Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

You shook earth to the foundations,
    ripped open huge crevasses.
Heal the breaks! Everything’s
    coming apart at the seams.

^3-5 You made your people look doom in the face,
    then gave us cheap wine to drown our troubles.
Then you planted a flag to rally your people,
    an unfurled flag to look to for courage.
Now do something quickly, answer right now,
    so the one you love best is saved.

^6-8 That’s when God spoke in holy splendor,
    “Bursting with joy,
I make a present of Shechem,
    I hand out Succoth Valley as a gift.
Gilead’s in my pocket,
    to say nothing of Manasseh.
Ephraim’s my hard hat,
    Judah my hammer;
Moab’s a scrub bucket,
    I mop the floor with Moab,
Spit on Edom,
    rain fireworks all over Philistia.”

^9-10 Who will take me to the thick of the fight?
    Who’ll show me the road to Edom?
You aren’t giving up on us, are you, God?
    refusing to go out with our troops?

^11-12 Give us help for the hard task;
    human help is worthless.
In God we’ll do our very best;
    he’ll flatten the opposition for good.

^10-12 “The people will end up following God.
    I will roar like a lion—
Oh, how I’ll roar!
    My frightened children will come running from the west.
Like frightened birds they’ll come from Egypt,
    from Assyria like scared doves.
I’ll move them back into their homes.”
    God’s Word!

12 ^1-5 Ephraim, obsessed with god-fantasies,
    chases ghosts and phantoms.
He tells lies nonstop,
    soul-destroying lies.
Both Ephraim and Judah made deals with Assyria
    and tried to get an inside track with Egypt.
God is bringing charges against Israel.
    Jacob’s children are hauled into court to be punished.
In the womb, that heel, Jacob, got the best of his brother.
    When he grew up, he tried to get the best of God.
But God would not be bested.
    God bested him.
Brought to his knees,
    Jacob wept and prayed.
God found him at Bethel.
    That’s where he spoke with him.
God is God-of-the-Angel-Armies,
    God-Revealed, God-Known.

^7-8 The businessmen engage in wholesale fraud.
    They love to rip people off!
Ephraim boasted, “Look, I’m rich!
    I’ve made it big!
And look how well I’ve covered my tracks:
    not a hint of fraud, not a sign of sin!”

^9-11 “But not so fast! I’m God, your God!
    Your God from the days in Egypt!
I’m going to put you back to living in tents,
    as in the old days when you worshiped in the wilderness.
I speak through the prophets
    to give clear pictures of the way things are.
    Using prophets, I tell revealing stories.
I show Gilead rampant with religious scandal
    and Gilgal teeming with empty-headed religion.
I expose their worship centers as
    stinking piles of garbage in their gardens.”

^12-14 Are you going to repeat the life of your ancestor Jacob?
    He ran off guilty to Aram,
Then sold his soul to get ahead,
    and made it big through treachery and deceit.
Your real identity is formed through God-sent prophets,
    who led you out of Egypt and served as faithful pastors.
As it is, Ephraim has continually
    and inexcusably insulted God.
Now he has to pay for his life-destroying ways.
    His Master will do to him what he has done.