Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)
The sons of Korah wrote this psalm for the music leader.
A prayer for peace[a]
85 Lord, you have blessed your land.
You have made Jacob's descendants strong again.[b]
2 You forgave your people's sins.
You took away their guilt.
Selah
3 You stopped being so angry with them.
You did not punish them any more.
4 But now turn back to us,
and make us strong again, God.
You are the one who rescues us.
Please stop being angry with us.
5 Will you continue to be angry with us for ever?
Will you be angry with our children too?
6 Please turn back to us
and give us new life!
Then your people will be happy
and they will praise you.
7 Lord, show us again your faithful love!
Please rescue us!
8 Now I will listen to what the Lord God says.
He will give peace to his people,
to those who serve him.
But they must not turn back
to do foolish things again.
9 Yes, God will soon rescue his people who serve him.
Then we will see his glory again in our land.
10 God will be faithful to us
and he will love us with his faithful love.
His justice and his peace will join together,
like dear friends.
11 Faithful truth will grow like a plant in the ground.
Justice will look down from the sky above.[c]
12 Yes! The Lord will bless us with many good things.
Plenty of food will grow in our land.
13 Justice will go before our God,
and it will make a way for him to walk on.
11 Then the people of Judah and the people of Israel will come together again. They will choose a single leader to rule them. They will return to live in their own land. They will know that the day of Jezreel is a great day.
2 Then you will tell your brothers, ‘Ammi: you are my people.’ You will tell your sisters, ‘Ruhamah: he loves you.’
The Lord warns the Israelites
2 My children, warn your mother![a] She is no longer my wife. I am not her husband. Tell her that she must stop living like a prostitute. She must stop having sex with other men instead of me. 3 If she does not return to me, I will remove all her clothes. She will have nothing to wear, like the day when she was born. She will be ashamed. Her life will be useless and empty, like a dry land that has no water. Then I will leave her to die because she has no water to drink. 4 I will not show love to her children, because she became pregnant with them as a prostitute. 5 Yes, their mother has lived as a prostitute. She became pregnant because she had sex with other men instead of with her husband. She should be ashamed. She herself said, ‘I will go and sleep with my lovers. They give me food and water. They give me wool, linen, olive oil and wine.’[b]
6 So I will stop her living like that. I will put thorn bushes around her, like a wall. Then she will not be able to go anywhere that she likes. 7 She will run after her lovers, but she will not catch them. She will look for them, but she will not find them. Then she will say, ‘Now I will return to my husband, as before. Life was better for me then than it is now.’
8 She did not realize that I was the one who gave her everything that she needed. I gave her grain, wine and olive oil. I even gave her lots of silver and gold. But she used my gifts to worship Baal instead of me. 9 So now I will take back the grain and the new wine that I gave her at harvest time. I will take away the wool and the linen. She will have no clothes to cover her bare body. 10 I will remove her clothes for all her lovers to see her as she really is. Nobody will be able to rescue her from my power.
11 I will stop the festivals that she enjoys each year. I will stop her feasts at the times of a new moon and on Sabbath days. I will stop all her parties.[c] 12 I will destroy her vines and her fig trees. She said that those were the things that her lovers paid to her. But I will make her gardens become like a forest. Only wild animals will eat the fruit from those trees. 13 I will punish her because she burned incense to the idols of Baal. I will punish her because she made herself beautiful with jewels when she went to sleep with her lovers. I will punish her because she did those things but she forgot about me.
That is what the Lord says.
The Lord still loves his people
14 But listen! One day, I will speak kind words to her. I will lead her into the wilderness. I will tell her that I love her.[d] 15 There, I will give her the vineyards that she had before. I will change Trouble Valley into a place where there is hope.[e] She will be happy with me there, as she was when she was young. That was the time when she came out of Egypt.[f]
Jesus stops a storm
22 One day, Jesus got into a boat with his disciples. He said to them, ‘We should go across to the other side of the lake.’ So they started to cross the lake. 23 While they sailed in the boat, Jesus began to sleep. Then a strong wind started to blow across the lake. Water began to fill the boat and they were in danger. 24 So the disciples went to Jesus and they woke him. ‘Master, master, we will die here in the water!’ they said.
Then Jesus got up and he spoke strongly to the wind and to the water. ‘Stop!’ he said. The wind stopped immediately and the water became flat. 25 Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Why do you not believe in me?’
All this frightened the disciples and they were very surprised. They asked each other, ‘Who is this man? He even tells the wind and the water what to do. He speaks and they obey him!’
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