you not see what they are doing in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? ¹⁸ The children gather wood, the fathers light the fire and the women knead the dough to make sacrificial cakes to the queen of heaven. Moreover, they pour out drink offerings to other gods in order to provoke Me to anger. ¹⁹ But am I the One they are provoking?” declares Adonai. “Are they not vexing themselves to their own shame?”

²⁰ Therefore thus says Adonai Elohim: “My anger and My wrath is about to be poured out on this place—on man and beast, and on the trees of the field and the fruit of the land—and it will burn and not be quenched.”

²¹ Thus says Adonai-Tzva’ot, the God of Israel: “Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices and eat the meat! ²² For on the day that I brought your fathers out of the land of Egypt I did not speak to them nor did I command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices, ²³ but I explicitly commanded them: ‘Obey My voice and I will be your God to you and you will be My people. Walk in all the ways that I command you that it may go well with you.’ ²⁴ But they did not listen or pay attention. Instead they followed their own counsel, in the stubbornness of their evil heart. They have gone backward and not forward, ²⁵ from the day your fathers left the land of Egypt until today. Although I sent to you all My servants the prophets, daily and persistently, ²⁶ they did not listen to Me or pay attention. Rather, they stiffened their neck, doing more evil than their fathers.

⁷ Look at what is before your eyes.^[a] If anyone is confident in himself that he belongs to Messiah, let him reconsider that just as he belongs to Messiah, so also do we. ⁸ For even if I boast a little more about our authority—which the Lord gave for building you up and not for tearing you down—I will not be put to shame. ⁹ Not that I would try to terrify you by my letters— ¹⁰ for they say, “His letters are weighty and strong, but his presence in person is weak and his speech of no account.” ¹¹ Let such a person consider this, that what we are in word through letters when we are absent, we also are in action when we are present.