Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

28 I plead with you to help me, Lord, for you are my Rock of safety. If you refuse to answer me, I might as well give up and die. ² Lord, I lift my hands to heaven^[a] and implore your help. Oh, listen to my cry.

³ Don’t punish me with all the wicked ones who speak so sweetly to their neighbors while planning to murder them. ⁴ Give them the punishment they so richly deserve! Measure it out to them in proportion to their wickedness; pay them back for all their evil deeds. ⁵ They care nothing for God or what he has done or what he has made; therefore God will dismantle them like old buildings, never to be rebuilt again.

⁶ Oh, praise the Lord, for he has listened to my pleadings! ⁷ He is my strength, my shield from every danger. I trusted in him, and he helped me. Joy rises in my heart until I burst out in songs of praise to him. ⁸ The Lord protects his people and gives victory to his anointed king.

⁹ Defend your people, Lord; defend and bless your chosen ones. Lead them like a shepherd and carry them forever in your arms.

40 ^1-3 Some time later it so happened that the king of Egypt became angry with both his chief baker and his chief butler, so he jailed them both in the prison where Joseph was, in the castle of Potiphar, the captain of the guard, who was the chief executioner. ⁴ They remained under arrest there for quite some time, and Potiphar assigned Joseph to wait on them. ⁵ One night each of them had a dream. ⁶ The next morning Joseph noticed that they looked dejected and sad.

⁷ “What in the world is the matter?” he asked.

⁸ And they replied, “We both had dreams last night, but there is no one here to tell us what they mean.”

“Interpreting dreams is God’s business,” Joseph replied. “Tell me what you saw.”

^9-10 The butler told his dream first. “In my dream,” he said, “I saw a vine with three branches that began to bud and blossom, and soon there were clusters of ripe grapes. ¹¹ I was holding Pharaoh’s wine cup in my hand, so I took the grapes and squeezed the juice into it, and gave it to him to drink.”

¹² “I know what the dream means,” Joseph said. “The three branches mean three days! ¹³ Within three days Pharaoh is going to take you out of prison and give you back your job again as his chief butler. ¹⁴ And please have some pity on me when you are back in his favor, and mention me to Pharaoh, and ask him to let me out of here. ¹⁵ For I was kidnapped from my homeland among the Hebrews, and now this—here I am in jail when I did nothing to deserve it.”

¹⁶ When the chief baker saw that the first dream had such a good meaning, he told his dream to Joseph, too.

“In my dream,” he said, “there were three baskets of pastries on my head. ¹⁷ In the top basket were all kinds of bakery goods for Pharaoh, but the birds came and ate them.”

^18-19 “The three baskets mean three days,” Joseph told him. “Three days from now Pharaoh will take off your head and impale your body on a pole, and the birds will come and pick off your flesh!”

²⁰ Pharaoh’s birthday came three days later, and he held a party for all of his officials and household staff. He sent for his chief butler and chief baker, and they were brought to him from the prison. ²¹ Then he restored the chief butler to his former position; ²² but he sentenced the chief baker to be impaled, just as Joseph had predicted. ²³ Pharaoh’s wine taster, however, promptly forgot all about Joseph, never giving him a thought.

²³ Then he got into a boat and started across the lake with his disciples. ²⁴ Suddenly a terrible storm came up, with waves higher than the boat. But Jesus was asleep.

²⁵ The disciples went to him and wakened him, shouting, “Lord, save us! We’re sinking!”

²⁶ But Jesus answered, “O you men of little faith! Why are you so frightened?” Then he stood up and rebuked the wind and waves, and the storm subsided and all was calm. ²⁷ The disciples just sat there, awed! “Who is this,” they asked themselves, “that even the winds and the sea obey him?”