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The Lord is a great king: come, let us adore him.

Year: C(I). Psalm week: 3. Liturgical Colour: Green.

Other saints: Saint Botolph (7th century)

East Anglia

Botolph was born of noble Saxon parentage in the 7th century. With his brother, Adulph, he was educated and received the Benedictine habit in Belgian Gaul. He returned to England and became one of the foremost missionaries of the 7th century. He founded an abbey at Ikanhoe, formerly thought to be near Boston in Lincolnshire but now generally supposed to Iken in Suffolk.

East Anglian Ordo

About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:

Second Reading: St Cyprian (210 - 258)

Cyprian was born in Carthage and spent most of his life in the practice of the law. He was converted to Christianity, and was made bishop of Carthage in 249. He steered the church through troubled times, including the persecution of the emperor Decius, when he went into hiding so as to be able to continue looking after the church. In 258 the persecution of the emperor Valerian began. Cyprian was first exiled and then, on the 14th of September, executed, after a trial notable for the calm and courtesy shown by both sides.

Cyprian’s many letters and treatises shed much light on a formative period in the Church’s history, and are valuable both for their doctrine and for the picture they paint of a group of people in constant peril of their lives but still determined to keep the faith.

Liturgical colour: green

The theological virtue of hope is symbolized by the colour green, just as the burning fire of love is symbolized by red. Green is the colour of growing things, and hope, like them, is always new and always fresh. Liturgically, green is the colour of Ordinary Time, the orderly sequence of weeks through the year, a season in which we are being neither single-mindedly penitent (in purple) nor overwhelmingly joyful (in white).

Mid-morning reading (Terce)	Jeremiah 22:3
Practise honesty and integrity; rescue the man who has been wronged from the hands of his oppressor; do not exploit the stranger, the orphan, the widow; do no violence; shed no innocent blood in this place.

Noon reading (Sext)	Deuteronomy 15:7-8
Is there a poor man among you, one of your brothers, in any town of yours in the land that the Lord your God is giving you? Do not harden your heart or close your hand against that poor brother of yours, but be open-handed with him and lend him enough for his needs.

Afternoon reading (None)	Proverbs 22:22-23
Because a man is poor, do not therefore cheat him, nor, at the city gate, oppress anybody in affliction; for the Lord takes up their cause, and extorts the life of their extortioners.