Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)
Psalm 123
A pilgrimage song.
123 I raise my eyes to you—
you who rule heaven.
2 Just as the eyes of servants attend to their masters’ hand,
just as the eyes of a female servant attend to her mistress’ hand—
that’s how our eyes attend to the Lord our God
until he has mercy on us.
3 Have mercy on us, Lord! Have mercy
because we’ve had more than enough shame.
4 We’ve had more than enough mockery from the self-confident,
more than enough shame from the proud.
27 When you tell them all this, they won’t listen to you. When you call to them, they won’t respond. 28 Therefore, say to them: This nation neither obeys the Lord its God nor accepts correction; truth has disappeared; it has vanished from their lips.
29 Cut off your hair and cast it away;
grieve on the well-traveled paths.
The Lord has rejected you
and has cast off a generation that provokes his anger.
30 The people of Judah have done what displeases me, declares the Lord. They have corrupted the temple that bears my name by setting up their disgusting idols. 31 They have built shrines at Topheth in the Ben-hinnom Valley to burn their sons and daughters in the fire, although I never commanded such a thing, nor did it ever cross my mind. 32 So now the time is coming, declares the Lord, when people will no longer speak of Topheth or the Ben-hinnom Valley, but the Carnage Valley. They will bury in Topheth until no space is left. 33 The corpses of this people will be food for birds and wild animals, with no one to drive them off. 34 I will silence the sound of joy and delight as well as the voice of bride and bridegroom in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, for the country will be reduced to a wasteland.
Discussions about following
18 Now when Jesus saw the crowd, he ordered his disciples to go over to the other side of the lake. 19 A legal expert came and said to him, “Teacher, I’ll follow you wherever you go.”
20 Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens, and the birds in the sky have nests, but the Human One[a] has no place to lay his head.”
21 Another man, one of his disciples, said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”
22 But Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”
Copyright © 2011 by Common English Bible