Throughout the Advent season, we have been reflecting on the stories of the women who showed up in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel. These ancestresses of Jesus affected his life and his character in important and profound ways. We reflected on the faith of Tamar, the hope of Rahab, the love of Ruth, and the peace of Bathsheba. And so, on this day when we celebrate the birth of Jesus, I want to continue in the theme and look at the final woman mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy, Mary, whose husband was Joseph, through whose lineage Jesus is connected to David and Abraham. Now, you may think this a bit of an unorthodox choice to not focus on Jesus on Christmas Eve. But if you think about it, the guy gets to be the focus of pretty much every other sermon throughout the whole rest of the year, so on this day of his birth, who better to talk about than the woman who birthed him.
The theme word for today is “joy,” which at first seems like low-hanging fruit after some of the theological gymnastics we’ve had to go through to make some of the previous words fit. Remember the faith of Tamar or the peace of Bathsheba, those weren’t the easiest. But today, on Christmas Eve, on the eve of the birth of Jesus the newborn king, we have joy. What could be more fitting than that?
Except, remember this evening we’re focusing not on Jesus but on Mary. And, don’t get me wrong, I love babies as much as the next person, especially if those babies go home and wake up somebody else, but there are a lot of reasons why the pronouncement of the arrival of a baby did not immediately fill Mary with a sense of joy. Mary is barely more than a baby herself. People married early in those days, she is possibly as young as fourteen. Her engagement to Joseph was probably arranged by her father, as was the custom at that time. Following the announcement of an engagement, the bride-to-be would remain with her parents for up to a year until the groom would come for the marriage celebration. That period of engagement was as legally binding as a wedding, but because they were not yet married, there would have been no question from the community that the child Mary carried was not the child of Joseph.
So when the angel showed up and told Mary, hey, guess what, you’re going to have a baby, her initial response would probably not have been, “oh yay, a baby!” It would have more likely been worry, fear, even shame. Having a child out of wedlock can cause raised eyebrows even today, imagine the judgment this pregnancy would have inflicted on Mary. The Law of Moses is very clear about its stance on adultery. While first century rabbis had begun to back off on the punishment of stoning unwed mothers, society’s ability to throw verbal stones was still in full effect. The looks, the shrugs, the turned away glances and whispers under breath, all this and more, Mary heard foretold in the angel’s words. This unasked for, unanticipated, infant may someday shake the very foundations of the earth, but first it was going to turn Mary’s life upside down.
And fear was Mary’s first response. The translation of verse twenty-nine tames it, calling her response “perplexed,” but the Greek is not so gentle. There is a Hebrew folk tale about a jealous angel who sabotaged a woman’s wedding by killing her bridegroom again and again, what ill will did this unanticipated visitor mean for Mary?
The angel was quick to assuage her fears, “Greetings favored one! The Lord is with you.” And here is the real miracle of this story, maybe more miraculous than the birth itself. Mary believed the angel’s judgment of her. When the angel called Mary the favored one of God, Mary clung to that word, and not the words of all those competing voices, who would cast judgment and hatred and shame. Mary believed the pronouncement of the angel, and responded to him, “Let it be with me according to your word.”
This single-minded ability to drown out all of the competing voices of a judgmental world and focus only on the voice of God is a characteristic that Jesus also had, and that I think he inherited from his mother. Jesus certainly heard judgmental voices throughout his ministry. Voices of religious leaders accosting him for healing on the Sabbath, for eating with the “wrong” sorts of people, for not conforming to their expectation for how a Messiah should act. Voices of Roman authorities, mocking this upstart Galilean who thought he could take on the power of the One Roman Empire. Voices of thieves and soldiers mocking, “he saved others, let him save himself.” Voices of his own followers, questioning his teachings on the purpose of his mission. All these competing voices, yet the only one that seemed to shaped Jesus was the words uttered at his baptism, “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.”
I think part of the reason Jesus was so easily able to shake off the competing judgments and focus only on the judgment of God, was because he was raised by a woman who knew from her own experience that only the voice of God mattered, and who raised her son to know who he was, and whose he was. And that quiet assurance brings joy, not fleeting happiness, but the deep-seated confident joy that who you are is exactly who God wants you to be, that you are God’s beloved, God’s favored, and you, as you are, is enough for God. This is a stabilizing promise that holds fast through terror and happiness, through fear and amazement. The same assurance that got Mary through nine months of judgment and mumbling, was the assurance that when the shepherds burst in shouting of the amazing words of the heavenly host, and all around were amazed, led Mary not to be swept up in the hubbub, but to treasure their words and ponder them in her heart, to hold onto this promise for the days she would really need them, the days when the judgments of the world where not so warm and fuzzy.
May this be the joy that fills you this Christmas season. Joy in the promise that you are the favored one of God, and that to you has been born, this day, in the city of David, a savior who is the Messiah, the Lord. May every other competing voice, every voice of judgment or condemnation, every voice of question or doubt or fear, every voice that says you are not enough, that this is not for you, may all those voices fall silent in the promise made this night. Because the joy of Mary is the promise of this pronouncement, “Greetings, favored one. The Lord is with you.” May you internalize this promise, and may your heart respond in kind, “Let it be with me according to your word.” Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Thursday, December 22, 2016
Conversation Points for Mary: Luke 1:26-38; 2:1-20
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
Luke 1:26-38
• The announcement of the birth of Jesus matches the announcement of the birth of John in many ways, so much so that the audience is drawn to notice the differences. For example, John’s birth announcement was an answer to prayer, while Jesus’ was unexpected; John was born to parents past the age of child-bearing, while Jesus was born to a virgin. In each case, the miracle of Jesus’ birth was great, underscoring how Jesus’ role would be greater.
• V. 26 sets the temporal location and provides credibility by linking the story to the story before it. This announcement took place in the sixth month of the pregnancy already announced by Gabriel.
• The angel’s greeting to Mary, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you,” is an echo of the words of Hannah, the mother of Samuel (1 Sam 1:18, “Let your servant find favor in your sight”). It also parallels the promise of power given to the judges of Israel (Judg 6:12, “The Lord is with you”). The writer of Matthew’s Gospel makes a similar point by using the name Emmanuel, “God is with us” (Matt 1:23).
• Though Mary was not yet married, according to ancient customs, an engagement was just as legally binding as a marriage. Marriage was arranged by the bride’s father. The bride would then live at home for a year, before the groom would come to take her to his house.
• Like the announcement of John as the one who would prepare the people (Lk 1:16-17), Jesus’ role is announced, but he is “the Son of the Most High” (v. 32). Jesus, therefore, will be superior to John, even though he comes after John. The prediction also gives weight to the earlier report that Joseph was a descendant of David. There are also echoes of OT promises. 2 Sam 7:9, “I will make for you a great name,” Luke 1:32, “He will be great.” 2 Sam 7:13, through David’s sons, God would “establish the throne of his kingdom forever,” Luke 1:33, Mary’s child would “reign over the house of Jacob forever.” Also in 2 Sam 7:14, “I (God) will be his (David’s) father, and he will be my son.” The promise made to David is now fulfilled in Jesus.
• The Bible doesn’t give a date for the birth of Jesus, so why does the church celebrate it on December 25? Culpepper gives a couple reasons. 1) (the one Pastor Kjersten had heard of) December 25 is a few days after the winter solstice, as the days start growing longer, reminding Christians that Jesus is the true light that came to enlighten the world. 2) Apparently March 25 was traditionally regarded as the first day of creation (Pastor Kjersten did not know this, and does not know why March 25 was regarded as this). Jesus’ conception at the birth of creation highlights Jesus as the beginning of the new creation.
Luke 2:1-20
• Verses 1-5 set the birth narrative in historical context. While it is impossible to link the description to an exact historical time, the theological point is made; this was a real event that took place among real circumstances. Just one baby born in the midst of the counting of many in a census.
• Verses 6-7 tell of the actual birth narrative, in very bare bones terms. Again, the emphasis is on what isn’t said, this is a simple story, one that could be overlooked, except, of course, it is not.
• The word “fear” can also be translated as “respect” or “awe.” So “do not be afraid,” could also be “stop reverencing me, and pay attention to my message about the one you should reverence.”
Works Sourced:
Barfield, Ginger. “Commentary on Luke 2:1-14 [15-20].” Working Preacher.. Accessed: 19 December 2016.
Culpepper, R. Alan. “The Gospel of Luke.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
Luke 1:26-38
• The announcement of the birth of Jesus matches the announcement of the birth of John in many ways, so much so that the audience is drawn to notice the differences. For example, John’s birth announcement was an answer to prayer, while Jesus’ was unexpected; John was born to parents past the age of child-bearing, while Jesus was born to a virgin. In each case, the miracle of Jesus’ birth was great, underscoring how Jesus’ role would be greater.
• V. 26 sets the temporal location and provides credibility by linking the story to the story before it. This announcement took place in the sixth month of the pregnancy already announced by Gabriel.
• The angel’s greeting to Mary, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you,” is an echo of the words of Hannah, the mother of Samuel (1 Sam 1:18, “Let your servant find favor in your sight”). It also parallels the promise of power given to the judges of Israel (Judg 6:12, “The Lord is with you”). The writer of Matthew’s Gospel makes a similar point by using the name Emmanuel, “God is with us” (Matt 1:23).
• Though Mary was not yet married, according to ancient customs, an engagement was just as legally binding as a marriage. Marriage was arranged by the bride’s father. The bride would then live at home for a year, before the groom would come to take her to his house.
• Like the announcement of John as the one who would prepare the people (Lk 1:16-17), Jesus’ role is announced, but he is “the Son of the Most High” (v. 32). Jesus, therefore, will be superior to John, even though he comes after John. The prediction also gives weight to the earlier report that Joseph was a descendant of David. There are also echoes of OT promises. 2 Sam 7:9, “I will make for you a great name,” Luke 1:32, “He will be great.” 2 Sam 7:13, through David’s sons, God would “establish the throne of his kingdom forever,” Luke 1:33, Mary’s child would “reign over the house of Jacob forever.” Also in 2 Sam 7:14, “I (God) will be his (David’s) father, and he will be my son.” The promise made to David is now fulfilled in Jesus.
• The Bible doesn’t give a date for the birth of Jesus, so why does the church celebrate it on December 25? Culpepper gives a couple reasons. 1) (the one Pastor Kjersten had heard of) December 25 is a few days after the winter solstice, as the days start growing longer, reminding Christians that Jesus is the true light that came to enlighten the world. 2) Apparently March 25 was traditionally regarded as the first day of creation (Pastor Kjersten did not know this, and does not know why March 25 was regarded as this). Jesus’ conception at the birth of creation highlights Jesus as the beginning of the new creation.
Luke 2:1-20
• Verses 1-5 set the birth narrative in historical context. While it is impossible to link the description to an exact historical time, the theological point is made; this was a real event that took place among real circumstances. Just one baby born in the midst of the counting of many in a census.
• Verses 6-7 tell of the actual birth narrative, in very bare bones terms. Again, the emphasis is on what isn’t said, this is a simple story, one that could be overlooked, except, of course, it is not.
• The word “fear” can also be translated as “respect” or “awe.” So “do not be afraid,” could also be “stop reverencing me, and pay attention to my message about the one you should reverence.”
Works Sourced:
Barfield, Ginger. “Commentary on Luke 2:1-14 [15-20].” Working Preacher.
Culpepper, R. Alan. “The Gospel of Luke.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Monday, December 19, 2016
The Peace of Bathsheba: A Sermon on parts of 2 Samuel 11 and 1 Kings 1 and Matthew 1:18-25
The selections of the story of Bathsheba read in worship were 2 Samuel 11:1-5, 14-27 and 1 Kings 1:11-18, 29-31.
So our theme word for this morning is peace. And I have to confess, that when I realized the way this was working out, and that this order meant “peace” would be our word for the day, I thought, well, here is where my brilliant Advent theme breaks down. Up to this point, the words lined up really well with the stories, faith of Tamar, hope of Rahab, love of Ruth, they all sort of fit. But I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to make sense of the peace of Bathsheba. This didn’t seem like all that peaceful of a story, it seemed more like an episode of Game of Thrones. But as I was pondering what to do with this text, I was reading a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that I have taped up on the frame of my computer screen. Bonhoeffer, if you remember, was a German Lutheran pastor who was killed by the Nazis for participating in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler. Here is what Bonhoeffer had to say on the subject of peace. He wrote: “There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God’s commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of the Almighty god, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes.” And that got me thinking about the line from the prophet Jeremiah, about God’s anger against those “saying, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” And those two thoughts, Bonhoeffer’s distinction between peace and security, and Jeremiah’s judgment against those who claim false peace, started me wondering about what is meant by the word peace. Because peace, really like all the words we’ve talked about this advent, sometimes get co-opted to mean less than they are. The most classic example of this actually comes from the time of Jesus. During the first century, Rome brought what they called the “Pax Romana,” the Peace of Rome, to their conquered nations. And while under the Pax Romana, there weren’t violent uprisings, it wasn’t because everyone was getting along, puppies and rainbows. The Pax Romana was peace through force; it was the violent squelching of any opposition. If you were on the right side of that force, then you may have experienced a modicum of calm, but the tension and fear certainly would not have felt peaceful. I supposed one could make the same argument that the beginning of Hitler’s rule of Germany was fairly peaceful, if you were not Jewish or gay or a gypsy or disabled, or any of the other reasons one might have to be judged a threat to the status quo. Allowing such atrocities to go on, resting in the false calm, is crying peace, peace, when, like the prophet Jeremiah announced, there is no peace.
So then I thought about Bathsheba. 2 Samuel 11 marks a turning point in the story of King David. Up to here, David was really the golden boy of the Old Testament. Everything he did was wonderful. Any battle he fought, he won, any challenge he faced, he conquered, he was faithful, obedient to God’s word, a gracious and merciful leader and ruler. But, in chapter eleven, the story shifted as the power seemed to go to David’s head. The problem is noticeable right off the bat. “In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him… But David remained at Jerusalem.” The role of a king was to lead the troops into battle. David especially had risen to power by being a great leader of troops. But here it was, the time for going out, and David sent someone else to risk danger in his place. This was peace for David, but certainly not peace for the men he sent.
And this peace that was not peace made David restless. And a restless king with too much power and not enough control is a dangerous combination. When you’re used to having whatever you want, and you have nothing to occupy your time, you run the risk of thinking you deserve whatever you want. Even if the thing you want is in fact another human being. David saw something he wanted, the wife of one of his soldiers, and he took it. What I find interesting, and really a better word is disturbing, about this passage, is that Bathsheba is less of a character than she is a piece of scenery. David saw her, summoned her, sent her back, all without her so much as saying a word. We wouldn’t even know her name, were it not used as a point of identification in verse three. Bathsheba had no part in her own story. This makes Bathsheba a really relatable character, because sometimes things just happen. Sometimes we find ourselves feeling like set pieces in a story happening around us. When tragedy strikes or forces outside our control cause us harm, we might feel like Bathsheba, ordered around by a powerful figure, who crumbled her life for his own pleasure. Peace, peace, some might be tempted to say to her. What did you do lead the David on, to bring this on yourself? Or, look on the bright side; at least you’re now married to the most powerful man in the world. Those questions are silence, they are status quo, but they are not peace. Peace, for Bathsheba, does not come for many years. But it did come. Our reading flashed us forward about forty years, to the time when David was old and ill. A little bit of background. Remember what I said about how David’s life really started to slide with the incident with Bathsheba? As is so often the case with these things, David’s actions didn’t just affect him, they spread to his family. This culture he created about taking what he wanted, regardless of who it hurt, shaped how his children interacted with each other. By this time, David’s oldest sons had already destroyed each other in their quest for power, and Adonijah, the fourth son, was trying to usurp power from his father by simply assuming the role of king while David was still alive.
Enter Bathsheba. No longer content to be a character as life happened around her, Bathsheba took the situation into her own hands and worked the system so David would name her son as his heir. Now, is this some questionable backrooms dealing, pulling the wool over the old king’s eyes when he was too infirm to defend himself, absolutely. I’m certainly not justifying tricking people and seizing power whenever possible. But what Bathsheba does here that I think is important to realize, is Bathsheba reclaimed her own peace. No longer would she allow others to value their peace over her. No, Bathsheba, who had once taken the safe role of doing whatever the king commanded, now threw safety and security to the wind and took the bold risk of shifting the situation to her favor. Sometimes doing what is right does not mean doing what is easy.
This morning we also heard Matthew’s version of the birth of Jesus. It’s a bit different from the one we’ll hear on Christmas Eve, from Luke’s Gospel. For Matthew, it is important to locate Jesus in the lineage of David, and Matthew does that by highlighting the position of Joseph.
The story starts out by giving some background. Mary and Joseph were engaged, which in the first century was as good as being married from a legal standpoint, when it turned out that Mary was pregnant. And “Joseph, being a righteous man…planned to dismiss her quietly.” Seems logical enough, until you really think about the word “righteous.” See righteous means one who lives by the law. And the Law of Moses is pretty clear about what should happen to someone who commits adultery, and let me give you a hint, it is not “dismiss her quietly.” So, Joseph’s decision to dismiss Mary quietly was not actually righteous by the strictest definition of the word. But it was righteous in the sense that it was the right thing to do. Even before Joseph knew the full story of Mary’s miraculous pregnancy, felt in his bones that subjecting her to the judgment of others was not the right thing to do. Like his ancestor Bathsheba, Joseph refused to follow the whim of cultural expectation and be a set piece in his own story. Instead, he sacrificed his own peace by this decision, but in taking this step, he brought about true peace, and peace that would become the Prince of Peace.
These stories, Bathsheba getting Solomon to the throne, and Joseph standing by Mary, are both stories that happened before Jesus was born. But like David’s mistakes affected his children, so I think did these stories of bravery shape Jesus. Because Jesus is the Prince of Peace, the one who comes to judge the world in righteousness. And neither of those roles is easy. It would have been easy for Jesus to go along with the way the Law was being interpreted, giving power to some at the expense of others. He would have made a lot fewer enemies, ruffled a lot fewer feathers, and probably would not have ended up on a cross. But instead Jesus, like his adopted father Joseph had done in claiming Jesus as his own, redeemed the law, bringing it back to the purpose God had intended for it, to bring justice and light and life to the world, rather than hold the world in the false peace of status quo. This is the peace who’s birth we celebrate at Christmas. The birth of the one who refused to be a character in other people’s stories, a pet Messiah who would follow the role assigned to him. Jesus loved the world too much to settle for peace that was not peace. And so Jesus threw safety to the wind, and in doing so brought about true redeeming, life-giving peace. May the power and righteousness and peace of Jesus fill you this season. And may you find the courage to seek true peace, for the God of Peace is seeking you. Amen.
So our theme word for this morning is peace. And I have to confess, that when I realized the way this was working out, and that this order meant “peace” would be our word for the day, I thought, well, here is where my brilliant Advent theme breaks down. Up to this point, the words lined up really well with the stories, faith of Tamar, hope of Rahab, love of Ruth, they all sort of fit. But I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to make sense of the peace of Bathsheba. This didn’t seem like all that peaceful of a story, it seemed more like an episode of Game of Thrones. But as I was pondering what to do with this text, I was reading a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that I have taped up on the frame of my computer screen. Bonhoeffer, if you remember, was a German Lutheran pastor who was killed by the Nazis for participating in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler. Here is what Bonhoeffer had to say on the subject of peace. He wrote: “There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God’s commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of the Almighty god, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes.” And that got me thinking about the line from the prophet Jeremiah, about God’s anger against those “saying, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” And those two thoughts, Bonhoeffer’s distinction between peace and security, and Jeremiah’s judgment against those who claim false peace, started me wondering about what is meant by the word peace. Because peace, really like all the words we’ve talked about this advent, sometimes get co-opted to mean less than they are. The most classic example of this actually comes from the time of Jesus. During the first century, Rome brought what they called the “Pax Romana,” the Peace of Rome, to their conquered nations. And while under the Pax Romana, there weren’t violent uprisings, it wasn’t because everyone was getting along, puppies and rainbows. The Pax Romana was peace through force; it was the violent squelching of any opposition. If you were on the right side of that force, then you may have experienced a modicum of calm, but the tension and fear certainly would not have felt peaceful. I supposed one could make the same argument that the beginning of Hitler’s rule of Germany was fairly peaceful, if you were not Jewish or gay or a gypsy or disabled, or any of the other reasons one might have to be judged a threat to the status quo. Allowing such atrocities to go on, resting in the false calm, is crying peace, peace, when, like the prophet Jeremiah announced, there is no peace.
So then I thought about Bathsheba. 2 Samuel 11 marks a turning point in the story of King David. Up to here, David was really the golden boy of the Old Testament. Everything he did was wonderful. Any battle he fought, he won, any challenge he faced, he conquered, he was faithful, obedient to God’s word, a gracious and merciful leader and ruler. But, in chapter eleven, the story shifted as the power seemed to go to David’s head. The problem is noticeable right off the bat. “In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him… But David remained at Jerusalem.” The role of a king was to lead the troops into battle. David especially had risen to power by being a great leader of troops. But here it was, the time for going out, and David sent someone else to risk danger in his place. This was peace for David, but certainly not peace for the men he sent.
And this peace that was not peace made David restless. And a restless king with too much power and not enough control is a dangerous combination. When you’re used to having whatever you want, and you have nothing to occupy your time, you run the risk of thinking you deserve whatever you want. Even if the thing you want is in fact another human being. David saw something he wanted, the wife of one of his soldiers, and he took it. What I find interesting, and really a better word is disturbing, about this passage, is that Bathsheba is less of a character than she is a piece of scenery. David saw her, summoned her, sent her back, all without her so much as saying a word. We wouldn’t even know her name, were it not used as a point of identification in verse three. Bathsheba had no part in her own story. This makes Bathsheba a really relatable character, because sometimes things just happen. Sometimes we find ourselves feeling like set pieces in a story happening around us. When tragedy strikes or forces outside our control cause us harm, we might feel like Bathsheba, ordered around by a powerful figure, who crumbled her life for his own pleasure. Peace, peace, some might be tempted to say to her. What did you do lead the David on, to bring this on yourself? Or, look on the bright side; at least you’re now married to the most powerful man in the world. Those questions are silence, they are status quo, but they are not peace. Peace, for Bathsheba, does not come for many years. But it did come. Our reading flashed us forward about forty years, to the time when David was old and ill. A little bit of background. Remember what I said about how David’s life really started to slide with the incident with Bathsheba? As is so often the case with these things, David’s actions didn’t just affect him, they spread to his family. This culture he created about taking what he wanted, regardless of who it hurt, shaped how his children interacted with each other. By this time, David’s oldest sons had already destroyed each other in their quest for power, and Adonijah, the fourth son, was trying to usurp power from his father by simply assuming the role of king while David was still alive.
Enter Bathsheba. No longer content to be a character as life happened around her, Bathsheba took the situation into her own hands and worked the system so David would name her son as his heir. Now, is this some questionable backrooms dealing, pulling the wool over the old king’s eyes when he was too infirm to defend himself, absolutely. I’m certainly not justifying tricking people and seizing power whenever possible. But what Bathsheba does here that I think is important to realize, is Bathsheba reclaimed her own peace. No longer would she allow others to value their peace over her. No, Bathsheba, who had once taken the safe role of doing whatever the king commanded, now threw safety and security to the wind and took the bold risk of shifting the situation to her favor. Sometimes doing what is right does not mean doing what is easy.
This morning we also heard Matthew’s version of the birth of Jesus. It’s a bit different from the one we’ll hear on Christmas Eve, from Luke’s Gospel. For Matthew, it is important to locate Jesus in the lineage of David, and Matthew does that by highlighting the position of Joseph.
The story starts out by giving some background. Mary and Joseph were engaged, which in the first century was as good as being married from a legal standpoint, when it turned out that Mary was pregnant. And “Joseph, being a righteous man…planned to dismiss her quietly.” Seems logical enough, until you really think about the word “righteous.” See righteous means one who lives by the law. And the Law of Moses is pretty clear about what should happen to someone who commits adultery, and let me give you a hint, it is not “dismiss her quietly.” So, Joseph’s decision to dismiss Mary quietly was not actually righteous by the strictest definition of the word. But it was righteous in the sense that it was the right thing to do. Even before Joseph knew the full story of Mary’s miraculous pregnancy, felt in his bones that subjecting her to the judgment of others was not the right thing to do. Like his ancestor Bathsheba, Joseph refused to follow the whim of cultural expectation and be a set piece in his own story. Instead, he sacrificed his own peace by this decision, but in taking this step, he brought about true peace, and peace that would become the Prince of Peace.
These stories, Bathsheba getting Solomon to the throne, and Joseph standing by Mary, are both stories that happened before Jesus was born. But like David’s mistakes affected his children, so I think did these stories of bravery shape Jesus. Because Jesus is the Prince of Peace, the one who comes to judge the world in righteousness. And neither of those roles is easy. It would have been easy for Jesus to go along with the way the Law was being interpreted, giving power to some at the expense of others. He would have made a lot fewer enemies, ruffled a lot fewer feathers, and probably would not have ended up on a cross. But instead Jesus, like his adopted father Joseph had done in claiming Jesus as his own, redeemed the law, bringing it back to the purpose God had intended for it, to bring justice and light and life to the world, rather than hold the world in the false peace of status quo. This is the peace who’s birth we celebrate at Christmas. The birth of the one who refused to be a character in other people’s stories, a pet Messiah who would follow the role assigned to him. Jesus loved the world too much to settle for peace that was not peace. And so Jesus threw safety to the wind, and in doing so brought about true redeeming, life-giving peace. May the power and righteousness and peace of Jesus fill you this season. And may you find the courage to seek true peace, for the God of Peace is seeking you. Amen.
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Conversation Points for the story of Bathsheba and Matthew 1:18-25
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
2 Samuel 11:1-5, 14-27
• 2 Samuel 11 marks a dramatic shift in the story of David. Up to this point, David was portrayed as just, righteous, and in favor with God. Here, due to David’s own actions, the story starts to shift, and the fall of David begins. When David uses royal power to get what he wants (Bathsheba), his life and reign spiral out of control and Israel never again will reach the heights it was under David’s rule.
• The first sign of this downfall is that David did not go with his troops into battle, but remained behind in Jerusalem. When the people had begged for a king to “go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Sam 8:20), the prophet Samuel had warned them of the dangers of kings, who “take” from their people for their own interested (1 Sam 8:11-18), now David, instead of leading troops, is “taking” what he sees and desires (2 Samuel 11:4).
• Was Bathsheba guilty for being seen by the king? Some commentators have argued she was, bathing in a place that was so visible from the king’s palace. Others say she was simply a victim; she was, after all, bathing on a roof out of sight. The narrator himself lays the moral responsibility entirely on David, leaving the issue of Bathsheba’s complicity unaddressed.
• Outside of the introduction in v. 3, Bathsheba is never addressed by name, called only “the wife of Uriah” or “the woman.” Even in Matthew’s Gospel, she is addressed as “the wife of Uriah.” The purpose was to place the emphasis of the story on David’s act of adultery, but the effect is to render Bathsheba as essentially a non-person, no more than a part of the plot. She is not mentioned by name again until 2 Samuel 12:24.
• The affair itself is told very abruptly. David “sent,” “took,” and “lay,” Bathsheba “went” and then “returned.” “Sent” and “took” have a sense of aggression, though “went” and “returned” seem to indicate some level of acquiescence. It is important to remember the power dynamic in effect. The king sent for a subject, the subject obeyed. If Bathsheba “came,” it could indicate passivity rather than consent.
• David dealt with the problem of Bathsheba’s pregnancy by placing Uriah in a position in battle where he was sure to be killed. Uriah died a hero’s death, his honor in death preserving David’s honor in life.
1 Kings 1:11-17, 29-31
• The story of Bathsheba picks back up many years later, when King David was old and infirm. He was no longer able to care for himself or his house, and was in the care of others. Time for power to be transferred from David to his successor. Into this power vacuum stepped David’s fourth son, Adonijah. By this point in the story, Adonijah was heir and the oldest surviving son, the earlier three having died or been killed in various court intrigues (the story of David and his family is high drama, like a Game of Thrones style soap opera). Adonijah held a feast to confirm his new status, inviting all the high court officials, but not his brother Solomon who was born in the new capital city and had the support of the court officials against Adonijah.
• Nathan, the court prophet and a supporter of Solomon, came up with a plan. Solomon’s mother, Bathsheba, who had always been a favorite of King David, would go to the king, inform him of Adonijah’s attempted takeover, and “remind” him of his promise that Solomon would be king. “Remind” is in quotation marks, because there is no reference in scripture to David ever making such a promise. Seow indicates that Nathan and Bathsheba were trying to take advantage of David’s senility and trick him into putting Solomon on the throne.
• The trick worked, David spoke decisively, accepting Bathsheba’s memory of the situation and “confirming” the oath he was alleged to have made. Solomon becomes the next king of Israel. And while, certainly, the story behind his ascent is pretty back hall deal-y, Solomon is regarded as a wise and just ruler, a man of faith and wisdom.
Matthew 1:18-25
• Having finished the genealogy, the author now transitions to the main story, the life of Jesus. The writing starts in the middle of the story, when the author brings the reader in, Mary and Joseph are already engaged (a binding engagement in the first century, dissolvable only by death or divorce, so unfaithfulness would be considered adultery) and Mary is already pregnant.
• Strict interpretation of the Law of Moses required capital punishment in instances of adultery; though rabbinic practice had softened that some, the penalty was still severe and humiliating. Joseph is said to be “righteous,” a key word in Matthew’s Gospel meaning “just,” or “one who lives by the law.” Yet Joseph, contrary to the law, out of consideration for Mary, decided not to turn her over to justice, but rather to divorce her quietly.
• The angel’s revelation in v. 20 starts in the typical way, with the phrase “Do not be afraid.”
• The angel told Joseph he was to name the child, naming the child would indicate Joseph had adopted him as his own, thus claiming him in the Davidic line as a “Son of David.” Joseph’s naming of Jesus was how Jesus, without being a genetic descendant of Joseph, ended up in the Davidic line.
• Jesus is an English transliteration of Iesous, a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew Yesua, a shortened form of Yehosua, all of which are versions of the English name Joshua. Joshua/Yeshua/Jesus was in Matthew’s Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (what we call the Old Testament), the successor of Moses. Through his name, we see Jesus cast as the heir and successor to Moses, a theme that will be built upon throughout Matthew’s Gospel. The repeated refrain to Joshua, “I [God] will be with you’ (eg. Joshua 1:9), is also a repeated motif in Matthew’s Gospel.
• The name Jesus/Yeshua was also a common first century name (the historian Josephus knew 20 different people named Jesus). The commonality of the name helps to unite Jesus to humanity, he has a common name and thus is of the world rather than separated from it. The name means “Yahweh helps.” The Messiah is not an individualistic concept, not a “great man,” but the promised deliverer of the people of God. As Moses delivered the people of Israel from physical slavery into freedom, so too is Jesus the one who is to deliver God’s people from spiritual slavery into freedom.
• V. 21 does not specify who “his people” are. The reader might assume at first Israel, but throughout Matthew’s Gospel, the category is expanded to include all people.
• V. 23 is a reference to Isaiah 7:4. In its original context, the quote refers to the idea that there was a woman who was already pregnant in Judah, and by the time her child reached the age of moral discernment, Judah would be delivered from the threat of the Syro-Ephraimitic War. The child was to be given the name “God is with us” (Hebrew Immanuel), to connect it to other times the same promise was made in Isaiah. This child is referenced again in Isaiah 8:8, this time as already present. The word translated as “virgin” in Matthew’s Gospel is alma, and is translated a “young woman” in Isaiah. The word can mean either thing. For Isaiah’s time, it was not a long-range prediction, but a promise of the current salvation of Israel from war. Matthew, however, understands Jesus as a fulfillment of the whole of Scripture, and so understand this promise as both true for Isaiah in the way Isaiah intended it AND as a way of affirming Jesus’ place in the whole of salvation history.
• Did Jesus have siblings? The “until” in v. 25 seems to imply that Mary and Joseph had normal marital relations after the birth of Jesus, and the brothers and sisters mentioned in Matthew 13:55-56 were in fact Jesus’ siblings (or, half-siblings). It is also possible to understand v. 25 as a case for the perpetual virginity of Mary, as the Catholic Church has understood it. Personally (this is Pastor Kjersten’s interpretation), I think Jesus probably did have siblings, but I suppose it doesn’t matter much one way or another.
Works Sourced:
Birch, Bruce C. “The First and Second Books of Samuel.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume II. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1998.
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Seow, Choon-Leong. “The First and Second Books of Kings.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume III. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1999.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
2 Samuel 11:1-5, 14-27
• 2 Samuel 11 marks a dramatic shift in the story of David. Up to this point, David was portrayed as just, righteous, and in favor with God. Here, due to David’s own actions, the story starts to shift, and the fall of David begins. When David uses royal power to get what he wants (Bathsheba), his life and reign spiral out of control and Israel never again will reach the heights it was under David’s rule.
• The first sign of this downfall is that David did not go with his troops into battle, but remained behind in Jerusalem. When the people had begged for a king to “go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Sam 8:20), the prophet Samuel had warned them of the dangers of kings, who “take” from their people for their own interested (1 Sam 8:11-18), now David, instead of leading troops, is “taking” what he sees and desires (2 Samuel 11:4).
• Was Bathsheba guilty for being seen by the king? Some commentators have argued she was, bathing in a place that was so visible from the king’s palace. Others say she was simply a victim; she was, after all, bathing on a roof out of sight. The narrator himself lays the moral responsibility entirely on David, leaving the issue of Bathsheba’s complicity unaddressed.
• Outside of the introduction in v. 3, Bathsheba is never addressed by name, called only “the wife of Uriah” or “the woman.” Even in Matthew’s Gospel, she is addressed as “the wife of Uriah.” The purpose was to place the emphasis of the story on David’s act of adultery, but the effect is to render Bathsheba as essentially a non-person, no more than a part of the plot. She is not mentioned by name again until 2 Samuel 12:24.
• The affair itself is told very abruptly. David “sent,” “took,” and “lay,” Bathsheba “went” and then “returned.” “Sent” and “took” have a sense of aggression, though “went” and “returned” seem to indicate some level of acquiescence. It is important to remember the power dynamic in effect. The king sent for a subject, the subject obeyed. If Bathsheba “came,” it could indicate passivity rather than consent.
• David dealt with the problem of Bathsheba’s pregnancy by placing Uriah in a position in battle where he was sure to be killed. Uriah died a hero’s death, his honor in death preserving David’s honor in life.
1 Kings 1:11-17, 29-31
• The story of Bathsheba picks back up many years later, when King David was old and infirm. He was no longer able to care for himself or his house, and was in the care of others. Time for power to be transferred from David to his successor. Into this power vacuum stepped David’s fourth son, Adonijah. By this point in the story, Adonijah was heir and the oldest surviving son, the earlier three having died or been killed in various court intrigues (the story of David and his family is high drama, like a Game of Thrones style soap opera). Adonijah held a feast to confirm his new status, inviting all the high court officials, but not his brother Solomon who was born in the new capital city and had the support of the court officials against Adonijah.
• Nathan, the court prophet and a supporter of Solomon, came up with a plan. Solomon’s mother, Bathsheba, who had always been a favorite of King David, would go to the king, inform him of Adonijah’s attempted takeover, and “remind” him of his promise that Solomon would be king. “Remind” is in quotation marks, because there is no reference in scripture to David ever making such a promise. Seow indicates that Nathan and Bathsheba were trying to take advantage of David’s senility and trick him into putting Solomon on the throne.
• The trick worked, David spoke decisively, accepting Bathsheba’s memory of the situation and “confirming” the oath he was alleged to have made. Solomon becomes the next king of Israel. And while, certainly, the story behind his ascent is pretty back hall deal-y, Solomon is regarded as a wise and just ruler, a man of faith and wisdom.
Matthew 1:18-25
• Having finished the genealogy, the author now transitions to the main story, the life of Jesus. The writing starts in the middle of the story, when the author brings the reader in, Mary and Joseph are already engaged (a binding engagement in the first century, dissolvable only by death or divorce, so unfaithfulness would be considered adultery) and Mary is already pregnant.
• Strict interpretation of the Law of Moses required capital punishment in instances of adultery; though rabbinic practice had softened that some, the penalty was still severe and humiliating. Joseph is said to be “righteous,” a key word in Matthew’s Gospel meaning “just,” or “one who lives by the law.” Yet Joseph, contrary to the law, out of consideration for Mary, decided not to turn her over to justice, but rather to divorce her quietly.
• The angel’s revelation in v. 20 starts in the typical way, with the phrase “Do not be afraid.”
• The angel told Joseph he was to name the child, naming the child would indicate Joseph had adopted him as his own, thus claiming him in the Davidic line as a “Son of David.” Joseph’s naming of Jesus was how Jesus, without being a genetic descendant of Joseph, ended up in the Davidic line.
• Jesus is an English transliteration of Iesous, a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew Yesua, a shortened form of Yehosua, all of which are versions of the English name Joshua. Joshua/Yeshua/Jesus was in Matthew’s Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (what we call the Old Testament), the successor of Moses. Through his name, we see Jesus cast as the heir and successor to Moses, a theme that will be built upon throughout Matthew’s Gospel. The repeated refrain to Joshua, “I [God] will be with you’ (eg. Joshua 1:9), is also a repeated motif in Matthew’s Gospel.
• The name Jesus/Yeshua was also a common first century name (the historian Josephus knew 20 different people named Jesus). The commonality of the name helps to unite Jesus to humanity, he has a common name and thus is of the world rather than separated from it. The name means “Yahweh helps.” The Messiah is not an individualistic concept, not a “great man,” but the promised deliverer of the people of God. As Moses delivered the people of Israel from physical slavery into freedom, so too is Jesus the one who is to deliver God’s people from spiritual slavery into freedom.
• V. 21 does not specify who “his people” are. The reader might assume at first Israel, but throughout Matthew’s Gospel, the category is expanded to include all people.
• V. 23 is a reference to Isaiah 7:4. In its original context, the quote refers to the idea that there was a woman who was already pregnant in Judah, and by the time her child reached the age of moral discernment, Judah would be delivered from the threat of the Syro-Ephraimitic War. The child was to be given the name “God is with us” (Hebrew Immanuel), to connect it to other times the same promise was made in Isaiah. This child is referenced again in Isaiah 8:8, this time as already present. The word translated as “virgin” in Matthew’s Gospel is alma, and is translated a “young woman” in Isaiah. The word can mean either thing. For Isaiah’s time, it was not a long-range prediction, but a promise of the current salvation of Israel from war. Matthew, however, understands Jesus as a fulfillment of the whole of Scripture, and so understand this promise as both true for Isaiah in the way Isaiah intended it AND as a way of affirming Jesus’ place in the whole of salvation history.
• Did Jesus have siblings? The “until” in v. 25 seems to imply that Mary and Joseph had normal marital relations after the birth of Jesus, and the brothers and sisters mentioned in Matthew 13:55-56 were in fact Jesus’ siblings (or, half-siblings). It is also possible to understand v. 25 as a case for the perpetual virginity of Mary, as the Catholic Church has understood it. Personally (this is Pastor Kjersten’s interpretation), I think Jesus probably did have siblings, but I suppose it doesn’t matter much one way or another.
Works Sourced:
Birch, Bruce C. “The First and Second Books of Samuel.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume II. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1998.
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Seow, Choon-Leong. “The First and Second Books of Kings.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume III. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1999.
Sunday, December 11, 2016
The Love of Ruth: A Sermon on Parts of the Book of Ruth and Matthew 11:2-11
The section we read in worship this morning was Ruth 1:8-11, 14-18, 22; 2:2-3, 17, 19-20, 23; 3:1-11; 4:13-15, 17. But I encourage you to read the whole book, it is a lovely little story.
Fun fact, if you ask me to officiate your wedding, I will probably try to convince you to work in a reading from Ruth. I managed to get it into two of the three weddings I did this summer, including my brother’s Steinbeck themed wedding. You’ll probably want First Corinthians 13, “love is patient, love is kind” and I will be more than happy to read that and even preach on it, but it will make my day if I can also get you to include Ruth.
Our theme for this third Sunday of Advent is love, which is appropriate because Ruth is a love story. Though maybe not the one you’re thinking about, especially after my wedding reference earlier. While there is a wedding in Ruth, the love that is the focus of the story is not between Ruth and Boaz. They do get married, and maybe they had a romantic and love-filled marriage, we really don’t know. Ancient marriages were not so much about romance as they were about property rights, so what feelings developed between Ruth and Boaz are really tangential to the story. No, the love that is important in this story is the love between Ruth and Naomi.
Bit of background. The story began with Naomi, her husband, and their two sons moving to Moab to escape a famine that was sweeping through Israel. The family was there a long time, long enough for the two boys to become men and marry Moabite women. Eventually all three men died. The Bible doesn’t tell us anything about the cause of death, so we can assume it wasn’t important. They weren’t killed out of some wrongdoing on someone’s part, life was just generally cruel, brutish, and short in ancient times, and the men died because there were a lot of ways to die and no real medical anything, and that’s just what happened. But their death set up the major conflict in the story, the three women were now left alone, without anyone to provide for them. Naomi, having no family in Moab, decided to return to Israel where there may still be someone alive from her family who could provide for her. Before she left, she told her daughter-in-laws to return to their families. The women were probably still young, and as widows, if they were returned to their families by their in-laws, they would be free to marry again, to start a new life. This was a gesture of care on Naomi’s part. She wanted what she thought was best for the women whom she said had dealt kindly with her family. The word translated as “kindly” in verse eight is the Hebrew word hesed, which has a deep meaning. More than just kindness, it is often translated lovingkindness, and it is care, devotion, and loyalty well above the expectations and requirements of the law. It is usually used as an attribute of God. Naomi is basically saying to her daughters-in-law, “return to your homes, for you have been so kind and loyal to our family, that God will do the same to you.” And Orpah, the one daughter-in-law, did as Naomi commanded. She wept and she grieved, but she took Naomi’s offer of a chance to start over, and she went back to her home. But Ruth would not. Ruth, in fact, became indignant when Naomi told her to leave. The English obscures this; we don’t catch the tone of frustration that the Hebrew exhibits. There’s also something else that the English misses. In verses sixteen and seventeen, which, by the way, is the reading I love for weddings, the English reads “where you go, I will go, where you lodge I will lodge, your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” The English uses a future tense, this will happen. But Hebrew is a really succinct language that sometimes drops unnecessary verbs. Which, as an aside, is one of the reasons my Hebrew is terrible, but anyway. So the Hebrew actually reads: “You go, I go. You lodge, I lodge. Your people, my people. Your God, my God. There are no connecting verbs. The translators added the “will” in order to make it easier to understand in English, but it’s not in the original. This then wasn’t a future tense thing for Ruth; this was a current reality. Ruth said to Naomi, in essence, I cannot return to my people, because your people are my people, your God is my God. There is nothing for me but you, but where you are. The hesed, the lovingkindness that connected Ruth to her husband, connected her to his whole family, and she was every bit as connected, as loyal, to Naomi as she was to the original agreement.
See, that’s love. Love is not a feeling; it is an action, a commitment. Ruth was just like, look, I’m in this. Where you go, I go, that’s it. And that love that Ruth had for Naomi was transformative; it was redemptive. It redeemed Naomi. The title of this section of the Bible is The Book of Ruth, but it is really a story about Naomi. Remember, Naomi was the Israelite, and Ruth the outsider. So the story the writer wanted the Israelites to take from this text was not “be like Ruth,” it was “you are Naomi.” You are Naomi, and just as Ruth clung to Naomi, and loved her more than seven sons, and gave her a grandson who restored her connection to the community, so too does God cling to, and love, and restore you. Like Naomi, this restoration is not at all based on who you are, on your ability to earn it, it is simply an attribute of God. God is hesed, God is lovingkindness, and God is your people, your God, where you lodge, where you are. Not in a future tense, but right now, right here, in this moment. God’s love for you is not God’s warm feelings towards you; it is God’s constant, determined action to bring you to new life. That is love, God’s love.
That is love, but it is still oh so easy to forget what love is, to miss love when you see it. That’s what happened to John the Baptist in our Gospel reading this morning. John, if you remember from last week, first showed up in the wilderness of Judea with his crazy clothes and his wild hair and his weird food, shouting “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” He called out the Pharisees and the Sadducees, called them broads of vipers, fleeing from the wrath. John told them all about how the one coming after him, would baptize them not with water, but with fire. This one had winnowing fork at the ready to gather up the wheat into the barns, and burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. Not just regular fire, oh no, unquenchable fire. So, flash forward eight chapters, John was now in prison, and Jesus had been on the scene for a while. And John sent a message to Jesus asking, “are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” John was basically like, hey, Jesus, I was pretty sure I knew who you were, but these things that you’re doing, these healings, and teachings, and feeding the hungry and forgiving sinners, um, these things don’t really look like what I was thinking, when proclaimed your coming. I was kind of thinking baptisms of the Holy Spirit and unquenchable fires would have a little more umph to them. Are you really the one?
Jesus responded not with some deep theological insight, or a listing of scriptures that proved his identity, or an explanation of his purpose, he simply listed his actions, “Go and tell John what you hear and see, the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” If you want to know who I am, John, here it is. Here is what baptism by fire looks like, here is what cutting the trees that do not bear good fruit looks like, here is what clearing the chaff from the threshing floor looks like. It looks like feeding the hungry, it looks like healing the sick, it looks like raising the dead, and bringing good news to the poor. Baptism by fire and the Holy Spirit is baptism into the love of God, and this is what God’s love looks like in action.
Jesus is God’s love personified. It is what love looks like, when love slips into skin and comes to dwell among us. Now, before we let ourselves get to swept up in the snuggly, good feelings of the whole thing, let us also remember that love is not about making us feel good, it is about redemption. Which means it was just as much an act of love when Jesus turned over the tables drove the money changers out of the temple with whips as it was when he fed five thousand with five loaves and two fish. And it was just as much an act of love when he rebuked Peter and told him “get behind me Satan,” as it was when he called the children to come to him. Love, God’s love, is sometimes challenging, sometimes comforting, but it is always redeeming, always transforming, always making us new. It is this sort of love that Jesus inherited from his ancestor Ruth, a love that is fierce and strong and determined and active. As we await the coming of our savior, may we be aware of God’s active, transforming, challenging, redeeming, fierce, and unfolding love in our own lives. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Fun fact, if you ask me to officiate your wedding, I will probably try to convince you to work in a reading from Ruth. I managed to get it into two of the three weddings I did this summer, including my brother’s Steinbeck themed wedding. You’ll probably want First Corinthians 13, “love is patient, love is kind” and I will be more than happy to read that and even preach on it, but it will make my day if I can also get you to include Ruth.
Our theme for this third Sunday of Advent is love, which is appropriate because Ruth is a love story. Though maybe not the one you’re thinking about, especially after my wedding reference earlier. While there is a wedding in Ruth, the love that is the focus of the story is not between Ruth and Boaz. They do get married, and maybe they had a romantic and love-filled marriage, we really don’t know. Ancient marriages were not so much about romance as they were about property rights, so what feelings developed between Ruth and Boaz are really tangential to the story. No, the love that is important in this story is the love between Ruth and Naomi.
Bit of background. The story began with Naomi, her husband, and their two sons moving to Moab to escape a famine that was sweeping through Israel. The family was there a long time, long enough for the two boys to become men and marry Moabite women. Eventually all three men died. The Bible doesn’t tell us anything about the cause of death, so we can assume it wasn’t important. They weren’t killed out of some wrongdoing on someone’s part, life was just generally cruel, brutish, and short in ancient times, and the men died because there were a lot of ways to die and no real medical anything, and that’s just what happened. But their death set up the major conflict in the story, the three women were now left alone, without anyone to provide for them. Naomi, having no family in Moab, decided to return to Israel where there may still be someone alive from her family who could provide for her. Before she left, she told her daughter-in-laws to return to their families. The women were probably still young, and as widows, if they were returned to their families by their in-laws, they would be free to marry again, to start a new life. This was a gesture of care on Naomi’s part. She wanted what she thought was best for the women whom she said had dealt kindly with her family. The word translated as “kindly” in verse eight is the Hebrew word hesed, which has a deep meaning. More than just kindness, it is often translated lovingkindness, and it is care, devotion, and loyalty well above the expectations and requirements of the law. It is usually used as an attribute of God. Naomi is basically saying to her daughters-in-law, “return to your homes, for you have been so kind and loyal to our family, that God will do the same to you.” And Orpah, the one daughter-in-law, did as Naomi commanded. She wept and she grieved, but she took Naomi’s offer of a chance to start over, and she went back to her home. But Ruth would not. Ruth, in fact, became indignant when Naomi told her to leave. The English obscures this; we don’t catch the tone of frustration that the Hebrew exhibits. There’s also something else that the English misses. In verses sixteen and seventeen, which, by the way, is the reading I love for weddings, the English reads “where you go, I will go, where you lodge I will lodge, your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” The English uses a future tense, this will happen. But Hebrew is a really succinct language that sometimes drops unnecessary verbs. Which, as an aside, is one of the reasons my Hebrew is terrible, but anyway. So the Hebrew actually reads: “You go, I go. You lodge, I lodge. Your people, my people. Your God, my God. There are no connecting verbs. The translators added the “will” in order to make it easier to understand in English, but it’s not in the original. This then wasn’t a future tense thing for Ruth; this was a current reality. Ruth said to Naomi, in essence, I cannot return to my people, because your people are my people, your God is my God. There is nothing for me but you, but where you are. The hesed, the lovingkindness that connected Ruth to her husband, connected her to his whole family, and she was every bit as connected, as loyal, to Naomi as she was to the original agreement.
See, that’s love. Love is not a feeling; it is an action, a commitment. Ruth was just like, look, I’m in this. Where you go, I go, that’s it. And that love that Ruth had for Naomi was transformative; it was redemptive. It redeemed Naomi. The title of this section of the Bible is The Book of Ruth, but it is really a story about Naomi. Remember, Naomi was the Israelite, and Ruth the outsider. So the story the writer wanted the Israelites to take from this text was not “be like Ruth,” it was “you are Naomi.” You are Naomi, and just as Ruth clung to Naomi, and loved her more than seven sons, and gave her a grandson who restored her connection to the community, so too does God cling to, and love, and restore you. Like Naomi, this restoration is not at all based on who you are, on your ability to earn it, it is simply an attribute of God. God is hesed, God is lovingkindness, and God is your people, your God, where you lodge, where you are. Not in a future tense, but right now, right here, in this moment. God’s love for you is not God’s warm feelings towards you; it is God’s constant, determined action to bring you to new life. That is love, God’s love.
That is love, but it is still oh so easy to forget what love is, to miss love when you see it. That’s what happened to John the Baptist in our Gospel reading this morning. John, if you remember from last week, first showed up in the wilderness of Judea with his crazy clothes and his wild hair and his weird food, shouting “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” He called out the Pharisees and the Sadducees, called them broads of vipers, fleeing from the wrath. John told them all about how the one coming after him, would baptize them not with water, but with fire. This one had winnowing fork at the ready to gather up the wheat into the barns, and burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. Not just regular fire, oh no, unquenchable fire. So, flash forward eight chapters, John was now in prison, and Jesus had been on the scene for a while. And John sent a message to Jesus asking, “are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” John was basically like, hey, Jesus, I was pretty sure I knew who you were, but these things that you’re doing, these healings, and teachings, and feeding the hungry and forgiving sinners, um, these things don’t really look like what I was thinking, when proclaimed your coming. I was kind of thinking baptisms of the Holy Spirit and unquenchable fires would have a little more umph to them. Are you really the one?
Jesus responded not with some deep theological insight, or a listing of scriptures that proved his identity, or an explanation of his purpose, he simply listed his actions, “Go and tell John what you hear and see, the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” If you want to know who I am, John, here it is. Here is what baptism by fire looks like, here is what cutting the trees that do not bear good fruit looks like, here is what clearing the chaff from the threshing floor looks like. It looks like feeding the hungry, it looks like healing the sick, it looks like raising the dead, and bringing good news to the poor. Baptism by fire and the Holy Spirit is baptism into the love of God, and this is what God’s love looks like in action.
Jesus is God’s love personified. It is what love looks like, when love slips into skin and comes to dwell among us. Now, before we let ourselves get to swept up in the snuggly, good feelings of the whole thing, let us also remember that love is not about making us feel good, it is about redemption. Which means it was just as much an act of love when Jesus turned over the tables drove the money changers out of the temple with whips as it was when he fed five thousand with five loaves and two fish. And it was just as much an act of love when he rebuked Peter and told him “get behind me Satan,” as it was when he called the children to come to him. Love, God’s love, is sometimes challenging, sometimes comforting, but it is always redeeming, always transforming, always making us new. It is this sort of love that Jesus inherited from his ancestor Ruth, a love that is fierce and strong and determined and active. As we await the coming of our savior, may we be aware of God’s active, transforming, challenging, redeeming, fierce, and unfolding love in our own lives. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Thursday, December 8, 2016
Conversation Points for selections from the Book of Ruth and Matthew 11:2-11
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
Ruth 1:8-11, 14-18, 22; 2:2-3, 17, 19-20, 23; 3:1-11; 4:13-15, 17
• This reading follows the character of Ruth, but reading further into 4:14, identifies Naomi as the character who is “redeemed.” Farmer writes that the reader is meant to identify with Naomi, and that Ruth is a story of redemption for Israel in that like the effort God made to redeem Naomi through Ruth, so too will God work to redeem Israel. The story is not that we OUGHT to be like Ruth, but that we ARE like Naomi. Farmer writes, “A redemptive reading of Ruth will assume that the story is primarily concerned with the faithfulness of God rather than with the faithfulness of the people of God.
• In 1:8, Naomi encouraged her daughter-in-laws to “go back to [their] mother’s house” in order to find new husbands, since her family could no longer provide for them.
• “Kindly” is the Hebrew word hesed, which is a word rich in theological significance. It is an essential part of the nature of God. Hesed is lovingkindness and loyalty far beyond the requirements of the law. Naomi is indicating that both her daughter-in-laws have been kind and loyal, and Naomi hopes God will do the same.
• There is a tone of indignation in Ruth’s response to Naomi in v. 16-17 that the English doesn’t fully capture. Ruth is indignant that Naomi is asking her to abandon her present loyalties.
• The “will” in v. 16-17 are not in the Hebrew, in fact there are no verbs at all. Hebrew is a much more succinct language than English, it reads simply “your God, my God; your people, my people.” The “will” is intended to make it read clearer in English, but the Hebrew has more of a present tense reality then the future tense translation. Ruth has already committed herself to this family, there’s no turning back for her now.
• “Ruth the Moabite” in v. 22 is meant to emphasize Ruth’s outsider status.
• “Glean” in v. 2 refers to a law in Leviticus that forbade Israelites from fully stripping their fields as they harvested their crops. Instead they were to leave some behind for those who had no land of their own to cultivate. See Leviticus 19:9-10, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.” Leviticus 23:22, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God.” Deuteronomy 24:19, “When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings.”
• “Nearest kin” in v. 2:20 is a Hebrew term “kinsman redeemer.” This gets to Israelite inheritance law, like was talked about in the story of Tamar. A kinsman redeemer had the obligation, like the brother of a deceased man, to make sure that property stayed within a family by doing whatever was necessary to regain whatever was lost to family control, be the item lost by death, war, poverty, etc.
Matthew 11:2-11
• The purpose of this section is to identify the identity and role of Jesus within salvation history, who is Jesus in relation to the identity and role of John the Baptist.
• In Matthew 3, John spoke decisively about who Jesus was and what his role would be. Now, in chapter 11, after Jesus had been teaching and healing for a while, and his work was marked with compassion rather than judgment, John began to question whether Jesus really was the Messiah he was expecting.
• Jesus’ response in v. 4-5 references the promises made in Isaiah 35:5-6, “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert;” and Isaiah 42:18, “Listen, you that are deaf; and you that are blind, look up and see!”
• The “reed shaken by the wind” and the “soft robes in royal palaces” are references to the ongoing struggle in Matthew between the kingdoms of the world and the Kingdom of heaven. Herod’s fortress palaces of Herodium, Machaerus, and Masada, full of people wearing soft robes, were all in the wilderness along the Jordan. And some Herodian coins featured the symbol of a reed from the Jordan valley. But people hadn’t gone to the wilderness to see those things, they’d gone to see a prophet. John was the opposite of those things.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Robertson Farmer, Kathleen A. “The Book of Ruth.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume II. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1998.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
Ruth 1:8-11, 14-18, 22; 2:2-3, 17, 19-20, 23; 3:1-11; 4:13-15, 17
• This reading follows the character of Ruth, but reading further into 4:14, identifies Naomi as the character who is “redeemed.” Farmer writes that the reader is meant to identify with Naomi, and that Ruth is a story of redemption for Israel in that like the effort God made to redeem Naomi through Ruth, so too will God work to redeem Israel. The story is not that we OUGHT to be like Ruth, but that we ARE like Naomi. Farmer writes, “A redemptive reading of Ruth will assume that the story is primarily concerned with the faithfulness of God rather than with the faithfulness of the people of God.
• In 1:8, Naomi encouraged her daughter-in-laws to “go back to [their] mother’s house” in order to find new husbands, since her family could no longer provide for them.
• “Kindly” is the Hebrew word hesed, which is a word rich in theological significance. It is an essential part of the nature of God. Hesed is lovingkindness and loyalty far beyond the requirements of the law. Naomi is indicating that both her daughter-in-laws have been kind and loyal, and Naomi hopes God will do the same.
• There is a tone of indignation in Ruth’s response to Naomi in v. 16-17 that the English doesn’t fully capture. Ruth is indignant that Naomi is asking her to abandon her present loyalties.
• The “will” in v. 16-17 are not in the Hebrew, in fact there are no verbs at all. Hebrew is a much more succinct language than English, it reads simply “your God, my God; your people, my people.” The “will” is intended to make it read clearer in English, but the Hebrew has more of a present tense reality then the future tense translation. Ruth has already committed herself to this family, there’s no turning back for her now.
• “Ruth the Moabite” in v. 22 is meant to emphasize Ruth’s outsider status.
• “Glean” in v. 2 refers to a law in Leviticus that forbade Israelites from fully stripping their fields as they harvested their crops. Instead they were to leave some behind for those who had no land of their own to cultivate. See Leviticus 19:9-10, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.” Leviticus 23:22, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God.” Deuteronomy 24:19, “When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings.”
• “Nearest kin” in v. 2:20 is a Hebrew term “kinsman redeemer.” This gets to Israelite inheritance law, like was talked about in the story of Tamar. A kinsman redeemer had the obligation, like the brother of a deceased man, to make sure that property stayed within a family by doing whatever was necessary to regain whatever was lost to family control, be the item lost by death, war, poverty, etc.
Matthew 11:2-11
• The purpose of this section is to identify the identity and role of Jesus within salvation history, who is Jesus in relation to the identity and role of John the Baptist.
• In Matthew 3, John spoke decisively about who Jesus was and what his role would be. Now, in chapter 11, after Jesus had been teaching and healing for a while, and his work was marked with compassion rather than judgment, John began to question whether Jesus really was the Messiah he was expecting.
• Jesus’ response in v. 4-5 references the promises made in Isaiah 35:5-6, “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert;” and Isaiah 42:18, “Listen, you that are deaf; and you that are blind, look up and see!”
• The “reed shaken by the wind” and the “soft robes in royal palaces” are references to the ongoing struggle in Matthew between the kingdoms of the world and the Kingdom of heaven. Herod’s fortress palaces of Herodium, Machaerus, and Masada, full of people wearing soft robes, were all in the wilderness along the Jordan. And some Herodian coins featured the symbol of a reed from the Jordan valley. But people hadn’t gone to the wilderness to see those things, they’d gone to see a prophet. John was the opposite of those things.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Robertson Farmer, Kathleen A. “The Book of Ruth.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume II. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1998.
Monday, December 5, 2016
The Hope of Rahab: A Sermon on Parts of Joshua 2 and 6 and Matthew 3:1-12
The story of Rahab is found in Joshua chapters 2 and 6. In order to make the reading a manageable length for the reader,details of the story not directly pertinent were cut. The reading heard in worship was: Joshua 2:1-9, 12-15, 22-24; 6:1-5, 15-17, 20-23, 25.
Our theme word for this second Sunday in Advent, as you’ll notice on the Advent calendar banner growing on the wall behind me, is hope. Hope is a slippery little word in English, what does it mean to have hope? Sometimes hope gets itself mixed up with unrealistic optimism. For example, “I hope it is sunny today” and “I hope I get an A on the test I did not at all study for,” while technically proper uses of the word in English, do not capture the meaning of hope in a biblical sense. Hoping for weather is out of our control. If I hope for sunny and I live in Arizona, I can be reasonably confidence that the event will turn out in my favor. If, however, I live in Michigan and it’s winter, then if the lake effect turns on, it’s going to snow and there’s nothing I can do to change it. Similarly, hoping for an A on a test for which we haven’t prepared is really to sell hope short. You can hope all you want, but if you haven’t put the work in first, then what you have is not hope but vapid optimism. Hope that leads to passivity or inactivity is not hope at all. Rather hope, true hope, is the force that keeps us going in the face of opposition because of a trust that, despite all evidence to the contrary, something good will come out of it. What does hope look like? It looks like Rahab.
My first read on the Rahab story was a bit of annoyance at the author for introducing her as “a prostitute whose name was Rahab.” After all, Rahab’s profession does not come into play in this story. It makes no difference if she was a prostitute or a Sunday school teacher, this story isn’t about her occupation. I assumed it was an attempt to cast her as morally suspect for some reason. But the commentary I read had a very different take on it. The commentary pointed out that the story is not about Rahab’s home, but her father’s. This is, remember, the ancient near east, it was the responsibility of the men of her household to provide for her. That Rahab lived with a father, a brother, and others, presumably some of whom were men, who belonged to them, and yet this is a story where the central character was Rahab tells us something about the economic situation of the family, they were poor. Casting Rahab as a prostitute does not bring down her moral standing, rather it made her relatable to other debtor families, who would hear in this the desperation that forced Rahab into the central provider role for her family, and would then cheer for her against the king of Jericho who had so poorly provided for his people that families like Rahab’s were forced into destitution.
So Rahab’s poor, poor to the point of needing to support this whole household, most of whom by cultural standards had the obligation of supporting her. She’s an outsider to the Joshua story, as a Caananite and a resident of Jericho, but she’s also an outsider to her own society. In case we missed her outsider status, the author makes the point even more pointedly by literally positioning her home on the outside of the exterior wall of the community. In a time when the only thing standing between a community and conquest was the exterior wall, the most highly valued of society did not make their homes on the edge of it. The location of her residence demonstrated that the king of Jericho, despite his appeal to her to turn over the potential spies, saw Rahab and her family as throwaway goods.
Rahab was stuck between what looks like bad and worse. From her own community she was poor, an outsider, no more than a roadblock for conquest by her own community, and from the side of the invaders she was poor, a outsider, and easy pickings for looting. We can’t really portray Joshua’s troops as the just conquering heroes in this story. Verse twenty-one, “then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.” The army of Joshua was not coming into Jericho to establish utopian democratic rule where everyone’s needs are met and everyone’s voice heard and understood, no, they were coming for conquest. Facing oppression from within and conquest from without, with really neither side at all invested in her well-being, I think we can agree that Rahab had every excuse in the world to give up, to throw in the towel, pull the blanket back over her head, and to just stop trying. Now, you can argue that quitting wasn’t an option for her, as the wall her house was in would certainly be destroyed, but the truth is, we always have the option to quit, to give up, to stop fighting. Oftentimes it’s not as dramatic as the crisis facing Rahab, but we can all certainly think of times when faced with a hard task, we chose quitting. When we’re silent in the face of injustice, or we let a relationship wither away rather than do the hard work of fixing it, or we let ourselves be pushed around rather than stand up for our own value, these are all choices we make.
But Rahab didn’t choose to quit, because Rahab had hope. Hope for a better future, hope that God would somehow make tomorrow different from today. This hope isn’t some sort of passive, pie-in-the-sky optimism, it isn’t blind escapism, it isn’t even built on our ability to be hopeful. Rather hope is something that comes not from within, but from without, it is hope in the God of Abraham, and Joseph, and Jacob, and Judah, hope in the God who worked through Tamar, it is this connection to a larger story that stretches from the prophets through the cross. Rahab could not know about her place in the story, she could not know the future so many centuries in the future, but somehow this gritty, determined hope that she had a place in this unfolding story of God’s redemption moved her to outsmart the oppressive king of Jericho, to barter with the enemy, and to end up a part of the heritage of Jesus.
Hope, the unexpected, unexplainable, gritty determination of hope is the central point of the Christian story. How else can you explain a religion who’s central symbol is the cross, but a faith that clings to the impossible promise that life is born from the midst of death, and that the worst thing that can happen has never been and will never be the last thing that will happen, but God is always at work redeeming God’s people and bringing forth the promise of a new future. This hope is not blind or weak or passive, but this hope in the promise of God’s redemption moves us to action, and if it does not move us, then it is not hope.
Our Gospel reading for this morning features that most odd Christmas figure of John the Baptist. Side note: Why doesn’t this guy get more play in our Christmas cards? I went Christmas card shopping with friends over Thanksgiving, and all the cards were of angels, or manger scenes, or bells. There was not one card featuring a madman in the wilderness hollering about snakes fleeing from forest fires, and I feel like the greeting card market is the poorer for it… But anyway, John the Baptist is a crazy character. His clothing, his diet, his language all served to identify him as an outsider, one who was separate from the religious elites and part of the wilderness out of which he appeared. John preached “repent, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” Repentance in Greek literally means to “turn around.” It is a call to dramatic change of mind and direction, to turn from the old values and practices of self-service, idolatry, fear, and greed, to turn to the values and practices of God, to hope, to faith, to justice, to love. Repentance is a powerful and hopeful, if challenging call, but from the lips of John the Baptist it comes across, both the message and the messenger, as harsh and more than a little bit terrifying. Yet people from all over Jerusalem and Judea were going to him to be baptized. We don’t hear much about those people, but we do hear his response when the Pharisees and Sadducees showed up. Now, it is worth noting that the Pharisees and Sadducees were arch enemies. They were constantly in conflict with each other as to who was correctly interpreting scripture, which, as an aside, may sound familiar; there really is nothing new under the sun. Scripture seems to indicate the only force strong enough to bring these two warring factions together will eventually become their mutual fear and distrust of Jesus. But here they’re coming to John for baptism. Probably because John was gathering large crowds, and folk like this always want to be seen where the crowds are. The Pharisees and Sadducees were not coming to John because they heard in his message of repentance a promise of hope. They were coming because they wanted to make sure they were in with this potential new power. This wasn’t repentance, a dramatic turning away from the old ways and toward the new life John was proclaiming, this was playing both sides of the coin, waiting to see who to follow based on who was doing the best. The Pharisees and Sadducees have not come to John to be moved into action, and John has no time for hope that is not hope.
The baptism John proclaimed Jesus would bring, a baptism of the Holy Spirit and of fire, is a baptism of hope. It is a promise we can cling to, a force of our identity that can give us the courage to step forward boldly, secure in the promise that God is guiding us. It is a hope that Jesus learned from his ancestor Rahab, a hope that led him all the way to the cross, where hope shined the brightest. This is the world-shattering, life-changing power of hope. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Our theme word for this second Sunday in Advent, as you’ll notice on the Advent calendar banner growing on the wall behind me, is hope. Hope is a slippery little word in English, what does it mean to have hope? Sometimes hope gets itself mixed up with unrealistic optimism. For example, “I hope it is sunny today” and “I hope I get an A on the test I did not at all study for,” while technically proper uses of the word in English, do not capture the meaning of hope in a biblical sense. Hoping for weather is out of our control. If I hope for sunny and I live in Arizona, I can be reasonably confidence that the event will turn out in my favor. If, however, I live in Michigan and it’s winter, then if the lake effect turns on, it’s going to snow and there’s nothing I can do to change it. Similarly, hoping for an A on a test for which we haven’t prepared is really to sell hope short. You can hope all you want, but if you haven’t put the work in first, then what you have is not hope but vapid optimism. Hope that leads to passivity or inactivity is not hope at all. Rather hope, true hope, is the force that keeps us going in the face of opposition because of a trust that, despite all evidence to the contrary, something good will come out of it. What does hope look like? It looks like Rahab.
My first read on the Rahab story was a bit of annoyance at the author for introducing her as “a prostitute whose name was Rahab.” After all, Rahab’s profession does not come into play in this story. It makes no difference if she was a prostitute or a Sunday school teacher, this story isn’t about her occupation. I assumed it was an attempt to cast her as morally suspect for some reason. But the commentary I read had a very different take on it. The commentary pointed out that the story is not about Rahab’s home, but her father’s. This is, remember, the ancient near east, it was the responsibility of the men of her household to provide for her. That Rahab lived with a father, a brother, and others, presumably some of whom were men, who belonged to them, and yet this is a story where the central character was Rahab tells us something about the economic situation of the family, they were poor. Casting Rahab as a prostitute does not bring down her moral standing, rather it made her relatable to other debtor families, who would hear in this the desperation that forced Rahab into the central provider role for her family, and would then cheer for her against the king of Jericho who had so poorly provided for his people that families like Rahab’s were forced into destitution.
So Rahab’s poor, poor to the point of needing to support this whole household, most of whom by cultural standards had the obligation of supporting her. She’s an outsider to the Joshua story, as a Caananite and a resident of Jericho, but she’s also an outsider to her own society. In case we missed her outsider status, the author makes the point even more pointedly by literally positioning her home on the outside of the exterior wall of the community. In a time when the only thing standing between a community and conquest was the exterior wall, the most highly valued of society did not make their homes on the edge of it. The location of her residence demonstrated that the king of Jericho, despite his appeal to her to turn over the potential spies, saw Rahab and her family as throwaway goods.
Rahab was stuck between what looks like bad and worse. From her own community she was poor, an outsider, no more than a roadblock for conquest by her own community, and from the side of the invaders she was poor, a outsider, and easy pickings for looting. We can’t really portray Joshua’s troops as the just conquering heroes in this story. Verse twenty-one, “then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.” The army of Joshua was not coming into Jericho to establish utopian democratic rule where everyone’s needs are met and everyone’s voice heard and understood, no, they were coming for conquest. Facing oppression from within and conquest from without, with really neither side at all invested in her well-being, I think we can agree that Rahab had every excuse in the world to give up, to throw in the towel, pull the blanket back over her head, and to just stop trying. Now, you can argue that quitting wasn’t an option for her, as the wall her house was in would certainly be destroyed, but the truth is, we always have the option to quit, to give up, to stop fighting. Oftentimes it’s not as dramatic as the crisis facing Rahab, but we can all certainly think of times when faced with a hard task, we chose quitting. When we’re silent in the face of injustice, or we let a relationship wither away rather than do the hard work of fixing it, or we let ourselves be pushed around rather than stand up for our own value, these are all choices we make.
But Rahab didn’t choose to quit, because Rahab had hope. Hope for a better future, hope that God would somehow make tomorrow different from today. This hope isn’t some sort of passive, pie-in-the-sky optimism, it isn’t blind escapism, it isn’t even built on our ability to be hopeful. Rather hope is something that comes not from within, but from without, it is hope in the God of Abraham, and Joseph, and Jacob, and Judah, hope in the God who worked through Tamar, it is this connection to a larger story that stretches from the prophets through the cross. Rahab could not know about her place in the story, she could not know the future so many centuries in the future, but somehow this gritty, determined hope that she had a place in this unfolding story of God’s redemption moved her to outsmart the oppressive king of Jericho, to barter with the enemy, and to end up a part of the heritage of Jesus.
Hope, the unexpected, unexplainable, gritty determination of hope is the central point of the Christian story. How else can you explain a religion who’s central symbol is the cross, but a faith that clings to the impossible promise that life is born from the midst of death, and that the worst thing that can happen has never been and will never be the last thing that will happen, but God is always at work redeeming God’s people and bringing forth the promise of a new future. This hope is not blind or weak or passive, but this hope in the promise of God’s redemption moves us to action, and if it does not move us, then it is not hope.
Our Gospel reading for this morning features that most odd Christmas figure of John the Baptist. Side note: Why doesn’t this guy get more play in our Christmas cards? I went Christmas card shopping with friends over Thanksgiving, and all the cards were of angels, or manger scenes, or bells. There was not one card featuring a madman in the wilderness hollering about snakes fleeing from forest fires, and I feel like the greeting card market is the poorer for it… But anyway, John the Baptist is a crazy character. His clothing, his diet, his language all served to identify him as an outsider, one who was separate from the religious elites and part of the wilderness out of which he appeared. John preached “repent, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” Repentance in Greek literally means to “turn around.” It is a call to dramatic change of mind and direction, to turn from the old values and practices of self-service, idolatry, fear, and greed, to turn to the values and practices of God, to hope, to faith, to justice, to love. Repentance is a powerful and hopeful, if challenging call, but from the lips of John the Baptist it comes across, both the message and the messenger, as harsh and more than a little bit terrifying. Yet people from all over Jerusalem and Judea were going to him to be baptized. We don’t hear much about those people, but we do hear his response when the Pharisees and Sadducees showed up. Now, it is worth noting that the Pharisees and Sadducees were arch enemies. They were constantly in conflict with each other as to who was correctly interpreting scripture, which, as an aside, may sound familiar; there really is nothing new under the sun. Scripture seems to indicate the only force strong enough to bring these two warring factions together will eventually become their mutual fear and distrust of Jesus. But here they’re coming to John for baptism. Probably because John was gathering large crowds, and folk like this always want to be seen where the crowds are. The Pharisees and Sadducees were not coming to John because they heard in his message of repentance a promise of hope. They were coming because they wanted to make sure they were in with this potential new power. This wasn’t repentance, a dramatic turning away from the old ways and toward the new life John was proclaiming, this was playing both sides of the coin, waiting to see who to follow based on who was doing the best. The Pharisees and Sadducees have not come to John to be moved into action, and John has no time for hope that is not hope.
The baptism John proclaimed Jesus would bring, a baptism of the Holy Spirit and of fire, is a baptism of hope. It is a promise we can cling to, a force of our identity that can give us the courage to step forward boldly, secure in the promise that God is guiding us. It is a hope that Jesus learned from his ancestor Rahab, a hope that led him all the way to the cross, where hope shined the brightest. This is the world-shattering, life-changing power of hope. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Thursday, December 1, 2016
Conversation points for the story of Rahab and Matthew 3:1-12
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
Joshua 2:1-9, 12-15, 22-24; 6:15-17, 20-22
• In 2:12, 18, and 6:23, the story refers to Rahab’s whole family, starting with her father. This, then, is not a story of Rahab’s house, but of her father’s. Placing Rahab’s mother next to her father pokes at the patriarchal norms, but the father is still certainly the head of the household. That Rahab is the central character of the story tells us something about the economic status of the family; her family’s dire need has forced her into the role of supplying for the family.
• Rahab is identified as a prostitute, and by far the most common reason for entering prostitution in the ancient world was poverty. The story is meant to appeal to debtor families who, rather than condemning Rahab for her prostitution, would relate to the economic system that forced her into the role of provider, and cheer for her as she outsmarted the king to whom she was indebted. The story is a traditional folk narrative about poor people against kingly wealth and power.
• Rahab, like Tamar, is a Caananite, and thus an outsider. That is the source of her stigma, not prostitution.
Matthew 3:1-12
• The description of John’s clothing and diet separate him from urban society and identify him with the wilderness from which he comes. Locusts are a ritually clean food (Leviticus 11:22), and are a common protein for poorer people in desert cultures.
• The word “baptize” comes from the Greek verb baptizo, meaning to dip or to immerse. Various water rituals existed in Judean culture at the time and were probably a model for John’s baptism ritual. But John changed it, instead of ritually repeated event like ritual washing in the Jewish faith, John’s baptism is a once-for-all practice with eschatological implications.
• “Brood of vipers” calls to mind both images of snakes running before a fire and an insulting term for the poisonous false teachers who lead people astray. “Brood of vipers” in the Greek is literally “sons of snakes,” in comparison to Jesus as the Son of God.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Coote, Robert B. “The Book of Joshua.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume II. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1998.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
Joshua 2:1-9, 12-15, 22-24; 6:15-17, 20-22
• In 2:12, 18, and 6:23, the story refers to Rahab’s whole family, starting with her father. This, then, is not a story of Rahab’s house, but of her father’s. Placing Rahab’s mother next to her father pokes at the patriarchal norms, but the father is still certainly the head of the household. That Rahab is the central character of the story tells us something about the economic status of the family; her family’s dire need has forced her into the role of supplying for the family.
• Rahab is identified as a prostitute, and by far the most common reason for entering prostitution in the ancient world was poverty. The story is meant to appeal to debtor families who, rather than condemning Rahab for her prostitution, would relate to the economic system that forced her into the role of provider, and cheer for her as she outsmarted the king to whom she was indebted. The story is a traditional folk narrative about poor people against kingly wealth and power.
• Rahab, like Tamar, is a Caananite, and thus an outsider. That is the source of her stigma, not prostitution.
Matthew 3:1-12
• The description of John’s clothing and diet separate him from urban society and identify him with the wilderness from which he comes. Locusts are a ritually clean food (Leviticus 11:22), and are a common protein for poorer people in desert cultures.
• The word “baptize” comes from the Greek verb baptizo, meaning to dip or to immerse. Various water rituals existed in Judean culture at the time and were probably a model for John’s baptism ritual. But John changed it, instead of ritually repeated event like ritual washing in the Jewish faith, John’s baptism is a once-for-all practice with eschatological implications.
• “Brood of vipers” calls to mind both images of snakes running before a fire and an insulting term for the poisonous false teachers who lead people astray. “Brood of vipers” in the Greek is literally “sons of snakes,” in comparison to Jesus as the Son of God.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Coote, Robert B. “The Book of Joshua.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume II. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1998.
Monday, November 28, 2016
The Faith of Tamar: A Sermon on Genesis 38:11, 13-26 and Matthew 24:36-44
Since it’s the first Sunday of Advent, I want to take a moment and set up what we’ll be doing for the next few weeks. If you’re following along in one of the devotional books, you’ll notice that while the Gospel text matched, the other reading did not. You’ll also notice that there was only one other reading, instead of the normal three. I’m switching it up this year, because I want us to pay attention to something kind of interesting. Advent marks the start of our year in the Gospel of Matthew. And Matthew starts out with a genealogy. We don’t often read this, because, let’s face it, genealogies are kind of boring, just a list of names we’re not familiar with. But this start sets an idea that Matthew will build on throughout the rest of the gospel, the importance of Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophets. By starting it with a genealogy, Matthew demonstrates how Jesus is not a new thing; he is the completion of the prophetic line, one which started way back with God’s promise to Abraham. Pay attention throughout the rest of the year, because you’ll notice this theme of Jesus fulfilling promises made about Abraham, Moses, David, and other great figures in biblical history.
So that’s the role of the genealogy itself. But as we look closer, we notice something unusual. Genealogies usually trace the lineage through the male line, father to son. Read the genealogies in Leviticus and Chronicles, they do the same thing. But, there are five outliers in Matthew’s list, five names that are not like the other. And when something is out of the ordinary in scripture, it’s important to pay attention, because the author probably included it for a reason. In Matthew’s genealogy, five women appear in the list of Jesus’ ancestors. The questions I want us to consider in these weeks leading up to the birth of Jesus are who are these women? Why does Matthew include them? And what about them shaped Jesus as a leader and teacher? How did these women prepare Jesus for his work as savior of the world? We start this morning with the first woman on the list, Tamar, the mother of Judah’s sons.
A little background. Genesis chapter thirty-eight is an interruption in the middle of the story of Joseph. Joseph has his dreams of greatness, is sold by his brothers to some passing travelers, and ends up in Egypt in the house of Potiphar, and then we jump back to Israel, completely out of the story of Joseph, to hear this weird interjection about the line of Judah. Tamar was the wife of Judah’s oldest son, Er. When Er died childless, it fell to Judah’s next son, Onan, to produce an heir for his bother. Which doesn’t make much sense to us now, but was common practice of the time. If a brother died without an heir, it was the role of the next brother to father a son with his brother’s widow. That child would be considered the son and inheritor of the deceased brother’s property. This was important not only for inheritance rights, but also as a protection for the widow. Unfortunately, Onan was not interested in fathering his brother’s heir, and also died childless. Judah had a third son, to whom the responsibility of fathering an heir for Tamar should have fallen. But instead Judah kept this son from Tamar, which left her stuck. Because she still was under the house of Judah, she could not remarry. But without a husband or a son, she had no standing in society, she was a nobody. The funny thing that’s also going on here is by doing this; Judah had really cut off his nose to spite his face. Because as her father-in-law, he was responsible for Tamar’s well-being until she had a husband or heir. So by ignoring her, he was in violation of his legal and ethical responsibility. Also, in a society where one’s value was dependent on one’s descendents, isolating Tamar also left Judah himself without an heir. So fearful was Judah, that he jeopardized his future in order to protect his present.
And on the situation would have gone like this, with both Tamar and Judah paralyzed by Judah’s fear and failure to act. Until Tamar took matters into her own hands. Seeing the paralysis that Judah was stuck in, Tamar, from a position of seeming powerlessness, found a way to move forward, albeit through a bit of trickery. What strikes me about Tamar is how much faith it must have taken to make such a bold move. Faith is often thought of as a concrete thing, I have faith, I believe, in this. It feels very confident and sure. But Martin Luther King, Jr. defined faith as taking the first step even when you cannot see the whole staircase. That is the kind of faith that I think Tamar had. Tamar had faith in her own God-given value as a member of the chosen line of Judah, and her confidence in her own value gave her the courage to move against society’s expectations and demand her place in the family. The quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. feels apt, because when I think of people who took a stand against the accepted value of society out of their own internal sense of their value as children of God, I think of folk involved in the civil rights movement. I think of the students who sat at the Woolsworth lunch counter, the marchers across Edmund Petis bridge, the freedom riders, who said even though the ethic of the culture says I am less than, the ethic of the culture is wrong. In the eyes of God, I am a person worthy of the same rights and privileges of others, and I am going to stand up for those rights.
And as is always the case when we stand up for justice, Tamar’s bold action not only set her free, but it set Judah free as well. Because Judah, by giving in to his own fear, had cut himself off from the promise of descendents and was living against the law of God to provide for and protect the people of his family. Judah called Tamar righteous when he realized what she had done, because he realized that Tamar basically tricked him into doing the right thing. Because of her boldness, the family line of the Lion of Judah, a line that would eventually lead to Jesus, was able to continue.
I think Jesus inherited his boldness and his self-confidence from Tamar. In our Gospel reading for this morning, Jesus told his disciples about a very scary time. Like the passage we heard two weeks ago from Luke, this time that Jesus is foretelling, a time when one would be taken and one would be left, this time has already happened by the time Matthew recorded it. The temple had already fallen, the people of Israel has already seen the destruction of their city and some people being captured, literally “taken up” by the Roman soldiers, while others were left behind. So what Jesus is saying is really, things feel out of control right now, and you maybe feel forgotten by God in the midst of this destruction you cannot control. But you can trust that the Son of Man is coming for you. You can trust in the promise of your God-given value, that you have not been forgotten, that you have not been overlooked. It is a boost of confidence to weary and frightened people to ground them in who they are and help them to continue to step forward in faith.
It is this sort of confidence that Jesus needed, and demonstrated in spades. Throughout his ministry, Jesus always put the good of others above doing what was right by society’s standards. He ate with sinners and outcasts, he healed on the Sabbath, he healed the sick. And in just a few short chapters from this Gospel reading, Jesus will do the most scandalous thing of all. He will hand himself over to be crucified and to die. He will die the death of a sinner and an outcast in the eyes of many, but in fact, the opposite is true. His courageous act of boundary defying self-sacrifice confirmed his identity as the Son of Man and savior of the world.
Everett, today is your baptism. And I hope in your future, that today is a day you can look back on for that same confidence. My prayer for you is that for the rest of your life, when you feel lost, left behind, undervalued, you will be able to look back at this day and trust in your God-claimed identity as a beloved child of God. And that confidence in who you are and whose you are will give you the courage to step forward in faith to work for justice and peace. These are big words for such a little guy, but buddy, I believe God has big things in store for you. And, like all of us, you stand on the shoulders of the spiritual giants who have gone before you, and you have this community behind you, to support you, to pray for you, and to remind you of your God-given value as children of God. May all of us remind each other. Amen.
So that’s the role of the genealogy itself. But as we look closer, we notice something unusual. Genealogies usually trace the lineage through the male line, father to son. Read the genealogies in Leviticus and Chronicles, they do the same thing. But, there are five outliers in Matthew’s list, five names that are not like the other. And when something is out of the ordinary in scripture, it’s important to pay attention, because the author probably included it for a reason. In Matthew’s genealogy, five women appear in the list of Jesus’ ancestors. The questions I want us to consider in these weeks leading up to the birth of Jesus are who are these women? Why does Matthew include them? And what about them shaped Jesus as a leader and teacher? How did these women prepare Jesus for his work as savior of the world? We start this morning with the first woman on the list, Tamar, the mother of Judah’s sons.
A little background. Genesis chapter thirty-eight is an interruption in the middle of the story of Joseph. Joseph has his dreams of greatness, is sold by his brothers to some passing travelers, and ends up in Egypt in the house of Potiphar, and then we jump back to Israel, completely out of the story of Joseph, to hear this weird interjection about the line of Judah. Tamar was the wife of Judah’s oldest son, Er. When Er died childless, it fell to Judah’s next son, Onan, to produce an heir for his bother. Which doesn’t make much sense to us now, but was common practice of the time. If a brother died without an heir, it was the role of the next brother to father a son with his brother’s widow. That child would be considered the son and inheritor of the deceased brother’s property. This was important not only for inheritance rights, but also as a protection for the widow. Unfortunately, Onan was not interested in fathering his brother’s heir, and also died childless. Judah had a third son, to whom the responsibility of fathering an heir for Tamar should have fallen. But instead Judah kept this son from Tamar, which left her stuck. Because she still was under the house of Judah, she could not remarry. But without a husband or a son, she had no standing in society, she was a nobody. The funny thing that’s also going on here is by doing this; Judah had really cut off his nose to spite his face. Because as her father-in-law, he was responsible for Tamar’s well-being until she had a husband or heir. So by ignoring her, he was in violation of his legal and ethical responsibility. Also, in a society where one’s value was dependent on one’s descendents, isolating Tamar also left Judah himself without an heir. So fearful was Judah, that he jeopardized his future in order to protect his present.
And on the situation would have gone like this, with both Tamar and Judah paralyzed by Judah’s fear and failure to act. Until Tamar took matters into her own hands. Seeing the paralysis that Judah was stuck in, Tamar, from a position of seeming powerlessness, found a way to move forward, albeit through a bit of trickery. What strikes me about Tamar is how much faith it must have taken to make such a bold move. Faith is often thought of as a concrete thing, I have faith, I believe, in this. It feels very confident and sure. But Martin Luther King, Jr. defined faith as taking the first step even when you cannot see the whole staircase. That is the kind of faith that I think Tamar had. Tamar had faith in her own God-given value as a member of the chosen line of Judah, and her confidence in her own value gave her the courage to move against society’s expectations and demand her place in the family. The quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. feels apt, because when I think of people who took a stand against the accepted value of society out of their own internal sense of their value as children of God, I think of folk involved in the civil rights movement. I think of the students who sat at the Woolsworth lunch counter, the marchers across Edmund Petis bridge, the freedom riders, who said even though the ethic of the culture says I am less than, the ethic of the culture is wrong. In the eyes of God, I am a person worthy of the same rights and privileges of others, and I am going to stand up for those rights.
And as is always the case when we stand up for justice, Tamar’s bold action not only set her free, but it set Judah free as well. Because Judah, by giving in to his own fear, had cut himself off from the promise of descendents and was living against the law of God to provide for and protect the people of his family. Judah called Tamar righteous when he realized what she had done, because he realized that Tamar basically tricked him into doing the right thing. Because of her boldness, the family line of the Lion of Judah, a line that would eventually lead to Jesus, was able to continue.
I think Jesus inherited his boldness and his self-confidence from Tamar. In our Gospel reading for this morning, Jesus told his disciples about a very scary time. Like the passage we heard two weeks ago from Luke, this time that Jesus is foretelling, a time when one would be taken and one would be left, this time has already happened by the time Matthew recorded it. The temple had already fallen, the people of Israel has already seen the destruction of their city and some people being captured, literally “taken up” by the Roman soldiers, while others were left behind. So what Jesus is saying is really, things feel out of control right now, and you maybe feel forgotten by God in the midst of this destruction you cannot control. But you can trust that the Son of Man is coming for you. You can trust in the promise of your God-given value, that you have not been forgotten, that you have not been overlooked. It is a boost of confidence to weary and frightened people to ground them in who they are and help them to continue to step forward in faith.
It is this sort of confidence that Jesus needed, and demonstrated in spades. Throughout his ministry, Jesus always put the good of others above doing what was right by society’s standards. He ate with sinners and outcasts, he healed on the Sabbath, he healed the sick. And in just a few short chapters from this Gospel reading, Jesus will do the most scandalous thing of all. He will hand himself over to be crucified and to die. He will die the death of a sinner and an outcast in the eyes of many, but in fact, the opposite is true. His courageous act of boundary defying self-sacrifice confirmed his identity as the Son of Man and savior of the world.
Everett, today is your baptism. And I hope in your future, that today is a day you can look back on for that same confidence. My prayer for you is that for the rest of your life, when you feel lost, left behind, undervalued, you will be able to look back at this day and trust in your God-claimed identity as a beloved child of God. And that confidence in who you are and whose you are will give you the courage to step forward in faith to work for justice and peace. These are big words for such a little guy, but buddy, I believe God has big things in store for you. And, like all of us, you stand on the shoulders of the spiritual giants who have gone before you, and you have this community behind you, to support you, to pray for you, and to remind you of your God-given value as children of God. May all of us remind each other. Amen.
Wednesday, November 23, 2016
Conversation Points for Genesis 38:11, 13-26 and Matthew 24:36-44
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
Genesis 38:11, 13-26
• This story forms an interruption to the story of Joseph. In doing this it accomplishes two things. 1) It slows the narrative and thus heightens the tension concerning Joseph’s fate (much like a commercial break in an exciting moment in a TV show). 2) It keeps the rest of Jacob’s family from being forgotten in the story, anticipating Judah’s later role as the primary carrier on of the family lineage.
• Other important themes that mirror the Joseph story include recognition (Joseph hid from his brothers much like how Tamar hid from Judah), reversal (Joseph rose from prison to power, Tamar moved from obscurity to ancestor of the promised line of Judah), and deception through evidence (Joseph hid a cup on his brother Benjamin, Tamar took Judah’s staff, signet, and cord as identification).
• Judah’s line bypassing his sons helps to make sense of how Jacob’s line bypasses Judah’s older brothers and falls to him, God is not beholden to strict genealogical lineage.
• Tamar is a Canaanite, which is important to her role in Jesus’ lineage. Jesus’ message is for all, gentiles as well as Jews, because Jesus himself is from gentile origins.
• In the ancient near east, a woman’s place in society came from her spouse or son. Inheritance also passed from father to son. In order to keep inheritance lines straight and to protect widows, if a man died without fathering an heir, it was the man’s brother’s responsibility to father an heir for his brother. The child would be considered the son of the dead man, not the son of the brother. Because of that, as weird and inappropriate as it seems to us, it was not at all unethical our inappropriate for Judah to father a child with his son’s widow. The child would be considered Judah’s grandson, even though Judah was the biological father.
• Judah called Tamar “more in the right than [him]” (v. 26) because she was willing to go to greater risks on behalf of an heir for her husband/his son.
Matthew 24:36-44
• Like the passage we heard from Luke’s Gospel two weeks ago, this passage foretells destruction that Matthew’s audience had already experienced. Scholars date Matthew’s gospel to sometime after 70 CE, so sometime after the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans.
• Modern dispensationalism would have us read “one will be taken and one will be left” as favorable to the taken. But when I think about what happens when someone is “taken” by an invading army, I wonder if the emphasis could be on the randomness of warfare and comfort for those who are “left” to pick up the pieces.
• Thief seems like a strange metaphor for Jesus, but the emphasis seems to be on the urgency and the unexpectedness, the importance of vigilance and action.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Fretheim, Terence. “The Book of Genesis.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume I. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
Genesis 38:11, 13-26
• This story forms an interruption to the story of Joseph. In doing this it accomplishes two things. 1) It slows the narrative and thus heightens the tension concerning Joseph’s fate (much like a commercial break in an exciting moment in a TV show). 2) It keeps the rest of Jacob’s family from being forgotten in the story, anticipating Judah’s later role as the primary carrier on of the family lineage.
• Other important themes that mirror the Joseph story include recognition (Joseph hid from his brothers much like how Tamar hid from Judah), reversal (Joseph rose from prison to power, Tamar moved from obscurity to ancestor of the promised line of Judah), and deception through evidence (Joseph hid a cup on his brother Benjamin, Tamar took Judah’s staff, signet, and cord as identification).
• Judah’s line bypassing his sons helps to make sense of how Jacob’s line bypasses Judah’s older brothers and falls to him, God is not beholden to strict genealogical lineage.
• Tamar is a Canaanite, which is important to her role in Jesus’ lineage. Jesus’ message is for all, gentiles as well as Jews, because Jesus himself is from gentile origins.
• In the ancient near east, a woman’s place in society came from her spouse or son. Inheritance also passed from father to son. In order to keep inheritance lines straight and to protect widows, if a man died without fathering an heir, it was the man’s brother’s responsibility to father an heir for his brother. The child would be considered the son of the dead man, not the son of the brother. Because of that, as weird and inappropriate as it seems to us, it was not at all unethical our inappropriate for Judah to father a child with his son’s widow. The child would be considered Judah’s grandson, even though Judah was the biological father.
• Judah called Tamar “more in the right than [him]” (v. 26) because she was willing to go to greater risks on behalf of an heir for her husband/his son.
Matthew 24:36-44
• Like the passage we heard from Luke’s Gospel two weeks ago, this passage foretells destruction that Matthew’s audience had already experienced. Scholars date Matthew’s gospel to sometime after 70 CE, so sometime after the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans.
• Modern dispensationalism would have us read “one will be taken and one will be left” as favorable to the taken. But when I think about what happens when someone is “taken” by an invading army, I wonder if the emphasis could be on the randomness of warfare and comfort for those who are “left” to pick up the pieces.
• Thief seems like a strange metaphor for Jesus, but the emphasis seems to be on the urgency and the unexpectedness, the importance of vigilance and action.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Fretheim, Terence. “The Book of Genesis.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume I. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994.
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Conversation Points for Luke 23:33-43
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• Jesus prayed for forgiveness in verse 34, who was he praying for? 34a seems to make an awkward shift from the chief priests earlier in chapter 23 to the soldiers, was Jesus praying for the Romans or the Jewish leaders, or both? Culpepper suggests both. The soldiers, operating under order, are the easiest to fit under the plea of ignorance. But throughout the gospel, Luke has emphasized the role of the Jewish leaders, and the people in calling for Jesus’ death. And the speeches in Acts continue to maintain that the Jewish leaders acted in ignorance when they called for Jesus’ crucifixion. So it seems Jesus’ call for forgiveness should be for all involved.
• The prayer itself is also true to the pattern of Jesus’ prayer throughout the gospel, a model prayer to precede a model death. One Stephen will follow in his own martyrdom in Acts, a death that eventually led to the conversion of Paul. • The soldiers responded to the prayer by continuing their business of dividing his clothing, as was called for in the Scriptures (Psalm 22:18), thus demonstrating their ignorance of the events transpiring.
• Unlike in Mark, Jesus was taunted not by the crowds, but by the leaders (v. 35), the soldiers (v. 36-37), and the criminal (v. 39). The irony of these taunts helps underscore Jesus’ identity and the true meaning of his death. The one who taught that those who wanted to save their lives must lose them, now loses his own life to save others. If he had saved his life, it would have denied his salvific role. The challenges echo the tempter’s taunts in Luke 4.
• Luke is the only Gospel to record the conversation between Jesus and the men with whom he was crucified. The story contributes to prominent Lukan themes: Jesus as giver of forgiveness, Jesus as one who stands with outsiders (even dies with them in this case).
Works Sourced:
Culpepper, R. Alan. “The Gospel of Luke.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• Jesus prayed for forgiveness in verse 34, who was he praying for? 34a seems to make an awkward shift from the chief priests earlier in chapter 23 to the soldiers, was Jesus praying for the Romans or the Jewish leaders, or both? Culpepper suggests both. The soldiers, operating under order, are the easiest to fit under the plea of ignorance. But throughout the gospel, Luke has emphasized the role of the Jewish leaders, and the people in calling for Jesus’ death. And the speeches in Acts continue to maintain that the Jewish leaders acted in ignorance when they called for Jesus’ crucifixion. So it seems Jesus’ call for forgiveness should be for all involved.
• The prayer itself is also true to the pattern of Jesus’ prayer throughout the gospel, a model prayer to precede a model death. One Stephen will follow in his own martyrdom in Acts, a death that eventually led to the conversion of Paul. • The soldiers responded to the prayer by continuing their business of dividing his clothing, as was called for in the Scriptures (Psalm 22:18), thus demonstrating their ignorance of the events transpiring.
• Unlike in Mark, Jesus was taunted not by the crowds, but by the leaders (v. 35), the soldiers (v. 36-37), and the criminal (v. 39). The irony of these taunts helps underscore Jesus’ identity and the true meaning of his death. The one who taught that those who wanted to save their lives must lose them, now loses his own life to save others. If he had saved his life, it would have denied his salvific role. The challenges echo the tempter’s taunts in Luke 4.
• Luke is the only Gospel to record the conversation between Jesus and the men with whom he was crucified. The story contributes to prominent Lukan themes: Jesus as giver of forgiveness, Jesus as one who stands with outsiders (even dies with them in this case).
Works Sourced:
Culpepper, R. Alan. “The Gospel of Luke.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Monday, November 14, 2016
It's Wednesday, Now What?: A Sermon on Luke 21:5-19
This sermon was preached at a joint service of St. Mark CME Church and Trinity Lutheran Church. St. Mark bought Trinity's old building in the 1970s, and the two congregations are working together on mission in the Post neighborhood.
First, and most importantly, what a joy and a treat it is to once again worship together this day. Thank you St. Mark for your wonderful hospitality and thank you Pastor Bell for being my dear friend and brother in the work of justice. It is good, good, good to be worshiping our risen Christ together this day.
Well, we had an election this week. And I have to say; from the president to the Battle Creek school board the only thing that this election told me was that we are a divided nation. From the president to the Battle Creek school board, here in Calhoun County, these were tight races. From the president to the Battle Creek school board, all the candidates know is that we are conflicted. We know something is wrong, but we are split on the best way to fix it.
I went to bed Tuesday night, before any elections were called, feeling pretty confused and upset about the whole thing. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know how to proceed, in the face of such a divided electorate. I went to bed anxious about what it meant to live in a time where one candidate won the popular vote and the other the electoral vote, and neither party, neither platform, in any campaign, from the president to the Battle Creek school board, had a clear majority. I felt polarized, divided, aware of my privilege as a white American, and afraid.
And then I woke up Wednesday morning, and I made a pot of coffee, and I went to work. I woke up, made coffee, and went to work, because I realized that for every election, from the president to the Battle Creek school board, whoever won didn’t change what my response as a follower of Jesus Christ should be. As a follower of Jesus Christ, my job, however I may feel, is to be God’s hands and feet and heart and mind in the world, bringing forth the kingdom of God. Last Sunday at Trinity we talked about how whether we were delighted or devastated with what happened on Tuesday, there would be a Wednesday, and the work of being the people of God would continue. Well, it’s Wednesday now, and our work continues. This realization made me so, so excited to be here with you this morning, my brothers and sisters in Christ and my partners in the work of bringing the kingdom of God to the Post neighborhood.
Part of what helped me come to this realization was the text I read this morning. In the Lutheran tradition, I don’t choose the texts I preach from. The ELCA is what is known as a lectionary church, which means we read from a series of assigned readings each week. Sometimes I love the assigned text, sometimes I don’t. But the fact that it’s given to me forces me to hear the word the Holy Spirit has for me in it. More often than not, I find that my initial response is wrong, and the Holy Spirit has some great stuff going on to challenge and comfort me. That was the case again this week. At first read through, the assigned Gospel text for this week is terrifying. Jesus said, “not one stone will be left upon another… there will be wars and insurrections, nation will rise up against nation and kingdom against kingdom,” this is scary stuff, Jesus! But I want to step back for a second here, and place this text in its historical context, see what this text might have to say to us.
This text comes from the final days of Jesus’ life. The crucifixion is like four days away at this point. Jesus has already ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey to shouts of Hosanna, the religious and political leaders have already seen how Jesus stirred up the attention of the crowds, and they were already scared by that. It seems to be those religious and political leaders whom Jesus is speaking to in this story. He seems to be saying to them, you who have put your trust in worldly powers, watch out. Even this glorious, gold-plated Temple, the very symbol of power and might, this Temple in which you put so much faith, will crumble in the face of the power of God. Jesus is challenging the status quo, those who use their power and privilege to step on and oppress others in their battle for the top. He is telling those powers in no uncertain terms, you better watch out, for the powers of the earth will crumble.
So that’s the first level of historical context, the text itself. But there’s then a second level, the level of the audience for which the text was written. Because, think about it, Jesus said and did a lot of stuff in his thirty-three years of ministry. There’s no way the Gospel writers could get it all down. If you recorded every moment every day of someone’s life, well, let’s just say our pew bibles wouldn’t fit in our pews. So Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, had to pick and choose what to record. So why this story? Why did Luke choose to record this particular incident when he was setting down the life of Jesus for his community?
Luke’s Gospel was written down around 80 to 90 CE. The Temple was destroyed by Roman invaders in 70 CE. Which means that Luke was writing to an audience who was staring at the ruins of their Temple and trying to make sense of the devastation they had witnessed, trying to understand where God was in the midst of these ruins and their fear. By recounting these words of Jesus, Luke was reminding his audience, its ok folks, God’s got this. The destruction of the Temple does not mean the destruction of our God. Jesus told us this would happen, and now that it’s happened, remember the words of Jesus, do not be afraid.
I think we here in the Post Addition have a lot more in common with Luke’s audience than we do with Jesus’ audience. This is Post Addition. We are not staring up at the glorious gold-plated edifices of our buildings, marveling at their beauty and wealth. We are making it work in crumbling buildings, amidst broken families, broken school systems, broken homes. The glorious promise of cereal plant labor and middle class jobs, these homes built for families and schools built for children, have crumbled and fallen. Post Addition may be the neighborhood that Battle Creek forgot, but what this text promises us is that God has not forgotten, God is still here. This neighborhood has seen the earthquake of job loss, the famine of school closures, the plague of violence, and this text is the unwavering promise of God’s presence and power. Do not be afraid, Jesus said in this text, for the end will not follow immediately. This is not the end. Jesus said it, this is not the end, so do not follow those who tell you it is the end. Do not follow those who tell you there in nothing worth saving in Post Addition. Do not believe those who try to sow fear and discord. Do not be afraid, for this is not the end.
This passage started with a conversation about stones. In reflecting on these beautiful stones, Jesus remarked, not one stone will be left upon another, all will be thrown done. Luke’s Gospel has a lot to say about stones. In the very beginning, John the Baptist told the crowds, the same crowds Jesus was speaking to in this story, that from stones God would raise up children to Abraham. Dear people of God, we are these stones. We are the living stones being raised up by God in this place. I want to say again, as I said in the beginning, I am so grateful to be worshiping with you today, I am so grateful you came to worship with us in September, and I am so grateful for my friendship with your pastor. Because in a world that preaches division and a philosophy of not enough, the friendship between our two churches stands in opposition to that. In our work together I find courage, in our work together I find God’s presence, in our work together, I find hope.
This text is comfort, but it is also challenge. Because this text makes us aware of God’s presence, this text also convicts us that we cannot be held hostage to fear, we have to be about the work of the kingdom. We have to be about claiming the opportunity to testify to God’s grace and God’s goodness. We have to be about letting folk know that God is here in Post Addition, and since God is a God of resurrection glory, a new thing is in the process of being born out of this place. It is slow work, we know it is slow work, but this text also encourages endurance. And as Paul said in Romans we know that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint.
Thank you, St. Mark, for being my partners in ministry, my sisters and brothers in the kingdom of God. Let us go forward together to proclaim the presence of God in this community and in this world. Let us show our elected officials what it looks like to walk united, not divided. This is hard work, it is slow work, it is scary work. But Jesus Christ has promised us that he will give us the words and a wisdom that none can withstand or contradict.
In the Lutheran tradition, we read a psalm together every Sunday. The psalms are the church’s first hymnal and prayer book. And in an act of shared testimony, I would love it if we could end the sermon today by praying aloud, together, the psalm appointed for this morning, which is Psalm 98. I want to end with us all speaking together to remind us that this is not the end, it is a beginning of our shared witness. Let us give voice to the promise that God has the victory, that God is steadfast and powerful, and that God has given us the words to testify to God’s name.
O sing to the Lord a new song,
for he has done marvelous things.
His right hand and his holy arm
have gained him victory.
The Lord has made known his victory;
he has revealed his vindication in the sight of the nations.
He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness
to the house of Israel.
All the ends of the earth have seen
the victory of our God.
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth;
break forth into joyous song and sing praises.
Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre,
with the lyre and the sound of melody.
With trumpets and the sound of the horn
make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord.
Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
the world and those who live in it.
Let the floods clap their hands;
let the hills sing together for joy
at the presence of the Lord, for he is coming
to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with equity.
Amen.
First, and most importantly, what a joy and a treat it is to once again worship together this day. Thank you St. Mark for your wonderful hospitality and thank you Pastor Bell for being my dear friend and brother in the work of justice. It is good, good, good to be worshiping our risen Christ together this day.
Well, we had an election this week. And I have to say; from the president to the Battle Creek school board the only thing that this election told me was that we are a divided nation. From the president to the Battle Creek school board, here in Calhoun County, these were tight races. From the president to the Battle Creek school board, all the candidates know is that we are conflicted. We know something is wrong, but we are split on the best way to fix it.
I went to bed Tuesday night, before any elections were called, feeling pretty confused and upset about the whole thing. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know how to proceed, in the face of such a divided electorate. I went to bed anxious about what it meant to live in a time where one candidate won the popular vote and the other the electoral vote, and neither party, neither platform, in any campaign, from the president to the Battle Creek school board, had a clear majority. I felt polarized, divided, aware of my privilege as a white American, and afraid.
And then I woke up Wednesday morning, and I made a pot of coffee, and I went to work. I woke up, made coffee, and went to work, because I realized that for every election, from the president to the Battle Creek school board, whoever won didn’t change what my response as a follower of Jesus Christ should be. As a follower of Jesus Christ, my job, however I may feel, is to be God’s hands and feet and heart and mind in the world, bringing forth the kingdom of God. Last Sunday at Trinity we talked about how whether we were delighted or devastated with what happened on Tuesday, there would be a Wednesday, and the work of being the people of God would continue. Well, it’s Wednesday now, and our work continues. This realization made me so, so excited to be here with you this morning, my brothers and sisters in Christ and my partners in the work of bringing the kingdom of God to the Post neighborhood.
Part of what helped me come to this realization was the text I read this morning. In the Lutheran tradition, I don’t choose the texts I preach from. The ELCA is what is known as a lectionary church, which means we read from a series of assigned readings each week. Sometimes I love the assigned text, sometimes I don’t. But the fact that it’s given to me forces me to hear the word the Holy Spirit has for me in it. More often than not, I find that my initial response is wrong, and the Holy Spirit has some great stuff going on to challenge and comfort me. That was the case again this week. At first read through, the assigned Gospel text for this week is terrifying. Jesus said, “not one stone will be left upon another… there will be wars and insurrections, nation will rise up against nation and kingdom against kingdom,” this is scary stuff, Jesus! But I want to step back for a second here, and place this text in its historical context, see what this text might have to say to us.
This text comes from the final days of Jesus’ life. The crucifixion is like four days away at this point. Jesus has already ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey to shouts of Hosanna, the religious and political leaders have already seen how Jesus stirred up the attention of the crowds, and they were already scared by that. It seems to be those religious and political leaders whom Jesus is speaking to in this story. He seems to be saying to them, you who have put your trust in worldly powers, watch out. Even this glorious, gold-plated Temple, the very symbol of power and might, this Temple in which you put so much faith, will crumble in the face of the power of God. Jesus is challenging the status quo, those who use their power and privilege to step on and oppress others in their battle for the top. He is telling those powers in no uncertain terms, you better watch out, for the powers of the earth will crumble.
So that’s the first level of historical context, the text itself. But there’s then a second level, the level of the audience for which the text was written. Because, think about it, Jesus said and did a lot of stuff in his thirty-three years of ministry. There’s no way the Gospel writers could get it all down. If you recorded every moment every day of someone’s life, well, let’s just say our pew bibles wouldn’t fit in our pews. So Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, had to pick and choose what to record. So why this story? Why did Luke choose to record this particular incident when he was setting down the life of Jesus for his community?
Luke’s Gospel was written down around 80 to 90 CE. The Temple was destroyed by Roman invaders in 70 CE. Which means that Luke was writing to an audience who was staring at the ruins of their Temple and trying to make sense of the devastation they had witnessed, trying to understand where God was in the midst of these ruins and their fear. By recounting these words of Jesus, Luke was reminding his audience, its ok folks, God’s got this. The destruction of the Temple does not mean the destruction of our God. Jesus told us this would happen, and now that it’s happened, remember the words of Jesus, do not be afraid.
I think we here in the Post Addition have a lot more in common with Luke’s audience than we do with Jesus’ audience. This is Post Addition. We are not staring up at the glorious gold-plated edifices of our buildings, marveling at their beauty and wealth. We are making it work in crumbling buildings, amidst broken families, broken school systems, broken homes. The glorious promise of cereal plant labor and middle class jobs, these homes built for families and schools built for children, have crumbled and fallen. Post Addition may be the neighborhood that Battle Creek forgot, but what this text promises us is that God has not forgotten, God is still here. This neighborhood has seen the earthquake of job loss, the famine of school closures, the plague of violence, and this text is the unwavering promise of God’s presence and power. Do not be afraid, Jesus said in this text, for the end will not follow immediately. This is not the end. Jesus said it, this is not the end, so do not follow those who tell you it is the end. Do not follow those who tell you there in nothing worth saving in Post Addition. Do not believe those who try to sow fear and discord. Do not be afraid, for this is not the end.
This passage started with a conversation about stones. In reflecting on these beautiful stones, Jesus remarked, not one stone will be left upon another, all will be thrown done. Luke’s Gospel has a lot to say about stones. In the very beginning, John the Baptist told the crowds, the same crowds Jesus was speaking to in this story, that from stones God would raise up children to Abraham. Dear people of God, we are these stones. We are the living stones being raised up by God in this place. I want to say again, as I said in the beginning, I am so grateful to be worshiping with you today, I am so grateful you came to worship with us in September, and I am so grateful for my friendship with your pastor. Because in a world that preaches division and a philosophy of not enough, the friendship between our two churches stands in opposition to that. In our work together I find courage, in our work together I find God’s presence, in our work together, I find hope.
This text is comfort, but it is also challenge. Because this text makes us aware of God’s presence, this text also convicts us that we cannot be held hostage to fear, we have to be about the work of the kingdom. We have to be about claiming the opportunity to testify to God’s grace and God’s goodness. We have to be about letting folk know that God is here in Post Addition, and since God is a God of resurrection glory, a new thing is in the process of being born out of this place. It is slow work, we know it is slow work, but this text also encourages endurance. And as Paul said in Romans we know that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint.
Thank you, St. Mark, for being my partners in ministry, my sisters and brothers in the kingdom of God. Let us go forward together to proclaim the presence of God in this community and in this world. Let us show our elected officials what it looks like to walk united, not divided. This is hard work, it is slow work, it is scary work. But Jesus Christ has promised us that he will give us the words and a wisdom that none can withstand or contradict.
In the Lutheran tradition, we read a psalm together every Sunday. The psalms are the church’s first hymnal and prayer book. And in an act of shared testimony, I would love it if we could end the sermon today by praying aloud, together, the psalm appointed for this morning, which is Psalm 98. I want to end with us all speaking together to remind us that this is not the end, it is a beginning of our shared witness. Let us give voice to the promise that God has the victory, that God is steadfast and powerful, and that God has given us the words to testify to God’s name.
O sing to the Lord a new song,
for he has done marvelous things.
His right hand and his holy arm
have gained him victory.
The Lord has made known his victory;
he has revealed his vindication in the sight of the nations.
He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness
to the house of Israel.
All the ends of the earth have seen
the victory of our God.
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth;
break forth into joyous song and sing praises.
Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre,
with the lyre and the sound of melody.
With trumpets and the sound of the horn
make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord.
Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
the world and those who live in it.
Let the floods clap their hands;
let the hills sing together for joy
at the presence of the Lord, for he is coming
to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with equity.
Amen.
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Conversation Points for Luke 21:5-19
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• This passage takes place in the Temple in the final days before Jesus’ crucifixion. Tempers, and stakes, are high. After the meandering journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, Jesus entered the city (think Palm Sunday) in 19:28-39. In 19:45-48, Jesus drove the money changers out of the Temple, setting up the conflict between Jesus and the religious powers that would in just a few days lead to his crucifixion.
• This section in particular addresses the destruction of the Temple. The Gospel of Luke was written around 80-90 CE, placing it after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Having witnessed the mighty Temple falling, the readers of Luke’s Gospel would have heard this passage as comforting, because it was a reminder that even though the Temple was gone, God was still with them.
• We don’t know who the audience is in this passage. In Mark’s Gospel, it is clearly identified as the disciples, but Luke leaves it ambiguous. The hearers addressed Jesus as “teacher,” a term which was never, in its ten previous uses, used by the disciples as a title for Jesus.
• Jesus instructed his followers not to be alarmed when the temple was destroyed and follow false prophets. Wars and uprisings always feel like times of terror, but they do not signal that the end is near.
• The verses about persecutions foretell the descriptions of such in the Acts of the Apostles. Persecution is one of the major motifs of Acts, they become occasions for the apostles to give testimony.
Works Sourced:
Culpepper, R. Alan. “The Gospel of Luke.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• This passage takes place in the Temple in the final days before Jesus’ crucifixion. Tempers, and stakes, are high. After the meandering journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, Jesus entered the city (think Palm Sunday) in 19:28-39. In 19:45-48, Jesus drove the money changers out of the Temple, setting up the conflict between Jesus and the religious powers that would in just a few days lead to his crucifixion.
• This section in particular addresses the destruction of the Temple. The Gospel of Luke was written around 80-90 CE, placing it after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Having witnessed the mighty Temple falling, the readers of Luke’s Gospel would have heard this passage as comforting, because it was a reminder that even though the Temple was gone, God was still with them.
• We don’t know who the audience is in this passage. In Mark’s Gospel, it is clearly identified as the disciples, but Luke leaves it ambiguous. The hearers addressed Jesus as “teacher,” a term which was never, in its ten previous uses, used by the disciples as a title for Jesus.
• Jesus instructed his followers not to be alarmed when the temple was destroyed and follow false prophets. Wars and uprisings always feel like times of terror, but they do not signal that the end is near.
• The verses about persecutions foretell the descriptions of such in the Acts of the Apostles. Persecution is one of the major motifs of Acts, they become occasions for the apostles to give testimony.
Works Sourced:
Culpepper, R. Alan. “The Gospel of Luke.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Monday, November 7, 2016
The Work Begins on Wednesday: A Sermon on Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18 and Luke 6:20-31
I’m cognizant as I preach this morning that there are a lot of factors at play in our worship this morning. First, of course, it is All Saints Sunday, the day in the church year that we set aside to remember all of the saints, both the living and the dead, though we do tend to give special focus on our dearly departed saints. As Lutherans, we celebrate All Saints Day the Sunday after Reformation Day, and our Lutheran heritage reminds us that all of us are both saint and sinner, one hundred percent of both, all of the time. Outside of the church, of course, it is the Sunday before Election Day, a day that has been built up as the time when we vote for the candidate who is the saint and reject the candidate who is the sinner. Of course the most well-known of these races is the Presidential election, where a hearty case for sainthood is being pushed by the two major party candidates, but also the two most well known independent party candidates, and a host of write-in candidates. All willing to tell you why their person is the saint and the other is the absolute worst thing to ever happen to our country in the history of countries. But, as anyone who’s been coming to the local forums on Thursdays knows, the Presidential campaign is not the only race attempting to set up this saint/sinner dichotomy between one side and the other. This is human nature, we like order, we like clarity, we like good and bad, right and wrong, one side or the other, we like clear cut choices. And here’s the thing, the American political system is not the first system to realize and exploit this flaw in our human nature. Exalting one side and demonizing the other is as old as time itself. Remember Adam and Eve in the garden. God called out Adam for eating the forbidden fruit, and Adam said, “the woman made me do it,” and Eve replied, “the serpent tricked me,” as each tried to raise up someone else as the villain instead of recognizing their own cooperation in a broken system. The fact that we have a political system that lifts up some and the expense of others isn’t a modern problem, dear people, it is a fact of our fallen humanity. It is a thing we are going to have to deal with until the coming of the Kingdom of God. We will be divided, as Jesus said in Luke chapter twelve, “father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law” until Christ comes again.
So, there’s the bad news. But, here’s the good news. Just because sin and division is a part of our human condition, does not mean that we have to sit back and let it be so. In fact, the readings on this All Saints day remind us that number one, we as the church have been given the promise that our God is always at work on the part of liberation and freedom for the oppressed and unifying of the divided, and number two, God has give us the tools to be God’s hands and feet and hearts and minds in this process of healing the world. We as followers of the resurrected and ascended Christ live in this beautiful already and not yet. Already Christ has come, already we know Christ to be in the midst of us, already we meet Christ in the world, and hear the promise of Christ’s unfolding work and repairing and redeeming us. And yet, because we also know that the Kingdom Christ is bringing has not yet fully come into completion, we get to also live in the hopeful not yet of the promise that there will be a time that is better than this one, and we get to be a part of bringing that time into fruition, a foretaste in this world of the unfolding feast to come. I don’t know about all of you, but in this fractured and frightening time, that promise that Christ is here, with us, that the Kingdom of God is both at hand and yet to be fulfilled, and I get to be a part of that fulfilling, that feels like pretty good news indeed. So, let’s take a look at our scripture readings for this morning, and see the proof in our history, that while division is a reality, so too is God’s providence.
So our Daniel reading this morning is admittedly weird, with its talk of four beasts emerging from the sea. We might, like Daniel, find our “spirits troubled” by what to do with this frightening imagery. The book of Daniel is what is known as apocalyptic literature, the same style of literature found in the book of Revelation. Apocalyptic literature uses images more vividly portray a situation. Dr. Fred Gaiser notes: “One could say, calmly and rationally, that the world is a bleak and dangerous place, or one could make the point more fully and dramatically through apocalyptic fantasy. The latter genre will more quickly trouble and terrify us (as they did for Daniel), which is the point.” The four beasts in Daniel are widely accepted to be the kingdoms of Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece, which had dominated and subjugated Israel for five centuries by the time the book of Daniel was written. When Daniel’s audience heard of his dream, they didn’t need it explained to them; they knew what it felt to be terrorized by powerful beasts. So when the interpretation ended with the destruction of the beasts by “the holy ones of the Most High” that felt like hope to Daniel’s audience. What that said to them was yes, you have been terrorized by these four powerful empires, these four beasts, for centuries. But guess what, God’s got this. God is more powerful than the most powerful empire. And the day will come when those four beasts will be destroyed. You don’t have to be afraid; you can stand tall in the midst of all of your terror, because the almighty God is on your side. And the beasts of empire are no match to the glory of God.
We don’t live in the time of Daniel, and the beasts that threaten us are no longer the kingdoms of Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t threatened by our own consuming “beasts.” And what the book of Daniel and stories like it remind us is that when our “spirits are troubled,” we, like Daniel, can hold fast to the promise that the Most High God is in control.
That’s good news number one. Yes, the world feels crazy and divided now, but the world’s felt crazy and divided before, and God has always led God’s people through, so there’s no reason to think that this time will be any different. We don’t have to live in fear, because we have a God who’s bigger than fear. So for good news number two, that we get to be a part of this healing of the world, we turn to Luke.
All Saints Sunday in the year we read Matthew and Luke both give us the beatitudes. In Matthew they are spoken in the passive voice and spiritualized, “blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who hunger for justice.” This distances them, allows us some breathing space. Luke does us no such favors. Jesus looked at his disciples and said, “Blessed are you who are poor... Blessed are you who are hungry… But woe to you who are rich.... Woe to you who are full.” These are concrete realities. For Luke the beatitudes are proof of God’s commitment to the poor. In the same way as the parable of the rich man and Lazarus or the wheat and the chaff, Luke’s beatitudes draw a line in the sand for what it means to be favored of God. Imagine the tension this must have created in the crowd listening to Jesus as he spoke, the puffed up pride of the poor, the hungry, the weeping and the persecuted, as they heard the promise of God’s favor for them, and the building anger in the rich, the full, the laughing, and those who others spoke well of, as Jesus knocked them down. How those in the first group must have preened, for the first time in their lives maybe, to be able to look down their noses as those who had so often been above them. But immediately, before the first group could get too built up, or the second group too filled with anger, Jesus knocked them both down by saying, “But I say to you, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you…If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your cloak.” How that must have stung! Jesus was not saying, poor, you now get to lord over the rich, and rich, prepare to be lorded over. Instead, both sides are called to serve the other, to care for the other, to love the other. How is this good news for the poor, you might ask, it seems like Jesus is opening the doors for the poor to get walked over as they have been before? There’s all kinds of really interesting historical reasoning for the subversive nature of what Jesus said here, how this turning of cheeks and giving of coats is really a subtle way of challenging the status quo in a powerful twist of creative non-violent protest. It’s great fodder for sermons, and next time the Beatitudes come around, I’ll probably preach on it. But it wasn’t what caught my attention this week. What caught my attention this week, on this All Saints Sunday, was how impossible it is to draw the rich/poor, hungry/full line at all. Because here’s the thing, like all of Jesus’ parables, the beatitudes seem to be setting up this dichotomy of good and bad, and like all of Jesus’ parables, if we read far enough into them, we find ourselves on both sides of the line. We are, this morning, a mixed group of incomes. Some of us make more, some of us less, so which side are we on? Are we blessed or in woe? I read an article in Living Lutheran this week about refugee camps in South Sudan, compared to the Sudanese, every one of us in this room, regardless of our economic situation, is unthinkably wealthy. I also saw a comparison of the salaries of the richest one percent of Americans, compared to them every one of us in this room is mired in poverty. Are you full now? Maybe, but eventually you will be hungry. Are you laughing? You can think of a time you’ve wept. Are you weeping? At some point you have laughed. Every single one of us is richer than someone and poorer than someone, hungrier than someone, fuller than someone, happier than someone, sadder than someone. We are both, all of us, all the time. The world of the parables forces us to think, so that we can enter the complexities of our own world and be changed, and change it. Jesus modeled for us how we read these parables in the real world when he stood up to the Pharisees, comforted the outsiders, cast out demons, and in the end, in the most powerful contradiction of weakness, turned over his own life in a demonstration of his power over death. We see in the actions of Jesus that the phrase “love your enemies” is not a request for us to be doormats of abuse. Love is both blessing and challenging, so that the lowly can be brought into the Kingdom of God and the high are not able to wander too far from it.
And we, the hearers of Jesus’ blessings and woes, those whom he has challenged to love and pray and bless, we are the ones whom Jesus has chosen to be a part of this great gathering. Because the truth of this election week is that as momentous as Tuesday may feel, there will be a Wednesday. On Wednesday someone will have won and someone will have lost. I know, the Bush/Gore election wasn’t decided for several months, but some races will be over, and anyway, you get the point. There will be a Wednesday, and a Thursday, and a Friday, and days onward from there. And on Wednesday is when the real work begins. Because on Wednesday, we who have been divided, have to find ways to come together again. And we in the church can be the leaders in that effort. Because we have a theology that tells us that just because one won and another lost, doesn’t mean that either was all perfect or all terrible. Regardless of the outcomes, a human was elected to every position. A human who will make good decisions and bad ones, and needs our support and prayers, but also our challenges and holding to accountability so that whoever was elected keeps the raising up of all in mind. And because we know, whoever was elected, that we did not elect a savior, because we already have one, we can reach out to those who think differently than us, who voted differently than us, learn from their differences, hear their concerns, and be about bringing peace and respect and justice.
No matter how out of control things feel, the God of Daniel is in control, dear people of God. And that same God challenges us to look honestly at ourselves and others, our faults and our strengths, with love, so that we can be a part in the great unveiling of the Kingdom of God. On Tuesday and on Wednesday, and on every day to come. Because God possesses the kingdom forever—forever and ever. Amen.
So, there’s the bad news. But, here’s the good news. Just because sin and division is a part of our human condition, does not mean that we have to sit back and let it be so. In fact, the readings on this All Saints day remind us that number one, we as the church have been given the promise that our God is always at work on the part of liberation and freedom for the oppressed and unifying of the divided, and number two, God has give us the tools to be God’s hands and feet and hearts and minds in this process of healing the world. We as followers of the resurrected and ascended Christ live in this beautiful already and not yet. Already Christ has come, already we know Christ to be in the midst of us, already we meet Christ in the world, and hear the promise of Christ’s unfolding work and repairing and redeeming us. And yet, because we also know that the Kingdom Christ is bringing has not yet fully come into completion, we get to also live in the hopeful not yet of the promise that there will be a time that is better than this one, and we get to be a part of bringing that time into fruition, a foretaste in this world of the unfolding feast to come. I don’t know about all of you, but in this fractured and frightening time, that promise that Christ is here, with us, that the Kingdom of God is both at hand and yet to be fulfilled, and I get to be a part of that fulfilling, that feels like pretty good news indeed. So, let’s take a look at our scripture readings for this morning, and see the proof in our history, that while division is a reality, so too is God’s providence.
So our Daniel reading this morning is admittedly weird, with its talk of four beasts emerging from the sea. We might, like Daniel, find our “spirits troubled” by what to do with this frightening imagery. The book of Daniel is what is known as apocalyptic literature, the same style of literature found in the book of Revelation. Apocalyptic literature uses images more vividly portray a situation. Dr. Fred Gaiser notes: “One could say, calmly and rationally, that the world is a bleak and dangerous place, or one could make the point more fully and dramatically through apocalyptic fantasy. The latter genre will more quickly trouble and terrify us (as they did for Daniel), which is the point.” The four beasts in Daniel are widely accepted to be the kingdoms of Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece, which had dominated and subjugated Israel for five centuries by the time the book of Daniel was written. When Daniel’s audience heard of his dream, they didn’t need it explained to them; they knew what it felt to be terrorized by powerful beasts. So when the interpretation ended with the destruction of the beasts by “the holy ones of the Most High” that felt like hope to Daniel’s audience. What that said to them was yes, you have been terrorized by these four powerful empires, these four beasts, for centuries. But guess what, God’s got this. God is more powerful than the most powerful empire. And the day will come when those four beasts will be destroyed. You don’t have to be afraid; you can stand tall in the midst of all of your terror, because the almighty God is on your side. And the beasts of empire are no match to the glory of God.
We don’t live in the time of Daniel, and the beasts that threaten us are no longer the kingdoms of Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t threatened by our own consuming “beasts.” And what the book of Daniel and stories like it remind us is that when our “spirits are troubled,” we, like Daniel, can hold fast to the promise that the Most High God is in control.
That’s good news number one. Yes, the world feels crazy and divided now, but the world’s felt crazy and divided before, and God has always led God’s people through, so there’s no reason to think that this time will be any different. We don’t have to live in fear, because we have a God who’s bigger than fear. So for good news number two, that we get to be a part of this healing of the world, we turn to Luke.
All Saints Sunday in the year we read Matthew and Luke both give us the beatitudes. In Matthew they are spoken in the passive voice and spiritualized, “blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who hunger for justice.” This distances them, allows us some breathing space. Luke does us no such favors. Jesus looked at his disciples and said, “Blessed are you who are poor... Blessed are you who are hungry… But woe to you who are rich.... Woe to you who are full.” These are concrete realities. For Luke the beatitudes are proof of God’s commitment to the poor. In the same way as the parable of the rich man and Lazarus or the wheat and the chaff, Luke’s beatitudes draw a line in the sand for what it means to be favored of God. Imagine the tension this must have created in the crowd listening to Jesus as he spoke, the puffed up pride of the poor, the hungry, the weeping and the persecuted, as they heard the promise of God’s favor for them, and the building anger in the rich, the full, the laughing, and those who others spoke well of, as Jesus knocked them down. How those in the first group must have preened, for the first time in their lives maybe, to be able to look down their noses as those who had so often been above them. But immediately, before the first group could get too built up, or the second group too filled with anger, Jesus knocked them both down by saying, “But I say to you, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you…If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your cloak.” How that must have stung! Jesus was not saying, poor, you now get to lord over the rich, and rich, prepare to be lorded over. Instead, both sides are called to serve the other, to care for the other, to love the other. How is this good news for the poor, you might ask, it seems like Jesus is opening the doors for the poor to get walked over as they have been before? There’s all kinds of really interesting historical reasoning for the subversive nature of what Jesus said here, how this turning of cheeks and giving of coats is really a subtle way of challenging the status quo in a powerful twist of creative non-violent protest. It’s great fodder for sermons, and next time the Beatitudes come around, I’ll probably preach on it. But it wasn’t what caught my attention this week. What caught my attention this week, on this All Saints Sunday, was how impossible it is to draw the rich/poor, hungry/full line at all. Because here’s the thing, like all of Jesus’ parables, the beatitudes seem to be setting up this dichotomy of good and bad, and like all of Jesus’ parables, if we read far enough into them, we find ourselves on both sides of the line. We are, this morning, a mixed group of incomes. Some of us make more, some of us less, so which side are we on? Are we blessed or in woe? I read an article in Living Lutheran this week about refugee camps in South Sudan, compared to the Sudanese, every one of us in this room, regardless of our economic situation, is unthinkably wealthy. I also saw a comparison of the salaries of the richest one percent of Americans, compared to them every one of us in this room is mired in poverty. Are you full now? Maybe, but eventually you will be hungry. Are you laughing? You can think of a time you’ve wept. Are you weeping? At some point you have laughed. Every single one of us is richer than someone and poorer than someone, hungrier than someone, fuller than someone, happier than someone, sadder than someone. We are both, all of us, all the time. The world of the parables forces us to think, so that we can enter the complexities of our own world and be changed, and change it. Jesus modeled for us how we read these parables in the real world when he stood up to the Pharisees, comforted the outsiders, cast out demons, and in the end, in the most powerful contradiction of weakness, turned over his own life in a demonstration of his power over death. We see in the actions of Jesus that the phrase “love your enemies” is not a request for us to be doormats of abuse. Love is both blessing and challenging, so that the lowly can be brought into the Kingdom of God and the high are not able to wander too far from it.
And we, the hearers of Jesus’ blessings and woes, those whom he has challenged to love and pray and bless, we are the ones whom Jesus has chosen to be a part of this great gathering. Because the truth of this election week is that as momentous as Tuesday may feel, there will be a Wednesday. On Wednesday someone will have won and someone will have lost. I know, the Bush/Gore election wasn’t decided for several months, but some races will be over, and anyway, you get the point. There will be a Wednesday, and a Thursday, and a Friday, and days onward from there. And on Wednesday is when the real work begins. Because on Wednesday, we who have been divided, have to find ways to come together again. And we in the church can be the leaders in that effort. Because we have a theology that tells us that just because one won and another lost, doesn’t mean that either was all perfect or all terrible. Regardless of the outcomes, a human was elected to every position. A human who will make good decisions and bad ones, and needs our support and prayers, but also our challenges and holding to accountability so that whoever was elected keeps the raising up of all in mind. And because we know, whoever was elected, that we did not elect a savior, because we already have one, we can reach out to those who think differently than us, who voted differently than us, learn from their differences, hear their concerns, and be about bringing peace and respect and justice.
No matter how out of control things feel, the God of Daniel is in control, dear people of God. And that same God challenges us to look honestly at ourselves and others, our faults and our strengths, with love, so that we can be a part in the great unveiling of the Kingdom of God. On Tuesday and on Wednesday, and on every day to come. Because God possesses the kingdom forever—forever and ever. Amen.
Thursday, November 3, 2016
Conversation Points for Luke 6:20-31
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• We’ve jumped back to the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, though with the advantage of having already read through it. This is one of Jesus’ initial teachings to his disciples. How have we seen these beatitudes played out in his ministry?
• Unlike the beatitudes in Matthew, which speak of spiritual conditions or attitudes, the beatitudes in Luke speak of real socioeconomic conditions; they declare God’s commitment to the poor and oppressed, a theme in Luke’s Gospel.
• The first beatitude, “Blessed are the poor…” is the second reference of 32 to “the kingdom of God” in Luke. The reference to the poor is an echo of Jesus’ declaration in his hometown synagogue (4:18) that he is the fulfillment of Isaiah 61, the one who has come to bring good news to the poor. These are neither idealizations or glorifications of poverty. Rather, a theme of Luke’s Gospel is the radical reversal of fortunes (ex. Lazarus in 16:19-31).
Works Sourced:
Culpepper, R. Alan. “The Gospel of Luke.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• We’ve jumped back to the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, though with the advantage of having already read through it. This is one of Jesus’ initial teachings to his disciples. How have we seen these beatitudes played out in his ministry?
• Unlike the beatitudes in Matthew, which speak of spiritual conditions or attitudes, the beatitudes in Luke speak of real socioeconomic conditions; they declare God’s commitment to the poor and oppressed, a theme in Luke’s Gospel.
• The first beatitude, “Blessed are the poor…” is the second reference of 32 to “the kingdom of God” in Luke. The reference to the poor is an echo of Jesus’ declaration in his hometown synagogue (4:18) that he is the fulfillment of Isaiah 61, the one who has come to bring good news to the poor. These are neither idealizations or glorifications of poverty. Rather, a theme of Luke’s Gospel is the radical reversal of fortunes (ex. Lazarus in 16:19-31).
Works Sourced:
Culpepper, R. Alan. “The Gospel of Luke.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Monday, October 31, 2016
The Gift of our Reformation Heritage: A Sermon on John 8:31-36
Well here it is again, that strange contradiction that is the last week of October. While all around us people are buying candy and putting the finishing touches on their Halloween costumes, we Lutherans are dusting off our red sweaters and singing A Mighty Fortress. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Reformation Day. It tops my list of favorite church holidays. Also, this is my favorite stole, and I think I look especially good in my red sweater. Though, I’m preaching to the choir tonight, you are a fine-looking red clad bunch. But even though we are that special breed of folk who come out on a Wednesday night to celebrate the Reformation, we may still be asking the question, why? What does it matter? We are insiders gathered here tonight, listening to an insider message. And while this is fun, I think it is safe to say that for most of us, we wonder what the future will be for our churches. Most, if not all of us, wish for the church we remember, the time when our numbers were booming, when Sunday Schools were packed and worship was standing room only. But we don’t live in that world anymore. Mainline churches are struggling, our economy is increasingly global, and even though technology has increased to the point where we can connect to each other in an instant over the internet, we seem to be more disconnected than ever before. So what’s the point, other than nostalgia, for celebrating the Reformation? Are the actions of a sixteenth century German monk at all relevant in our twenty-first century global world?
Now, bear with me, because I think the answer to that question is yes, yes the Reformation is still relevant. And not only relevant, I actually believe that our Reformation heritage gives us who call ourselves Lutheran Christians a unique and important perspective that can be a gift to our global and fast-paced world. I believe that the lessons of Luther and the Reformation can help us lead others into this new era. And I’ll get to why I believe this. But first, I want to talk about the real thing that draws us together. I want to talk about Jesus.
Our Gospel reading for Reformation starts with Jesus talking to a group of “Jews who had believed in him.” It’s always important to remember, especially when reading John’s Gospel, that Jesus himself and all his disciples were Jewish. Christianity didn’t become a separate religion until much later. Jesus was not out to create a new religion and break from the Jews, Jesus was a Jew. So these “Jews who had believed in him,” is really better translated as “Judeans” or probably “Jewish religious leaders.” They are the people who have the most to lose if the upheaval of the social order that Jesus was preaching came to fruition. These are people who followed Jesus as long as it was politically expedient for them to do so, and then turned as soon as his message started to threaten their power. The conflict in John’s Gospel is not Jesus over and against the Jews, it is Jesus over and against the people who have worldly power, power that they are using to oppress others.
And if we needed more proof that these “Jews who had believed in him” were not really religious Jews, we need only to keep reading. Because when Jesus said to them, “‘the truth will make you free.’ They answered, ‘We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone.’” Wait a second; you’ve “never been slaves to anyone.” That’s just not true. A case could be made that they were in some ways slaves in that moment to the occupying Roman Empire. But more than that, what is, to this day, one of the central holidays in the Jewish religious tradition? Passover. Two-thousand years later, our Jewish sisters and brothers still gather in the spring to “remember that they were slaves in Egypt” and God led them to freedom. To be a descendant of Abraham is to be an heir to this promise that God sets God’s people free, that God does not allow God’s people to dwell in slavery, be it slavery in Egypt, slavery under the Babylonian exile, slavery under the Roman occupation of Jesus’ time, or even slavery to their own greed and self-absorption. What God does in Jesus Christ is really a new riff on the same old salvation story sung since the dawn of creation, that God brings freedom to God’s people.
The guys in our Gospel reading today had been slaves but now they were free. Only they forgot their history, and so they forgot what a gift that freedom was. The story had become so familiar to them, they were so caught up in the role they thought they were playing in earning their own salvation, that they did not even recognize their freedom anymore. They needed Jesus to tell them the truth anew, to remind them of their need and God’s faithfulness, so they could recognize the new promise God was unfolding in front of them in the person of Jesus Christ.
And I can’t be too hard on these guys, because I think sometimes we do this too. Or at least, I do this, I can’t speak for you. But I forget. I get so caught up in the story in front of me, in the immediate moment, that I forget that God is a God of freedom, that God is a God of resurrection, that God is a God of life and hope and promise. I know those things, I’ve seen them in the stories of scripture, I know them in my soul, but like the guys in our Gospel reading, I forget them sometimes. I get too caught up in the task ahead of me, too obsessed with my own abilities, or lack thereof and it blocks me from recognizing the thing that God is doing. And here, I think, is where our Reformation heritage can help us.
Let’s start with Luther. Now, I love Luther. I love his theology, his writings are central to how I’ve made sense of my faith. I would say that Jesus is why I am a Christian, but Luther is why my particular brand of Christianity is Lutheran. But as a student of Luther, I also have to be critical and admit that, if God had given me the job of choosing reformers, I might have picked someone a little more tactful. His theology was grace-filled and inclusive, but his way of delivering it was often less so. When you get a chance, Google “Luther Insulter,” the guy had some zingers. He was plagued his whole life with both crippling self-doubt and a chronic stomach disorder that often left him short-tempered and even mean. He could be stubborn and harsh, and he wrote things about Jews and peasants that are simply indefensible. And yet, despite all of that, Luther’s theology articulates this promise that God is a loving God, that God wants nothing but to be in relationship with us, and that God’s grace is a gift that God gives to everyone regardless of whether or not we deserve it, but simply because it is God’s nature to love us. Luther was by no means a saint, and I think we can take hope in that, and confidence that no matter what doubts or failures we might have, God still uses us to share the promise of grace. That the worst things we’ve done or said do not define us, what defines us is the love God has for us. And so, following in the example of Luther, we can try our best, and when we fail, when we are grumpy or irritable or lose our temper, we can rest in the promise of God’s forgiveness and try again. Luther was not some paradigm of virtue; he was a flawed human being just like the rest of us. And that makes him a hero in the faith we can relate to. If Luther, grumpy, irritable, Luther, could change the world by proclaiming the love of God, then we can too.
Another thing our Reformation heritage teaches us is the importance of leveraging technology. Now, how am I comparing smartphones to a period when people thought the devil could enter your mouth when you sneezed, but bear with me. Luther lived in a time that was actually not that much different than our own in terms of the pace of change. Luther was not the first person to have these ideas, but he was the first person to have them take off, and the reason for that was a new technology called the printing press. Prior to the fifteen hundreds, news spread slowly because the only way to copy written documents was by hand. But with the invention of the printing press, suddenly multiple copies could be run off in comparatively rapid speed. When Luther nailed the ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, he wasn’t thinking they would have a wide readership; he simply wanted to start a conversation about some excesses he saw in the local church. But somebody got a hold of them, translated them, and ran off a ton of copies, spreading Luther’s writing all over the known world. The analogy I make is its like if you think an interesting thing and you post it on your Facebook page, because you want to talk about it with your friends, and then suddenly Reddit picks it up, and it goes viral, and everyone around the world is arguing about your cat’s opinion on the election. Friends, Luther literally stumbled into the concept of having something “go viral.”
And here’s maybe my favorite thing Luther did. He translated the entire Bible, both Greek and Hebrew, into German. And, in the process, he really created the modern German language, because Germany wasn’t a united nation at the time but a series of loosely connected nation-states. But, more important than the coolness factor of creating a language, why Luther’s translation is important is it opened the scripture up so that people could hear the good news of God’s love for them in their own language. For the first time in people’s lives, the scripture they heard in church was in a language they spoke, the hymns they sung told the story of God’s love, the sermon was an exposition on God’s good news for God’s people. All of the reforms Luther did in translating scripture and opening up the worship service was about finding new ways to tell the same old truth; that since the Son has made us free, we are free indeed. Luther didn’t change the story of Jesus; he just found ways to tell it so that everyone could understand.
Friends, the world is changing. We stand at this pivotal moment in history and the way church was in the past will not be the way it is in the future. And that, especially as someone who has staked my livelihood on ordained ministry, is terrifying. But here’s the good news. We too are descendants of Abraham, grafted into the family tree through the waters of baptism. That means that slavery, struggle, and hardship is a part of our story, but so too is the overwhelming creative and redeeming grace of God who throughout history has led God’s people into their next tomorrow. The God who led the Israelites through the wilderness, who delivered them from captivity in Babylon, and who sent Jesus to defeat death and bring all of creation into newness, that God is our God. Yes, the church and the world is changing, but on Reformation we celebrate that the church that buried Luther was not the church he was born into. And so, we who claim the name of Lutheran Christians can be bold to lead the church into the new thing that God has in store for us. We can listen for the winds of the Spirit’s creative presence; we can follow in Luther’s model and translate the scripture into our own context. We can find new ways to tell the same old glorious truth, that the Son has made us free, and we are free indeed. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Now, bear with me, because I think the answer to that question is yes, yes the Reformation is still relevant. And not only relevant, I actually believe that our Reformation heritage gives us who call ourselves Lutheran Christians a unique and important perspective that can be a gift to our global and fast-paced world. I believe that the lessons of Luther and the Reformation can help us lead others into this new era. And I’ll get to why I believe this. But first, I want to talk about the real thing that draws us together. I want to talk about Jesus.
Our Gospel reading for Reformation starts with Jesus talking to a group of “Jews who had believed in him.” It’s always important to remember, especially when reading John’s Gospel, that Jesus himself and all his disciples were Jewish. Christianity didn’t become a separate religion until much later. Jesus was not out to create a new religion and break from the Jews, Jesus was a Jew. So these “Jews who had believed in him,” is really better translated as “Judeans” or probably “Jewish religious leaders.” They are the people who have the most to lose if the upheaval of the social order that Jesus was preaching came to fruition. These are people who followed Jesus as long as it was politically expedient for them to do so, and then turned as soon as his message started to threaten their power. The conflict in John’s Gospel is not Jesus over and against the Jews, it is Jesus over and against the people who have worldly power, power that they are using to oppress others.
And if we needed more proof that these “Jews who had believed in him” were not really religious Jews, we need only to keep reading. Because when Jesus said to them, “‘the truth will make you free.’ They answered, ‘We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone.’” Wait a second; you’ve “never been slaves to anyone.” That’s just not true. A case could be made that they were in some ways slaves in that moment to the occupying Roman Empire. But more than that, what is, to this day, one of the central holidays in the Jewish religious tradition? Passover. Two-thousand years later, our Jewish sisters and brothers still gather in the spring to “remember that they were slaves in Egypt” and God led them to freedom. To be a descendant of Abraham is to be an heir to this promise that God sets God’s people free, that God does not allow God’s people to dwell in slavery, be it slavery in Egypt, slavery under the Babylonian exile, slavery under the Roman occupation of Jesus’ time, or even slavery to their own greed and self-absorption. What God does in Jesus Christ is really a new riff on the same old salvation story sung since the dawn of creation, that God brings freedom to God’s people.
The guys in our Gospel reading today had been slaves but now they were free. Only they forgot their history, and so they forgot what a gift that freedom was. The story had become so familiar to them, they were so caught up in the role they thought they were playing in earning their own salvation, that they did not even recognize their freedom anymore. They needed Jesus to tell them the truth anew, to remind them of their need and God’s faithfulness, so they could recognize the new promise God was unfolding in front of them in the person of Jesus Christ.
And I can’t be too hard on these guys, because I think sometimes we do this too. Or at least, I do this, I can’t speak for you. But I forget. I get so caught up in the story in front of me, in the immediate moment, that I forget that God is a God of freedom, that God is a God of resurrection, that God is a God of life and hope and promise. I know those things, I’ve seen them in the stories of scripture, I know them in my soul, but like the guys in our Gospel reading, I forget them sometimes. I get too caught up in the task ahead of me, too obsessed with my own abilities, or lack thereof and it blocks me from recognizing the thing that God is doing. And here, I think, is where our Reformation heritage can help us.
Let’s start with Luther. Now, I love Luther. I love his theology, his writings are central to how I’ve made sense of my faith. I would say that Jesus is why I am a Christian, but Luther is why my particular brand of Christianity is Lutheran. But as a student of Luther, I also have to be critical and admit that, if God had given me the job of choosing reformers, I might have picked someone a little more tactful. His theology was grace-filled and inclusive, but his way of delivering it was often less so. When you get a chance, Google “Luther Insulter,” the guy had some zingers. He was plagued his whole life with both crippling self-doubt and a chronic stomach disorder that often left him short-tempered and even mean. He could be stubborn and harsh, and he wrote things about Jews and peasants that are simply indefensible. And yet, despite all of that, Luther’s theology articulates this promise that God is a loving God, that God wants nothing but to be in relationship with us, and that God’s grace is a gift that God gives to everyone regardless of whether or not we deserve it, but simply because it is God’s nature to love us. Luther was by no means a saint, and I think we can take hope in that, and confidence that no matter what doubts or failures we might have, God still uses us to share the promise of grace. That the worst things we’ve done or said do not define us, what defines us is the love God has for us. And so, following in the example of Luther, we can try our best, and when we fail, when we are grumpy or irritable or lose our temper, we can rest in the promise of God’s forgiveness and try again. Luther was not some paradigm of virtue; he was a flawed human being just like the rest of us. And that makes him a hero in the faith we can relate to. If Luther, grumpy, irritable, Luther, could change the world by proclaiming the love of God, then we can too.
Another thing our Reformation heritage teaches us is the importance of leveraging technology. Now, how am I comparing smartphones to a period when people thought the devil could enter your mouth when you sneezed, but bear with me. Luther lived in a time that was actually not that much different than our own in terms of the pace of change. Luther was not the first person to have these ideas, but he was the first person to have them take off, and the reason for that was a new technology called the printing press. Prior to the fifteen hundreds, news spread slowly because the only way to copy written documents was by hand. But with the invention of the printing press, suddenly multiple copies could be run off in comparatively rapid speed. When Luther nailed the ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, he wasn’t thinking they would have a wide readership; he simply wanted to start a conversation about some excesses he saw in the local church. But somebody got a hold of them, translated them, and ran off a ton of copies, spreading Luther’s writing all over the known world. The analogy I make is its like if you think an interesting thing and you post it on your Facebook page, because you want to talk about it with your friends, and then suddenly Reddit picks it up, and it goes viral, and everyone around the world is arguing about your cat’s opinion on the election. Friends, Luther literally stumbled into the concept of having something “go viral.”
And here’s maybe my favorite thing Luther did. He translated the entire Bible, both Greek and Hebrew, into German. And, in the process, he really created the modern German language, because Germany wasn’t a united nation at the time but a series of loosely connected nation-states. But, more important than the coolness factor of creating a language, why Luther’s translation is important is it opened the scripture up so that people could hear the good news of God’s love for them in their own language. For the first time in people’s lives, the scripture they heard in church was in a language they spoke, the hymns they sung told the story of God’s love, the sermon was an exposition on God’s good news for God’s people. All of the reforms Luther did in translating scripture and opening up the worship service was about finding new ways to tell the same old truth; that since the Son has made us free, we are free indeed. Luther didn’t change the story of Jesus; he just found ways to tell it so that everyone could understand.
Friends, the world is changing. We stand at this pivotal moment in history and the way church was in the past will not be the way it is in the future. And that, especially as someone who has staked my livelihood on ordained ministry, is terrifying. But here’s the good news. We too are descendants of Abraham, grafted into the family tree through the waters of baptism. That means that slavery, struggle, and hardship is a part of our story, but so too is the overwhelming creative and redeeming grace of God who throughout history has led God’s people into their next tomorrow. The God who led the Israelites through the wilderness, who delivered them from captivity in Babylon, and who sent Jesus to defeat death and bring all of creation into newness, that God is our God. Yes, the church and the world is changing, but on Reformation we celebrate that the church that buried Luther was not the church he was born into. And so, we who claim the name of Lutheran Christians can be bold to lead the church into the new thing that God has in store for us. We can listen for the winds of the Spirit’s creative presence; we can follow in Luther’s model and translate the scripture into our own context. We can find new ways to tell the same old glorious truth, that the Son has made us free, and we are free indeed. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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