Tag Archives: Saint Paul

Sunday, January 15th

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SECOND SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY

Isaiah 49:1–7
Psalm 40:1–11
1 Corinthians 1:1–9
John 1:29–42

PRAYER OF THE DAY: Holy God, our strength and our redeemer, by your Spirit hold us forever, that through your grace we may worship you and faithfully serve you, follow you and joyfully find you, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

Our gospel lesson for this coming Sunday follows an episode in which John the Baptist is interviewed aggressively by the religious authorities from Jerusalem. In response to persistent questions about his identity, John tells us a good deal more about who he is not than who he is. But John’s reticence evaporates when he “sees Jesus coming toward him.” Suddenly, John has plenty to say! He speaks at great length about what he has seen. John tells us that he “saw the spirit descend as a dove from heaven, and it remained on him.” He has “seen and borne witness” that Jesus is the “Lamb of God.” How odd! How can you “see” the Spirit of God? What does the Spirit look like? How can you tell that the Spirit is “remaining” in any given space? Doesn’t Jesus tell us that the Spirit blows where she wills, that we hear the sound of her but know not where she comes from or where she is going? And what exactly did John the Baptist see to convince him that Jesus is the Lamb of God-whatever that might be? John doesn’t even try to explain himself. He simply points Jesus out to a couple of his disciples and says “Behold!” We don’t know what these two disciples saw in Jesus or understood about John’s witness. But what they saw and heard was enough to convince them to follow Jesus.

We put a lot of stock in our sense of sight. “Seeing is believing,” we are told. But our ability to process what we see is highly overrated. Study after study reveals that numerous factors influence both what we see and how we remember what we see. E.g. Lorenza, Sheena M., Factors Affecting the Accuracy of Eyewitness Identification, The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research, vol. 6 (c. 2003 by Fisher Publications). Our brain does a good job of distorting our sight. When something we see does not fit with our internal narrative about the way things are, our brain “corrects” our vision. That is why proof reading your own work is so difficult. You know what is supposed to be on the page. For that reason, your brain fills in the missing comas, conjunctions and letters you inadvertently omitted from the text. You read right over your mistakes because you see what you know is supposed to be there instead of what is. That goes a long way toward explaining how racial stereotypes persist in spite of ample evidence debunking them, why we find ourselves judging people we have known for only seconds and why there are some people in our lives who take offense at everything we say, never appreciate anything we do for them and never respond to any friendly overtures. Once the mind is made up, the eye seems always to follow suit. Thus, you can have 20/20 vision and still be blind.

We would all like to believe in a world where the truth is crystal clear, where the line between good and evil is stark and plain, where everyone we meet falls into recognizable categories. I suspect that is why the press is one of our most hated institutions among people of nearly all ideological persuasions. A good reporter uncovers facts that expose the errors in our scripts, blur the distinctions we use to make sense out of our chaotic existence and present to us a world that is nuanced, complex and too big to fit into our religious, political, ideological paradigms. Contrary to our modernist creed, we are not rational beings. Neither are we capable of “objectivity.” We believe what we want to believe and the facts (at least the discomforting ones) be damned. Anyone who has ever had the unpleasant task of arguing with a racist (or “white nationalist” as they like to be called these days) knows what I am talking about. As Simon & Garfunkel so aptly put it, “A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.” Perhaps we have it backwards. Maybe you can’t see truly until you believe truly.

From the very beginning, John’s gospel provokes us to question everything we think we see and know. In these opening verses from our gospel lesson, John propounds mysteries that will deepen and unfold as his narrative builds. There are “signs” in Jesus’ ministry that are more suggestive than definitive. Every time we think we have a fix on Jesus, he eludes our conceptual grasp and coaxes us deeper into the riddle of his identity. At the conclusion of the gospel, we find the disciples as confused and directionless as ever. Even after witnessing Jesus’ resurrection, receiving the breath of his Spirit and being sent out into the world by him as he was sent by the Father, they still can find nothing better to do with their lives than go fishing. But Jesus will not let them be. He appears one last time, calling them to leave behind the last ties to life as they once knew it and follow him. In the end, there really is no faithful response to Jesus other than to inhale the Spirit he breaths upon us and follow him deeper into the Trinitarian mystery of love between the Father and the Son. In the process, we discover the poverty of our vision, unlearn all that we thought we knew and so begin at last to see with new eyes.

“Let not, therefore, but travail therein till thou feel list. For at the first time when thou dost it, thou findest but a darkness; and as it were a cloud of unknowing, thou knowest not what, saving that thou feelest in thy will a naked intent unto God. This darkness and this cloud is, howsoever thou dost, betwixt thee and thy God, and letteth thee that thou mayest neither see Him clearly by light of understanding in thy reason, nor feel Him in sweetness of love in thine affection. And therefore shape thee to bide in this darkness as long as thou mayest, evermore crying after Him that thou lovest. For if ever thou shalt feel Him or see Him, as it may be here, it behoveth always to be in this cloud in this darkness. And if thou wilt busily travail as I bid thee, I trust in His mercy that thou shalt come thereto.”  The Cloud of Unknowing, (an anonymous 14th Century English monk’s sublime expression of contemplative discipleship).

Here is a poem about the frailty of sight and the power of vision.

Vision

My vision isn’t what it used to be.
Time was when I could read signs
A quarter mile up the road.
I could make out the tree line
On mountain ranges, mark
The glacial frontier and the
Divide between ice and ice cold stone
With surgical precision and
Rock solid certainty.

Today, without specs,
I can barely discern the signs
In front of my face and wonder even so
If there is anything on them to be read.
Field and forest, ice and stone
All blend together into one
As life into death and I’ll be damned
If I can tell them apart from where I stand.
I squint at the horizon for signs of contrast,
Shape and defining form
But see only the blur of connectedness as,
It seems, did the great Monet in his declining years.
Yet lacking clarity, perhaps we see the more truly.

Source: anonymous

Isaiah 49:1–7

Once again the reading in Isaiah is taken from the second section of the book (Isaiah 40-55) authored in the main by an anonymous prophet speaking a message of salvation to the Jewish exiles living in Babylon during the 6th Century B.C.E. For more specifics, See Summary Article by Fred Gaiser, Professor of Old Testament, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN. This is the second of four “servant songs” in which the prophet sings both of his own calling and struggles and, more widely, of Israel’s calling to be God’s light to the nations. For a more thorough discussion of the “servant songs,” see my post of January 8th. As I noted last week, it is not always easy to discern where the prophet is speaking of himself and where he is speaking of Israel as a whole. For example, the Lord declares, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob…I will give you as a light to the nations.” Vs. 6. It seems likely that the prophet himself is the person addressed since he ministers to Israel. Most commentators seem to follow this view. I believe it is also possible, however, that the word is addressed to the Babylonian exiles whose return and restoration of Jerusalem will rally the “preserved of Israel” and so constitute a light to the nations. Again, these different interpretations are really a matter of emphasis. The prophet’s mission is inextricably bound up with that of Israel to the nations.

The first verse lets us know that the song as a whole is addressed to the nations: “Listen to me, O coastlands, and harken, you peoples from afar.” Vs.. 1. There are three stages of development according to Hebrew scriptural scholar Claus Westermann: 1) the election, call and equipment of the servant; 2) the servant’s despondency as a result of his perceived failure; 3) the servant’s new (or perhaps better understood) task. Westermann, Claus, Isaiah 40-66 (c. SCM Press Ltd 1969) p. 207. To the nations the prophet declares that he has been called to serve Israel’s God and Israel whose mission is to “glorify” God. Vs 3. Once again, the line between the identity and mission of the servant and that of Israel is necessarily blurry. The prophet/Israel is despondent because his life’s work/Israel’s history seems to have been in vain. Vs. 4. So far from glorifying God, Israel has become a despised refugee minority from a fallen nation.

In verse 5 the mood changes with the words “and now.” Though called to “bring Jacob back” to the Lord, such a calling is “to light a thing” for the servant. God declares that the servant will henceforth be given “as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Vs. 6.  Verse 7 does not appear to be part of the song set forth in verses 1-6. But it follows naturally from the servant song nonetheless. Though now deeply despised, ruled by foreign powers and oppressed, the day will come when “Kings shall see and arise; princes, and they shall prostrate themselves; because of the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.” Vs. 7. Though perhaps uttered at an earlier time in more vindictive tones, within the present cannon this verse serves to emphasize how the servant’s and Israel’s faithful suffering obedience will finally bring the nations to their knees in adoration of Israel’s just and merciful God.

This and the other servant songs at Isaiah 42:1–9 Isaiah 50:4-11 and Isaiah 52:13-53:12 have been central to New Testament thinking about Jesus and his mission. It bears repeating that the biblical witness to peace and non-violence did not begin with Jesus. Note well how the prophet speaks of his/her call. God has made the prophet “a sharp sword” and a “polished arrow.” Vs. 2. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures God’s weapon is God’s word, God’s voice, God’s speech. It is finally through persuasion that God reigns over humanity. Persuasion takes time, patience and a willingness to experience your efforts as “nothing and vanity.” Vs. 4. The way of the prophet foregoes coercion and the use of force. Such faithful suffering witness to God’s reign is, to use St. Paul’s words, foolishness. More precisely, it is the “foolishness of God.”  I Corinthians 1:25. Yet this “foolishness of God” is wiser than human wisdom that seeks results, demands progress and resorts to any means to achieve what it views as the right end.

Psalm 40:1–11

The lectionary folks might arguably have gotten it right in halving this psalm had they ended with verse 10 instead of verse 11. Verses 13-17 of the psalm are found nearly verbatim in Psalm 70. Thus, it appears as though Psalm 40 is a composite of at least two originally separate psalms. Verses 11-12 serve as a bridge linking together verses 1-10 and verses 13-17 into a single coherent prayer. For reasons I despair of ever understanding, the lectionary planners walked halfway across the bridge and stopped short. On the whole, I would have recommended including the entire psalm. It is important to understand that the psalmist uttering the words of praise in our reading is actually encompassed in “evils without number;” that his/her “iniquities have overtaken” him/her; that his/her heart fails him/her. The high praises for God’s past faithfulness and deliverance are thus a preface to the psalmist’s plea for deliverance.

Immature faith naively assumes that trust in God shields the believer from all harm. Growing faith laments, having discovered that covenant life with God sometimes plunges one into the depths of despair. Mature faith recognizes that evidence of God’s faithful intervention and salvation in one’s life stand side by side with indications of God’s absence. Neither praise nor lament can be permitted to exist exclusive of its seeming opposite. At all times both are called for. As Alfred North Whitehead has said, “the fairies dance and Christ is nailed to the cross.” Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality-an Essay in Cosmology, (c. 1978 The Free Press) p. 338. This psalm binds both praise and lament together in a mature expression of faith in time of crisis. Though faced with numerous threats and challenges and seeing no obvious way out, the psalmist boldly cries out to God having recited God’s faithfulness to him/her throughout his/her life. I therefore recommend reading Psalm 40 in its entirety.

1 Corinthians 1:1–9

The reading is from the opening lines of Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. It constitutes a classic form of salutation used in opening letters customary to ancient Greek style, beginning with the name of the sender. That is important when you consider that these letters were originally produced as scrolls to be opened and read from top to bottom. If the letter were merely signed by the author at the end as we do today, the recipient would not know the identity of the sender until s/he had read the entire letter. The intended recipient is also placed in the salutation to ensure that the reader knows from the start the audience being addressed.

Though clearly the work of St. Paul, the letter is also from Sosthenes “our brother.” He is not mentioned at any other point by Paul. Some scholars suggest that he might be identified with the Sosthenes who, according to Acts 18:17, was chief of the synagogue at Corinth when Paul was arrested there. While possible, there is no textual evidence for this assertion beyond the name which appears to have been a common one. As in his other letters, Paul introduces himself as an Apostle called by God. The body of the letter will demonstrate that some in the Corinthian church had been comparing Paul’s apostleship and teaching authority unfavorably to other church leaders. Paul is laying the groundwork for the defense of his apostleship to be set forth more particularly in I Corinthians 15:3-11.

As usual, Paul begins his letter with an expression of thanksgiving for the church to which he writes. He also expresses confidence that the testimony of Christ has been so confirmed within the Corinthian congregation that it lacks no spiritual gift necessary to sustain it until “the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Vs. 7. Paul’s confidence is based in God’s faithfulness as indeed it must. For as we discover upon further reading, the faithfulness of the Corinthian church was more than a little shaky.

It is worth noting that Paul routinely gives thanks for his churches-even a church as compromised as the Corinthian church with all of its personality conflicts, doctrinal disputes and moral lapses. In my view, clergy often do entirely too much complaining about their churches and the church at large. True, the church is far from perfect. Yet it is worth remembering that Paul could say even of this dysfunctional congregation, “Now you are the Body of Christ.” I Corinthians 12:27. Note that he does not say, “You should be the Body of Christ;” or “If only you could get your act together you might someday be the Body of Christ.” He says of this church “you are.” That is already enough reason to give thanks.

John 1:29–42

In this reading John the Baptist, who in previous verses has been reticent about his own identity and mission, now becomes quite vocal and explicit in testifying to Jesus. As New Testament scholar Raymond Brown points out, John unfolds through the speech of the Baptist a whole Christology. He identifies Jesus as the Lamb of God, the pre-existent one and the vehicle of the Holy Spirit. Brown, Raymond, The Gospel of John I-X11, The Anchor Bible, Vol. 29 (c. Doubleday, 1966) p. 58. The reading opens with what Brown identifies as an “encounter formula” frequently employed in the Book of Revelation substantially related to the Johannine literature. A messenger of God sees a person and says “Look” or “behold” followed by a description in which the seer reveals the mystery of the person’s mission. Ibid. A similar instance of this formula is found later in vss. 35-37. The construction has roots in the Old Testament as well. (See, e.g., I Samuel 9:17).

There has been much discussion over what is meant by the term “Lamb of God.” Many scholars argue that the meaning is grounded in a Jewish understanding of the lamb as a heroic figure who will destroy evil in the world. This meaning fits well with the synoptic depiction of John the Baptist as an apocalyptic preacher of judgment and with the imagery employed by John of Patmos in Revelation. It does not fit quite so well, however, with John’s depiction of the Baptist chiefly as a witness to Jesus. Other New Testament scholars believe that John’s testimony was shaped by an understanding of Jesus as the suffering servant depicted in the “servant songs” discussed above. Especially pertinent is the fourth servant song (Isaiah 52:13-53:12) in which the prophet states that “[The servant] opened not his mouth, like a sheep that is led to the slaughter and like a lamb before its shearers.” Isaiah 53:7. This argument assumes that John (the author of the Gospel) made the connection between these prophetic oracles and the story of Jesus. Although specific textual evidence is sparse for such an assertion, many of John’s allusions to the Hebrew Scriptures are intentionally more suggestive than explicit.

Some scholars favor identifying the Lamb of God with the Passover lamb. As Brown points out, the Western Fathers favored this interpretation. Ibid, p. 61. In favor of this interpretation, the Passover lamb is a central symbol in Israelite worship, whereas in the servant songs the lamb is but one isolated image. Passover symbolism is common throughout the Gospel of John. The slaying of the paschal lamb and its protective blood upon the doorposts of the Israelites fits well into the parallel between Jesus’ mission and the Exodus narrative. The problem arises with what follows, namely, that the Lamb of God is to take away the sin of the world. The Passover lamb was not understood as a sin offering and thus the shedding of its blood cannot be construed as making atonement for sin.

I tend favor the apocalyptic interpretation as most consistent with the Johannine tradition over all. Nevertheless, I believe that the suffering servant theme and the Passover tradition are also instructive and very much in the consciousness of the gospel writers. The fact that Jesus was crucified (according to John’s Gospel) the day before Passover at just the time when the Passover lambs would have been slain in preparation for the meal is suggestive. It seems to me that the death of the Passover lamb that shielded Israel from destruction is not so very inconsistent with the death of the servant in Isaiah whose ministry took the shape of suffering. Nor are these understandings inconsistent with the slain Lamb of God in Revelation who nonetheless is the only one mighty enough to open the seals to God’s future. Revelation 5:1-10.

Finally, we have the call of the first disciples. Two disciples of John the Baptist, one of which was Andrew the brother of Peter, follow Jesus in response to John’s testimony. They ask Jesus where he is staying and they wind up going to Jesus’ place of abode and “remaining” with him. Recall that beforehand John reported that he knew Jesus was the Lamb of God because he saw that the Spirit “remained with him.” The Greek word in both cases is the same and seems to indicate that, just as the Spirit remains or abides with Jesus, so Jesus’ disciples abide with him.  Through him they will also have access to the Spirit. Indeed, Jesus will make that very point later on when he tells his disciples, “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.” John 15:4. Again, the word translated as “abide,” is the same word translated as “remain” in our lesson. Abiding in Jesus seems to be all important. Perhaps that is why John’s gospel ends the way the Synoptics begin: with the disciples leaving their nets behind and following Jesus. See John 21:15-22.

 

Sunday, January 8th

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BAPTISM OF OUR LORD

Isaiah 42:1–9
Psalm 29
Acts 10:34–43
Matthew 3:13–17

PRAYER OF THE DAY: O God our Father, at the baptism of Jesus you proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit. Make all who are baptized into Christ faithful to their calling to be your daughters and sons, and empower us all with your Spirit, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

The gospels all grapple with one single issue: the identity of Jesus. In his own words, Jesus asks “Who do you say that I am?” What the gospels give us is less a definitive answer than the parameters within and the springboard from which the church must struggle until the end of time with the same question. The Creeds of the church likewise do not end the inquiry, but rather mark decisive turning points along the way in our journey toward that time when, as Paul puts it, “we will know as we are known.”

Certain formulations of the church’s past understandings about Jesus were decisively rejected at Nicaea and Chalcedon while other formulations were recognized as faithful and true. These landmark confessions guard against our slipping back into inaccurate, incomplete and misleading formulations of the faith, but they do not finally answer Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” With the guidance of the Holy Spirit, under the norming authority of Scripture and in accord with the ecumenical Creeds, the church in every age must continue to articulate its teaching and shape its practices toward a deeper faith in Jesus and an ever more faithful witness to his saving work among us.

There has never been an age in the life of the church when the importance of Jesus’ identity was more critical than our own. This is so because the identity of Jesus in the United States has been hijacked by a contingent of largely white and largely male adherents to a deviant and truncated iteration of Christianity aligned with the ugliest manifestations of nationalism, racism, patriarchy and homophobia. It is maddening to hear the media regularly employing terms like “Christian” and “Evangelical” when referring solely to this narrow demographic. Rest assured (I find myself repeating to so many people whose perceptions of the church have been shaped by this vocal minority), the vile hate speech spewing from the likes of Franklin Graham, Mike Huckabee and James Dobson does not represent the preaching and teaching of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to which I belong. We confess Jesus, the Son of the God who chose two nationless nomads to found a nation of blessing; the God who chose as his people a band of landless slaves over the powerful empires sparing for control of the earth. This God says of Jesus, “this is my beloved Son. With him I am pleased.” We follow this Jesus who didn’t have a single encouraging word for people who amass wealth nor a judgmental word to speak against the poor; who rejected family values over kingdom values; who associated himself throughout his ministry with people branded “sinners” by the “moral;” who was killed because he proclaimed the coming reign of God in which the wealthy and powerful will be toppled from their thrones and their wealth redistributed. Jesus staked his life on the coming reign of God and lost it in the process. He loved the world that much-all of it.

Now I hasten to add that we Lutherans have not been stellar examples of the Christ we proclaim. We are one of the whitest churches ever to thrive in the midst of this diverse culture growing on American soil. We have been shamefully slow to name the sins of racism and sexism among us. We have stumbled awkwardly and slowly toward recognizing and welcoming our LGBT members and the gifts they bring to our life and ministry. We are materialistic, institutionally entangled with systemic injustice, infatuated with worldly power and sadly lacking in spiritual vibrancy. Yet for all of our failures, we are at least failing in the right things. We are failed disciples of Jesus, but our failures at least testify to what we are striving to become. The worst football team in the league might be playing poorly and losing every game, but at least it is playing the game. Incompetent and inept as the players might be, they know what good football is supposed to look like and they are trying to get there. Their failures testify to what they know they should be and the game they are trying to play well.

I can’t say how successful these so-called “evangelicals” are in their game because I don’t know what game they are playing. All I can say is that it looks nothing like discipleship. Trash talking the poor, glorifying wealth, preaching hate against perceived “sinners,” advocating fear and distrust of people who are different and dealing with enemies by means of brute military force sounds nothing like the Jesus we meet in the New Testament and it certainly doesn’t sound like “good news” (the root meaning of “evangelical”). Whatever this game of theirs might be, it isn’t discipleship and it’s high time the rest of us under the “Christian” umbrella called them on it. Jesus is not the poster boy for white privilege, late stage capitalistic wealth accumulation, nationalism, bullying, sexism and discrimination. He is the friend of sinners, outcasts and what our culture regards as “the least” among us. He is the Son of our God who came to save, not condemn the world. What we say about Jesus is important. In fact, it is the most important issue we have to talk about and struggle with.Here is a poem in which Marcus Wicker struggles with the identity of Jesus.

Conjecture on the Stained Glass Image of White Christ at Ebenezer Baptist Church

For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

—1 Corinthians 12:13

If in his image made am I, then make me a miracle.
Make my shrine a copper faucet leaking everlasting Evian to the masses.
Make this empty water glass a goblet of long-legged French wine.
Make mine a Prince-purple body bag designed by Crown Royal
for tax collectors to spill over & tithe into just before I rise.
If in his image made am I, then make my vessel a pearl Coupe de Ville.
Make mine the body of a 28-year-old black woman
in a blue patterned maxi dress cruising through Hell on Earth, TX
again alive. If in his image made are we, then why
the endless string of effigies?
Why so many mortal blasphemes?
Why crucify me in HD across a scrolling news ticker, tied
to a clothesline of broken necks long as Time?
Is this thing on? Jesus on the ground. Jesus in the margins.
Of hurricane & sea. Jesus of busted levees in chocolate cities.
Jesus of the Middle East (Africa) & crows flying backwards.
Of blood, on the leaves, inside diamond mines, in under-
developed mineral-rich countries. If in your image made are we,
the proliferation of your tie-dyed hippie doppelgänger
makes you easier to daily see. & in this image didn’t we make
the godhead, slightly stony, high enough to surf a cloud?
& didn’t we leave you there, where, surely, paradise or
justice must be meted out? Couldn’t we see where water takes
the form of whatever most holds it upright? If then this
is what it’s come down to. My faith, in rifle shells.
In Glock 22 magazine sleeves. Isn’t it also then how, why,
in a bucket shot full of holes, I’ve been made to believe?

Source, Poetry (December 2016) Marcus Wicker was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1984. He is the poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review and serves as director of the New Harmony Writers Workshop. Wicker is currently an assistant professor of English at University of Southern Indiana. You can find out more about Marcus Wicker and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

Isaiah 42:1–9

Verses 1-4 constitute the first of four “servant songs” found in the second of three major sections of Isaiah. See Summary Article by Fred Gaiser, Professor of Old Testament, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN.  The other three servant songs are found at Isaiah 49:1-6; Isaiah 50:4-11 and Isaiah 52:13-53:12. According to biblical commentator Claus Westermann, these songs represent a special strand within section two of Isaiah. Westermann, Claus, Isaiah 40-66, The Old Testament Library (c. SCM Press, Ltd. 1969) p.  92.  This section (Isaiah 40-55), you may recall, is attributed to an unnamed prophet who lived among the Babylonian exiles during the 6th Century. His was the task of alerting his fellow exiles to the new opportunity created for them to return home to Palestine opened up by Persia’s conquest of Babylon. On the one hand, the prophet makes a joyous declaration of salvation for Israel and announces the potential for a new start. On the other hand, the prophet makes clear that God is doing with Israel something entirely new. This will not be a return to “the good old days” when Israel was a powerful and independent people under the descendants of David. That, according to the prophet, “is too light a thing” for the people of God. The servant and the servant people are to be given “as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Isaiah 49:6.

Scholars hold differing views on the identity of the “servant” in these songs. Some view the servant as an individual, perhaps the prophet him/herself. Others maintain that the servant is the people of Israel whose covenant life in the restored Jerusalem will enlighten the nations. Christians from very early on have seen reflected in these verses the ministry of Jesus. It seems to me that all of these interpretations are valid in some measure. Clearly, the prophet himself/herself understood that s/he was announcing an act of God that would be revelatory for all peoples. So too Israel always had an awareness that her existence was in part a demonstration of God’s glory to the world though, like the church, she tended to forget that aspect of her calling at times. The church likewise confessed from the outset that Jesus’ lordship was defined in terms of the hopes and expectations set forth in the Hebrew Scriptures. Just as the faithful service of the prophet was a model for Israel’s servant role among the nations, so the church is a continuation of Jesus’ faithful ministry. In sum, these differing interpretations enrich rather than contradict one another.

There is an interesting contrast here between the conquering Cyrus (referred to as God’s “anointed” or “messiah.” Isaiah 45:1) before whom God “breaks in pieces the doors of bronze” and the servant who will not break a “bruised reed” or extinguish a “dimly burning wick.” Vs. 3. To be sure, God turns Cyrus (and all nations) to God’s  own redemptive purposes. But they have no knowledge or understanding of these purposes. As far as they know, they are simply pursuing their own national interests. In the end, it is not the might of Cyrus, but the quiet and faithful servant who will “bring forth justice.” The servant will accomplish this through his humble ministry of healing and compassion. It bears repeating that the witness of non-violence and redemption through peacemaking do not begin with Jesus. While the Hebrew Scriptures reflect the cruelty and violence of the cultures in which they were composed, these harsh realities serve merely as a backdrop for the peaceful reign of God to which they testify.

The messiah will not be “discouraged.” Vs. 4. The task of “establishing justice in the earth” though forgiveness, reconciliation and peacemaking requires much patience. That is a quality sorely lacking in human nature generally. We want justice now. We want peace in our time. Oddly, it is often our impatient longing for peace and justice that leads us down the false path of violence. In the face of tyranny, injustice and oppression, violence promises a swift solution. Kill the enemy. Overthrow the “axis of evil.” Fight fire with fire. In reality, however, the victory obtained by violence only sows the seeds of future violence. Yesterday’s “freedom fighters” armed to undermine Soviet power are today’s terrorists against whom we are told we must also fight. Efforts to destroy these new enemies are building up resentment in an upcoming generation of Afghan and Pakistani youths. We are merely sowing for our children a new crop of enemies that may well prove more threatening still. The “short cut” to peace and justice violence promises leads finally into a vortex of hate, breeding more and more violence and destruction.

As long as peace and justice remain abstract nouns, concepts or ideals to be achieved, they will remain forever beyond our reach. Jesus does not promise a way to peace and justice. He calls us to live justly and peacefully. It is through communities that embody the heart of God revealed in Jesus that God’s justice and peace are offered to the world. That is a hard word for impatient people who become discouraged when they cannot see measurable results from their life’s work. Disciples of Jesus know, however, that there are no shortcuts to the kingdom of God. The cross is the only way. It is a hard, slow and painful way. But it is the one sure way. That is what makes it such an incredibly joyful way.

Psalm 29

Many commentators suggest that this psalm is an Israelite poet’s adaptation of an ancient Phoenician hymn praising Baal-Hadad, the Canaanite storm god. Other commentators have maintained that the psalm is a liturgical recital of God’s appearance to Israel on Mt. Sinai. Both views might be correct. Israel frequently borrowed liturgical and literary material from its neighbors in shaping its own worship traditions. Thus, a hymn originally praising the storm god in the wake of a particularly fierce weather event might have served as a template for this psalm memorializing God’s stormy appearance on Sinai. Nothing wrong with that. After all, Luther was said to compose hymns from drinking songs.

The psalmist unashamedly attributes to Israel’s God the awe inspiring and often destructive effects of a storm. That is a little unnerving for us moderns who are squeamish about attributing anything to God that isn’t “nice.” Indeed, this psalm is particularly embarrassing in the shadow of tragic, large scale weather events. Did God send this week’s blizzards and brutal cold over the country or just allow it to occur? Does it make any difference either way? Is it more comforting to believe that God just fell asleep at the wheel and allowed a tornado to happen rather than to believe that God deliberately sent one? Has the universe gotten so far out of God’s hands that God is no longer able to prevent hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis?

I don’t pretend to have neat answers to all these questions. But perhaps part of our problem is our homocentric view of things. Indeed, I would go further and suggest that the problem may be with our “me” centered approach to faith. It seems to me that a lot of our prayers are exceedingly self-centered. We pray for good weather on our vacations-even in times when our farms are desperate for rain. We pray for an economic recovery without any thought to the economic, ecological and social havoc our economy wreaks upon the world. Even our prayers for others often have a strong streak of selfishness in them. As the father of a child with a chronic medical condition, a day does not go by that I don’t pray for her healing. Yet lately I have been wondering about my motives. Am I looking for a special miracle? By what right do I get to push to the head of the line of parents with sick children to receive such special treatment? Thanks to the benefits of medical treatment afforded by our insurance plan, my daughter is able to live a relatively normal and healthy life despite her condition. So shouldn’t any miracle go to a child without these benefits?  I find that too often my prayers do not venture beyond my own needs, concerns and the small circle of people in my small world.

Perhaps this psalm gives us some perspective. The psalmist does not begin his or her prayer with a request that God stop the storm or steer it in some other direction. The psalm begins with praise, awe and reverence for God. As Jesus taught his disciples, that is where all prayer needs to begin. Recall that in both of the creation stories from Genesis, the world was created first. In the first chapter of Genesis, the earth and all its creatures were created and declared good. Then human beings were created to rule over and care for the earth. Likewise in the second chapter of Genesis: the earth was created and God planted a garden in the earth. Then God created human beings to tend and care for the garden. The message is clear. It’s not all about us. The world was not designed to be a twenty-first century playground that is so well padded and equipped with safety features that no kid could ever possibly get hurt-or have any fun either.  No, the world is far more like the way playgrounds used to be-places where you can really play. It pains me to no end that my grandchildren will probably never know the ecstasy of rocketing half way to the sky on a real swing set. Nor will they ever experience the dizzying high you could get from one of those merry-go-rounds that we used to crank up to warp speed. Our public parks have been cleansed of all such unacceptable risks. The attorneys and insurance underwriters who have taken over our lives have determined that fun is just too dangerous for kids.

But don’t get me started on that. We were talking about the psalm and the fact that we are not the center of God’s universe. As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, God is not a tame lion. God is not “safe” and neither is the world God made. There is no room in the Bible or in real life for a wimpy, weak kneed religion that longs for a “nice” god. You can get hurt on this planet and tragically so. But for all that, the earth is a good place to be. It’s a place where you can have real fun. Beauty the likes of which you see in the ocean, in the storm and on the top of Sinai necessarily has an element of terror.  The psalmist doesn’t hide in the storm shelter and plead with God not to be so scary. The psalmist praises God for this awesome display of power and rejoices in the beauty, wonder and terror of creation. This is the glorious world God made and the stage on which God acts. The psalmist doesn’t complain about its dangers. S/he prays instead that Israel will find the courage to live boldly and faithfully in this grand universe. Anybody who whines about bad weather and wishes that God had made a safer planet has never been on a real swing!

Acts 10:34–43

Acceptance of gentiles into the church was a contentious issue.  Peter’s vision related in Acts 10:1-16 reflects the inner struggle of the deeply Jewish church with the positive response of gentiles to the good news about Jesus. Most Jews, like Peter, harbored serious reservations about receiving these outsiders into the church. How could these outsiders possibly have an informed and sincere faith in the Jewish messiah when they knew next to nothing about the Jewish scriptures and practices? What would be the consequences of an influx of these new comers? What conditions, if any, should be placed upon admission of a gentile believer? Must he be circumcised? Should he be required to learn the Hebrew Scriptures? Peter was on solid scriptural grounds with his scruples about eating ritually unclean food and sharing meal fellowship with non-Jews. Jewish believers under the Greek tyrant, Antiochus Epiphanes chose to endure torture and to die horrible deaths rather than eat food deemed unclean as demanded. I Maccabees 1:62-64. How could Peter go into the home of a Roman, an oppressor of Israel to eat his unclean food at his unclean table? Would this not dishonor the memory of the brave martyrs under Antiochus?

Peter’s declaration “that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him…is acceptable to him” came only after much difficult soul searching. Peter had to give up his long held interpretation of the scriptures and religious practices that had been part of his life since infancy. That did not come easily. I suspect it was not until Peter witnessed the Holy Spirit breathing life giving faith into the Roman Cornelius and his family that he became fully convinced that these folks should be baptized. He simply decided that any interpretation of the scriptures that stands between Jesus and a believing heart cannot possibly be right no matter how clear, convincing and well established it may be.

This story of Peter and Cornelius, along with my having met many gay and lesbian people of faith over the years, is what ultimately convinced me that the church must be fully inclusive and welcoming to these folks. When all is said and done; when all the scriptural arguments have been made; there remains the fact that the Holy Spirit has moved a person to faith in Jesus. I find myself asking, as did Peter, “Can anyone forbid water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” Acts 10:47.

Matthew 3:13–17

The relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist has always been a subject of dispute among New Testament scholars.  About all they can seem to agree upon is the fact that Jesus was baptized by John. Knowing as little as we do about John the Baptist and what his ministry represented, that isn’t much to go on. How did John understand his own role? The New Testament portrays him as Jesus’ forerunner, but did he see himself that way? It seems obvious to me that John saw himself as the forerunner of somebody. The gospels all agree on this point and, unless one rejects the gospel narratives as reliable information about John (some biblical scholars have), then it seems that John understood his baptism as a preparation for the coming of the Messiah. The Gospel of Matthew very explicitly identifies John’s ministry with the return of Elijah foretold in Malachi 4:5. see Matthew 17:9-13. Knowing what we do about the fate of John, this revelation can only alert us to the reception the Messiah will finally receive at the hands of Rome and the religious leadership in Jerusalem.

The larger question is: Why would Jesus seek out and submit to a baptism of repentance? Mark and Luke see no need to deal with this obvious question. The Gospel of John does not specifically state the Jesus was baptized by John, only that John bears witness to Jesus. Matthew, by contrast, puts into the mouth of John himself the question we must all be asking. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” vs. 14. Jesus’ response is that his receipt of John’s baptism is necessary to “fulfill all righteousness.” But does that explain why Jesus would need a baptism of repentance? I suppose that depends on how you understand the word “repent.” Literally, the Greek word means to turn around or go in a new direction. In the New Testament context, the term means turning toward God and God’s will. For sinful human beings, that necessarily means turning away from sin. But for Jesus, the sinless Son of God, it means simply to turn toward God. That is not to say that Jesus ever was turned away from God, but merely that Jesus’ turning toward God is much the same as his being “eternally begotten of the Father.” As the obedient Son, Jesus is always turning toward God. Only as the Word becomes incarnate and becomes flesh (to borrow John’s language) does this turning appear as a discrete act rather than an intrinsic and essential aspect of his being. So understood, Jesus’ baptism into the body of people prepared by John for the coming of the Messiah is but another step in his messianic mission of drawing that body into the Kingdom of Heaven.

“This fulfilling takes place in the adoption of baptism: in that the Messianic judge of the worlds and the Messianic baptizer himself becomes a candidate for baptism, humbles himself and enters the ranks of sinners. By this means he fulfils ‘all righteousness.’” Barth, Gerhard, “Matthew’s Understanding of the Law,” printed in Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew, The New Testament Library (c. SCM Press Ltd 1963) p. 138. It is important to recognize that for both John and Jesus, righteousness has nothing to do with adherence to an objective moral code and everything to do with being rightly related to God and to neighbor. Nolland, John, The Gospel of Matthew-A Commentary on the Greek Text, The New International Greek Testament Commentary (c. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.) p. 154.  That is not to say, of course, that the law has no importance for Matthew. To the contrary, Matthew more than any of the other gospel writers emphasizes Jesus as the fulfilment of the law, no part of which can be set aside as long as heaven and earth endure. Matthew 5:17-18. Yet for this very reason righteousness must grow not out of slavish obedience to the letter of the law, but out of faithfulness to Jesus. The latter righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the law as demonstrated by the Sermon on the Mount.

This gospel lesson is rich with references and allusions to the Hebrew Scriptures. The declaration of the divine voice is almost a direct quote from Psalm 2:

I will tell of the decree of the Lord:
He said to me, ‘You are my son;
today I have begotten you.
8 Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You shall break them with a rod of iron,
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.’

Psalm 2:7-9. Matthew’s allusion to this psalm reflects his conviction that Jesus is indeed Israel’s king. Yet this declaration must be juxtaposed to the so called “king of the Jews” we have already met, namely, Herod. The coronation of Jesus at his baptism signals a new kind of king that exercises a very different sort of power and calls us into a kingdom radically different from any nation or kingdom the world has ever known.

More distant scriptural echoes are heard in the creation out of the watery chaos in Genesis 1:1-2; the liberation of Israel from slavery into freedom by passage through the Red Sea. Exodus 14:1-15:2. Matthew means to let us know that, although Jesus is by every measure the king that was David, the teacher that was Moses and the prophet that was Elijah, he is much more. The presence of the Holy Spirit brooding over the waters of the Jordan into which Jesus enters and emerges testifies that God is doing something altogether new here. In the words of Stan Hauerwas, “Jesus is unleashed into the world. His mission will not be easy, for the kingdom inaugurated by his life and death is not one that can be recognized on the world’s terms. He is the beloved Son who must undergo the terror produced by our presumption that we are our own creators. He submits to John’s baptism just as he will submit to the crucifixion so that we might know how God would rule the world. His journey begins. Matthew would have us follow.” Hauerwas, Stanley, Matthew, Brozos Theological Commentary on the Bible (c. 2006 by Stanley Hauerwas, pub. by Brazos Press) p. 49.

 

Sunday, December 18th

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FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Isaiah 7:10–16
Psalm 80:1–7, 17–19
Romans 1:1–7
Matthew 1:18–25

PRAYER OF THE DAY: Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come. With your abundant grace and might, free us from the sin that hinders our faith, that eagerly we may receive your promises, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“Night comes when no one can work.” Jesus of Nazareth, John 9:4.

In the winter of 2012 my mother took a fall and shattered her pelvis. This was not the first fall she had taken nor was it the first serious medical incident she had encountered. Mom had suffered a series of injuries and illnesses over the last decade, each taking its toll. This last injury came at a time that she was already battling a number of serious life threatening infections. The doctors informed her that surgery to repair her broken bones was an option, but one that involved numerous risks and potentially permanent side effects. By this time Mom was in her late 80s. She made it clear to all of us that, for her, the struggle was over. She understood that modern medicine had done all it could to make her life better. Now it had nothing more to offer her. So it was that Mom entered hospice where she spent her last days singing hymns, reminiscing with her children and, when she no longer had the strength for that, simply resting in their presence. She was content to let evening come.

There was nothing despairing or fatalistic in Mom’s decision. She told my sister, “If you need to cry for yourself and your family, go ahead and do it. It’s good for you. But don’t you dare cry for me. I’ve lived a blessed life. Now it’s ending just like I always knew it would. Nothing sad about that.” Mom once told me of a dream she had about coming to a door with her name on it. Somehow, she knew it was the door into heaven. She was about to open it when she heard the voice of Jesus say, “Not yet, Clara. But soon.” She took immense comfort in that dream. It gave her a profound sense of hopefulness throughout the rest of her life. Perhaps that’s why Advent was Mom’s favorite season. It is, after all, a season of hope, expectation and longing. Her favorite hymn was The Bridegroom Soon Will Call Us. Verse 1 declares:

The Bridegroom soon will call us;
Come all ye wedding guests!
May not His voice appall us
While slumber binds our breasts!
May all our lamps be burning
And oil be found in store
That we, with Him returning,
May open find the door!

The Lutheran Hymnal, # 67 (c. 1941 Concordia Publishing House)

Mom’s confidence in Jesus’s promise to walk with her through the valley of shadow enabled her to take her first step into the blackness of death with hope and even a measure of joy and anticipation. What, from a purely human standpoint, looked like the ultimate dead end, she recognized as the long awaited door with her name on it.

I think that perhaps it was this same confident faith the prophet Isaiah was attempting to inspire in the frightened young King Ahaz. At the tender age of 20, Ahaz inherited a Kingdom that had experienced half a century of peace and prosperity under his father, Jotham and his grandfather, Uzziah. For his predecessors, the empire of Assyria was but a distant and abstract menace. Judah’s northern neighbors, Israel and Syria, served as a buffer between Judah and Assyrian aggression. But just as this young, inexperienced and uncertain lad took the throne, everything changed. Israel and Syria would no longer put up with their neighbor’s benefiting from their military protection, but refusing to contribute. So Israel and Syria sent the king an ultimatum: Join with them in a military attack on Assyria or face war with them.

The Bible tells us that when the king and his advisors received this ultimatum, “his heart and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind.” Isaiah 7:2. This fear is understandable. The world was changing in ways the king and his advisors failed to comprehend. The old alliances, the old conventions and the old ways of diplomacy were not working for them anymore. None of the wisdom handed down from generations of kings before seemed to apply. While the king and his advisors were clueless, the changed circumstances were all too clear for Isaiah the prophet. Isaiah could see that the future belonged to superpowers like Assyria, Egypt and Babylonia. In a world dominated by these imperial giants, there was no room for small, petty kingdoms like Judah, Israel and Syria. The kingdom of David, as it had existed for seven centuries, had no future. There was nothing the king could do, no decision he could make, no strategy he could employ to change that.

But that did not mean the people of God had no future. Isaiah was not a prophet of cynical resignation. Like Mom, he understood that when there appears to be no way forward, God makes a way. The last two readings we have had from the prophet Isaiah during this Advent season give us a graphic vision of the future God intends, not only for Israel, but for the whole earth. But this future will be brought to fruition by “the zeal of the Lord,” not by our own efforts and designs. Isaiah 9:7. Indeed, our efforts to “help” God make history come out right often only make matters worse for ourselves.

The response of King Ahaz to Isaiah illustrates the point. The king was wise enough to recognize that the Israel/Syria alliance stood no realistic chance of defeating the Assyrian empire. Joining Judah to such an alliance would only seal the kingdom’s destruction. The better course, Ahaz was advised, would be to act pre-emptively. Send overtures to Assyria; become Assyria’s faithful subject. Save the emperor the bother of having to conquer Judah and he might well allow it to continue with a measure of autonomy. There would be a stiff price to pay in terms of tribute, loss of sovereignty and religious compromise. But these sacrifices are surely worth making if they keep the line of David intact a little longer, let the temple remain standing for the time being and allow the people of Judah to continue living in the promised land for the foreseeable future.

Of course, Isaiah didn’t see it that way. He urged the king to resist the temptation of giving in to the shortsighted, survival oriented advice of his counselors. This isn’t just a pragmatic choice between the lesser of evils. There is a good and faithful choice to be made here. There is another way. “Be quiet. Do not fear.” I can hear already the response of the king and his advisers: “Is that it? That’s your strategy? Sit and do nothing?” I can well understand that response. Being a child of the 60s, I grew up with the established creed that nothing is worse than doing nothing. “Don’t just stand there, do something!” We used to say. Yet Isaiah’s advice to Ahaz appears to be, “Don’t just do something. Stand there!”

As hard as it is for people like me to accept, there are times when waiting and doing nothing is the faithful response. When the world is changing, when the old rules do not seem to apply anymore, the old ways of doing things don’t seem to be working and when one’s very survival is at stake, it is easy loose one’s moral compass and grasp at anything or anyone promising a way out. Again, Ahaz is a case in point. He was fixated on saving the kingdom, but God’s priority is always on the covenant made with Israel before it had any land, king or temple. What matters to God is that God’s people live faithfully within that covenant and thereby testify to the future God is working to bring about for all of creation. For that good and faithful work, there is no need for land, king or temple- as synagogues throughout the world testify. But because Israel would not be still; because Israel fought tooth and nail against the future; because Israel could not imagine any covenant existence without the marks of her nationhood, God stripped all of these marks away and subjected Israel to a lengthy exile. Out of these dark and bitter times, a new Israel emerged-a community of faith that produced the Hebrew Scriptures, rebuilt the city of Jerusalem and re-interpreted the Torah for a new generation.

There comes a time for every person, nation and church to recognize the end of an era. It takes courage, spiritual maturity and discernment to know when medical treatment holds no more promise for healing; when the fight for national survival no longer serves a people; when pouring more money, more energy and more time into a congregation or denominational program no longer produces life-giving mission and ministry. There is a time for admitting that we do not know the way forward; that we do not know what time it is in the grand scheme of things; that we cannot prevent the onset of night. Such awareness will not paralyze us with hopelessness and fear so long as we understand that our faithful God is at work under the cover of darkness setting the stage for us to shine as witnesses to the bright future in store for the world God sent his Son to save.

Here’s a poem by Jane Kenyon expressing the kind of faith known by Mom and Isaiah the prophet.

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

Source: Let Evening Come, Kenyon, Jane (Graywolf Press, 1990). Jane Kenyon was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She attended the University of Michigan in her hometown and completed her master’s degree there in 1972. It was there also that she met her husband, the poet Donald Hall, who taught there. Kenyon moved with Hall to Eagle Pond Farm, in New Hampshire where she lived until her untimely death in 1995 at age 47. You can read more of Jane Kenyon’s poetry and find out more about her at the Poetry Foundation Website.

Isaiah 7:10–16

Imagine that you are a twenty year old prince growing up in a nation that has not seen war in a generation. Of course, you have heard rumors about the growth of the Assyrian Empire and its expansionist policies. But Assyria lies far to the north. Several nations stand between your country and the empire. Assyria is not seen as an immediate threat. Suddenly, your father dies and you find yourself king. No sooner do you ascend the throne than you are confronted with a military crisis. Several of your neighboring kings hand you an ultimatum: join with them in a military coalition against Assyria or face war with all of them. You have three choices, none of them good. You can join the coalition, which seems doomed to defeat, and then face the destructive wrath of Assyria. You can resist the coalition and stand your ground against the bellicose threats of your neighbors-a doubtful proposition for a nation whose army is practiced in little more than marching in parades. Or you can act preemptively. You can reach out to Assyria and offer to become its vassal state. That way, you gain Assyrian protection from your enemies and preserve your throne. Such protection comes at a cost, however. Assyria will demand a punishing tribute that must be financed through taxation of your people. You will also be required to erect a shrine to Assyria’s god Asshur in the Temple of Jerusalem. That will offend the priests and rile up the prophets. But they must be made to understand that these measures are diplomatic necessities, matters of national security over which the crown exercises sole authority.

Enter, the prophet Isaiah. There is a fourth way, he says, that you have not considered. Do you not recall how God intervened to give Sarah and Abraham a son when their line seemed doomed to extinction? Do you not understand that you live and breathe only because God faithfully kept his promise to this patriarchal couple? Do you not remember how God intervened to rescue your ancestors from slavery in Egypt and bring them into the land where you now live? How then is it that you have come to believe in a world driven solely by geopolitical forces? How is it that you have made your decisions in such a way as to leave no room for the saving intervention of the God you have to thank for the land you live in?

That is precisely the situation in which we find King Ahaz in our lesson from Isaiah. He has chosen to seek refuge from Assyria and accept all of the attending consequences. This, he maintains, is the least offensive of three bad choices. Isaiah urges the prophet to reconsider. There is another choice the king can make; a faithful choice; a life giving choice. “Take heed, be quiet, and do not fear.” Vs. 4. The prophet begs the king to ask for a sign of God’s faithfulness (Vs. 11), but the king replies: “I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test.” Vs. 12. This seemingly pious response is in fact a curt dismissal. The king is a Niebuhrian realist. Faith has no place in geopolitics. The Sermon on the Mount is all well and good when it comes to governing behavior at church picnics. But it has no place in determining how one should deal with the likes of ISIS or Kim Jong Un. Real world threats call for real world solutions.

Of course, that begs the question. What is more real for you: the specters that threaten your security or the covenant promises of your God? For Isaiah, God was the overwhelming reality. His graphic encounter with this God in the Temple of Jerusalem governed Isaiah’s outlook on all else. (Isaiah 6:1-5) There Isaiah recognized that neither Israel’s king nor the king of Assyria reign over history. The Lord of Hosts is King and he alone deserves ultimate allegiance. This God is the only one worthy of trust. So what would have happened had the king listened to Isaiah, refused both the anti-Assyrian alliance and his counselors’ urging to seek Assyrian aid? We can never know where the road not taken might have led. But we can confidently say that if Ahaz had put his trust in God’s covenant promises, his decision would have made room for yet another saving act of God. What shape that act might have taken we will never know.

As I have said in previous posts, it would be a mistake to characterize Isaiah as an idealistic dreamer whose visions were divorced from reality. Isaiah understood the geopolitical landscape better than Ahaz and his advisers. He could see that the dawning age of empires held no place for small, autonomous kingdoms like Judah and Israel. But that did not mean there was no place in that future for the people of God. Far from it! In the coming age of violent imperial warfare on a scale the world had not yet seen, a light for the nations would be needed more than ever. More than ever before, a faithful covenant people would be necessary to show the world that life does not have to be the way we have made it. There is an alternative way to be human, a social reality different from the hierarchical model of master and slave. The challenge for Israel: how to be this people of blessing in the age of empire.

Though he refused a sign under the pretext of humble piety, Ahaz receives a sign anyway. “The young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel.” Vs. 14. Though as we shall see, Matthew recognizes in the birth of Jesus the fulfillment of this prophecy, the immediate meaning for Ahaz is quite different. Biblical scholars continue to dispute the identity of this promised child. It has been argued that Emmanuel must be 1) a child of Ahaz; 2) a child of Isaiah; 3) a general reference to all Judean children born in this time of crisis. For numerous reasons, the discussion of which would be far too tedious, none of these interpretations really fits. Nor is it clear what is meant by Isaiah’s declaration that the child shall be eating curds and honey by the time he knows how to distinguish between right and wrong. It is clear, though, that by this time the nations now pressuring Ahaz to join their anti-Assyrian coalition and threatening Judah with invasion will no longer exist. The implication is that Ahaz need only have waited and trusted in the Lord. God would have seen to the destruction of his enemies. There was no need to seek Assyrian aid. But now that Ahaz has ventured down this faithless path, he and his nation will bear the consequences-Assyrian oppression and tyranny. According to verse 17 (not in today’s reading) “The Lord will bring on you and on your people and on your ancestral house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah—the king of Assyria.” Though couched in terms of realism and practical necessity, Ahaz’ decision to seek Assyrian protection was in fact short-sighted and foolhardy. So far from preserving the liberty of his nation, he exchanged one tyrant for another that would in time prove far worse.

Psalm 80:1–7, 17–19

Prior to the formation of the Davidic monarchy the tribes of Israel were bound together in a lose confederacy. It was customary for the people to assemble at a central sanctuary located at Shechem (See Joshua 24) and later at Shiloh. See I Samuel 1. Three such assemblies were required by covenant law: Festival of unleavened bread (later associated with Passover); Festival of first fruits (also called “weeks” or “Pentecost”) and the festival of ingathering (also called Tabernacles). See Exodus 23:14-17. Of the three, the most significant was the Feast of Tabernacles which evolved into a covenant renewal ceremony in which Israel recited God’s faithful acts of salvation and pledged her allegiance to this trustworthy God. Anderson, Bernhard W., Out of the Depths-The Psalms Speak for us Today, (c. 1983 Bernhard W. Anderson, pub. The Westminster Press) pp. 168-69. This tradition persisted after the division of the Davidic monarchy into the Southern Kingdom of Judah and the Northern Kingdom of Israel following the death of King Solomon. According to I Kings, Jeroboam, the first king of Israel in the north, instituted an ingathering festival “like the feast that was in Judah.” I Kings 12:32-33. The liturgies from these festivals naturally found their way into the psalms, the hymnals of the worshiping communities in both Israel and Judah. It is believed that verses 8-11 of Psalm 80 (not included in our reading) constitute the portion of the liturgy in which Israel recites the saving acts of God.

You brought a vine out of Egypt;
you drove out the nations and planted it.
You cleared the ground for it;
it took deep root and filled the land.

The mountains were covered with its shade,
the mighty cedars with its branches;
it sent out its branches to the sea,
and its shoots to the River.

After the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel to Assyria in 722 B.C.E., its psalms, scriptures and worship traditions were brought into the southern kingdom of Judah by refugees and incorporated into Judah’s worship. Psalm 80, which references the northern tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, was one of the psalms so transmitted from north to south.

As it now stands, Psalm 80 is a prayer for national restoration. Unlike Judah in the south which benefited from the presence of Israel and the Phoenician states to the north acting as buffers against Syrian and Assyrian aggression, Israel was exposed to the brunt of such aggression. Israel did not enjoy the stability of a ruling family such as the line of David which provided a measure of political stability for Judah. Israel’s government was volatile, unstable and subject to frequent coups and revolutions. Such violent changes in leadership were sometimes viewed as acts of salvation and were even instigated by prophets such as Elijah and Elisha. Divine leadership for the nation was sought more in charismatic individuals raised up by God’s Spirit to meet national emergencies than from dynastic succession. Hence, the prayer that God would “let your hand be upon the one at your right hand, the one whom you made strong for yourself.” Vs. 17.

A prayer for God to raise up a savior for God’s people is an appropriate one for Advent. Yet if we would read this psalm faithfully as Jesus’ disciples, we must juxtapose this prayer for deliverance to the kind of savior Jesus is and the powers from which he saves us. Rightly understood, this psalm brings into sharp focus the scandal of the cross: the Messiah is Jesus the crucified one. If we are looking for a more powerful, more effective and more efficient savior to implement the new creation by force of arms or other coercive means, we are bound to be disappointed. Jesus implements the kingdom of heaven by the slow process of limitless compassion, forgiveness and peacemaking. That means his disciples must live also in this slow and often seemingly ineffective process. Such a life tests our patience and endurance. That is why we have the Book of Psalms.

Romans 1:1–7

Why would our lectionary include a reading that consists only of the formal opening for Paul’s letter to the Romans when we will not hear from this letter again until Lent? The only rationale I can see is that Paul’s reference to Jesus as descended from David according to the flesh” sort of fits in with the gospel lesson-if that gospel lesson had included the genealogy in Matthew 1:1-17 (it does not). Otherwise, I am tempted to conclude that this Sunday in Advent came rather late in the day for the lectionary makers who at 4:45 p.m. wanted only to call it a day and go home.

The reading constitutes a classic form of salutation used in opening letters customary to ancient Greek style. It begins with the name of the sender and that is important when you consider that these letters were originally produced as scrolls to be opened and read from top to bottom. If the letter were merely signed by the author at the end as we do today, you would not know the identity of the sender until you had finished reading the letter. The intended recipient is also placed in the salutation to ensure that the reader understands from the start the audience being addressed.

Paul expands on this classic form by using it to express the content of his faith and to give us just a hint about what is to come. First, Paul establishes his credentials as an apostle set apart by God to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. Vs. 1 Second, he articulates his understanding of that good news as the proclamation of Jesus as God’s Son through the testimony of the scriptures and the testimony of God expressed by God’s resurrection of Jesus from death. Vss. 2-4. Finally, Paul zeros in on his particular calling to bring about “obedience of faith among all the Gentiles.” Vs 5

Paul calls himself a “slave” of Jesus Christ (translated as “servant” in most translations). He understands himself therefore to be the property of Jesus. It is not lost on Paul that Jesus exercised his Lordship through servanthood. That is why Paul can also say that he is a slave of the church for Jesus’ sake. II Corinthians 4:5. Paul’s understanding of the church is radically anti-hierarchical. Though Paul is not at all shy about asserting his authority, he emphasizes that such apostolic authority has been given him for one reason only: to serve and build up the church. II Corinthians 13:10.

Paul refers to himself as having been “set apart” for the gospel of God. The Greek word he uses, “aphorisemenos,” has the same root meaning (translated from the Hebrew) as the title “Pharisee,” which means “one who is set apart.” That linguistic link could not have been lost on Paul, himself a Pharisee. The irony here is that through his calling Paul has been set apart, not to be isolated from the rest of the world, but to be propelled into it. He is set apart for the mission of bringing together the new people of God under Christ Jesus. This expanded salutation is a great wind-up for the pitch Paul is about to make: his lengthy discussion of God’s inclusion of the Gentiles into the covenant relationship with Israel through the faithful ministry, obedient death and glorious resurrection of Jesus.

Matthew 1:18–25

While I can understand why you would not want to include the lengthy genealogy preceding this week’s gospel lesson in the readings, I also believe that it is impossible to appreciate Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth without it. That genealogy traces the ancestry of Joseph all the way from Abraham and through the lineage of King David. See Matthew 1:1-17. Then, after having established Joseph’s Abrahamic and Davidic credentials, Matthew goes on to explain that Jesus’ conception had nothing to do with Joseph. We are told that Joseph’s espoused wife was pregnant with a child not his own. So what was the point of the genealogy? If anyone’s genealogy matters in this story, it would be that of Mary, and we don’t know squat about her family tree.

I think Matthew is doing a couple of things here. For one thing, he wants to make it clear that God is doing a new thing. The Holy Spirit is again brooding over the waters and the birth of this child is a new creation. God does not need Abraham to produce his Messiah. The Baptist has told us already that God can make children of Abraham from stones. Matthew 3:9. Neither does God need the line of David to produce a new King. To be sure, the Messiah is first and foremost Israel’s Messiah and is given according to the covenant promises made exclusively with her. But the Messiah is a gift of grace to Israel no less than to the Gentile believers who will follow.

Mary’s virginity and the miraculous conception of Jesus have become foundational in so much thinking about the Incarnation. These topics are far too complex for this brief post (and this preacher) to tackle. Nevertheless, I believe it necessary to take a close look at what Matthew is saying (and not saying) here. It is obvious that Mary is pregnant and that Joseph is not the father. It is also clear that the child conceived in Mary is “from the Holy Spirit.” Matthew 1:20. That means quite simply that the Holy Spirit was active in bringing about the conception of Jesus. Matthew does not tell us how the Spirit operated in this case, whether by some human agent or through what we would call “supernatural” means. The Spirit, we know, can work either way. Furthermore, it is well known that the Hebrew text from our Isaiah reading, cited here as having been fulfilled by Jesus, states only that a young woman will conceive and bear a son. Isaiah 7:14. It says nothing about her sexual history or marital status. This does not rule out either Mary’s virginity at the time of Jesus’ conception or that the conception constituted a miraculous intervention without any other human involvement. But one cannot look to Matthew for support in arguing these assertions.

Finally, although the genealogy preceding our gospel lesson is not a part of the appointed text, I think a couple of comments are still in order. First, anyone examining them with care will soon discover that they contain significant discrepancies from the genealogical records of the Hebrew Scriptures. I don’t believe Matthew found that at all problematic as his use of them was not intended to provide a credible pedigree for Jesus. As noted earlier, Matthew did not believe such genealogical grounding to be necessary. For him, the genealogy is a literary device intended merely to show that the Messiah, though born into Israel, is not a product of Israel and his mission extends beyond Israel. For a very thorough discussion of where this genealogy came from and how it might have come into Matthew’s possession, see Brown, Raymond E., The Birth of the Messiah-A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke, (c. 1977 by Raymond E. Brown, pub. Doubleday & Company) pp. 69-70.

What I find most interesting about the genealogy is the inclusion of four women. Such inclusion of women in an ancient Jewish genealogy is itself unusual as lines of ancestry were traced exclusively through male descendants. Even more intriguing is the choice of women singled out. First is Tamar, the rejected wife of Judah’s several sons who posed as a prostitute in order to conceive Judah’s child. There was Rehab, the friendly prostitute of Jericho who assisted Joshua’s spies in scouting out the city in preparation for attack. According to Matthew’s genealogy, she became the wife Boaz, the husband of Ruth, a woman of Moab, whose own seductive measures won her marital status. Finally, Bathsheba is noted as the one through whom the ruling line of Davidic kings proceed. For the story of David and Bathsheba, see II Samuel 11-12:25 or refer to my post of Sunday, June 6, 2013. These women have the dubious distinction of being outside the lineage of Israel or of having borne children outside the legal bonds of wedlock. One cannot help but wonder whether their inclusion is intended to reflect on Mary’s situation and illuminate the work of the Spirit in her life as in theirs.

I must also confess that I have often wondered whether the Gospel of Matthew was not composed or edited by a woman’s hand. Perhaps the inclusion of these women, all of whom played active and often assertive roles in the divine drama, was the author’s way of reminding us that “we are in this too, you know.”

Sunday, November 27th

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First Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 2:1–5
Psalm 122
Romans 13:11–14
Matthew 24:36–44

Prayer of the Day: Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come. By your merciful protection save us from the threatening dangers of our sins, and enlighten our walk in the way of your salvation, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.” Romans 13:11.

At first blush, this isn’t particularly encouraging. These words of Paul were written in the middle of the First Century to a church that could not have existed much longer than a couple of decades. A couple of millennia later we hear this message and wonder what Paul could possibly have meant when he told the Christians of Rome that “the night is far gone” and “the day is at hand.” The stock answer given by a lot of New Testament scholars back in my seminary days was that Paul, like all First Century believers, expected the return of Jesus in his own lifetime. Neither he nor any of the other early believers suspected that the return of Jesus in glory might be “delayed” for a century, to say nothing of over two thousand years and counting. That explanation allows us to dismiss much of the New Testament’s ethical teachings on grounds that they are “eschatological” in nature. The Sermon on the Mount, Paul’s love ethic and the communal existence we read about in the Book of Acts must be understood as hastily drawn, interim guidelines for a community that did not believe it would be living in the present age for very long. Clearly, communal living, non-violence and renunciation of wealth are not practices that can be the defining values for a community desiring to maintain itself over the historical long run. At best, they reflect ideals for which monks and nuns might aspire, but which we who must live in the “real world” find unhelpful. So we can safely dispose with the New Testament and look elsewhere for ethical guidance.

As I have said in prior posts, I find this reading of the New Testament unpersuasive. While none of us can see into Saint Paul’s brain, I strongly suspect that his view of Jesus’ return in glory was a good deal more nuanced than these scholars allow. Though convinced of the imminent reality of Christ’s return in glory, the final judgment and the resurrection of the dead, Paul’s primary focus is always very much on the present state of things. The moral practices of his churches are anything but an afterthought. His is an ethic for a church living in the darkness of this present age in which the works of darkness abound in the surrounding culture. Paul’s call for militant resistance to the darkness with the “armor of light” underscores his confidence that the inbreaking of God’s kingdom is as sure as the dawn. How near or far away the sunrise might be in chronological time is irrelevant. For the disciple of Jesus, the hour is always late. Morning is already on the horizon. The light is already breaking into the world and the time for waking up and getting on with life in God’s resurrection kingdom is now.  This, according to Paul, is the “real world.”

Paul has no interest in faith that accommodates the darkness. He doesn’t preach a gospel that helps us “cope” with the realities of our world. That’s why we have valium and TV. The status quo is not to be endured, but resisted. Paul has no use for a faith that is hardly worth pulling the kids out of soccer practice to learn. If the church doesn’t preach something worth your life’s devotion, then it should not be wasting an hour of your time on Sunday either. If the lives of Christians are not noticeably different from those of everyone else, what’s the point of joining the church? There are plenty of other places with good coffee, friendly people and entertaining things to do-and nobody will stick a plate under your nose. A church that fits nicely into its community is not worth the oxygen it uses up. It has gotten so comfortable living in the dark that it thinks it belongs there. When the light of God’s kingdom breaks in, such churches find themselves blinded and frantically shuttering their eyes just like everyone else.

Paul boldly proclaims a brand new reality-something that is worth living for and, if necessary, dying for. Paul calls us to re-orientate our focus. We look in vain toward the western horizon, trying desperately to find light and hope in the ever diminishing glow of the vanishing day. Instead, we need to face the darkness squarely with the confident belief that our salvation comes from the dawn whose light cannot yet be seen, but whose coming is as certain as yesterday’s end. We are challenged to be communities living in the darkness as though in broad daylight; people shaping our lives as though we lived now in the nearer presence of our Lord. We are challenged to become the kind of communities we long for and that, by virtue of Jesus’ resurrection, we confidently anticipate. In the face of so much doom saying, the Advent scriptures insist that the night in which we now live must inevitably give way to a new day.

What does such an Advent community look like in a fragmented society such as ours? What does church look like in neighborhoods filled with strangers who commute hours to their place of work and socialize principally with clients and coworkers? What does Jesus’ call to discipleship mean for people increasingly enslaved by the demands of employers, financial institutions to which they are indebted and the anxieties of unemployment, loss of medical insurance and everything that follows in the wake of such losses?

Perhaps the most important contribution the church has to offer is that of simply being the church. What made the church an object of awe in the New Testament was its members’ commitment to one another. There was not among them any that were in need, Luke tells us in the Book of Acts. This was a community that said to a world under imperial oppression, military occupation and slavery, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” Hunger is not inevitable. Class distinctions are not absolute. Race is not a defining human characteristic. Conflict need not lead to violence. This community is living proof of that. This is a demo plot for the reign of Christ. Not surprisingly, a lot of people who witnessed all this wanted in. In the New Testament church, your fellow disciples had your back. That was important because discipleship was dangerous. Taken seriously, it still is. And it’s costly. It takes guts for a congregation to pledge that none of its members will ever go without a roof over his head, the medical care she needs or food on the table. It takes courage to give sacrificially to help a sister or brother in time of need trusting that the community will be there for you when your time of need comes. It’s risky to open your doors to strangers. Societies that specialize in building walls between peoples (real and metaphorical) don’t like seeing them knocked down. But that is precisely what the kingdom of heaven does.

There is a danger, Saint Paul knew, of becoming too comfortable with the darkness, too much at home in a world that is in rebellion against its Creator. Here’s a poem by Ilya Kaminsky about such false and deceptive comfort.

We Lived Happily During the War

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in 1977 in the former Soviet Union city of Odessa. His family was granted political asylum by the United States in 1993 and they settled in Rochester, New York. Kaminsky earn a BA in political science at Georgetown University and a JD at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law. He is a recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Milton Center’s Award for Excellence in Writing, the Florence Kahn Memorial Award, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize as well as their Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Philips Exeter Academy’s George Bennett Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation fellowship. You can learn more about Ilya Kaminsky and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

Isaiah 2:1–5

The introductory comment at verse 1 indicates that this chapter begins a collection of sayings associated with the prophet Isaiah that once constituted an independent collection. The material from our lesson was therefore not joined to the rest of what we now know as the Book of Isaiah until a later time. The prophesies introduced by this opening line probably extend at least until Isaiah 4:6 and may also include Isaiah 5:1-7; Isaiah 5:8-24; Isaiah 10:1-4; Isaiah 9:8-21; Isaiah 5:25, 26-30. Kaiser, Otto, Isaiah 1-12, A Commentary, The Old Testament Library (c. 1972 SCM Press Ltd.) p. 23.

Verses 2-5 are also found in Micah 4:1-4. This could mean that one prophet was relying upon the other, but the more probable explanation is that this oracle of salvation grew out of ancient Israelite cultic worship traditions from which both prophets drew. Kaiser, supra goes so far as to suggest that the saying was introduced into the works of both prophets by a later editor in the post-exilic period. Placement of such a liturgical expression of hope from pre-exilic times into the collected oracles of these pre-exilic prophets strengthened the prophetic witness and encouraged the post-exilic community in its struggle to understand its new role as God’s people in their changed circumstances.

Be that as it may, the saying in its present context (which is the only one that really interests me) juxtaposes in stark contrast the future declared by Israel’s God against the present reality of impending and actual war. In the midst of this violent geopolitical neighborhood where imperial superpowers vie for control and the smaller players seek to survive by playing one such empire off against the next through ever shifting alliances, the little nation of Judah is called to be something other than one more petty kingdom thrown into the mix. “The mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains” says the prophet. Isaiah 2:2. Yet what exalts Judah is not her military might or her commercial power, but her Torah. Her covenant wisdom, not her sword will bring all nations under the righteous reign of Israel’s God. When the treasure of Torah is opened up to the nations, they will seek it eagerly and submit their disputes to God’s judgment there under. When perfect justice is so established, weapons will become obsolete. Resources dedicated to producing them can now be put to more productive use. Verse 5 concludes with a plea for Judah to begin doing now what she and all other nations must inevitably do in the end: walk in the light of the Lord. God’s people are called to live in God’s future now.

This passage presents a bold challenge to all of us in mainline churches that have reliably and often uncritically supported military action, assuming it to be a necessary accessory to the “kingdom of God’s left hand” (To use a peculiarly Lutheran term). Though we generally subscribe to the “just war doctrine,” we seldom apply its criterion vigorously when the prospect of military conflict ensues. More often than not, we issue preachy/screechy denominational statements for public consumption, stand on the sidelines and allow political and military leaders to make all the decisions based largely on “national interests,” which, by the way, do not justify military action according to just war doctrine. How might we begin “walking in the light of the Lord” in the midst of this very violent global village? In a society where trading sound bites and exchanging rhetorical barbs from across entrenched ideological battle lines passes for dialogue, how do communities of faith bear witness to a better way of conversing with one another about important issues? How do churches reflect to the world an alternative way of living together?

Psalm 122

This psalm is part of a collection within the Psalter designated “Songs of Ascent.” (Psalms 120-134) While the precise meaning of this title is unknown, it is probable that these psalms were used on the occasion of pilgrimages to Jerusalem by Diaspora Jews visiting the second temple built following the return from Babylonian Exile. It is important to keep in mind, however, that although these psalms were compiled into this collection following the Babylonian Exile, the psalms themselves or portions of them might well belong to a much earlier period.

The psalmist expresses devotion to and longing for Jerusalem. Verse 1 suggests that the pilgrim is overcome with awe upon arriving at the holy city and standing within its gates. Though probably used by post-exilic pilgrims visiting Jerusalem, these verses might well date back to the monarchic period of Judah when the kingdom of David was still intact. The psalmist refers to Jerusalem as the place where all the tribes come together. Vs. 4. Though th

is was surely the case during the reigns of David and Solomon, it is not clear whether and to what extent this practice was continued by the northern ten tribes after the kingdom was divided into Israel in the north and Judah in the south. The phrase may therefore indicate early composition between 1000 B.C.E. to 900 B.C.E. during the united monarchy. On the other hand, the reference might well be symbolic, reflecting the unifying function of Jerusalem for Diaspora Jews following the return from exile in 530 B.C.E.

Verse 6 seems to be a word play on “Jerusalem,” the shorter form of which is “Salem,” and “peace” which in Hebrew is “Shalom.” Thus, “Pray for the shalom of Jerusalem.” The term shalom means more than mere absence of conflict. It denotes wholeness, health and wellbeing. As I have often said before, I am not a big fan of interfaith dialogue as it seldom produces anything more than generalities and platitudes you can get at your local Hallmark store. However, I believe that Jews, Muslims and Christians might have a fruitful discussion about what the city of Jerusalem means in each of their respective traditions and how, working together, we might make it a place of peace.

Romans 13:11–14

This snippet from Paul’s letter to the Romans comes in the middle of some admonitions delivered to the Roman church. Paul has completed in Chapter 11 his lengthy discussion of Israel’s and the church’s role in God’s plan of redemption. Now he turns to practical pastoral concerns. Paul speaks more generally here than in his other letters, probably because this is a congregation Paul did not start and has never personally visited. Nevertheless, he appears to know several of the persons involved with the congregation at Rome, most notably Prisca (Priscilla) and Aquila who assisted him in founding the church at Corinth. Acts 18:1-4.

Paul begins by urging the Roman believers to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.” Romans 12:1. He then warns them not to be conformed to the surrounding culture, but “transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Romans 12:2. These verses reflect the practical outcome of Paul’s understanding of church as the presence of and witness to the resurrected Christ in the midst of the world. The church’s life is to reflect God’s future, an alternative to the carnivorous culture of death that is the Roman Empire. Just as Jesus’ body was broken on the cross, the resurrected Body of Christ can expect resistance and opposition to its way of being in the world. Thus, the sacrifice Paul calls for here is not an afternoon of raking leaves out of the church parking lot. Being the church is a dangerous profession.

In the reading for today Paul urges the Roman congregation to “stay awake” and be alert, for “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.” Romans 13:11. That theme is echoed in our gospel lesson from Matthew. The phrase that caught my eye in this reading was Paul’s call to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Having had three of my kids in the high school band, I know firsthand the transformative effect of a uniform. The band uniform was a reminder to my children and their fellow band members that they were not just another bunch of high school kids. They were members of an organization that made certain demands on them, set them apart from the rest of the community and called them to a higher standard of conduct. They acted much differently when in uniform.

A uniform also raises expectations from outsiders. If fire breaks out in a building, you wouldn’t blame anyone for trying to get out-unless the person is wearing the gear of a fire fighter. You expect fire fighters to act differently in the face of a fire. You expect them to enter into the zone of danger. They are not supposed to run away from it. Similarly, when one puts on Christ one assumes the calling of a disciple of Jesus. As Jesus offered himself up as a living sacrifice, so his disciples are called to place themselves in harm’s way if necessary for the sake of God’s Kingdom.

Matthew 24:36–44

With the dawn of a new church year, we say farewell to Luke and embark on the gospel narrative given to us by Matthew. Though most scholars date both Matthew and Luke sometime after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 A.C.E., recent scholarship has questioned this dating. For example, John Noland, academic dean and lecturer in New Testament studies at Trinity College in Bristol, England believes that Matthew wrote his Gospel before the Jewish War that lead to the fall of Jerusalem. Noland, John, The Gospel of Matthew, The New International Greek Testament Commentary (c. 2005 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.) p. 12. Noland notes that scholars dating the gospel after the Jewish War point to Matthew 22:7; Matthew 23:36-38 and Matthew 24:2 as reflecting memories of this traumatic event. However, given the strained political atmosphere of resentment toward Rome and the frequent and reckless insurgencies against Roman rule throughout the first century, it would not have been surprising that an astute observer like Jesus should have foreseen Jerusalem’s destruction as did Jeremiah in the years immediately before 587 B.C.E. Noland shares with most scholars the view that Matthew was dependent upon the Gospel of Mark and source material also available to Luke in constructing his own gospel. This means, of course, that both Mark and the source common to Matthew and Luke were also composed significantly earlier than most scholars assume. Consequently, the source material utilized by the gospel writers likely emerged during the life time of eye witness to Jesus life and ministry. It is conceivable also that the writers themselves were witnesses. If this is the case, we lose the historical gap between the gospel witness and the so called “Jesus of history.” While I still lean toward the majority view that Matthew post dates the Jewish War, I am keeping an open mind.

Matthew makes more specific citations to the Hebrew Scriptures than any of the other three gospels. This has led most scholars to conclude that his gospel is written for a Jewish Christian audience. Though the location of Matthew’s community cannot be determined with certainty, the prevailing view among New Testament scholars is that the community was located at Antioch in modern day Syria. Noland, supra, at 18. Though numerous attempts have been made to discern efforts on Matthew’s part to parallel his narrative of Jesus with Moses, the patriarchs or the people of Israel as a whole, none of them seem to hold up with any consistency. In my own humble opinion, Matthew was not attempting such a ridged comparison with any one particular Hebrew Scriptural narrative. Instead, he was intent on drenching his story of Jesus in Hebrew prophecy, employing numerous Old Testament parallels, citations and images in order to enrich Jesus’ portrait. Matthew portrays Jesus as a new Moses; a prophet in the tradition of Elijah; and a royal heir to the throne of David. In the end, though, none of these images is fully capable of containing him. Like the new wine poured into old wine skins, Jesus bursts through even the most powerful, eloquent and beautiful messianic images showing himself finally to be God’s only beloved Son.

There are many gospel events narrated only in the Gospel of Matthew. The coming of the Magi to the infant Jesus by the guidance of the star in the east which triggered the tragic slaughter of the innocents is found only in Matthew. Matthew alone has Jesus and his family sojourning in Egypt. Parables unique to Matthew include the story of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16); the story of the wise and foolish maidens (Matthew 25:1-13); and the account of the last judgment (Matthew 25:31-46). As we will see, these stories and parables help us understand Matthew’s particular focus as his witness to Jesus unfolds.

The gospel reading for Sunday calls upon the disciples to be prepared. I think that is the sum total of the message here. But for us that is frequently too little and too much. It is too little in the sense that we look for more to do than simply wait and hope. Literalist readers of the scripture turn the strange passages about those who are taken and those who are left in every which direction in an effort to figure out how and when the end of the world will come. Moreover, as Stanley Hauerwas points out, liberal progressive readers who have no use for mapping out the end times nevertheless assume that disciples of Jesus are capable of discerning the God intended direction history should take and use every means available to turn it in that direction. Hauerwas, Stanley, Matthew, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (c. 2006 by Stanley Hauerwas, Brozos Press) p. 204. In both cases, these readers are chasing the voices of false prophets claiming to know more than they do. The siren call of the false prophets would lure us away from following Jesus into a fruitless attempt to ferret out information that the Father has specifically withheld from us or goad us into a misguided seizure of the levers of political power in order to “make history come out right.”

“Both temptations-to employ Jesus’ apocalyptic imagery to predict the end time or to discern the movement of history-betray the character of Jesus’ training of his disciples. He is trying to teach them how they must live in the light of his coming. The dramatic character of apocalyptic language should help the disciples understand the challenge he presents to them. We, along with the disciples, make a disastrous mistake, however, if we allow our imaginations to be possessed by the images of apocalypse rather than by the one on whom these images are meant to focus our attention-that is, Jesus.”  Hauerwas, supra, p. 205.

Verses 40-41 in which Jesus speaks of two men working in the field and two women grinding at the mill at the coming of the son of man, one of each being “taken” and the other “left,” figure prominently in the Left Behind novels by Tim Lehaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Because I don’t believe in the “rapture,” I naturally do not believe that these verses have anything to do with that fanciful event. Standing alone, it is not even obvious from these verses whether it is more desirable to be taken than left behind. However, in the context of the previous discussion about Noah’s salvation through the Ark and Lot’s rescue from Sodom’s destruction, it seems likely to me that being “taken” is equivalent to salvation on the day of the Son of Man. The wise maidens whose faithful watching resulted in their being received into the wedding celebration is instructive as is the judgment in favor of all who practiced compassion toward their vulnerable neighbors and so found a welcome from the Son at the last day. (Matthew 25:1-13 and Matthew 25:31-46).

 

Sunday, November 20th

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Christ the King

Jeremiah 23:1–6
Psalm 46
Colossians 1:11–20
Luke 23:33–43

Prayer of the Day: O God, our true life, to serve you is freedom, and to know you is unending joy. We worship you, we glorify you, we give thanks to you for your great glory. Abide with us, reign in us, and make this world into a fit habitation for your divine majesty, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

The critical question we face on this Sunday of Christ the King is posed in a hymn we often sing on that occasion: “O Christ, What Can it Mean for Us to Claim you as our King?” What indeed can it mean for us to claim as the ultimate authority in our lives the one who associated with the outcast, befriended the outlaw, blessed the poor, welcomed the outsider and chose death over violence?

The recent uptick in racial violence poses this question in a particularly pointed way to those of us who identify as white. On the Wednesday following election day, numerous acts of racist and sexist aggression occurred throughout the United States. Two male Babson College students drove a pickup truck waving a Donald Trump flag through the campus of Wellesley College where my daughter and other Wellesley alumnae had gathered for an election watch party. The truck cruised in front of Harambee House, a meeting place for students of color, as the two shouted racist and sexist insults and spit in the direction of Wellesley Students. In South Philadelphia the words “Seig Heil 2016,” were spray painted across a storefront window along with a swastika. In Wellsville, New York, a softball dugout at a local park was reportedly defaced with the words “Make America White Again” and a swastika. In the Minneapolis suburb of Maple Grove, students at the local high school were greeted on Wednesday morning with the words, “Whites Only” along with a string of obscene and racist remarks I will not dignify by repeating. And in York, Pennsylvania, students were filmed chanting “white power” while parading through the halls at a local high school. That was all in just one single day.

Racism has been endemic to American culture since the days of our founding. To the credit of many of our leaders, black, white, Asian, Latino and others, we have eradicated the most overt forms it has taken. But racial injustice has continued to operate under the radar of our laws and policies. I doubt it is any worse today than in prior decades, but I do believe the fierce campaign rhetoric from this election cycle has unleashed the beast. Racial slurs and sexist insults, that for long years were never spoken in polite company, have been dragged up from the sewers and brought back into mainline discourse. We have sent a message to many of our young people that it is OK, even “cool” to be racist again.

Over the last week I have heard a lot of admonitions to let by bygones be bygones, accept the result of the election and move on. That actually sounds pretty good to me. I would like nothing more than to erase all memory of this last campaign from my hard drive and start fresh! I’m not a sore loser. One of my first official pastoral acts on Wednesday morning after election day was to pray for President Elect, Donald Trump. I wish him and the new administration well. But I am fearful for the well-being of my friends who are people of color. I am fearful for my loved ones who are lesbian, gay and transgendered. I am worried about the growing number of folks who seem to think it is now OK to threaten, insult and humiliate them. I can accept the result of the election, but I will never accept a culture in which people of color, sexual minorities and women must live in fear. Whatever other political differences we might have, I hope we can say that we are agreed on that.

As church, we confess that all human beings share one ancestor and all are called to redemption through one baptism into the one Body of Christ. Because this baptismal oneness is at the heart of the scriptures, the creeds and our confessions, we can’t simply sweep the scandal of racial injustice under the rug. Neither can we remain silent when the most vulnerable among us are targets of terror and intimidation. What is being done to our sisters and brothers throughout the country is being done to Jesus, our King. When we overcome our spiritual neuropathy, when we understand that we truly are one body and that the health of the whole depends on the health of each part, then we will realize that what is being done to our sisters and brothers is being done to ourselves as well. Because we claim Jesus as our king, we can be nowhere else but at the side of all who are now feeling the sting of discrimination, bullying and intimidation.

Here’s a poem by Langston Hughes. May we all learn to see the world through his eyes and with his clarity!

I Look at the World

I look at the world
From awakening eyes in a black face—
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space
Assigned to me.

I look then at the silly walls
Through dark eyes in a dark face—
And this is what I know:
That all these walls oppression builds
Will have to go!

I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that’s in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find.

Source: Poetry Magazine (January 2009) Langston Hughes was an important African American voice in the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920s. Though well-educated and widely traveled, Hughes’ poetry never strayed far from his roots in the African American community. Early in his career, Hughes’ work was criticized by some African American intellectuals for portraying what they viewed as an unflattering representation of back life. In a response to these critics, Hughes replied, “I didn’t know the upper class Negroes well enough to write much about them. I knew only the people I had grown up with, and they weren’t people whose shoes were always shined, who had been to Harvard, or who had heard of Bach. But they seemed to me good people, too.”  Today Langston Hughes is recognized globally as a towering literary figure of the 20th Century. You can read more about Hughes and discover more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website (from which the above quote is taken).

Jeremiah 23:1–6

Jeremiah pulls no punches here. He faults Judah’s kings, her “shepherds,” for recklessly leading the nation into a ruinous war with Babylon that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem, the exile of a substantial number of Jews and the scattering of the remainder of the people into distant lands. His criticism of these rulers, however, goes far beyond the obvious failure of their geopolitical policies. By referring to them as “shepherds,” Jeremiah is reminding his hearers that kingship in Israel was never intended to be a position of privilege. At the coronation of a Judean king, the people prayed:

Give the king your justice, O God,
and your righteousness to a king’s son.
2 May he judge your people with righteousness,
and your poor with justice.
3 May the mountains yield prosperity for the people,
and the hills, in righteousness.
4 May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,
give deliverance to the needy,
and crush the oppressor.

Psalm 72:1-4. The king was to be the agent of God’s justice and compassion in Israel. The wellbeing of the people, particularly the most vulnerable members of society, was to be the king’s chief concern. King Zedekiah’s decision to release Judah’s slaves in accord with the provisions of the Torah in the face of imminent military invasion and his calculated revocation of that ruling when the threat seemed to recede demonstrates just how callus and dismissive the rulers of Jeremiah’s time had become to the responsibilities of kingship. See post from October 27, 2013. In response, God declares through the mouth of Jeremiah that he himself will take kingship into his own hands. God will gather the remnants of Judah from all the nations to which they have fled or been carried away in exile. God will lead them back to their land and shepherd them with justice and compassion. It seems here as though God were saying, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”

But then in verse 5 the Lord declares through his prophet that he will raise up a “righteous Branch” for David who will deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. This seems contrary to the previous declaration in which God appears to have given up altogether on the line of David and human kingship. It is possible that this oracle comes from an earlier period in Jeremiah’s career when he may still have hoped for a righteous king to emerge from David’s line. The passage might also be from a subsequent editor who held such a hope. However that might be, the canonical testimony is that kingship over God’s people is rooted in God’s reign over all of creation. That reign is characterized by care for the land, compassion for God’s people and faithfulness to God’s covenant. That no human ruler has ever come close to exercising such a gentle and peaceful reign suggests that the good life God intends for creation cannot be implemented by political means.

It has been said that “war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means.” Carl von Clausewitz, On War. The converse is also true, namely, that politics is war by other means. It is after all through political arrangements, international treaties and multi-national commercial agreements that the dominance of the wealthier nations over the vast majority of poverty stricken peoples is maintained. The political structures that enforce grinding poverty, starvation and oppression are no less violent than terrorist attacks. Economic sanctions inflicting hunger and poverty on populations having little or no control over the governments these sanctions were intended to punish are acts of violence as devastating as any bombing raid. Most often, differences between the “military” and the “political” solution to a conflict are merely definitional. Violence is always the common denominator.

It is not for nothing, therefore, that Jesus refused to take hold of the levers of political power when they were handed to him on a silver platter by the devil. It is not for nothing that Jesus taught his disciples that the use of violence, whether offensively or defensively, is not an option for them. It is not for nothing that Jesus would not allow his disciples to use violence to defend him from crucifixion and that he also refused to invoke violent divine intervention against his enemies. It is not for nothing that God responded to the murder of his only begotten Son not with vengeance, but by raising him up and offering him to us again. Absolute renunciation of violence is not just the fringe position of a few Christians at the margins of orthodoxy. It stands at the heart of the New Testament witness to Jesus. If Jesus is our king, we can have no truck with violence whether on the battlefield or in the halls of congress.

Is politics therefore to be avoided totally? I don’t believe so. Every community needs order and disciples of Jesus benefit no less from the protections afforded, the benefits offered and the security ensured by government. Accordingly, disciples are obligated to share in the responsibility for maintaining the health and proper functioning of governmental institutions through political involvement. But like all good gifts, politics becomes toxic when it is used for selfish and self-serving ends. It becomes demonic when it usurps the reign of God. The idolatries of nationalism, imperialism and colonialism stem from divinizing nation, race, tribe or ideology.

Psalm 46

See my post from October 27, 2013 on which this psalm was one of the appointed lessons. I will only add here that verse 9 emphasizes God’s emphatic commitment to “make all wars cease to the end of the earth.”

Colossians 1:11–20

For an excellent introduction to this epistle, see the Summary Article by Paul S. Berge, Emeritus Professor of New Testament on enterthebible.org. Of particular interest in this reading are verses 15-20. These passages are believed by most scholars to consist of an ancient Christian hymn to Christ that was incorporated into the letter by the author. As such, they demonstrate that from very early on the church understood Jesus’ life, death and resurrection to be an event of cosmic proportions with ramifications for the whole creation. The opening stanza of the hymn proclaims Jesus as “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” Vs. 15. Yet he is also “the head of the body, the church…” vs. 18. Consequently, the church is the concrete expression of the presence of God in and for the world. This is a remarkable claim made for a teacher from an obscure town who was ultimately rejected by the leaders of his people, deserted by all of his followers and put to a cruel, shameful death by a Roman governor.

The cosmic scope of Jesus’ ministry is reflected in the claim that through him God “reconciled to himself all things, whether on earth or heaven, making peace through the blood of his cross.” Vs. 20. The resurrection of Jesus is therefore not merely the hope of individual believers. It is the destiny of all creation of which the church is but the first fruits. This bold assertion refutes the limited, non-biblical notion of salvation as a rescue operation to save as many souls as possible from a sinking ship. Clearly, God is determined to save the entire ship! That is what makes the gospel good news not only for disciples of Jesus, but for all creation.

The temptation, of course, is to “spiritualize” this passage. Paul does not wish for us to view our “inheritance of the saints in light” as a future event. These riches belong to us even now and should shape the way we live our lives and the way we handle our wealth. If the world remains unreconciled to God; if we are a people without a heavenly Father who promises to provide for all our needs; if the world is a place of ever diminishing resources-then the only sensible thing to do is grab as much of the pie as you can now before it disappears altogether. This is the survivalist mentality. If the reign of God has any meaning to such people, it is in the distant future, after death, in the sweet by and by. That is all well and good. But I have to live now.

Paul’s point, however, is that the inheritance of the saints in light is now. The fullness of God is present now in the community of faith, a community that is called to live now under the jurisdiction of God’s reign of abundance and peace. How else will the creation learn that reconciliation has been accomplished? How else will the world know that there is an alternative to our death spiral of endless consumer greed for more stuff and ruthless commercial exploitation of the earth to feed it? Unless the Body of Christ practices confidence in God’s reconciling power and the generosity it inspires, how will the world ever understand what human life is supposed to look like? How will people come to believe that the future of creation is resurrection rather than apocalyptic demise unless they see the reality of resurrection faith lived out by Jesus’ disciples?

Luke 23:33–43

This passage seems to put to bed once and for all any claim Jesus might have to kingship. His death is one reserved for insurrectionists, terrorists and those guilty of the most heinous crimes. Pilate inscribes over the cross the title “King of the Jews” so that everyone will understand that before you go claiming to be a king, you had better make sure you really are one. In Mark and Matthew Jesus is mocked by all who pass by. In Luke’s gospel, however, a crowd of people including many women accompany Jesus to the cross with weeping and lamentation. Luke 23:27. The Jewish leaders mock and deride Jesus, but the crowds merely stand by silently witnessing the crucifixion. Vs. 35. Though all of the gospels report that Jesus was crucified along with two other criminals, only Luke relates the story of the criminal who sought recognition in Jesus’ coming kingdom. He alone seems to recognize Jesus’ kingship, a subject of mockery for the Roman soldiers and the Jewish leaders. Though sympathetic, it is not at all clear that the crowds recognize Jesus as anything more than a righteous teacher suffering an undeserved fate.

Luke’s account of Jesus’ crucifixion turns our notion of kingship on its head. It is clear now that the reign of God is taking a very different form than we might have expected. Jesus is certainly not a king under any existing model of kingship. He has no army, nor royal court, no power to compel obedience. His might-and the might of God as well-consist in just this: that Jesus is able to continue loving his enemies in the face of the most virulent hatred. Just as he refused to accept his disciples’ efforts to defend him with the sword or to invoke divine power in his own defense in the Garden of Gethsemane, so now he will not rain down curses at his enemies from the cross. His only words are words of forgiveness. God will not be sucked into the vortex of retribution. That is God’s power. “For not with swords loud clashing, nor roll of stirring drums, but deeds of love and mercy the heavenly kingdom comes.” “Lead on, O King Eternal,” Lutheran Book of Worship, # 495.

What exactly did Jesus mean when he told the bandit crucified with him on the cross: “Today you will be with me in paradise?” According to the understanding of death in the Hebrew Scriptures, the end of life is the end of everything; body soul, spirit and whatever else might constitute a human person. Sheol, the abode of the dead, was not viewed as a continuation of life after death. Rather, it was a sort of universal grave yard of unknowing. In the much later apocalyptic writings like Daniel, we find a growing belief in the resurrection of the dead. Nevertheless, the dead are truly and completely dead. If they are raised to life again, it is only because God exercises his prerogative to breathe life back into the lifeless dust all flesh is destined to become.

By the dawn of the first century when Jesus’ ministry took place, Jewish beliefs about death and the afterlife were diverse and complex. The Sadducees, as we saw last week, rejected altogether the resurrection of the dead or any form of human existence after death. The Pharisees, by contrast acknowledged the resurrection of the dead. Some of them at some point also believed in a paradise for the souls of the righteous awaiting the resurrection. According to at least one commentator I have read, this post-biblical understanding of paradise was behind Jesus’ promise to the bandit crucified with him. Caird, G.B. The Gospel of Saint Luke, The pelican New Testament Commentaries (c. G.B. Caird, 1963, Penguin Books, Ltd.) p. 253.

I don’t buy it. The scriptures use a host of metaphors and images when speaking about death and resurrection (how else can you speak of such things?). It is dangerous to draw metaphysical conclusions from parabolic speech. The Greek word translated “paradise” in this passage merely means “garden.” It was employed by the Greek translation of the Old Testament scriptures to describe the Garden of Eden. As such, it was also used as a metaphor for the restored creation under the reign of God. Jesus’ promise, then, was that the crucified criminal would share in the reign of God which was breaking through even now under the sign of the cross. There is no attempt here to explicate the metaphysical implications of all this (assuming there are such).

Sunday, November 13th

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Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Malachi 4:1–2a
Psalm 98
2 Thessalonians 3:6–13
Luke 21:5–19

Prayer of the Day: O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without you nothing is strong, nothing is holy. Embrace us with your mercy, that with you as our ruler and guide, we may live through what is temporary without losing what is eternal, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

This Sunday’s lessons are hard to hear. They all bear the dreadful news of God’s judgment. Even the Psalm, which is a jubilant hymn of praise, ends with the dire warning that the Lord “comes to judge the earth.” I am not sure how to preach these texts as good news in the shadow of an election cycle that has laid bare for us the darkest angels of our nature and exposed the deep race, class, gender and ideological divides in our nation. By the time Sunday rolls around, the question of who is to occupy the oval office will have been settled. But I doubt that the deep wounds we have inflicted upon one another will be on their way to healing anytime soon. With all of the raw anger hanging in the air, what healing effect can be expected from preaching the anger of God? With all the judging we have done against one another over the last year, what good can possibly come from turning up the volume of that anger to cosmic dimensions?

Perhaps there is a silver lining here. After all, anger thrives only between siblings, neighbors, people who have some connection to each other. Even enemies are bonded, if only by their mutual hate. I wouldn’t much care what a perfect stranger thought or did about something in which I have no interest. Our anger, then, is at least a testament that our identity as a people remains intact. We are united by matters about which we all passionately care. My hope is that we will eventually find the grace to see beyond our differences to a good that is common to all of us. Whoever occupies the White House during the next four years will have no greater challenge than helping us catch a glimpse of that good which is greater and more inspiring than all of our own selfish interests.

So, too, I believe that the anger of God testifies to God’s abiding commitment to God’s creation and God’s people. It is the shape God’s passionate love takes in a creation distorted, exploited and ruined by the selfish appetites of its human creatures. It is precisely because God loves us so dearly that God says “no” to our self-destructive impulses, “no” to our Promethean ambitions to exploit the earth, “no” to the exaltation of our own clans, tribes and nations over God’s gracious reign. God will not permit us to achieve peace at the expense of justice, happiness at the expense of compassion or wealth at the expense of the poor. Yes, God is angry, but not because of anything we have done directly to God. Yes, God inflicts punishment, but not because God cannot abide infractions against God’s law. God is angry over the misery our sin inflicts upon ourselves and our neighbors. God’s punishment aims not to repay us for our wrong doing, but to curb our self-destructive impulses which, left unchecked, would destroy us. God’s judgment is God’s mercy though, like headstrong toddlers bent on running into the street, we see God’s stern intervention only as a malicious restraint on our willful freedom.

Paul reminds us in his second letter to the Church in Corinth that we are Christ’s ambassadors sent to proclaim reconciliation between God and humanity. We are the new people of God who are, as John of Patmos reminds us, made up of every tribe, language and nation. Reconciliation is the only way forward for the church and, I believe, for the nation and for the world. We cannot hope to rid ourselves of all the folks we don’t like. Twelve million undocumented immigrants, generations of descendants of slaves still smarting from the sting of racism, women steadfastly pushing with their gifts and abilities into what used to be a man’s world, gay, lesbian and transgendered persons seeking justice and legal protection for their families; angry white men who feel that their jobs, their culture and their very country is slipping out of their hands; we are all here to stay. There can be no future for America that does not include us all. Reconciliation is not an option. It is our only hope. We cannot afford to allow any obstacles to deter us from pursuing it. The pursuit of anything less is too horrible to contemplate.

Here’s a poem about the dreariness, resentment and joy of human connectedness by John Updike.

Relatives

Just the thought of them makes your jawbone ache:
those turkey dinners, those holidays with
the air around the woodstove baked to a stupor,
and Aunt Lil’s tablecloth stained by her girlhood’s gravy.
A doggy wordless wisdom whimpers from
your uncles’ collected eyes; their very jokes
creak with genetic sorrow, a strain
of common heritable that hurts the gut.

Sheer boredom and fascination! A spidering
of chromosomes webs even the infants in
and holds us fast around the spread
of rotting food, of too-sweet pie.
The cousins buzz, the nephews crawl;
to love one’s self is to love them all.

Source, Collected Poems, (c. 1993 by John Updike, pub. by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.). John Updike (1932-2009) was a prolific American author and poet. He grew up in Shillington, Pennsylvania. His early poems and fiction are grounded in the gritty industrial and cultural environment of the rust belt. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the American Book Award for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for both fiction and criticism. You can learn more about John Updike and read more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

Malachi 4:1–2a

The name Malachi means “my messenger” in Hebrew. It was most likely a pseudo name derived from chapter 3:1 and given as the author of this prophetic book by a later editor. This prophet was active sometime around 500 to 450 B.C. after the Jews returned from Exile in Babylon and rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem. His concern is for proper maintenance of the temple cult and the worship practices of his people. Malachi castigates the priests for accepting sick and defective animals in sacrifice at the temple rather than animals “without blemish” as the Levitical laws required. Malachi 1:6-14. See, e.g., Leviticus 1:3; Leviticus 1:10. He condemns the men of the community for divorcing the “wife of your youth” (perhaps in order to obtain a newer model?). Malachi 2:13-16. There is a clear connection here between unfaithfulness to Israel’s covenant with her God and the unfaithfulness of Israelite men to their wives. Both are based on covenant promises. Offering animals unfit for consumption as offerings at the temple reflects contempt for God’s covenant with Israel just as cavalierly divorcing one’s wife of many years constitutes an egregious breach of faith on the human plain. There is no separation of the sacred from the secular. All of life is bound together by covenant promises.

In chapter 3, speaking on behalf of the Lord, Malachi declares: “Behold, I send my messenger to prepare the way before me.” Malachi 3:1. But this prophecy has a double edge, for “who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” Malachi 3:2. Like a refiner’s fire, this messenger will purify the priesthood so that the peoples’ offerings and worship will once again be pleasing to the Lord and invoke blessing rather than judgment. Malachi 3:3-4. It is against the backdrop of these oracles that the verses from our lesson must be read. The day of judgment that consumes the wicked is also the refining fire that will perfect the people of God.

This lesson serves as a reminder that salvation cannot come without judgment. Forgiveness does not benefit the sinner apart from the sinner’s repentance. Sanctification is the flip side of salvation by grace. Faith that does not transform is something less than faith. If one does not come away from an encounter with God full of stark terror or with a broken bone or with blinded eyes, then you have to wonder whether the encounter was with the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ. Nobody comes away from a meeting with the living God unscathed. Yet, though God be ever so terrifying, God is nevertheless good. It is a measure of God’s compassion that God takes the trouble to judge us, refine us and resurrect us as new people.

The danger here is that we might be tempted to read this text as drawing the line between the righteous and the wicked prematurely. That was precisely the problem with much of the religious tradition that Jesus confronted in his ministry. Chief among the complaints against him was that he associated with “sinners.” E.g. Mark 2:15-17. We do well to remember that the line between righteousness and wickedness does not run along any international border, or between any racial, religious, ethnic or political dividing line. Rather, the line runs through each human heart which must be both judged and redeemed by the Word of the Lord.

Psalm 98

This psalm of praise is an “enthronement psalm” celebrating the lordship of Israel’s God. The people are invited to sing a “new song” to the Lord echoing a nearly identical phrase in Isaiah 42:10 which introduces a song used in celebration of God’s coming to deliver Israel from captivity in Babylon. This similarity has led some commentators to conclude that the psalm is post-exilic. That might well be the case, but it seems to me a slender reed upon which to make a definitive decision on dating. The victories of the Lord celebrated in verses 1-3 could as easily refer to events connected with the Exodus. In the absence of reference to any specific historical event, the issue of dating must remain open.

Verse 6 makes clear that the “king” whose enthronement is celebrated here is the Lord. This, too, may well indicate a post-exilic time in which any king there might be would necessarily be a gentile ruler. The psalm would then be a bold assertion that the earth is under the sole jurisdiction of the Lord rather than any emperor or king asserting authority over the nations. If, however, this psalm dates back to the monarchic period of Israel’s history, it would testify to the prophetic insistence that even Israel’s king is finally subject to the reign of God.

Verses 4-8 extend the call to praise out to the whole earth, its peoples and all the forces of nature. All the earth is invited to “make a joyful noise to the Lord” with all manner of musical instruments. Vss. 4-6. The sea is ordered to “roar,” the floods to “clap” and the hills to “sing together for joy.” What is the great act of God evoking such cosmic celebration? The answer is given in verse 3 where the psalmist announces that God “has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel.” This faithfulness has been expressed in a victory handed to Israel that is witnessed by the whole earth. Vs. 3. Furthermore, Israel will not be the only beneficiary of God’s faithfulness. For this God comes to “judge the earth” and “the world” with righteousness, establishing “equity” for all peoples. Vs. 9

Whether this psalm was written during the monarchic period of Israel’s history when she was but a small player in a violent and dangerous geopolitical neighborhood or whether it was composed following the Babylonian Exile when Israel lived as a conquered people, there was and still is a huge gap between the psalmist’s bold assertions of God’s reign and the “reality” in which the people were living. As we will see in our gospel lesson, God’s people of every age are called to live as children under God’s reign in the midst of a world where many other hostile forces assert their lordship. Faith refuses to accept the “reality” of the present world as the only one or the final one. God’s reign is the only real kingship and will endure after “crowns and thrones” have perished and after all other kingdoms have “waxed and waned.” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” The Lutheran Hymnal, # 658.

2 Thessalonians 3:6–13

The relationship between the form and substance of II Thessalonians and I Thessalonians has led most commentators to believe that II Thessalonians was composed by a Christian leader writing to a later generation in the name of Paul and his colleagues. However that might be, this second letter echoes Paul’s admonitions to the Thessalonians in the first letter not to concern themselves with “times” and “seasons” for the triumphal return of Christ. I Thessalonians 5:1-11. Here, too, Paul urges the church “not to be quickly shaken in mind or excited, either by spirit or by word or by letter purporting to come from us to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.” Vs 2. He then continues to discuss the appearance of “the man of lawlessness” and the “rebellion” preceding the second coming. This particular section of scripture has given rise to much speculation and is one of the texts that appears to have inspired the Left Behind series. Paul (or the anonymous author) does not explain who the “man of lawlessness” is, nor does he say much about the force that is “restraining him now” discussed in the omitted verses 6-12. Evidently, he assumes that the readers know perfectly well what he was talking about and they probably did. We, alas, have no clue. That is what happens when you read someone else’s mail.  You might also want to read the summary article on enterthebible.org by Matt Skinner, Associate Professor of New Testament for some good background on this brief letter.

In today’s lesson Paul addresses a perennial problem for the church. What to do with slackers in the Body of Christ? It appears that there were folks in the Thessalonian church taking advantage of the church’s hospitality and charity. Perhaps the congregation practiced common ownership of goods similar to the Jerusalem church in the Book of Acts. See Acts 4:32-37. Under this “honor system” the temptation to game the system runs high. See Acts 5:1-11. Or it might be that this church had an order of widows similar to that described in Paul’s first letter to Timothy under which elderly widows with no family to care for them received sustenance from the church in return for their commitment to minister to the needs of the saints. It seems, however, that the order was becoming a dumping ground for unwanted grannies and a refuge for younger women capable of gainful employment. I Timothy 5:3-16. In any event, it is clear that the church in Thessalonica is beset by folks who are taking far more than they give.

This problem is comparable to the dilemma presented by drifters who show up at our doors with a heart wrenching problem that cash and only cash can solve. It is perhaps similar to members of our churches who feel entitled to its benefits, but feel no responsibility to support it. They show up when someone needs to be baptized, confirmed, married or buried. You might see them on Christmas or Easter. You don’t see them at any other time, but they still think of the church as “theirs.” It is easy to share Paul’s annoyance with these slackers and I am sometimes tempted to call them out on their crass abuses of our ministry. But I never do. My reluctance is twofold. I am glad to see anyone come within the influence of the Body of Christ because I see there an opportunity to exercise hospitality and witness to the gospel.

Additionally, I cannot help but feel that the church itself is partly responsible for creating this problem. Back in the days when everyone went to church, evangelism (such that it was) consisted of little more than consumer marketing. Because we assumed that everyone was looking for a church, we advertised our church as the best in town. We touted our air conditioned buildings; our youth programs; our Sunday Schools and varied activities for seniors. Even when our outreach was specifically religious, we sold our faith as a consumer good. The trouble with consumer advertising is that it only draws consumers and consumers only consume. When we ask them to contribute, they balk-and rightly so. They were lured into our midst with the promise of freebies. Then we go and stick an offering plate under their nose, ask them to give up an evening every month to be on a committee or spend their Saturday raking our leaves. It’s a classic bait and switch.

Jesus did not market to consumers. Even to those who sought him out, he warned them that they might be sleeping on the ground or even dying on a cross should they follow him. He had no use for people who put even their family commitments ahead of discipleship. Jesus never sought mass appeal. He avoided it like the plague. Like the United States Marines, Jesus was looking for a few good people. He wanted disciples, not members. He spent the years of his ministry working intensely with twelve people and that remained his focus even when it meant turning the crowds away. Paul’s ultimatum might sound rather severe: “Whoever will not work, let them not eat.” Vs. 10. We do well to remember that Paul is not a governmental agent denying food stamps to hungry families. He is an apostle speaking to people who are under the false impression that the church is a club designed to meet the needs of its members rather than the Body of Christ devoted to the work of preaching, reconciliation and peacemaking. For their own sake and for the sake of the church these slackers need to be called to account.

Now that we are living in a post Christian age where there no longer is a huge contingent of church shoppers out there to whom we can market church membership, we can perhaps find our way back to the good work of making disciples.

Luke 21:5–19

This section of the gospel, like apocalyptic literature generally, has been subject to all manner of end times prognostication. With the arguable exception of “great signs from heaven” in vs 11, the natural and political traumas described have been regular features of every age. Consequently, it has always been possible to employ these scriptures to convince gullible persons with short historical memories that the end has in fact drawn near. Careful reading of the text reveals, however, that Jesus’ point is precisely the opposite. Neither the destruction of the temple nor any of the geopolitical fallout signal the coming of the Son of Man. Jesus is careful to point out that the cosmic signs heralding that final chapter will be impossible to miss. Luke 21:25-28.  The disciples should not imagine that the ordinary traumas of war, pestilence and famine constitute signs of the end. Vss. 10-11.

New Testament Scholarship has sometimes viewed the entire Gospel of Luke and its sequel, the Book of Acts, as a response to dashed expectations of a church that had been looking for the imminent return of Jesus in glory. The German New Testament scholar Hans Conzelmann wrote extensively on the Gospel of Luke arguing that Luke changed the emphasis in Jesus’ teaching from an expectation that the coming of the Son of Man was imminent to a focus on the redemptive presence of God’s saving work in history through the church. This, he maintained, was Luke’s answer to a theological crisis in the church occasioned by the delay of Christ’s return as expected. That would account for the emphasis in Sunday’s gospel reading on the indefinite period of testimony required of the disciples between the resurrection and Christ’s return. Conzelmann’s thinking has been quite influential in shaping New Testament scholarship generally.

Frankly, I think Conzelmann was wrong. I am not convinced that Jesus thought the end of the world or the consummation of God’s kingdom was imminent. I believe rather that Jesus understood the kingdom as having come in its fullness through his ministry and that he invited his disciples to join him in living under its jurisdiction. I also think he understood that life under the reign of God would take the form of the cross until the “coming of the Son of Man,” the timing of which is known to God alone. I am unconvinced that the church anticipated the immediate return of Christ. Though mindful that the Son of Man would come “like a thief in the night” and that watchfulness was important, I believe the church well understood that Israel waited 400 years for liberation from Egypt; wandered for 40 years in the wilderness before entering the Promised Land and spent 70 years in exile before returning home from Babylon. Though perhaps tempted by “end times” hysteria (as is our own age), the church understood from the get go that God will not be rushed. The church also understood that God can be trusted to supply her with whatever might be required to complete her journey-however long that journey might take. In short, there never was a “crisis of faith” in the early church over the supposed delay of Jesus’ return necessitating a re-write of the church’s preaching or self-understanding.

Patience and endurance have always been central to the church’s life of faith. These virtues are learned under the yolk of oppression when no hope of liberation is in sight; when one is wandering in the wilderness without a map; or while one lives as a captive foreigner in a hostile, alien culture. These virtues might not seem so very important when the direction is clear, the way ahead is smooth and the goal is in sight. But when you are waiting for all the weapons of war to be beaten into plowshares, for a world in which each person can sit under his or her own fig tree living without fear, for the blind to see, the lame to walk, the hungry to be fed and every tear to be wiped from every eye, for that you need a truck load of endurance. It is that for which I pray to help me wait faithfully for Jesus’ triumphal return and “live through what is temporary without losing what is eternal.”

What the disciples should be preparing for is an indefinite time in which they are to live as children of their Heavenly Father in a world hostile to his reign. They can expect persecution from the government, from their fellow countrymen and even from members of their own families. Vs. 12. The disciples must be prepared to give their testimony and may do so with confidence as Jesus will give them “a mouth and wisdom which none of [their] adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict.” Vs. 15. Though the “end” may not be imminent, the kingdom surely is-and the world’s opposition to it as well. The faithful disciple can therefore assume that tribulation will be the status quo. Nevertheless, such tribulation is not to be met with fear and foreboding. While the rest of the world is running for cover, disciples of Jesus are invited to hold their heads high in hope. They understand their trials to be not death-throws, but birth pangs.

Some New Testament scholars have practically made a career of dissecting this text and trying to figure out where the gospel writers got their material, what the material looked like before they wove it into their gospel narratives and what different meaning (if any) these supposedly independent pieces might have had in the context where they were originally composed. The fancy name for that is “redaction criticism.” In the case of this particular gospel lesson, it is commonly held that Luke relied upon Mark 13 (the “Little Apocalypse”) in composing these verses. The similarities between the two gospels at this point of intersection are striking. But there are also significant differences leading to a split of opinion over whether Luke may have relied upon other sources in addition to Mark. Marshall, I. Howard, Commentary on Luke, New International Greek Testament Commentary (c. 1978, The Paternoster Press, Ltd.) p. 755. There is also a good deal of scholarly argument over whether Mark relied upon a tract circulating during the Jewish War of 70 A.C.E.  Ibid. 761. That war ended with Rome’s conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. It is not altogether inconceivable that such written oracles warning of the impending disaster and seeking to interpret its significance were in existence at that time or that Mark might have relied upon one of them in composing his Little Apocalypse. Yet the fact remains that no document of this kind has ever been identified. Thus, the suggestion that either Mark or Luke relied upon such a document is merely speculative. At least that is how I see it. Bottom line? Whatever may or may not have happened along the way in formation of the gospels might be of academic interest, but as far as I am concerned it is not particularly significant. I preach from the gospel as it is, not from what somebody else tells me it might have looked like in some earlier form.

Sunday, November 6th

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All Saints Day

Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18
Psalm 149
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31

Prayer of the Day: Almighty God, you have knit your people together in one communion in the mystical body of your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant us grace to follow your blessed saints in lives of faith and commitment, and to know the inexpressible joys you have prepared for those who love you, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

All Saints Day is the church’s Veteran’s Day, a time for honoring the memory of all whose lives have illuminated for us the way of the cross and the shape of faithful discipleship in every age. Special attention is given to the martyrs, those whose witness to Jesus required the loss of their lives. The first of these known to us was the deacon, Stephen, who died at the hands of an angry mob. His story is recounted in the Book of Acts. Acts 6-7. One thing always puzzled me about that story. Stephen was one of seven disciples elected to oversee food assistance to destitute widows. How did he go from running a soup kitchen to being at the epicenter of a violent controversy?

I don’t think becoming the first Christian martyr was Stephen’s goal in life. I suspect he would have been perfectly happy to spend his life in anonymity caring for the poor. But caring for the poor can get you into deep trouble. St. Lawrence of Rome, another deacon charged with care of the poor in his city, caught the attention of a Roman prefect. Having witnessed the very generous giving by the church to the poor in Rome, the prefect imagined that the church must have in its possession a huge store of wealth. He ordered Lawrence to turn over to him the treasures of the church. Lawrence promised to do just that within three days. He gathered together a large crowd of the poor, crippled and destitute people under the church’s care and presented them to the prefect three days later declaring, “Behold the treasure of the church!” The prefect was not amused. He had Lawrence burned alive.

This is no coincidence. Hatred of the poor is endemic to most cultures. In our own country we try to pretend that the poor don’t exist. We shut them out of our gated communities, we put impassible distances between them and our suburbs and we employ vagrancy laws enabling the police to clear them out of places where their presence might disturb shoppers, theater patrons and tourists. The poor are unwelcome reminders of our nation’s failures, a challenge to the “American Dream” in which we want so desperately to believe. Because the presence of the poor challenges all that we would like to believe about ourselves, we react to them with hostility. We blame them for their predicament. They are lazy, shiftless, dishonest and unmotivated. The benefits that keep them alive are a burden on the rest of us honest, hardworking citizens. That’s not fair! Besides, helping the poor only destroys what little incentive they might still have to better themselves. Charity is “toxic.” The kindest thing you can do for the poor is to take them off the dole and force them to fend for themselves.

There is some truth to that notion of “toxic charity” as I noted in my post for Sunday, February 21, 2016. My concern there, however, had less to do with destroying the incentive of poor people to better themselves and more with how misguided efforts to help them reinforce our stereotypes of poor people and cause those we help to feel judged rather than loved and valued. Such charity is indeed toxic, both for the church and those we seek to help. Yet when I hear the well-heeled beneficiaries of white privilege complain about toxic charity, it sounds a lot more like a rationale for selfishness, self-righteousness and greed than a serious response to poverty. It also demonstrates a glaring ignorance of poverty and its causes. Though I have worked all my adult life and put in far more than a forty-hour week more than half that time, I have never worked as hard as the homeless people I have met over the years in their struggle to survive day by day. I have thankfully never suffered from addiction, depression or chronic illness. If I had, however, I would have been surrounded by family and friends who would have been there to see that I got the treatment I needed and the care I required. Without that network, you are always just one stroke, one drink, one bad decision, one accident away from poverty and perhaps homelessness.

Are there poor people who game the system? Sure. But are they gamming the system any more than corporations that get huge tax breaks, ostensibly to invest in American production and generate American jobs, but invest their savings in foreign stocks instead? Are the poor gamming the system any more than real estate tycoons who repeatedly use bankruptcy laws to escape their contractual obligations, avoid their just debts and stiff their workers? Are the poor gamming the system any more than the vast majority of us who are willing to let a sub-class of warriors die fighting wars we have nearly forgotten about? If we cannot see these great logs of selfish exploitation in our own eyes, how dare we presume to take the speck out of the eye of one who is merely trying to get through another day?

In our gospel lesson Jesus proclaims that the poor are blessed. He is speaking, of course, to his disciples. Jesus presumes that his followers, if they are not poor themselves, are nevertheless solidly aligned with the poor. Jesus does not glorify poverty. The poor are not blessed because they are poor, but because the kingdom of God belongs to them. To be on the side of the poor is to be on the side of God. To oppose the poor is to war against God. It’s as simple as that. The saints of God know that the poor are on the winning side of history. We ignore their cries for justice at our peril

Here’s a poem by Robert Southey reflecting those plaintive cries to a society that has nearly lost its ability to hear.

The Complaints of the Poor

And wherefore do the Poor complain?
The rich man asked of me,—
Come walk abroad with me, I said
And I will answer thee.

Twas evening and the frozen streets
Were cheerless to behold,
And we were wrapt and coated well,
And yet we were a-cold.

We met an old bare-headed man,
His locks were few and white,
I ask’d him what he did abroad
In that cold winter’s night:

‘Twas bitter keen indeed, he said,
But at home no fire had he,
And therefore, he had come abroad
To ask for charity.

We met a young bare-footed child,
And she begg’d loud and bold,
I ask’d her what she did abroad
When the wind it blew so cold;

She said her father was at home
And he lay sick a-bed,
And therefore was it she was sent
Abroad to beg for bread.

We saw a woman sitting down
Upon a stone to rest,
She had a baby at her back
And another at her breast;

I ask’d her why she loiter’d there
When the wind it was so chill;
She turn’d her head and bade the child
That scream’d behind be still.

She told us that her husband served
A soldier, far away,
And therefore to her parish she
Was begging back her way.

We met a girl; her dress was loose
And sunken was her eye,
Who with the wanton’s hollow voice
Address’d the passers by;

I ask’d her what there was in guilt
That could her heart allure
To shame, disease, and late remorse?
She answer’d, she was poor.

I turn’d me to the rich man then
For silently stood he,
You ask’d me why the Poor complain,
And these have answer’d thee.

Source: this poem is in the public domain. Robert Southey (1774–1843) was born in Bristol, England. He spent much of his childhood living under the watchful discipline of a stern aunt and in boarding schools that were hardly less vigorous in their enforcement of discipline. He was an avid reader of classic poets like Shakespeare and Milton. While at Westminster public school he wrote a satirical article on corporal punishment. The administration was not amused. He was promptly expelled. This anti-authoritarian streak continued into his adult life as he became an avid supporter of the French Revolution. In addition to his many poems, Southey produced plays, essays and historical sagas. You can find out more about Robert Southey and read more of his poems at the Poetry Foundation website.

Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18

There is no getting around it: the Book of Daniel is a strange piece of literature. It is usually classified “apocalyptic” as is the Book of Revelation. Both of these books employ lurid images of fabulous beasts and cosmic disasters to make sense out of the authors’ experiences of severe persecution and suffering. In the case of Daniel, the crisis is the oppression of the Jews under the Macedonian tyrant, Antiochus Epiphanes whose short but brutal reign lasted from 167-164 B.C.E. Antiochus was determined to spread Greek culture to his conquered territories and to that end tried to stamp out all distinctively Jewish practices. He compelled his Jewish henchmen to eat pork-strictly forbidden under Mosaic Law-and threatened with torture and death those who refused. Antiochus considered himself a god and was thought to be mad by many of his contemporaries. Antiochus’ most offensive act was his desecration of the Temple in Jerusalem with an altar to Zeus upon which he sacrificed pigs. Though many Jews resisted to the point of martyrdom efforts to turn them from their faith, others were more inclined to submit to or even collaborate with Antiochus.

The early chapters of the Book of Daniel tell the tale of its namesake, a young Jew by the name of Daniel taken captive and deported three hundred years earlier by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar. This is Daniel of lions’ den fame. Stories about Daniel’s faithfulness in the face of persecution under King Nebuchadnezzar and later under the Persian rulers are retold in the new context in order to give comfort and encouragement to Jews struggling to remain faithful under the reign of Antiochus. It is as though the author were saying, “Look people, we have been through this before. We can get through it again.” The latter chapters contain apocalyptic material that, like Revelation, has given rise to no end of speculation over what it might have to say about when the world will end. That concern, however, was far from the mind of the author of Daniel. His concern was with the present suffering of his people and sustaining them as they waited for a better day.

Our text for this Sunday comes at the very beginning of the apocalyptic section of the book. Daniel is visited by “visions in the night” during which he observes four great beasts coming up out of the sea. At this juncture, the lectionary takes a flying leap over the graphic descriptions of each of the beasts. That is unfortunate because we need to meet them in order to understand the promises made to Daniel at the end of our reading. I therefore invite you to read verses 4-14 before proceeding any further. The first beast is described as a lion with eagles’ wings and is identified by most Hebrew Scripture scholars with the Babylonian Empire which destroyed Jerusalem and took many of the Jews into exile in 587 B.C.E. Vs. 4 The second beast, a bear with three ribs in its mouth, is identified with the empire of the Medes. Vs. 5 The third beast is a winged leopard corresponding to the Persian Empire under Cyrus who, as you may recall, conquered the Babylonians and permitted the Jews to return from exile in Babylon to their homeland in Palestine. Vs. 6 The fourth beast is nothing like any living animal. More vicious and destructive than the beasts before it, this animal has iron teeth and ten horns. Vs. 7. It represents the Greek Empire founded by Alexander the Great. The ten horns represent ten rulers who succeeded Alexander, ruling various parts of his empire. The little horn speaking “great things” is our friend Antiochus.

Also omitted from our reading are the “planting of thrones” and the descent of the “Ancient of Days” and his host of thousands. Before him “books” are opened and judgment is passed upon the nations. The fourth beast is destroyed and consigned to flames, but the remaining kingdoms are merely deprived of their jurisdiction. At this point “one like a son of man” is given dominion over all the nations of the earth. His kingdom, we are told, will not pass away. Now we are finally in a position to understand the full import of the words spoken to Daniel by one of the heavenly host: “These four great beasts are four kings who shall arise out of the earth. But the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom forever, forever and ever.” Vss 17-18. It might now appear that the “saints” or faithful Jews are helpless pawns in the struggle between these great empires. But appearances can be deceiving. In the end, it is not any one of the kingdoms asserting power over the earth that will prevail. The kingdom of the Most High will finally rule the peoples of all nations and tongues through the agency of his messiah.

The sixty-four thousand dollar question is: Who determines the outcome of history? From a modernist point of view, history is the confluence of innumerable currents that can be influenced for better or worse by human activity. The Book of Daniel offers us a radically different outlook. According to Daniel, history is God’s project from beginning to end. The kingdom of God comes in its own good time without any help from us, thanks just the same. The people of God can live an anticipatory counter-cultural existence of humble obedience under that reign even now and so bear witness to it. But they cannot hasten its coming anymore than the kingdom’s adversaries can prevent it.

That said, witness is important and faithfulness invariably leads to conflict with the surrounding culture. The fiery ordeal faced by the people addressed in the Book of Daniel is hard for most of us to imagine. Yet in more subtle ways, I believe that disciples of Jesus are faced with decisions that require them to take a stand for or against Jesus. Even in a society where being a disciple of Jesus is not against the law, following Jesus still means taking up the cross. The good news here is that persecution, failure and even death do not constitute the end of the game. God promises to work redemption through what we perceive to be futile gestures of faithfulness in a wicked and ruthless world. So too, our gospel lesson points out that lives spent struggling against starvation, poverty and injustice for Jesus’ sake will not have been wasted.

Psalm 149

Most biblical scholars date this psalm on the later side, most likely during the period of Greek dominance over Palestine discussed under the reading from Daniel. The psalm is distinct from most other psalms in one important respect. Although many psalms cry out to God for vengeance against enemies, the psalmists do not undertake vengeance on their own or seek to execute retributive justice on God’s behalf. Psalm 149, however, prays concerning the faithful, “Let the high praises of God be in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands, to wreak vengeance on the nations and chastisement on the peoples, to bind their kings with chains and their nobles with fetters of iron, to execute on them the judgment written decreed.” Vss. 6-9. There is no question here that the people of Israel are being called to take part in executing God’s judgment against the nations of the world that do not acknowledge him. More troubling still is the interpretive history of this psalm. It was used as a battle cry by Roman Catholic princes during the Thirty-Years War and also by the radical Anabaptist, Thomas Munzer, in his violent crusades.

What then can we say about this psalm? First, the psalm is entirely consistent with Israel’s conviction (and that of the church as well) that God is one and admits of no rival. Judgment is always the flip side of salvation, but only God is competent to judge. With this the psalmist is in agreement. Although Israel is called upon to execute judgment, the judgment to be enforced is that which is “decreed.” Vs. 9. Until such time as God makes clear to his people precisely what is just and how his justice is to be implemented, Israel must refrain from taking action against those “judged.”

Second, as the First Letter of Peter reminds us, “the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God…” I Peter 4:17. Just as the line between good and evil runs through the middle of every human heart, so every heart must undergo judgment. No one can claim to be entirely on the side of God such that there need be no reckoning with sin. It appears, then, that the execution of judgment to which Israel is summoned in Psalm 149is an eschatological event, that is to say, it points to a time when righteousness, wickedness and justice are made to stand out in unmistakable clarity. For disciples of Jesus, such a time cannot come until the revealing of the Son of Man.

Third, disciples of Jesus read this psalm the way they read all of Scripture: through the lens of Jesus. After all, we are not baptized into the name of Joshua son of Nun but into the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was never shy about telling his disciples when to go beyond the written word in obedience to God. Thus, the Scriptures limit retribution to exacting from the wrongdoer only the price of his wrong. If someone knocks out your tooth, you don’t chop off his heard or burn down his house or murder his family. You get the value of a tooth, no more and no less. But Jesus tells his disciples that they must go further than the Hebrew Scriptures. They are not to seek retribution of any kind. They are to turn the other cheek when stricken and forgive up to seventy times seventy in any given day.

Finally, in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, God’s judgment comes chiefly through God’s word. When the prophet describes the reign of God’s messianic king, he declares that he “shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked.” Isaiah 11:4. When John of Patmos describes how Christ appears to exercise his reign at the close of the age, he tells us that “From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations…” Revelation 19:15. In short, God does not employ violence to implement his reign. He speaks his Incarnate Word and sends fourth his Holy Spirit to transform hearts and minds. Thus, however Israel may have once interpreted the injunctions in Psalm 149, disciples of Jesus must interpret them consistent with Jesus’ call to confront an evil and unbelieving world with God’s offer of compassion, forgiveness and the promise of a new creation. The two edge sword we wield must be the sword of the Spirit.

The problematic sections of this psalm should not obscure the overall theme which is a call to praise God with melody, musical instruments and even dancing. Worship is supposed to be joyful, exuberant and strenuous. We Lutherans could use more than a little of that in our worship practices!

Ephesians 1:11-23

For an excellent summary of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, see the article of Mary Hinkle Shore, Associate Professor of New Testament on enterthebible.org.

Verses 15-23 constitute one very long sentence in the original Greek text. The old RSV preserves that sentence structure in its translation to the consternation of anyone who has ever tried to unpack these important passages. Thankfully for this Sunday’s readers, the New RSV has broken the reading down into several sentences. For all who have the patience to work through them, these verses provide a beautiful articulation of the Christian hope encompassing life here and now in the Body of Christ and life as it is folded into the “glorious inheritance of the saints” with Christ in the “heavenly places.”

There are more sermons in these verses than any preacher could exhaust in a lifetime. The particular verses that caught my eye this time around are the last two, vss. 22-23, pointing out that the church, Christ’s Body, is the “fullness of him who fills all in all.” It is mindboggling, albeit true, that each little congregation gathered around the Word and Sacrament is the fullness of Christ. It is Paul’s prayer that his hearers will come to understand the hope to which they have been called and the wealth of their inheritance. Though it does not appear that Paul himself was the author of this epistle* and we know little about the congregation or congregations to which it is addressed, it seems evident that the audience is predominantly gentile. Thus, Paul wishes to impress upon his hearers the deep and profound treasures of the covenant into which they have been brought by invitation through Christ Jesus.

Although Paul makes only scant use of the Hebrew Scriptures in Ephesians (another reason why most scholars tend to think the target audience was principally gentile), there are many echoes of Old Testament texts throughout the letter and in Sunday’s reading in particular. Verse 22, where Paul remarks that God has “put all things under his [Christ’s) feet,” reflects the language of Psalm 110:1 and Psalm 8:6. Thielman, Frank S., Ephesians published in Beale, G.K. & Carson, D.A., Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (c. 2007 G.K. Beale & D.A. Carson, Baker Press) p 815.  Psalm 110 is likely a coronation hymn for Judean kings and so it is not surprising that Paul should allude to it in speaking of Jesus’ elevation to God’s right hand. That Jews in the first century gave the psalm a messianic interpretation is suggested by the use Jesus made of it in his disputation with his adversaries. See, e.g., Mark 12:35-37. Clearly, early Christians interpreted the psalm in this way. Hays, R.B., Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, (c. 1989 Yale Press) 163-66.  Similarly, Psalm 8 speaks in poetic terms of human domination over creation. Jewish interpreters of the Second Temple period believed that Adam’s right to rule the world had been transferred to Israel and that God would one day give to the righteous remnant of his people the glory of Adam. Thielman, supra, p 816. Paul also spoke of Christ as a “new” Adam in his letter to the Romans. Romans 5:12-21. As such, Christ is entitled to reign not merely over the earth, but may properly be placed “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion.” Vs. 21.

*I will nevertheless continue to refer to the author as “Paul.” Though perhaps not the actual author, his thought pervades the letter. Besides, it is a lot less awkward than referring repeatedly to “the author.”

Luke 6:20-31

This excerpt from Luke’s “Sermon on the Plain” has some striking similarities to the “Sermon on the Mount” as presented in the Gospel of Matthew. See Matthew 5-7. It is generally accepted that both sermons are drawn from the same basic written tradition commonly called “Q.” But there are also significant differences and it is not clear whether these differences stem from variations in the source material or the editing of the gospel writers. In my own opinion, it is likely a matter of both/and rather than either/or. Clearly, some editing on the part of the gospel writers is at work. In Matthew, Jesus speaks from the mountain top evoking the image of Moses while going beyond Moses in many of his teachings. Luke’s Sermon is spoken on level ground. There appear to be three groups present: The twelve apostles Jesus selected just previously in vss. 12-16; “a great crowd of his disciples;” and “a great multitude of people.” In both cases, Jesus’ teachings are directed specifically at his disciples-not to the general public. Whereas Matthew contains more “beatitudes” than does Luke (Matthew 5:3-11), Luke includes four “Woes” not found in Matthew. Vss. 24-26.

It is important to emphasize that Jesus is speaking chiefly to his disciples here. Jesus does not make a virtue of poverty. There is no blessing in starvation. But for all who become impoverished for the sake of following Jesus and living for God’s reign, there are blessings that outweigh the woes of poverty. Similarly, weeping induced by suffering for the sake of Jesus and the reign of God he proclaims will likewise be outshone by the joy of experiencing God’s reign. So too, all who prefer wealth, comfort and security over Jesus’ invitation into the reign of God will someday understand the opportunity they threw away. They will have good reason to weep and hunger for that precious lost chance.

New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias argues forcefully that the Sermon on the Plain/Mount was the body of an early catechism for Christian ethical training. Jeremias, J., The Sermon on the Mount,  (c. London, 1961) pp 30-35 cited in Ellis, Earle E., The Gospel of Luke, The New Century Bible Commentary (c. 1974 Marshall, Morgan & Scott) p. 111. The commands given in the sermon presuppose an understanding of the gospel and merely spell out the shape obedience to that gospel must take. The kingdom’s coming is God’s doing and, as such, an act of sheer grace. The challenge for the children of the kingdom is to live now under that gentle reign. By so doing, they ensure that when the kingdom comes it will be welcomed joyfully as salvation rather than met with fear as judgment. As another commentator puts it:

“The sermon [on the Plain] is a description of the life of the new Israel, which is also life in the kingdom of God. In its fullness the kingdom belongs to the End, when God’s purposes are complete, and so throughout the Beatitudes there runs a contrast between the conditions of the present and the conditions of the future. But the good news which Jesus proclaimed was that the kingdom was already breaking in upon the present, so that men could here and now begin to enter into ultimate blessedness. Thus the Beatitudes were not merely a promise but an invitation.”  Caird, G.B. Saint Luke, The Pelican New Testament Commentaries (c. G.B. Caird 1963 pub. Penguin Books, Ltd.) p. 102.

The call to love enemies, throw blessings at curses and forswear all resort to violence and coercion form the radical core of discipleship. These words are not meant to apply only to folks with nothing between them but white picket fences. These are not ethics only for church picnics and potluck suppers. The enemies Jesus calls us to love are not simply obnoxious neighbors, rude checkout clerks or inconsiderate drivers. Enemies are people that hate us and would kill us if they could. Jesus’ enemies tortured him to death. He died praying for their forgiveness-just as he teaches us to do here. Never does Jesus act violently, teach violence or condone violence under any circumstance. Over the last several years I have become convinced that non-violence is at the core of the gospel and that Christian support for state sponsored killing (euphemistically called “military action”) and the mainline church’s reluctance to condemn it constitutes a stark betrayal of the gospel. I think it is high time that my own denomination in particular take a serious look at the faithful and courageous Anabaptist witness to peace throughout the ages. It is time to re-evaluate our centuries old adherence to “just war” doctrines.

 

Sunday, October 30th

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TWENTY-FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Isaiah 1:10-18
Psalm 32:1-7
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

PRAYER OF THE DAY: Merciful God, gracious and benevolent, through your Son you invite all the world to a meal of mercy. Grant that we may eagerly follow his call, and bring us with all your saints into your life of justice and joy, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

In William Saroyan’s play, The Time of Your Life, protagonist “Joe” tells Tom, his young assistant and admirer, that he prefers to keep his wealth out of his own sight and management so that he doesn’t have to see the way it is hurting people. Perhaps Zacchaeus felt the same way. After all, he was a chief tax collector which meant that the dirty work of extorting from his own people the tax required by Rome, his own premium and that of his underlings was the job of his subordinates. He told them what he needed to get out of each individual and they got it for him. Zacchaeus didn’t have to see the arm twisting and the knee capping. He didn’t have to hear the desperate pleas of destitute farmers asking only to be left with enough to feed their families for one more day. No doubt he knew that the money coming into him was tainted with fraud, extortion and violence. But he also knew that life isn’t fair and only a fool expects it to be that way. Zacchaeus knew that, if he were to step out of his lucrative position, there would be plenty of others glad to step in. He knew he could not make the world one wit better by standing on principle, but in so doing, he obviously would make things a great deal worse for himself. So it made good sense simply to enjoy his wealth and not think too much about where it came from.

I don’t know that my own situation is much different. I don’t directly exploit, injure or discriminate against anyone else. But the lifestyle to which I have grown accustomed is clearly a burden on the planet. I know that the colonial ambitions of my ancestors produced a world order that perpetuates systemic poverty and injustice from which, as a white American male, I have benefited greatly. The funds held in my retirement account are invested in hundreds of companies. I hope they produce valuable goods and services, I hope they pay their employees a living wage and I hope they provide reasonable benefits for all their workers. I hope they do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation or nationality. I hope they deal fairly and honestly with their contractors. I hope they do not pollute the rivers, lakes and oceans or deplete the forests. But I don’t know if all this is true, nor do I know how to find out. Yes, I have heard of socially responsible investment funds and have even invested in a few of these, but my review does not give me the assurances my conscience really needs.

The most troubling aspect of this story from our gospel is that we really don’t know how it ends. I would love to know how Zacchaeus lived his life going forward. How much did he have left after giving half his wealth to the poor and then paying back all the people he had defrauded over the years? How could he continue in his profession after encountering Jesus and hearing the good news of God’s reign? We don’t get answers to those questions and I suppose that is because the answers cannot be found in any book. They must be lived out in our lives. That is what makes the Bible such a difficult book to read. You start out reading what you think will be a story about a man who lived over two-thousand years ago, only to discover that the story is actually about you.

Here’s a poem by Peter Balakian giving us a glimpse into the other half of our world that those of us who live in peace, security and comfort would rather forget.

Slum Drummers, Nairobi

What were we watching on the tube under mildewed ceilings in Eastlands?
A Kenyan guy shaking a rattle made from a can
while another guy in the band was talking to the queen

about making sound out of anything? The queen smiled.
The Jubilee receiving line filed through.

2.

We shimmied past tin shacks selling wigs and bananas, coke and goat lungs;

the tine of a kalimba kissed my face. My face kissed the blue plastic of
a soda bottle sliding down a hill of glass.

I paid the gang leaders for protection
and we walked into the hills of airplane garbage,

black and blue plastic bags glowing in the sun spray over the heads
of the marabou stalking the mounds with their knife-blade beaks.

3.

Stevie Wonder and Elton John moved through the Jubilee line.
Prince Charles thanked God for the weather as the camera cut
to fireworks spewing over Hyde Park and then to an image of Nairobi
and the Slum Drummers picking metal out of the collages of garbage.

4.

My jeans were charred from the tin-can fires,
and the grilling pig guts when some men looked up from scraps of wire—

and you went back and forth with them in Swahili before they offered us
some sizzling fat, before we thanked them with our coy smiles and moved on
with Michael who took us

down a maze of alleyways where tin shacks were floating
on polymers and nitrogen and a dozen pigs from nowhere snouted the garbage.

5.

You were saying “Dad”—when a marabou-hacked bag shot some shit
on our shoes—“Dad, kinship roles are always changing”—

when a woman asked us for a few shillings and salt
for her soup. Salt? Did I hear her right? Or was it Swahili
for something else? And through the sooty wind of charcoal fires

and creaking rusty tin you were saying, “Hannah Arendt called Swahili
a degraded language of former slave holders.”

In the soot of my head—I was listening—
and Michael was asking for more shillings for the gang guys

who were “a little fucked up,” he said, “but needed help”—
and when I turned around the heads of chickens

were twitching, the feathers fluttering down on oozing sludge;
“Arendt called it a nineteenth century kind of no language,”

you were saying, “spoken”—as we were jolted
by a marabou eating a shoe—“spoken—by the Arab ivory and slave caravans.”

6.

Out of bottles, cans, pipes, mangled wire—the Slum Drummers
twisted and hacked, joined and seamed their heaven

into the black plastic ghost of a mashed pot.
Pure tones blew from the vibrato holes

like wind through Makadara
where the breath of God flew through sewage pipes.

I heard in a tubophone the resurrection
of ten men rising out of coal and pig snouts

into the blue Kenyan sky where a marabou

swallowed a purse—and a woman’s conga
was parting at the seams above boiling soup cans.

7.

Down a slope of stinking plastic you kept on about Arendt—
“a hybrid mixture of Bantu with enormous Arab borrowings”

I could say poa poa  sawa sawa  karibu.

We could make a kalimba out of a smashed pot
and pour beans into a can and shake it for the queen.

Yesterday in the soundless savannah the wildebeests and zebras
seemed to float through the green-gold grass toward Tanzania.

We could hear a lion breathe; we could hear wind through tusks.

8.

On TV the guys were grinning into metal go-go drums;
hammering twisted sewage pipes and cut wire like sailors from Mombasa—
harder nailed than da Gama’s voyage down the Arab trade coast—

9.

So, where are we—in a slum of no language?
Walking through steam shovels of light, breaking over
mounds of metal as if the sky were just blue plastic?

Isn’t English just a compost heap of devouring grammar,
joined, hacked, bruised words, rotting on themselves?

I keep following you, daughter of scrutiny, into plastic fields of carrion

between sight and site, vision not visionary, pig guts on the grill,

trying to keep balance
between streams of sewage and the sky,

as you keep hacking, Sophia, at the de-centered,
the burning text, anthropology’s shakedown.

A marabou just knifed the arm of a woman picking
bottles out of plastic bags.

A rooster crows from under a pile
of galvanized tin as if it were morning on a farm.

Source: Balakian, Peter, Ozone Journal (c. 2015 by The University of Chicago Press). Peter Balakian was born in 1951. He is the author of several collections of poetry and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey. Much of his poetry and prose reflect his deep interest in his Armenian ancestry and, in particular, his family’s experiences during the Armenian Genocide at the dawn of the Twentieth Century.  You can find out more about Peter Balakian and read more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

Isaiah 1:10-18

As I have pointed out before, the book of the prophet Isaiah is regarded by most Hebrew Scripture scholars to be the work of three different prophets. Chapters of Isaiah 1-39 are attributed in the main to Isaiah the prophet who lived and prophesied in the 8th Century B.C.E. during the reigns of Judean kings Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah. Chapters of Isaiah 40-55 are attributed to a prophet who preached toward the end of the Babylonian exile of the Jews, declaring to them God’s forgiveness and God’s promise to lead them back from exile to their homeland in Palestine. Chapters of Isaiah 56-66 are the words of a prophet addressing the Jews who in fact returned to Palestine and were struggling to rebuild their community under difficult circumstances. But this neat three part division is still a little too simplistic. All three prophetic collections underwent editing, revisions and additions in the course of composition. Consequently, there are many sections of First Isaiah (Isaiah 1-39) that probably belong to a prophet of a much later time. It is nearly undisputed, however, that the verses from Sunday’s lesson are the work of the Isaiah of the 8th Century B.C.E.

Verses 10-18 are part of a collection of separate and distinct prophetic oracles making up the first chapter of the Book of Isaiah. They probably were spoken on different occasions. Each of these oracles follows the outline of a legal proceeding containing a summons, an indictment and a final word of comfort or hope. Mauchline, John, Isaiah 1-39, Torch Bible Paperbacks (c. 1962 SCM Press, Ltd) p. 44. According to Mauchline, supra, Verses 10-17 make up a distinct section criticizing Israel for her immorality, castigating her for the emptiness and hypocrisy of her worship and calling her to cleanse herself from unfaithfulness. Id. at 45. Verse 18 opens with yet another summons directed more specifically to Jerusalem. Id. See also Kaiser, Otto, Isaiah 1-12, The Old Testament Library (c. 1972 by SCM Press Ltd) p. 13. Taken together, this first chapter of Isaiah is a fitting introduction to the heart of the prophet’s message, namely, that covenant faithfulness requires zeal for doing justice. Without that, worship, sacrifices and holy day observances are worse than hollow and meaningless. They are rituals that God “hates.” Vs. 14.

These oracles probably relate to the early part of Isaiah’s ministry during the relatively peaceful reign of Jotham, son of Uzziah. Riding the legacy of wealth and power built under the leadership of Uzziah, the people and their leaders were enjoying a false sense of security. The rise of Assyria to the north would soon destabilize the region and shake up the matrix of alliances that had sheltered Judah from fierce international conflicts thus far. Isaiah saw the threat coming and recognized it as God’s long overdue judgment on a people who had failed to live up to their obligations under the covenant. Nevertheless, there is still time: “Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.” Vs. 18.

Sodom and Gomorrah are, of course, the epitome of evil in Hebrew Scriptural tradition. According to the prophet Ezekiel, these evil cities “had pride, surfeit of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” Ezekiel 16:49. Their people also displayed a shocking lack of hospitality and aggression toward helpless sojourners passing through their territory. Genesis 19:1-29. Like them, the aristocracy of Judah in Isaiah’s day was “crushing” the people and “grinding the face of the poor.” Isaiah 3:15. The covenant clearly required better of Israel. Concerning the poor, “You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor in the land.” Deuteronomy 15:11. As for the resident alien, “when a stranger sojourns in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself.” Leviticus 19:33-34. Failure to observe these commands to establish justice for the poor and the stranger cannot be cured by fastidious attention to worship and liturgy. Indeed, such worship is deemed an “abomination.” Vs. 13.

Isaiah does not reject temple worship as such. When properly grounded in the Exodus narrative, in which God liberates slaves of the Egyptian Empire to make of them an entirely different kind of community based on justice and compassion, the sacrifices, holy day observances and liturgical rites serve to call Israel back to her identity and mission. But when worship becomes detached from its moorings in salvation history and appropriated for the purpose of legitimating an oppressive hierarchical status quo, it becomes worse than empty and hypocritical. It is not an overstatement to call such worship idolatrous-even when performed with perfect liturgical precision.

Psalm 32

This is one of the seven “penitential psalms” so classified in the commentary of Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator written in the 6th century C.E. (These include Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130 and 143). Not surprisingly, it was a favorite of Augustine and Luther. The psalmist speaks eloquently about the joy and relief found in forgiveness of sin and the futility of denial and self-justification. The psalmist does not disclose the nature of his or her sins, but indicates that it was some illness that brought him or her to an acknowledgement of sin and the need for confession. There is no question but that guilt induced stress can bring about illness, but it is far more likely in this case that the psalmist’s illness was the catalyst for guilt. Sickness was almost universally understood in ancient cultures as an affliction from God intended to punish sin. As such, its onset naturally drove the psalmist to introspection and self-examination.

In this case, the psalmist’s self-examination led to the discovery of sin that the psalmist had been trying to hide from God and perhaps even from the psalmist’s own self. In the confession and acknowledgement of sin, the psalmist found healing and relief. The psalmist therefore instructs fellow worshipers not take the path of sin and self-deception that leads to illness and misfortune, but to “come clean” with God and cry out for deliverance. Mulish stubbornness will only lead to grief. As Augustine puts it, “much is he scourged, who, confessing not his sins to God, would be his own ruler.” Moreover, “it is right to be subject unto [God], that so you may be placed above all things beside.” Augustine’s Commentary of Psalm 32 published in The Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Vol 8, (Erdmans, 1979) p. 71.

In our modern culture we do not ordinarily associate illness with transgression. Still, I would not be too dismissive of this insight. Sometimes sickness is the result of our sinful lifestyles. It is well known that we are working longer hours these days under more stressful conditions. For many people in our country, this isn’t a choice. When you are at the minimum wage level, you need multiple incomes from two or three jobs just to put food on the table and keep a roof over your family. But for many of us, I believe that our frantic work ethic is more about maintaining a particular lifestyle. I have told the story many times of a fellow attorney who suffered a heart attack at the ripe old age of forty-one telling me, “This is what I get for spending my life doing work I hate to earn money I don’t need to buy stuff I don’t want to impress people I don’t like for reasons that don’t matter.” Eating habits, lack of exercise, smoking and many other unwise life choices can also contribute to illness.

So the psalmist’s advice is good as far as it goes, but his/her experience, valid and instructive though it may be, must not be elevated to a universal principle. As the case of Job illustrates, illness is not always the result of sin. The preacher from Ecclesiastes points out that in many cases justice and right do not prevail and all seems like “vanity.” Ecclesiastes 4:1-7. Sometimes tragedy happens for no apparent reason. There are psalms to address these circumstances as well. See, e.g. Psalm 39.

Aside from all questions arising from the psalmist’s views on the causal relationship between his/her sickness and his/her sin, the psalm makes the very important point that honesty, integrity and transparency lead us to a healthy and life-giving existence. The narratives we believe about ourselves invariably cast us as heroes or innocent victims. This stories we tell on ourselves can blind us to faults that undermine relationships, blind us to opportunities and lead us into self-destructive behavior. It takes personal courage and honest friendships strong enough to bear truthful speech in order to maintain spiritual health which, in turn, is often key to one’s overall well-being.

2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12

The relationship between the form and substance of II Thessalonians and 1 Thessalonians has led most commentators to believe that II Thessalonians was composed by a Christian leader writing to a later generation in the name of Paul and his colleagues. However that might be, this second letter echoes Paul’s admonitions to the Thessalonians in the first letter not to concern themselves with “times” and “seasons” for the triumphal return of Christ. I Thessalonians 5:1-11.   You might also want to read the summary article on enterthebible.org by Matt Skinner, Associate Professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN., for additional background.

As it appears in the lectionary, this short reading has Paul expressing his thankfulness for and pride in the church at Thessalonica while praying that the congregation will become what in Christ it already is: a people set aside to glorify the name of Jesus. Vs. 12. Once again, the lectionary people have insulted our intelligence (to say nothing of having perverted the scripture!) by excising from the reading material offensive to mainline, slightly left of center, white and ever polite protestants. Am I being a little too hard on these good folks? I invite you to read the censored material at II Thessalonians 1:5-10 and make your own judgment. If you think Hillary’s deleted e-mails are a big deal, this will really make you flip. I am sometimes tempted to spend a year of the liturgical cycle preaching on all the sections of scripture that have been deleted from the common lectionary. Perhaps I will call it the year of the Wiki Leak’s dump.

Paul’s actual message here is a good deal less benign. He tells us that “indeed God deems it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you” and “that when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance upon those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus…they shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord.” Vss. 6-9. Is this language consistent with the declaration of a church that insists that there is a place here for everyone? Actually, I think it is. Perhaps the kingdom Christ proclaims is the only community in which there is a place for everyone. But it isn’t clear that everyone is eager to take their place in that kingdom. In fact, I suspect that a kingdom in which you are promised only your bread for today and where the greatest of all are the least of all does not appeal to a good many folks. I think there are a lot of people who might recoil from a world in which their medals of honor no longer hold any significance, where nobody remembers all the fine buildings with their names on them; where no one has ever heard of their school or cares about their class rank. World renowned artists, theologians, musicians, business people and political leaders might find it distasteful to be ranked beneath a nursery school teacher who receives and cares for children to make ends meet. I suspect that for many such people, the kingdom of God might be pure hell!

I have often questioned the line in one of our liturgical offertory pieces in which we pray that God would “gather the hopes and dreams of all and unite them with the prayers we offer.” I think there are a lot of our hopes and dreams that have no place under the gentle reign of God. Hope for the continuance of white male privilege is one that needs to die. Dreams for unlimited accumulation of wealth and power for one’s nation or for oneself are incompatible with God’s reign. Indeed, I venture to say that most of our hopes and dreams, even (perhaps especially) the ones we deem holy, selfless and pure, probably need to be crucified before the kingdom can come in its fullness. Salvation for us is not God’s giving us all that we long for. That would be a little like giving a gift certificate from Total Wine to an alcoholic. We must be taught to long for that which is true, beautiful and good. We need to become the sort of people who will recognize the reign of God when it comes as heaven rather than experiencing it as hell.

Luke 19:1-10

Zacchaeus, we are told, was a chief tax collector and rich. He was not the sort of tax collector with whom Jesus frequently socialized. Tax collection in Palestine was accomplished by way of a pyramid scheme of extortion. The Roman overlords informed their Jewish agents what needed to be collected and left them to extort whatever profits they could as their compensation. Bamberger, B.J. “Tax Collector,” The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 4 (c. 1962 by Abingdon Press) p. 522. As a chief tax collector, we may presume that Zacchaeus had a ground crew of agents who actually did the dirty work of squeezing money out of merchants and farmers. Marshall, Howard, I., Commentary on Luke, New International Greek Testament Commentary (c. 1978 by Paternoster Press, Ltd.) p. 696. They also had to extract their own fee over and above what Zacchaeus directed them to collect. That may explain why Zacchaeus is not in a position to say by how much he defrauded anyone. Vs. 8.

The name “Zacchaeus” is an abbreviated form of Zachariah meaning “righteous one.” Id. Not much significance should be attached to this in my opinion. There is no obvious literary pairing with Zachariah the father of John the Baptist or the prophet by that name in the Hebrew Scriptures. If there is any symbolic meaning here it might simply be Luke’s effort at irony. Zacchaeus would have been deemed among the least righteous in the Jewish community of Jesus’ day, yet by his response to Jesus he is shown to be an example of the compassionate righteousness preached both by Jesus and John the Baptist.

Given what we know about tax collectors and the way they operate, it is hardly surprising that the people should hate Zacchaeus and resent the wealth he has obtained at their expense by collaborating with their Roman oppressors. As we have seen numerous times before, Jesus’ practice of sharing meal fellowship with tax collectors draws the ire of his critics. This, however, is a particularly grievous circumstance. One might find a degree of pity for the ground level tax collector whose earnings were likely modest-just as we might understand the addict who, in desperation, turns to dealing in order to support his habit. Zacchaeus, however, stands near the top of the food chain. He does not merely make his living by exploiting his own people. He gets rich from it!

Zacchaeus responds to Jesus’ self-invitation with lavish hospitality and astounding generosity. Not only does he give half of his wealth to the poor, but he dedicates the remaining half to compensating all whom he may have defrauded. Vs. 8. That raises all kinds of questions for us. How do you measure the amount of compensation due victims of a profession that is by its nature little more than extortion? Moreover, what will Zacchaeus do with his life going forward? Will he remain in his position but collect no premium for himself? It is hard to understand how he could do that while continuing to pay his bills and keeping his agents happy. Will he abandon his unclean profession altogether and get an honest job? In his usual irritating way, Jesus leaves us to struggle with these difficult questions.

Sunday, October 23rd

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Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Jeremiah 14:7-10, 19-22
Psalm 84:1-7
2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18
Luke 18:9-14

Prayer of the Day: O Lord God, tireless guardian of your people, you are always ready to hear our cries. Teach us to rely day and night on your care. Inspire us to seek your enduring justice for all this suffering world, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

Last week the long-standing tradition of electing a homecoming King and Queen at Rumson-Fair Haven High School was cancelled. The reason? The tradition was being used by the student body for “mass bullying.” It appears that that the students were planning to elect a couple of their classmates whose selection would be so unlikely that it would elicit mocking when they were announced. This is bullying on a grand scale! I have never seen anything like it and I have seen a lot of bullying. As a matter of fact, I was on the receiving end of it throughout my childhood and during my middle school years.

Most of the bullies I encountered were not the popular kids-athletes, cheerleaders, etc. They were usually pretty far down on the food chain of that carnivorous jungle called middle school. Bullying was the means these kids used to lift themselves a shade above the bottom. If they couldn’t win respect, they would settle for fear. If they couldn’t make it into the circle of popularity, they could win some attention and recognition from that coveted inner circle by providing a little entertainment. And what is more entertaining than mocking and humiliating someone else? Most kids in my school would never force a kid to push a penny across the floor with his nose or play catch with another unfortunate using a balloon filled with urine. But they were delighted to watch someone else do the dirty work.

Our teachers and administrators were not blind to the problem of bullying. They tried to help. I was part of a counseling group, a small class made up of kids who were bullied. Mr. Carlson, the boy’s adviser, tried to build self-esteem in us, tried to help us think of ways to stand up for ourselves. Though well meaning, this counseling only reinforced our belief that there was something wrong with us, that there was something that made kids want to pick on us, that our being bullied was in some way our own fault. In reality, of course, it was not our fault. Being over-weight, having acne, wearing braces, or lacking athletic skill should not be looked upon as an invitation to aggression putting one on the defensive. Victims of bullying do not need coping skills. What we needed-what everyone needed to be a healthy community-was an overhaul of our school culture, a culture that tolerated and even applauded aggression against the vulnerable.

Jesus understood the need for such a cultural overhaul. Throughout the Gospel of Luke Jesus proclaims a “great reversal.” John spoke of the mountains being leveled and the valleys lifted up. Mary sang of a day when the mighty would be brought low and the poor exalted. At the conclusion of his parable about the tax collector and the Pharisee in this Sunday’s gospel lesson, Jesus repeats that refrain, warning us that all who exalt themselves will be humbled while those who humble themselves will be exalted. The Pharisee in this parable is a kind of spiritual bully. He lifted himself up at the expense of the hated tax collector. He felt he was righteous because he was “not like other people,” particularly, “this tax collector.” Nobody wants to be at the bottom of the social/political/religious ladder. And the one sure fire way to prove you are not at the bottom is to demonstrate that there is someone beneath you.

Racism is the ultimate and most ugly expression of bullying. The few hardcore racists I have met in life (thankfully, few) are generally folks for whom life has not gone particularly well. They have gone through bitter divorces, lost their jobs, and watched as the America they once knew disintegrated in front of them. Their “whiteness” was their only claim to superiority-the one fact they could point to in order to show that they were not at the absolute bottom. At least that’s how it was until African Americans began to appear in jobs that paid even higher than the ones they lost, started showing up on TV more frequently in lead roles and then, of all things, occupied the White House! These folks feel cheated, as though their last shred of dignity has been stripped away. They shout the “N” word without much provocation, blame African Americans for ruining America and find them somehow responsible for all their personal woes and unhappiness.

Don’t think that these miserable creatures are harmless. As I said, they are few, but unfortunately, those of us who tolerate them, encourage them and exploit their dissatisfaction for political gain are far, far too many. Left unchecked, racist bullying by fringe individuals infects larger populations. When it suddenly becomes OK to propagate racist propaganda, use racial epitaphs and to subtly employ mass media to reinforce racial stereotypes, you can be sure that racist violence will not be far behind. Like a weed, it only takes a little neglect for bullying to thrive and take over an entire culture. Rumson High School is living proof of that and, sadly, so is the spike in racist rhetoric spurred on by the current state of our political discourse.

Jesus knows that bullying-all kinds of bullying-is a systemic disease inherent in our hierarchical culture. For as long as we need to derive our sense of self and self-worth by the level assigned to us based on our earning potential, body type, race, gender, sexual orientation or identity, we will always be looking down with contempt at those we deem below us and up with envy at those we think superior. Nothing short of the great reversal Jesus proclaims can free us from the hierarchical culture in which we have imprisoned ourselves and the systemic oppression infecting it.

On this link you will find a poem written by a teenager that will break your heart.

Jeremiah 14:7-10, 19-22

For my general comments on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, see my post of Sunday, August 14th. You might also want to check out the Summary Article by Terence E. Fretheim, professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota posted on enterthebible.org.

The lectionary has wisely omitted verses 11-18 as this section of prose seems to have been interpolated from another set of writings that pertain more to current political and military conditions than to the drought prompting Jeremiah’s message reflected in the balance of the lesson. Less than wisely, it has omitted verses 1-14 providing us with the lesson’s context.

The occasion for these words of the prophet Jeremiah appears to have been a catastrophic drought. Jeremiah 14:1. In verses 2-6, the prophet describes the effects of the drought on everyone from wealthy nobles down to the wild animals in the wilderness. Our lesson begins with a lament of the people in response to the calamity. The people confess their guilt, yet call upon God to act “for thy name’s sake.” Vs. 7. They argue that, sinful as Israel might be, Israel’s God is nevertheless faithful. That is the basis of their plea for help. God’s role as Israel’s savior is God’s very essence-at least insofar as God has ever made himself known. Vs. 8. It is therefore unseemly for God to act as a “stranger” toward Israel and as one unable or unwilling to save. Vss. 8-9.

God responds in verse 10. God has not abandoned Israel. To the contrary, God is visiting Israel with punishment for its inclination to “wander” from the terms of the covenant. While this response is probably not the one for which the people were hoping, it nevertheless makes clear that God has not given up or abandoned Israel. God’s judgment is given in hope of turning Israel from its wandering ways and back to covenant faithfulness. You wouldn’t bother disciplining a child upon whom you had given up. Thus, the proclamation of judgment is actually good news, though here as in many other instances, the good news has to be experienced as bad news before it can be heard as good.

In verses 19-22 the people offer a re-joinder lament assailing God with rhetorical questions: Has God utterly rejected Judah? Does God loath Zion? The failure of God to supply relief seems to indicate that this might well be so. Again, the people confess their wickedness and appeal to God’s faithfulness which, in their view, should not be diminished by their sin.

Verse 22 suggests an echo of the rivalry between YAHWEH the God of Israel and the Canaanite deity, Ba’al in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Ba’al was a nature deity credited with bringing the spring rains. As Israel transitioned from a nomadic existence into an agricultural society, the temptation to worship Ba’al was strong. After all, religious ritual was inextricable from agricultural techniques in the ancient world. It was difficult to download the Canaanite agricultural app without infecting the covenant people with a lot of religious malware. Here the people confess that the God of Israel and not that of any other nation is the bringer of rain and the only God capable of ending the drought, a lesson learned two centuries under the ministry of Elijah at Mt. Carmel. I Kings 18:17-46.

Interestingly, the people get the last word in this dialogical prayer. We are left with a God who has said in no uncertain terms that judgment has been entered and the appropriate sentence passed. There is no avenue of appeal. Nevertheless, the people do appeal the judgment and continue to cry out for God’s mercy-not because they believe the verdict to be unfair or the punishment too harsh-but because they know that God is merciful. A death sentence for Israel would mean that God has given up on the ancient covenant with Israel. It is precisely because they know God is incapable of breaking faith with them that the people of Israel continue to believe that God will even now be merciful and bring them the relief they seek.

Psalm 84:1-7

This psalm is likely a song composed by or for Jews making pilgrimages to the temple in Jerusalem on high feast days similar to the “songs of ascent” found at Psalms 120-134. Weiser, Artur, The Psalms, (c. 1962 b S.C.M. Press, Ltd.) p. 565-566. The vivid description of the pilgrims’ travels through the wilderness on their approach to Mt. Zion suggests to me a post-exhilic time when many Jews continued to live in lands far removed from Palestine. Vs. 5-7. Though separated from the holy city by miles, foreign borders and dangerous terrain, still “the highways to Zion” are indelibly etched into the hearts of these Jews from distant lands. Vs. 5.

Particularly moving is the physicality of the psalmist’s expression of longing for the temple. S/he “faints,” his/her “heart and flesh sing for joy.” Vs. 1. The psalmist expresses envy for the lowly sparrow privileged to nest within the sanctuary and raise her young within sight of the very holy of holies. Vs. 3. How much more blessed are the priests, singers and temple officials whose lives are dedicated to temple worship and who dwell perpetually within the temple courts! Vs. 4.

The location of the valley of Baca referenced in verse 6 is unknown. Earlier versions render it “the valley of weeping” based on the Latin Vulgate. It has been argued in favor of this translation that the name is associated with the Hebrew word “bakah,” meaning “to weep.” Other commentators suggest that the word Baca is derived from a word meaning “balsam tree.” Rogerson, J.W. and McKay, J.W., Psalms 51-100, (c. 1977 by Cambridge University Press) p. 171. Evidently, the balsam tree grows in arid places where rain is infrequent or seasonal. In addition to the speculative nature of the grammatical connection, it does not appear that these trees were found in the geographical area of Palestine. Ibid. Nevertheless, the context tells us that the Baca Valley is obviously a place through which pilgrims passed on their way to Jerusalem. The rainy season frequently filled natural crevices in the Palestinian wilderness with water and gave life to otherwise dry stream beds. Such “pools” were a godsend for travelers and their animals.

“They go from strength to strength” (vs. 7) or, as the New English Bible translates it, “from the outer wall to inner.” If this latter translation is given credence, then the reference might be to the pilgrim’s passage through the fortifications of Jerusalem or through the successive courts of the temple. If the NRSV version is accepted, the reference might be to the strength drawn by the pilgrims from the refreshing pools of water referenced in verse 6 or merely from the growing anticipation of worship at the temple increasing with each step toward Jerusalem.

Sadly, the lectionary amputates the concluding strophes of this wonderful hymn that declares the blessedness of being in God’s presence at the temple for worship and living one’s life with a profound sense of that presence wherever one might be. As always, I encourage you to read Psalm 84 in its entirety.

For disciples of Jesus, the temple is Jesus himself. What, then, are the highways to our Zion? I would suggest that the scriptures are the means of approaching Jesus. We read them, we preach on them, but have the scriptures become engraved in our hearts? Do we long for the Lord’s Table and the communion of saints in the same way those ancient pilgrims longed for the temple of the Lord and braved difficult and dangerous journeys to get there?

2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

For my views on authorship of this and the other two pastoral epistles (I Timothy and Titus), see my post on the lessons from Sunday, September 11th.

Probably in an effort to abbreviate the reading, the lectionary omits verses 9-15. That is unfortunate because we learn in verse 9 the chief reason for Paul’s writing this letter. Paul is urging Timothy to come to him. All his companions have left him during his time of imprisonment except Luke. Even commentators convinced that II Timothy was not in the main authored by Paul concede that these intensely personal verses with all of their vivid details have the ring of Pauline authenticity. Interestingly, Paul requests that Timothy bring with him a disciple named “Mark.” Was this the same person as “John Mark” mentioned in Acts 15:36-41? According to the Book of Acts, the mission partnership between Paul and Barnabas broke up due to a dispute over whether John Mark should accompany them on their next mission trip. Paul was adamantly opposed to bringing John Mark as he appears to have abandoned them during the prior journey. Did Paul have a change of heart toward Mark? Or did Mark distinguish himself in some way that caused Paul to see him in a different light? Or is the Mark of II Timothy an altogether different person? Paul also asks Timothy to bring with him “the cloak I left with Carpus at Troas” along with “the books and above all the parchments.” Again, it is difficult to believe that such mundane details are the product of any literary design.

“At my first defense no one took my part; all deserted me.” Vs. 16. It is hard to know when this “defense” took place. Was it when Paul was arrested in Jerusalem? Acts 21:17-40. Or does this refer to a hearing in Rome at which Paul was condemned to death? It is difficult to determine the author’s chronology here, but Paul’s generous response to those who abandoned him reflects the same attitude expressed in Philippians toward those who exploited Paul’s imprisonment to further their own agendas. Philippians 1:15-18.

Paul concludes with a firm expression of his confident faith in God’s ability to rescue him from every evil and preserve him for God’s heavily kingdom. Vs. 18. This cannot be taken as assurance that Paul will come through his current imprisonment unscathed. To the contrary, Paul has already expressed his view that he was “on the point of being sacrificed” and that the time for his “departure” had come. Vs. 6. His hope of salvation lies in the resurrection, life that God will bestow upon him beyond his upcoming execution. This same life, says Paul, belongs to all “who have loved [Jesus’] appearing.” Vs. 8. Accordingly, life in Jesus is eternal not merely because it does not end with death, but because it is invested in those things which are eternal: Faith, hope and, the greatest of all, love. I Corinthians 13:13.

Luke 18:9-14

“God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers…” Thus far, the Pharisee’s prayer is not far different than what we find in the Psalms. For example, the psalmist prays in the 101st Psalm:

I will walk with integrity of heart
within my house;
I will not set before my eyes
anything that is base.
I hate the work of those who fall away;
it shall not cling to me.
Perverseness of heart shall be far from me;
I will know nothing of evil.
One who secretly slanders a neighbour
I will destroy.
A haughty look and an arrogant heart
I will not tolerate.

It is good to live righteously and to be thankful for the opportunity to be righteous. I am thankful that I don’t have a criminal record. Nevertheless, I am mindful of the fact that my blameless reputation (relatively speaking!) is due in no small part to the fact that I have never been tempted to rob or steal to keep my family from starving to death. I have never been tempted to employ violence to save my life. All of this is the result of having lived a blessed life surrounded by caring family, friends and church. Frankly, I cannot say what sort of person I would have become had I not lived in such a blessed state.

There is something very wrong, however, with the Pharisee’s prayer. Jesus tells us right off the bat that the Pharisee “prayed with himself.” Vs. 11. Whether he knew it or not, this man was addressing not God, but his own need for self-affirmation. His prayer has no thankfulness in it. Instead, there is smugness and self-satisfaction. He does not leave the temple justified because he did not seek to be so in the eyes of God. Rather, he sought justification by comparison with others. The only way he could raise himself up, was by bringing the tax collector down.

Human communities tend toward hierarchy. It is important that we all know our place. The place society assigns to us is generally a measure of our worth. We can all probably recall the seating arrangements in the high school lunch room. Tables ranged from the “cool table,” athletes, cheerleaders and the generally good looking, down to the “nerd table” where yours truly sat with the other kids who had bad acne, braces on their teeth, fat rather than muscle and a lack of athletic prowess. And, as I indicated above, there were bullies. As I recall, bullies typically did not come from the “cool” table. They were much closer to us nerds on the social hierarchy. They just had a harder time accepting it. So by terrifying, intimidating and bullying the rest of us, they felt they were lifting themselves a bit closer to the top of the social ladder. It was all about self-justification. The Pharisee in Jesus’ parable was a spiritual bully attempting to exalt himself by denigrating the tax collector.

The language Jesus uses in introducing this parable is reflected in the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel: “Though I say to the righteous that he shall surely live, yet if he trusts in his righteousness and commits iniquity, none of his righteous deeds shall be remembered; but in the iniquity that he has committed he shall die.” Ezekiel 33:13. See  Fitzmyer, J.A., The Gospel According to Luke, (c. 1985 by Doubleday) p. 1185 cited in Beale, G.K. and  Carson, D.A., Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, (c. 2007 by G.K. Beal & D.A. Carson, pub. by Baker Publishing Group) p. 349. The point here is that good deeds today cannot be banked against iniquity the next. Each moment presents the choice between good and evil and true righteousness chooses the good consistently. So, too, fasting, prayer and tithing, commendable as these practices are, count for nothing when one neglects the great commandment to love God with all the heart and the neighbor as oneself.

The prayer posture of the tax collector, who would not even raise his head, echoes that of Ezra the scribe who, when he learned of the many mixed marriages between the returning Jewish exiles and foreign women, cried out, “O my God, I am too ashamed and embarrassed to lift my face to you, my God, for our iniquities have risen higher than our heads, and our guilt has mounted up to heaven.” Ezra 9:6. There is rich irony in that the notorious sinner prays in the manner of Ezra, second only to Moses in renown as a teacher and interpreter of the Torah!

The exaltation of the lowly and the humiliation of the proud and powerful is a recurring refrain throughout the gospel of Luke. It is sounded first in the song of Mary. Luke 1:51-53 and is repeated here to make clear the meaning of the parable. The great reversal is coming. Whether one welcomes this event as salvation or fears it as judgment depends on one’s posture toward Jesus and his proclamation of God’s impending reign. Of course, the same theme is repeated throughout the Hebrew Scriptures as well. See, e.g., Psalm 107:39-43.

Sunday, October 16th

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Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost

Genesis 32:22–31
Psalm 121
2 Timothy 3:14—4:5
Luke 18:1–8

Prayer of the Day: O Lord God, tireless guardian of your people, you are always ready to hear our cries. Teach us to rely day and night on your care. Inspire us to seek your enduring justice for all this suffering world, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” Luke 18:8

About eight years ago I was leading a Bible Study on Isaiah 39-55 attributed to the prophet of the return from Babylonian Exile whose ministry took place late in the 6th Century B.C.E. A constant refrain throughout these remarkable verses is “Do not fear.” Isaiah 41:10; Isaiah 41:14; Isaiah 43:1; Isaiah 43:5; Isaiah 44:2; Isaiah 44:8; Isaiah 51:7; Isaiah 54:4. In the course of our study I asked the group of about seven members what they thought it was we feared most as a church. Many expressed their fear that our little church might someday soon have to close its doors and cease operating as a congregation. That did not surprise me. Lutheran churches are not faring well in my little corner of Bergen County, New Jersey. During the last thirty-five years I have witnessed the closure of six congregations within my mission cluster. There are at least four I know of within my immediate area that are struggling to survive on a week to week basis and can no longer support a pastor. Though we talk endlessly among ourselves about the need for transformation, the need to become welcoming toward the new members of our diverse neighborhoods and become more mission oriented in our outlook, nobody seems to have figured out just how to do all of that. Consequently, the dialogue in my Bible Study group was gravitating in the direction of yet another discussion boiling down to the tiresome old question: “how do we get new members?”

But then Doug Campbell spoke up. That was unusual. Doug, who passed away almost five years ago, was a quiet and thoughtful man. He was chief of our lay ministers, a senior chaplain at Hackensack University Medical Center and a generous giver whose tithe to our congregation far exceeded the 10% benchmark. You wouldn’t necessarily know all that about Doug-even if you met him on numerous occasions. He didn’t talk much about himself or his accomplishments. He was by nature a listener, taking in all the heartbreaks, doubts and fears of everyone who needed a compassionate ear. Doug exercised leadership by quiet example and that is why, on those rare occasions when Doug spoke, we all listened. “I’m not so worried that we won’t survive,” said Doug. “Dying isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a church. I think the worst thing that could happen to us is that we will survive, but not as a church; that we might live on, but not as disciples of Jesus.”

Jesus seems to be expressing a similar concern in this Sunday’s gospel. Rest assured, Jesus tells us, God will vindicate the hope of all who cry out to God for justice, salvation and peace. God will remain faithful to God’s promises. But will God’s people continue to cry out to God? Will God’s people continue to long for God’s kingdom? Or will we become tired of waiting? Impatient with the seeming lack of progress toward the new creation God promises? Will we begin to settle into the status quo and decide in the depths of our hearts that “this is as good as it gets.”? Will we adapt ourselves so thoroughly to the values, goals and pursuits of our surrounding culture that the in-breaking of God’s kingdom will come as an unwelcome intrusion, a threat to our existence, something we resist as hostile and foreign? Is the kingdom in fact here and we just are not recognizing it? Is our preoccupation with the survival of our congregations and their respective denominational structures actually a form of resistance to the new heaven and the new earth God is initiating in our midst? Have we unwittingly become an instrument of the old order, an old wineskin struggling futilely to hold in the new wine of God’s reign bursting in upon the world? Perhaps it is time to stop obsessing over our prospects for survival and begin focusing on the health of our faith, the intensity of our longing for God’s gentle reign and our readiness to embrace that reign.

I must confess that my reading of this and other texts is colored by my efforts to change the culture of a “membership” congregation for whom church is a place you go into a the culture of a “mission” church for whom church is a people we are becoming. I am more than ever before convinced that churches offering nothing more than socialization, bland preaching, denominational brand names and a panoply of good causes to support has no future-nor should it. Our churches are in desperate need of a “flaming center,” to borrow a phrase from Prof. Carl Braaten. Commitment to social causes, a feeling of togetherness, theatrical worship services and the fading appeal of denominational labels cannot take the place of a longing for the reign of God and a burning conviction that it is even now in our midst. The fact that our synods are employing paid consultants to assist them in formulating their mission statements and articulating their core values is a stinging indictment of our cluelessness and an illustration of how thoroughly we have lost our way. Not to put too fine a point on it, a church that needs a consultant to tell it what its mission is and what its core values are is a church in deep, deep do do. It’s fair to ask, then, as does Jesus, when the Son of Man returns, will he find faith among us?

In sum, I think Doug Campbell got it right. Obsessing about declining membership, loss of financial support and the increasing inability of congregations to support their ministerial staff and aging buildings only obscure the larger issue. Unless we can explain why it is important that the church continue, it is pointless to agonize over how to assure its survival. I don’t have any solutions for my church or any grand plans for turning it around. I am doubtful that there is any strategy than can “turn things around” and if there were, I would not be inclined to trust it. I believe, however, there are tested and true practices that have sustained the church throughout periods of doubt and uncertainly and that make room for the Spirit to work the miracle of renewal in our midst. Immediately following the ascension of Jesus, the disciples did not strategize, collect demographic data or employ consultants to advise them. They strived to center their community; they waited for the inspiration of the Spirit; and they prayed. They understood, as did my friend Doug, that only God can be trusted to grow the church.

Here is a poem by Adelaide Anne Procter about just such striving, waiting and praying.

Strive, Wait, and Pray

Strive: yet I do not promise
The prize you dream of to-day
Will not fade when you think to grasp it,
And melt in your had away;
But another and holier treasure,
You would now perchance disdain,
Will come when your toil is over,
And pay you for all your pain.

Wait: yet I do not tell you
The hour you long for now
Will not come with its radiance vanished,
And a shadow upon its brow;
Yet, far through the misty future,
With a crown of starry light,
An hour of joy you know not
Is winging her silent flight.

Pray: though the gift you ask for
May never comfort your fears-
May never repay your pleading-
Yet pray, and with hopeful tears;
An answer, not that you long for,
But diviner will come one day;
Your eyes are too dim to see it,
Yet strive, and wait, and pray.

Source: This poem is in the public domain. Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) was an English poet and philanthropist. She worked prominently on behalf of unemployed women and the homeless, and was actively involved with feminist groups and journals. Procter never married. She contracted tuberculosis, possibly through exposure in the course of her relief work, and died at the age of 38.

Genesis 32:22–31

Few biblical stories are as mystifying as that of Jacob’s wrestling match at the Jabbok. A nocturnal being unable to overcome Jacob’s superior strength is hard to reconcile with the God of Israel whose almighty power is set over all other forces of nature throughout the psalms. Resorting to “source criticism,” commentators point out that this passage comes to us from the “Yahwist,” the oldest of the four literary sources constituting the first five books of the Bible known as the “Pentateuch.” They further suggest that elements of this story are drawn from even more ancient Canaanite myths about human encounters with spirits inhabiting rivers and lakes. These spirits, though powerful and dangerous at night, are driven back into their watery abode by the light of day. That would explain Jacob’s victory over his supernatural opponent as well as the opponent’s request that Jacob release him as dawn drew near.

I am not sure what to do with all of these helpful little noetic perjinkerties. I suppose we could use them to dismiss this text as an unhelpful throwback to Israel’s more primitive and unenlightened past and turn our attention instead to the clear expressions of monotheism found in other parts of the Pentateuch. That would surely comport with our 19th Century progressivist prejudices. But our prejudices are just that. Unless one accepts uncritically the doubtful proposition that “later” equates with “more advanced” and that each successive generation is necessarily wiser than the last, there is no basis for supposing that an older and more “primitive” expression of faith is any less true, profound or insightful than later expressions. Indeed, judged from the standpoint of John’s gospel in which the “Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” this gripping tale of an intense, sweaty, bone crunching wrestling match between Jacob and his God comes closer than anything else in the Hebrew Scriptures to the miracle of Incarnation lying at the heart of our faith.

The difficulty surrounding the story has little to do with its composition and everything to do with the narrative itself which is complex and layered. At this point in his life, Jacob is between a rock and a hard place. He had to flee from his father Isaac’s home in Canaan because he earned the mortal wrath of his brother Esau whose birthright and blessing he stole by subterfuge and deceit. Then he alienated his uncle and father-in-law to whom he fled for refuge. Now Jacob has finally painted himself into a corner. He cannot go back to his father-in-law and he faces the wrath of Esau if he tries to go home. Jacob cannot move.

The circumstances that define us usually are not those of our choosing. While it might be said that Jacob’s dilemma is largely one of his own making, the same could be said of any one of us. None of us imagined when we got married that what began with such high hopes for happiness could ever end in bitterness and estrangement. Nobody expects to be unemployed in her fifties. We don’t raise our children to hurt and disappoint us. Yet when these things occur, there frequently is no shortage of people around singing that old familiar chorus: “I told you so.” “I knew from the beginning you two weren’t right for each other;” “I could have told you that job was never going to lead anywhere;” “You always were too indulgent with that kid.” So let’s go easy on Jacob. Sure, he made some bad choices. Haven’t we all? All this advice about what you should have done is not all that helpful in dealing with the consequences flowing from what you did. You don’t need a consultant to tell you where you went wrong. What you need is a way forward. It is precisely at this point of no return on the way down a dead end street that God intervenes.

Biblical commentators are not alone in puzzling over the identity of the strange visitor to Jacob’s encampment on the Jabbok. Jacob himself seems unsure about what he is wrestling with. At first blush, it appears “a person” was wrestling with him. At dawn it becomes clear that Jacob’s opponent is something other than mere human-perhaps a demigod from whom blessings can be extracted. Not until the match is over and the strange visitor is gone does the terrifying truth dawn on Jacob: “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” Genesis 32:30. From a purely human standpoint, nothing has changed. Jacob is still estranged from his father-in-law and Esau is still approaching with four hundred armed men. But Jacob is no longer Jacob. He is no longer the “con-man” his name suggests. Rather, he is “Israel.” Whatever the etiological origins of that name may actually be, the narrative gives us the meaning as far as this story is concerned. Jacob is the one who strives with God and with human beings and prevails.

The God we worship is always nearest to us when it appears there is no way forward and no going back: between the Red Sea and the Egyptian army; between crucifixion and death; in the flesh and blood of dying bodies. The Word became flesh and entered into the messiness of our disordered lives where we so often feel trapped and imprisoned. Where that happens, faith is born. Change and decay is still around in everything we see, but that is not all there is. The God who raised Jesus from death has also entered into the mix. So in our wrestling with life, we find ourselves wrestling with God as well. Like Jacob, we can expect to get a little bent out of shape in the conflict. But that is a small price to pay for the blessing of transformation taking place in our lives. Though wounded and limping, the new day into which we hobble after a good wrestling match with God holds new opportunities we never dreamed possible; new directions we were never able to see before.

Jacob asks his opponent to reveal his name. vs. 29. But the opponent (who Jacob will soon discover to be the Lord) will not give up his name. In the ancient Middle East, possessing the name of a deity gave the worshiper a degree of influence over it. The Lord will not give Jacob any such power. God’s blessing is a gift to be received; not a favor to be extorted. One can take hold of God, wrestle with God and prevail upon God; but God will never be subject to human control. Similarly, God would not give to Moses any such name as would yield control. Instead, God gives Moses a name that asserts God’s freedom to “be what I will be.” Exodus 3:13-14.

In addition to my introductory observations, the following is noteworthy. The name “Jacob” means “supplanter.” It was appropriate given Jacob’s conduct toward his brother Esau whose blessing and birthright he stole. Genesis 25:27-34; Genesis 27:1-40. The meaning of “Israel” is a matter of some dispute. Most likely, the name means “God rules.” The basis of the interpretation “He who strives with God and humans and prevails” is etiologically uncertain but seems to have been a well-established attribution for Jacob. See, e.g., Hosea 12:3.

The Jabbok is the second largest tributary of the Jordan River into which it flows about half way between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. It formed the border between what became the land of Israel and the land of the Ammonites. As Israel’s borders expanded, it became the boundary between the tribe of Ruben and the half-tribe of Manasseh. Today this river is called the Zarka or blue river.

Psalm 121

This psalm is part of a collection within the Psalter designated “Songs of Ascent.” (Psalms 120-134) While the precise meaning of this title is unknown, it is probable that these psalms were used on the occasion of pilgrimages to Jerusalem by Diaspora Jews visiting the second temple built following the return from Babylonian Exile. Rogerson, J.W. and McKay, J.W., Psalms 101-150, (c. 1977 by Cambridge University Press) p. 114. It is important to keep in mind, however, that although these psalms were compiled into this collection following the Babylonian Exile, the psalms themselves or portions of them might well belong to a much earlier period. Psalm 121 is second only to Psalm 23 in popular piety. Id. at 115. Though originally an expression of faith in God’s protection for pilgrims making the long and sometimes dangerous journey to Jerusalem from Egypt, Persia and what is now Iraq, the psalm is also a fitting expression of faith for believers in almost any circumstance. Some scholars have suggested that the psalm was designed to be read antiphonally with verses 1 and 3 being questions addressed to the priest by worshipers at the holy place and verses 2 and 4 constituting the priest’s answers. Id. at 115. This would necessitate translating verse 1 as a question: “If I lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence does my help come?” This is a possible translation, though not favored by most English versions of the Hebrew Scriptures. Id.

“I lift up my eyes to the hills.” Vs. 1. This might be a reference to the “high places” where the “Ba’als” were worshiped. See, e.g., II Kings 23:5. It is also possible that the expression simply reflects the anxiety a traveler passing through a foreign land might feel looking up at the surrounding hills that could well be concealing gangs of bandits or hostile tribes. In either case, the point to be made is that Israel’s God is the source of all help and protection.

“He will not let your foot be moved.” Vs. 3. This might be a metaphorical way of saying that God will not allow the dangers of travel to deter the pilgrim on his or her journey. It may also be taken quite literally. A broken or sprained ankle could be a death sentence for a traveler far from any source of food, water and shelter.

“Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” Vs. 4. Therefore, the pilgrim can sleep soundly and peacefully at the stops along the way of his or her journey. The Lord protects the pilgrim both from the blazing heat of the sun and also from whatever malevolent forces might flow from the moon. It should be noted that, like many other ancient cultures, the Israelites believed that over exposure to moonlight could bring about detrimental effects. In sum, the pilgrim can be assured that the God of Israel will “keep [his or her] going out and [] coming in.” vs. 8. That is, God’s protection will attend the pilgrim’s journey to and from the holy city of Jerusalem.

2 Timothy 3:14—4:5

For my views on authorship of this and the other two pastoral epistles (I Timothy and Titus), see my post on the lessons from Sunday, September 11th.

Once again, the lectionary folks have stopped short-or picked up after-one of the most provocative verses in the New Testament where Paul warns Timothy that “all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” II Timothy 3:12. I don’t know about you, but I have not been persecuted since middle school and I can assure you that my persecution then had little to do with any desire on my part to be godly. Furthermore, let me say for the record that being denied permission to put up a crèche on the town square at Christmas time does not constitute persecution. Nor do I think denying to employers the right to police their employees’ health care decisions on birth control amounts to a “war against Christianity.” Please! If you want to see what a war on Christianity looks like, take a trip to Egypt, Syria or Nigeria where churches are being burned and Christians are regularly victims of mob violence. Let us not insult these true martyrs with such silly, moronic blabber about our own imagined persecution. Instead, let’s focus on becoming faithful disciples and putting Jesus and his kingdom ahead of all else. Of course, in addition to the joy that comes with following Jesus, such faithfulness might actually give us a taste of what real persecution is like.

I think the backdrop of persecution is essential to understanding what Paul is saying to Timothy here. Timothy is urged to “preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season…” II Timothy 4:2. The assumption here is that such faithful preaching will meet with resistance and even incite persecution. It is futile to wait for an opportune time to proclaim the gospel because that time will never come. Repentance is never convenient; the call to discipleship is always an intrusion into our settled existence. The old order will never welcome the new creation. So the time to proclaim the good news about Jesus Christ is always now. Although this advice is directed to a pastoral leader, it is generally applicable to all the baptized.

Verse 16 has been central to our discussions within the church over the nature, inspiration and authority of the Bible. “All Scripture is inspired by God,” or literally, “God breathed.” For many of my friends taking a literalist approach to the scriptures, this is a proof text demonstrating that God literally dictated each and every word of the Bible such that it must be deemed “inerrant and infallible.” The obvious corollary is that if any statement in the Bible is found to be less than absolutely accurate in every respect, God’s veracity and trustworthiness is called into question. Consequently, these folks find themselves in a running battle with the findings of astronomers, geologists and biologists concerning our origins which they feel cannot be reconciled with the creation accounts in Genesis. Their feverish efforts to discredit the theory of evolution have given birth to, among other things, the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, California. The museum is dedicated to the “biblical account of science and history.” The facilities include a 10,000 square foot showcase demonstrating a “literal six-day creation.” Though the supporters of the museum claim to be furthering the interests of science, it is clear that the true agenda is defense of the Bible’s integrity against the onslaught of mounting evidence supporting a four and one half billion year old earth, the origin of life from inorganic matter and the evolution of humans by natural selection through a shared ancestry with the great apes.

A careful reading of our lesson demonstrates just how far off the mark and how needless these efforts are. First, understand that when Paul speaks of the scriptures, he is referring only to the Hebrew Scriptures. If we assume that this letter was actually penned by Paul, then no other New Testament writings are yet in existence and it is highly doubtful that Paul would refer to his own letters as scripture. Assuming that II Timothy was written by a disciple of Paul after his death, the gospels could have been in existence for no more than a couple of decades and would not have established themselves as scripture by this time. Application of this text, strictly speaking, does not go to the New Testament.

Second, note well the purposes for which scripture is useful: “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” Vss. 16-17. Nowhere does Paul suggest that scripture is useful for answering questions about history, geology, biology and astronomy, none of which anyone in his day was even asking. So it is not enough to say that the Bible is inerrant and infallible. One has to go a step further and ask for what purpose the Bible is inerrant and infallible. If the claim is that the Bible is an inerrant and infallible witness to Jesus, then I have no problem with this assertion (though I prefer the words “faithful and reliable” to “inerrant and infallible”). On the other hand, when it comes to determining the age of a rock or finding the nearest pizza place, there are obviously other texts that can speak more authoritatively to these issues than the Bible.

Of course, this does not mean that the Bible has nothing to say to the sciences and what they reveal. The pursuit of knowledge and understanding about our planet is implicitly blessed in the commission given to human beings in Genesis to “fill the earth and subdue it.” Genesis 1:28. As pointed out previously, this commission must be interpreted in light of the second creation account in Genesis 2:4-17 demonstrating that our dominion over the earth consists in serving as God’s gardeners. Because “the earth is the Lord’s,” we are not free to exploit it in ways that diminish its life forms and destroy its ecology. Psalm 24:1. Like all knowledge, scientific knowledge must be brought under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. In the service of sinful and self-serving humanity, science can easily become a tool of greed, exploitation, war and tyranny. Knowledge must be tempered with wisdom and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Psalm 111:10.

Luke 18:1–8

This parable of the poor widow and the unjust judge is unique to the Gospel of Luke. It follows immediately on the heels of Jesus’ teaching about the coming of the Son of man in Luke 17:22-37. “The days are coming,” says Jesus, “when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of man, and you will not see it.” Luke 17:22. Jesus goes on to warn the disciples that many will come seeking a following and declaring that the day of the Son of man is at hand. The disciples must not be carried away by any such claims. They must wait patiently for this day and the waiting will continue for an indefinite period of time. But when that day comes, it will arrive suddenly and without warning, just as the flood overtook the generation of Noah and destruction came suddenly upon Sodom. Luke 17:26-30. Moreover, when the Son of man returns, no one will have to wonder whether the time has actually arrived. For “as the lightning lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of man be in his day.” Luke 17:24.

This parable, then, is for the disciples as they live in the anxious time between Jesus’ resurrection and the “revealing of the Son of man.” During this time they are to pray. Prayer plays a significant role in Luke’s gospel. The Lord’s Prayer is introduced specifically in response to Jesus’ disciples’ request that he teach them to pray.Luke 11:1-4. In the Book of Acts, the disciples are gathered in prayer as the Holy Spirit descends upon them at Pentecost. Acts 1:12-14. The prayer Jesus speaks of is not a passive activity and it does not consist of asking God for personal favors. Prayer is a cry to God for the coming of the kingdom promised to us. The kingdom of God, not our own individual concerns, is to be the focus of our praying. For the coming of this Kingdom we are “to cry out day and night.” Luke 18:7. It is by such prayer that the kingdom comes: 1) through the transformation of our minds and hearts such that we will be able to live peaceably in this kingdom and, 2) through God’s agency in our lives made possible as we open ourselves to the influence of his Holy Spirit. The following observation by philosopher James K. A. Smith says it all:

“The “desiring” model of the human person begins from our nature as intentional beings who first and foremost (and ultimately) intend the world in the mode of love. We are primordially and essentially agents of love, which takes the structure of desire or longing. We are essentially and ultimately desiring animals, which is simply to say that we are essentially and ultimately lovers. To be human is to love, and it is what we love that defines who we are.” Smith, James K. A, Desiring the Kingdom, (c. 2009 James K.A. Smith, pub. Baker Academic) pp. 50-51 (emphasis supplied).

To desire the kingdom is to love the kingdom. To love the kingdom is to pray for the kingdom. To pray for the kingdom is to be transformed by the kingdom such that the anticipated reign of God becomes a present reality; a ray of sunlight breaking through the clouds; “a foretaste of the feast to come.”

Thus far, the issue has been addressed from the human side: when will the kingdom come? When will the Son of Man be revealed? When will we see God’s justice? In verse 8, Jesus turns the tables on us and asks us to consider whether we will be prepared when God does act. Will God’s mighty act of salvation be recognized as such by a faithful band of disciples who have been waiting for it? Or will salvation look like mere judgment to a people who have lost their desire for the kingdom?