Category Archives: scripture

Inclusive church, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, November 17

The letter to the Hebrews is a challenging read. We are, fundamentally, not its intended audience, and you need a lot of context to understand what any given passage is trying to say. But let’s try to find a foothold in the text, today. 

Hebrews was probably written fairly early, like some of Paul’s letters that are also preserved as Epistles. In the year 70, about 35 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Great Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman army, in the course of crushing a revolt against Roman rule in Judea. As Jesus predicts, in our Gospel today! 

The loss of the Temple was a HUGE event for both Judaism and early Christianity. Now, the author of Hebrews writes a lot about the religious practices of the Temple. The destruction of the Temple would fit into their argument really well – but they don’t mention it. So, they’re likely writing before that happens, the mid-60s or so. 

The letter is clearly addressed to a Jewish Christian audience – people who were pious and committed Jews, and then also became followers of Jesus, without abandoning their Jewish identity. That’s why it’s called the letter to the Hebrews – meaning, here, people of Jewish heritage. 

The letter offers Jewish Christians a series of ways to think about Jesus in terms of Jewish faith and teaching, such as presenting Jesus as a new Moses, and Jesus as both a great High Priest, and the ultimate Sacrifice, in the terms of Temple worship. The overall message is: You can be deeply grounded in Judaism and still follow and worship Jesus!

There’s also a recurring call in the letter to stay faithful to Jesus and the church. This author may be writing to people who are considering abandoning their new faith and returning to Judaism – perhaps in the face of some persecution. 

It’s hard to tell in English translation, but scholars say this letter is a very literate and sophisticated piece of writing. It’s written in more elegant Greek than, for example, the letters of Paul. This author was educated and eloquent. 

So… who was this author? Who wrote this letter? In terms of theme and timing, it was probably someone close to the apostle Paul, and with a significant role as a leader and teacher in the early decades of the church. But interestingly, this person’s name isn’t recorded. Hebrews is anonymous; if a name was ever attached to it, it was lost early on. 

There’s a theory among some scholars that this letter might have been written by Priscilla, or Prisca. Priscilla and her husband Aquila were Jews from Italy who met Paul in Judea and became Christians. They then traveled with Paul on some of his missionary journeys. They’re mentioned several times in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. On one occasion they take another preacher aside to explain some Jesus stuff to him more clearly. 

The couple is also mentioned twice in Paul’s letters. Priscilla and Prisca are the same name – the “illa” is a diminutive. Paul doesn’t use the diminutive; he calls her Prisca. It’s a little like everyone else calls her Becky but Paul calls her Rebecca. Make of that you will! 

Paul also names her as a co-worker: “Greet Prisca and Aquila, who work with me in Christ Jesus,” in Romans, implying they had ended up in Rome. And in First Corinthians: “Aquila and Prisca, together with the church in their house, greet you warmly in the Lord.” So, this couple were leaders of a local church community, at one point.  

But why name Prisca, specifically, as the possible author here? BECAUSE the letter comes down to us as anonymous. This fairly remarkable piece of early church theology, clearly the work of one voice, is not attributed. We know from the trajectory of New Testament writings that for the first couple of decades, the church followed Jesus’ lead in taking women seriously as spiritual leaders. Paul joyfully shared leadership and ministry with women like Prisca, Phoebe, and Lydia. 

But over time patriarchy reasserted itself. Women started to be sidelined, and told to be quiet in church. Formal church leadership became mostly a dude thing, for a couple of millennia. 

So, the theory goes – and it makes sense to me! – maybe Prisca wrote this letter, and the first generation of Christians knew that. But over time that tradition fell away, and the book became anonymous… kind of like the Harry Potter novels. 

If any of the men surrounding Paul had written this, their name would still be attached to it. One scholar writes, “The lack of any firm data concerning the identity of the author… suggests a deliberate blackout more than a case of collective loss of memory.” (Gilbert Bilezikian)

So what does Prisca have to say to us today? 

In the verses just before this passage, Prisca is wrapping up one of her extended analogies about Jesus and Temple worship. She says: in the Great Temple, the high priests have keep offering the appointed sacrifices, every day, because those rites can never fully take away human sinfulness. But Jesus gave himself as the ultimate sacrifice, which restores and sanctifies all believers, and eliminates the need for any further ritual sacrifices, ever. 

(By the way, for the folks who feel particularly burdened by substitutionary atonement theology – the idea that Jesus had to be sacrificed in our place, in order for an angry God to forgive us – the letter to the Hebrews, as a whole, could be a helpful read. Prisca does play with that idea, or something close to it; but she also works through four or five other ways of framing the meaning of Jesus’ life and death through Jewish Scriptures and practices. The early church was using all kinds of metaphors to try to describe what folks had experienced and come to believe about Jesus. It’s much later that substitutionary atonement emerged as a dominant theme, and you are 100% free to take it or leave it.) 

As our passage begins, Prisca continues to riff on the practices of Temple worship: the curtain that separated the holiest place that only a few could enter; the blood and water sprinkled in rituals of repentance and purification; the ritual washing that prepared someone to approach God. Prisca says: We have all that, always, already, through Jesus. It’s done, once and for all. All we have to do is hold onto it, to our commitment to Christ and our hope in Christ, without wavering. To be as faithful to Jesus as he is to us.

And then she says one of my favorite lines in the Epistles: “And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”  … 

That bit about “not neglecting to meet together” is clearly a little dig at folks who don’t get to church that regularly. And “all the more as you see the Day approaching” is pointing towards the end of time, the day when God will turn the world upside down and right side up. 

Prisca’s generation of Christians expected it any moment. We have learned, two thousand years later, that there will be many seasons of war, and rumors of war; of conflict, famine, and disaster; and that all of that is still just the birthpangs of the new world God is laboring to bring forth, with our help. 

Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds. Provoke is an attention-grabbing word there, isn’t it? It’s only in the New Testament in three other places: once about a fight among the apostles; once when Paul is stirred up by idol worship in Athens; and once in the famous passage about love, from 1 Corinthians: Love is not irritable – not easily provoked. The Greek word means: Provoke, irritate, exasperate, incite… 

Provoke one another to love and good deeds? Can’t we encourage each other, instead? Inspire one another, maybe? … 

But the thing is: I know exactly what it feels like to be provoked to love and good deeds. 

It’s the interruption of someone at the church door who needs help with rent, or gas to get to their new job, or some clothes for the kids they just took in. 

It’s a longtime member asking a tough question that opens up a whole new direction in ministry. Or it’s a new member with particular needs, or particular hopes, pushing us, pushing me, to make space for new priorities.

It’s having someone tell me: We can’t just pretend that conflict didn’t happen. We should talk it out and learn from it. 

It’s deciding, a decade ago, to clarify our welcome for LGTBQ+ people, and then discovering we have work to do on actually BEING truly welcoming. And then having new people show up and say: I heard about y’all; are you ready be my church? 

And having people who’ve been here their whole lives say: Will you still be my church if I show up as my true self? 

So many of the directions in which we’ve changed, grown, stretched, or deepened, in the past many years, are because some person or group in this parish, or outside it, provoked us to love and good deeds. 

I love this verse because for Prisca, it’s not enough for people to keep the faith, to hold fast to the confession of our hope. Her vision for the church extends beyond some kind of bunkered, locked-down faithfulness. She wants to see her people, Christ’s people, living faith in action, in love and good deeds. 

And she knows that the way that happens isn’t all warm fuzzies and affirmation, marshmallows and daisies. We ask things of each other. We challenge each other. We struggle, sometimes, with directions, priorities, balancing needs, allocating scarce resources, managing anxiety, holding grief. 

But Prisca knows that that’s just how it is – that’s what happens when people choose to belong to each other, and to God. It’s part of the work, and even when it’s hard, it’s good. It’s holy. 

So let us consider, beloveds, how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, and to encourage one another – all the more as we see God’s Day approaching. Amen. 

Big Questions, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Oct. 13

From the introduction to Job by scholar and translator Robert Alter:
“The Book of Job is in several ways the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible. Formally, as a sustained debate in poetry, it resembles no other text in the canon…” (That means it’s not like anything else in the Bible!)

… “Theologically, as a radical challenge to the doctrine of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, it dissents from a consensus view of biblical writers” – that means a lot of other Biblical texts assume that this is how things work, though there’s some grappling with it elsewhere too! – 

Alter again: That dissent is “compounded by its equally radical rejection of the anthropocentric conception of creation that is expressed in biblical texts from Genesis onward…” I’ll say more about that next week. Upshot: the world, the universe, were not created to serve humanity, we’re not the center of it all, as many other Biblical texts assume. (Alter, the Writings, p. 457) 

It’s a remarkable book in lots of ways! Who wrote it and when? … 

Part of the broad category of Wisdom literature in the Bible & across the the Ancient Near East. Texts from other cultures also struggling with why people suffer and what it all means, though Job has its own perspective. It’s Job’s friends that sound the most like other Wisdom literature texts, with their advice – “just turn from evil and do good” – while Job himself – and eventually God – push back. 

As is common in the wisdom literature, there’s very little here about Israel’s covenant history or the specific obligations of the Law. You could say that Job is a deeply faithful book but not a very religious book, per se, in that it’s not very interested in worship or practice. 

Dating: Linguistic evidence places it probably 500 years before the time of Jesus, give or take half a century or so. 

Beyond that: We know nothing about the author of the Book of Job. But Alter suspects – based on the quality of the poetry and the uniqueness of the voice – that this is one author, though the text has been altered and some portions were added later. 

Alter: “One should probably think of [this author] as a writer working alone— a bold dissenting thinker and a poet of genius who produced a book of such power that Hebrew readers soon came to feel they couldn’t do without it, however vehement its swerve from the views of the biblical majority.” (458) 

What’s the relationship of all this poetry with the preface we heard last week? – in which God brags about how pious Job is, and Satan says, He only worships you because you’ve given him everything he wants; let me at him and we’ll see how long it takes for him to turn from you!… 

Alter notes the “palpable discrepancy” between the frame story and the core text. He thinks this is a much older folktale that this author uses to set the scene and get us into the meat of what he really wants to explore – the experience and meaning of suffering. 

Ultimately it’s easy to set the folktale aside because you don’t need it. You don’t need a pissing context between God and Satan to have someone lose their home, their family, everything except their life. People face that kind of agony all the time. 

The book of Job is remarkable because it explores the meaning of suffering though tens of thousands of words of incredible poetry. Alter: “Its astounding poetry eclipses all other biblical poetry, working in the same formal system but in a style that is often distinct [both in vocabulary and images] from its biblical counterparts.”

Alter notes Job’s linguistic and metaphorical breadth and creativity – this author someone who’s really stretching the bounds of language in order to create incredibly rich expressive text. Think of Shakespeare, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. 

The book is also notable for its passages about nature, in some of Job’s speeches and especially in God’s response, which we’ll hear a tiny bit of next Sunday. This author is someone who paid close attention to the natural world, including the wild and frightening parts of it – not just a stroll through the garden. 

I’ve done a terrible thing in creating this script, by simplifying and clarifying the language. I did that because I wanted us to be able to easily hear and follow the debate about the meaning of Job’s suffering, which is often a little more elusive in the Biblical text. 

But go read some of the poetry of Job, sometime soon! 

Listen, now, to Job’s first few lines, in Alter’s translation: 

“Annul the day that I was born, 

And the night that said, “A man is conceived.” 

That day, let it be darkness. 

Let God above not seek it out, nor brightness shine upon it.

Let darkness, death’s shadow, foul it; 

Let a cloud-mass rest upon it; 

Let day-gloom dismay it. 

That night, let murk overtake it.

Let it not join in the days of the year, 

Let it not enter the number of months.

Let its twilight stars go dark. 

Let it hope for day in vain, 

And let it not see the eyelids of dawn.”  (3:2-9)

Alter says of Job’s poetry: “Anguish has rarely been given more powerful expression.” 

That amazing poetry isn’t for its own sake. It’s in the service of diving into the problem of theodicy. (Spell it) 

Theodicy: The problem of evil and suffering: how do we make sense of these things if we believe in a good God who is actively involved in the world? It is one of the big questions, and it’s the question at the heart of the book of Job. 

Job’s friends have lots of answers, but they’re not very satisfying. 

Working on the script: my attention drawn to the friend who tells Job, You just don’t know God. Questions his faith. 

But I think Job is the person with the strongest faith, here. 

With the friends, I almost wonder whether what they think is their faith in God, is actually a kind of naive belief in a clockwork universe where people get what they deserve. It doesn’t take a lot of sustained attention to reality to know that people don’t get what they deserve. But Job’s friends cling to this idea SO HARD: “You must have secret sins, because that’s the only possible explanation.” The thing about a moral universe like that – where everyone’s fortunes in life are determined by their behavior – is you don’t really need God to run it. You don’t even need AI; we were building computers that sophisticated by the 1960s. 

Job is the person here who sees reality most clearly. And Job is the person with the strongest faith, the deepest conviction that there is actually a God out there somewhere, even when he feels utterly betrayed and abandoned. The most familiar passage of Job for many folks comes from chapter 19. It’s used – without attribution – as one of the texts at the beginning of the funeral rite: “As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth. After my awaking, God will raise me up; and in my body I shall see God. I myself shall see, and my eyes behold the Holy One, who is my friend and not a stranger.”

This is beautiful. It’s also a paraphrase of the Biblical text, making it substantially more hopeful and tender towards God. 

Job is not tender towards God. Job is furious at God. 

He denies God’s justice, God’s compassion, God’s availability to humanity, period. And yet: Job is very, very sure that however distant and unresponsive God seems right now, God is. And he believes that he will, someday, get to see God with his own eyes. 

In working on this script, it was hard to end it, without resolution. 

We’re still in the middle of the book; there is more to come! But still, as a writer and as a pastor, I wanted to be able to offer some closure, some sense of grace and peace beginning to emerge. But one of the big messages of the Book of Job is, I think, that the point at which suffering resolves into meaning is often elusive. Sometimes terrible things stay terrible. No silver linings in sight. 

We know nothing about the author of the book of Job, but I wonder if we can reasonably guess that they had experienced great loss. And that this book is an expression of their conviction that God is present, even in the unthinkable. 

In November, I’ll invite folks to join me in a seasonal study group on prayer – what it is, what it can be. I’ve got a few things we might read and discuss: a lovely, light book by a friend that’s kind of an overview and introduction. A beautiful book about praying our way into Advent, with art and poetry. And I just ordered a brand new book called Rage Prayers. Sounds very promising! 

Job’s friends keep telling him to silence his rage prayers. That he can’t talk to God like that. But he can. We can. You can. Job refuses their rebukes, again and again – insists on his right to cry out to the Holy in anger and pain. One of the big gifts of this strange, difficult, beautiful book of the Bible is its utter conviction that prayer doesn’t have to be polite. That we can scream and weep and break things. That there’s nothing we can say or do that will make the Holy One turn away from us. 

God heard Job; God will hear you. 

scripture, Sermons

Sermon, October 6

This was a tough week to figure out what to preach on! There’s a lot of strange and difficult stuff here. There’s beginning of the book of Job – a piece of folklore probably much older than the rest of the book, in which an unknown author living perhaps 500 years before Jesus takes this darkly funny story of God allowing Satan to torment someone to prove his piety, and uses it as the jumping-off point for a staggeringly profound and unique work of ancient theology written completely in dialogic poetry. I’ll talk more about Job next week, I promise! 

Then there’s the first bit of the letter to the Hebrews, which is interestingly preoccupied by the relationships among Jesus, the angels, and humanity. The project of Hebrews – which is really more of a sermon or theological essay than a letter – is to explore the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross through the ritual practices of worship at the Great Temple in Jerusalem. It’s interesting stuff but requires a lot of context to follow, and we are not its intended audience. It was likely written for early Jewish Christians and seekers who were trying to fit Jesus into their existing religious framework. 

There’s plenty of meat there for a sermon. But then… there’s this Gospel. Let me tell you, the temptation to just edit out the divorce talk and focus on the little children is strong! But this week I read a short commentary that convinced me to talk about the whole thing. The commentary – on the Working Preacher website – was written by Phil Ruge-Jones, who’s a Lutheran pastor in Eau Claire and a Biblical storyteller. 

Phil’s specialty as a Biblical storyteller is the Gospel of Mark. He has memorized and told the entire Gospel – there are videos online. That commitment to Mark’s voice and Mark’s witness gives Phil a valuable lens on how any given passage fits into Jesus’ overall message as Mark understands it. 

In his commentary, Pastor Phil names the elephant in room immediately. He says, “Beware this week. As soon as you read the word ‘divorce’ aloud, a whole sermon will appear in people’s heads. Some will hear… sermons that were launched at them or someone they loved… Others will conjure up [judgment] based on this single word.” 

This is exactly why it’s tempting to skip these verses! I know that talking about divorce stirs up a lot of stuff for a lot of people. Pain, shame, defensiveness, judgment, fear, and more. I know people for whom divorce has been liberation, even salvation. I know people for whom divorce has been a bitter loss, a deep wound. And many experiences of divorce are complex mixtures of hurt and healing, grief and relief. Regardless of folks’ experiences: NOBODY wants me to try to preach about divorce. 

So let’s step back from divorce to the setting for this passage. Pastor Phil notes, “Our lectionary still has us in the section of Mark where Jesus is leading the disciples toward Jerusalem. He is also trying to help the disciples find their way into what God desires. Interestingly, he is not calling them to acts of spiritual prowess. Rather, he is asking them to live well in their common human condition and in such mundane realities as family, wealth, and their gathered community. Jesus has consistently asked them to use what they have in service of those who are most vulnerable: children, the poor, those denied status.”

Three weeks ago, in our Gospel, in Mark chapter 8, we heard Jesus say, What good does it do anyone to gain the whole world and lose their soul? Two weeks ago, in chapter 9, we heard Jesus rebuke the disciples for arguing about who’s the greatest, saying, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” and reminding them that greatness looks like welcoming those who are unimportant by the world’s standards. 

Last Sunday, still in Mark 9, we heard Jesus caution the disciples against being too eager to say who’s in and who’s out – “Whoever isn’t against us is for us!” And urging his followers to stay salty. 

In today’s text, the beginning of chapter 10, he’s preaching again, and some Pharisees have a question for him. Jesus and the Pharisees had a lot in common!  They were both interested in calling ordinary people into renewed relationship with God. They clashed a lot because of the overlap in their missions. And it’s helpful for us to understand that arguing about how to interpret and apply Scripture is a really core practice in Judaism, past and present. For example: The Talmud, a core source of Jewish law and theology, consists of a block of Scripture surrounded on the page by the commentary of generations of rabbis, debating with each other about what the text means. I think we tend to read these encounters in the Gospels as hostile when this kind of religious sparring was very normal. 

I’m not sure why the Pharisees ask Jesus about divorce. Maybe it’s because they’ve gotten mixed messages about whether he’s really strict or really lenient in his teaching – he is kinda both! – so they’re trying to suss it out. Maybe it’s because divorce is a difficult, tender issue, and they want to see if they can corner him into saying something awkward that will upset people. 

What Jesus does is actually really interesting. He knows the Law perfectly well; he knows that Moses, the great interpreter of God’s laws for God’s people, allowed for divorce. But, Pastor Phil writes, “Jesus relativizes the law of God in light of the story of God. (Repeat.) Jesus argues that God’s creational desire for integrity in our relationships remains. While Moses might have made allowances in some cases, this does not nullify God’s original intent.”

Jesus says: the Law is secondary to God’s intentions for humanity and creation. God’s underlying purpose and desire for the cosmos is for right relationship, mutual flourishing and joy – whether that’s between nations and peoples, between humanity and the non-human created order, between members of a household or partners in a marriage. 

For all kinds of reasons: right relationship and mutual flourishing often fail, and so, God through Moses permitted divorce, among other concessions. But that doesn’t change what God wants for us: wholeness together, for many different togethers. 

One of the reasons mutual flourishing often fails is the development of social structures that give some power over others, because of wealth, anatomy, skin color, etcetera. Pastor Phil notes something about the dialogue in today’s Gospel that I had never noticed: what Jesus does with the pronouns. The Pharisees want to keep their question abstract, theoretical. They ask, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” They say, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”

Jesus is having none of it. He says, “What did Moses command you?” He says, “Because of your hardness of heart [Moses] wrote this commandment for you.” He refuses to let this be abstract. In Judaism at the time, a man could divorce a woman, but not the reverse. Jesus’ questioners are men.

So Jesus is saying: Moses made an allowance for divorce because dudes like you didn’t want to commit to love and to cherish, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, until you are parted by death. You want to be able to nope out if you start to find her annoying or boring or burdensome, or just spot someone you like better….  

And that’s cruel, because the way things work here and now, she has no protection and no livelihood, outside of a father or husband. So: Yeah, divorce is legal, because some of you are jerks. That’s a paraphrase and expansion of what Jesus says, but I think it’s the gist. 

Then Jesus goes home, and talks more with his disciples. So maybe this next scene with the little children is the next morning – or maybe it’s a thing that happened a lot, and this passage records what Jesus had to say about it. There’s no obvious connection with the divorce conversation… but then again, maybe there is. A social system in which women are often made vulnerable is also a social system in which children are often made vulnerable – true in Jesus’ time, true today. WayForward Resources, our local food pantry and resource center, regularly reminds us of the high numbers of children among their clients. And I think that, in both parts of this text, Mark wants us to hear Jesus’ insistence that his way is a way that cares for and honors those seen as less important, or pushed to the edges.

When Jesus holds up little children – literally and metaphorically – and says things like, “Whoever welcomes a little child in my name welcomes me,” and “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” he is profoundly challenging a social order in which adult men made most of the decisions affecting the welfare of others. Pastor Phil writes, “Marriage, as well as relationships between adults and children…, are proposed as spheres where we can live toward the other in the promise of our divine image.” 

It’s an election year, beloveds. I know that’s on many of our hearts and minds. I don’t talk about it a lot when I’m standing up here. I think it’s more important for us to pray through this season together, than for you to hear me hold forth about what I think. 

But our way of faith does have some big things to say, in seasons like this. And this year, here we are in our Sunday readings, deep in these chapters of Mark’s Gospel where Jesus keeps talking about the fact that wealth and power don’t mean you’re God’s favorite. About the ways our hardness of heart have distorted God’s intentions for our common life. About mercy, justice, love of neighbor, as the path to true greatness. About how a community that seeks to follow Jesus needs to look to those often pushed to the edges, and call them to the center, to care for them and learn from them. About how we can continue to live toward the other, toward one another, in the promise of our divine image. 

Jesus didn’t live in a democracy. But for us, using our votes and voices as citizens is a really important way we can practice our faith and love our neighbors. Who’s vulnerable in our world today? Where does your faith inform – or challenge – your opinions and convictions on the big issues in the public square? How does this election season call you as a person of faith, as a follower of Jesus, to show up and speak up?

May God guard us, guide us, and empower us, for the living of these days. Amen. 

Phil Ruge-Jones’s commentary on this Gospel: 

https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-27-2/commentary-on-mark-102-16-6

scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Sept. 15

My sermon was written as an outline this week so this version is a little sketchy, but you get the idea! 

Proverbs, the Biblical book: A collection of proverbs – sayings about life and how to live it – from the ancient Near East. There are six or more sets or sections within the book, anthologized in the time of Exile or even later. Focus on teaching and instruction. Fundamentally pragmatic sense of wisdom as something that helps you understand self and others, make good choices, and live a better life. To the extent that God is present, mostly as the originator and maintainer of a system in which good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people… even if it sometimes takes a while. 

Artfully written and poetic. Mostly couplets, two-line forms. Lots of evocative metaphors. An example: “Bread got through fraud is sweet to a man, but in the end it fills his mouth with gravel” (20:17) Using this image to say that what you get dishonestly may seem great at first, but…! 

Some are shrewd and funny; some offer genuine insight. Many boil down to, “Work hard and make good choices,” which I guess is the kind of thing parents and grandparents have always told children and grandchildren? 

Chapters 10 to 22 claim to be the wisdom of King Solomon, in particular – some of the 3000 proverbs that he composed, according to 1 Kings.

Proverbs, the thing: A proverb is a short saying that condenses some general truth, guidance, or advice. Wisdom distilled into something portable and concise. 

These past couple of weeks I’ve been noticing how many proverbs circulate in my household and our world! We learn them from our parents. A few from my family of origin: Pretty is as pretty does. That’s why God makes Fords and Chevys…  We learn them from our friends. I’m particularly fond of “Clear is kind,” from Cecilie B… We pick them up from the culture. “The morning is wiser than the evening” – Regina Spektor song.

But! It’s not that simple. Just because something makes a snappy saying doesn’t mean it’s true or wise. “God won’t give you anything you can’t handle” is one that particularly annoys me. First, because it implies that anything bad that happens to you is God’s intention for you, which I do not believe. And second, because it’s manifestly untrue. People are dealt situations they can’t handle all the time. That’s why God tells to look out for one another.

When I was in my teens – series of fantasy books popular at the time – line: “No evil ever came of a thing done for love.” I loved that; carried that around for a while.  … Then at some point in my late teens or 20s, I thought, Wait. That’s actually not true at all. Evil comes from things done for love all the time. 

Some of the proverbs we’ve inherited might be a little conditional in their application. For example: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” – That’s meant for situations like discouraging gossip, or not telling your friend that her new dress looks awful. But it can be misapplied to discourage people from speaking up about actual bad stuff. Contrast that with Proverbs 10:10: “The one who rebukes boldly makes peace!” 

Turning back to the Biblical book of Proverbs… it’s really interesting to read through! There are proverbs that still work, all these centuries later… Robert Alter: some of the proverbs “appear to derive from shrewd and considered reflection on moral behavior and human nature.” (351) 

One of my long-time favorites: “Better a meal of vegetables with love than a fatted ox with hatred.” (15:17) – better to live simply with love, than to have material plenty but no peace in your family or heart. One I read this week for the first time: “Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day, or pours vinegar on a wound, is one who sings songs to a heavy heart.” (25:20). Now, singing to someone sad could be nice, but I think the implication here is of somebody being aggressively cheerful at someone else who’s really burdened or struggling. We’ve all been there, and yeah, it’s rough. 

“A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing personal opinion.” (18:2) – We all know one of those… 

We had a youth retreat on relationships, last winter – Proverbs (and Sirach, another Biblical Wisdom book) had a lot of useful material! Proverbs 17.9: “One who forgives an affront fosters friendship, but one who dwells on disputes will alienate a friend…. 18: Some friends play at friendship, but a true friend sticks closer than one’s nearest kin…” Working with the youth: lots we could relate to! 

There are proverbs that we maybe CAN’T relate to so much, but that give us a glimpse into life 3000 years ago… “Cheating scales are the Lord’s loathing, and a true weight-stone His pleasure” (11:1) – several versions. Reflect a time when weighing things out was a key part of any transaction, and false weights was a major form of economic dishonesty. “If you find honey, eat just enough – too much of it, and you will vomit.” (25:16) Probably about more than just honey, but still makes me curious about the backstory.

And there are proverbs that make us grateful that times have changed… 11:22 – “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without good sense…” OK. 13:24 – “Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them…” Meaning: You have beat your children to raise them right. Some of y’all were raised like that. But that’s not how most folks choose to parent today. 

And of course there’s a whole boatload of stuff that only sounds wise, but doesn’t actually hold up if you give it a hard look. A biggie: Proverbs’ confidence that if you work hard and do what’s right, you’ll get ahead in life. Robert Alter: “[Proverbs]… evinces great confidence in a rational moral order that dependably produces concrete rewards for virtue and wisdom.” That is just… not reliably true!! But we still speak and act as if it were, sometimes – thereby adding to human suffering.The book of Job, which comes along later this fall, will bring us some wonderfully complex wrestling with the idea that good people always have good lives.

Let me pause here for a brief detour into the book of Ecclesiastes, or Qohelet; I’ll use the Hebrew name because it’s less confusing, since there’s another Biblical book called Ecclesiasticus. Every adult here has heard a few verses from Qohelet: To every thing there is a season… Let people finish the sentence. That’s a lovely passage and some durable wisdom, I think. That life has different seasons can be a helpful reminder sometimes. 

But the book as a whole is interestingly ambiguous in terms of what lasting wisdom it offers. Qohelet written centuries after King Solomon, but presents itself as the voice of Solomon, late in life, reflecting back on life – and forward towards death. 

There’s a core word, throughout the text, that’s traditionally translated as Vanity – not in the sense of excessive pride in one’s own appearance, but in the sense of something futile or pointless. Listen to part of the first chapter… 

“The words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil
at which they toil under the sun?… 
I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.
What is crooked cannot be made straight,
and what is lacking cannot be counted.

I said to myself, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.’… [But] I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind.
For in much wisdom is much vexation,
and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow…”

It is a loss that Qohelet is barely in our Sunday lectionary. It’s such a human text. Many of us have those thoughts and feelings at times. What is the point of it all? Where is the deeper meaning? And yet we might quickly find ourselves arguing with Qohelet’s sense that because death comes for us all, nothing matters and everything is pointless. I would love to do a study on Qohelet. I think there’s a struggle at the heart of that text with which we could be in fruitful conversation. But for now, let me just hold it up as another example of something that feels or sounds wise… and yet is missing something, at its heart. 

Proverbs are meant to distill wisdom – and there are different things that we call “wisdom.” Last week, we saw that Solomon’s “wisdom” included prudence, political savvy, strategic effectiveness. 

James – wonderful, vivid passage today on how much our tongues and our words can get us in trouble – follows that immediately with a passage we’ll hear next week, in which he says there are two types of wisdom: An “earthly, unspiritual, devilish” wisdom that has to do with envy and selfish ambition. And a wisdom from above, that is pure, peaceful, gentle, obedient, filled with mercy and good actions, fair, and genuine. You can recognize that kind of wisdom, says James, in a good life, and a spirit of gentleness. A person formed by this kind of holy wisdom will sow the seeds of justice through their peaceful acts. That sounds like somebody I want to be around. 

If we are lucky, and pay attention, we may meet a few people in life in whom we can see this kind of wisdom… and we might stumble upon and gather a few proverbs that capture that kind of wisdom. Bits and pieces we can carry with us to ground us and guide us. 

Beside my desk in my office, I have a cork board that’s covered with a lot of things – some proverb-length, some longer – that I have found to be true and reliable enough to use as touchstones, and that contain something of which I need to be reminded – something that’s not already built into my worldview and way of being. For example, there’s a simple prayer of gratitude and openness from Dag Hammarskjold – you can learn about him on our prayer table today: For all that has been: Thanks! For all that will be: Yes! 

There are other thing I carry inside me as sayings or songs – like the one that goes: You don’t have to know the way; the Way knows the way. These things meaningfully capture something important that helps me be a better priest and a better person. 

But I have wrestled a little, in these weeks of exploring the theme and the literature of Wisdom, with whether all this is God-y enough. Have I ditched my responsibility of calling us to turn our hearts towards the Love at the heart of the universe, in favor of insightful aphorisms and good advice? 

And yet! There is ALL THIS wisdom literature in the Bible. It’s a big chunk of the book, if you add it all up. And there are repeated reminders that Wisdom – true wisdom –  is a gift from God, even an emanation or aspect of God; and that the pursuit of wisdom is a holy and righteous path. 

God says through the prophet Isaiah, My thoughts are not your thoughts; but the Wisdom texts of the Bible suggest that there’s at least some overlap in the Venn diagram of God’s thoughts and our thoughts! 

And the fact that God gives us this capacity to become wise – to recognize and to share wisdom – true wisdom, the kind of wisdom James is talking about that’s peaceful and gentle and merciful and fair and genuine and just – the fact that God gives us that capacity is just such a beautiful sign of the intimacy and partnership that God wants with us. We were never made to be puppets or subjects, unquestioningly following divine degrees. We were made to be children, and co-workers, and friends of God, in the holy work of ordering all things well. 

scripture, Sermons

Homily, Oct. 15

Banquet Parable Parallels

Please click the link above to get the document referenced in the sermon!

  1. Matthew’s parable 
    1. Why read this today? Revised Common Lectionary. 
      1. We get Matthew’s version of this parable, which is also in Luke, and I believe Matthew’s version is pretty distorted – – why it sounds like such a terrible party!  
        1. A wonderful paper I found exploring this parable, by Ernest van Eck at the University of Pretoria: “Almost all scholars agree that the Matthean version of the parable is secondary.” 
  1. Look at page – comparisons. 
    1. Matthew and Luke are two of the four Gospels (explain). 
      1. Mark is the earliest written Gospel. 
      2. Most Biblical scholars agree that Matthew and Luke both draw on Mark, AND seem to have had access to another source that seems to have been a collection of Jesus’ sayings and parables. (Q source)
        1. There are debates about that hypothesis but it’s held up pretty well over time. 
        2. So when we see something in both Mt and Lk, that isn’t in Mark, we might guess that they got it from Q; & then they both maybe put their own spin on it & worked it into the narrative in their own way. 
    2. And then there’s Thomas. 
      1. Gospel of Thomas – discovered in 1945 as part of a cache of ancient documents found in Egypt. 
      2. Dating uncertain; probably sometime in the 2nd century, later than the canonical gospels, but built on/contains some earlier material. 
      3. It is a sayings gospel – no narrative, just teachings. Overlaps by about 2/3 with the things Jesus says in the canonical Gospels. 
        1. Some of the other stuff is … real weird. 
          1. “Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man.”
          2. “Whoever has come to understand the world has found (only) a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world.”
          3. Or my favorite – simply: “Become passers-by.”
        2. Thomas likely the work of early Christian sect – a group that had split off from the mainstream church – had this set of their own teachings (“secret” teachings of Jesus), reflecting a more gnostic perspective. 
          1. Gnostic – spell it. Gnostic movements or wings within many religious traditions. 
            1. Characteristics: Emphasis on secret knowledge; intentionally cryptic; usually a strong sense of dualism between body and spirit, this world and another divine world. 
        3. The point here is: Thomas is weird. I think early church leaders were correct in deciding that this gospel did not belong in the Christian scriptures that would be carried forward as our holy text. 
          1. But, when it also has a parallel text to something that’s in our Gospels, it can be interesting and informative to look at it alongside!
  1. So, let’s look. 
    1. We’ve already heard Matthew. Will someone read Luke’s version? Skip the part in italics; it shows us how Luke puts this parable in the context of a dinner party. 
      1. [Have somebody read it]
      2. Now let’s hear Thomas.  [Have somebody read it]
    2. Comparing these texts… 
      1. All the really scary stuff in Matthew – the king sending troops to murder the invited guests and burn their city! The guests who weren’t dressed correctly being thrown into outermost darkness! – that is JUST in Matthew. And there’s strong reason to believe that’s Matthew’s editorial voice. 
      2. As I’ve said before: Matthew lived through the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70, after the Jewish revolt that started in 66. He makes sense of that trauma by blaming it on the Jews who rejected Jesus as Messiah. 
      3. Sending troops to kill the guests and burn their city is describing what happened to Jerusalem. 
      4. The wedding garment part is just weird. But it’s very clear that this is also Matthew’s addition. 
        1. “Where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” appears SIX TIMES in Matthew; ONCE in Luke; nowhere else in the Bible. 
      5. So: Matthew has stamped this story, as he received it presumably from Q, with his own trauma and rage. Why I’m mad that the RCL gives us his version!
    3. Comparing Luke and Thomas… 
      1. A lot more similar – quite recognizably the same story. 
      2. Luke’s framing of this parable: Jesus is at dinner at the home of a person of status. He criticizes the way people invite “friends and relatives and rich neighbors” who will invite you back in return – so your hospitality only seems like generosity when it’s actually part of a system of honor and reciprocity where you gain status by hosting an event, and will be given favor in return. 
        1. Jesus suggests pointedly that people try having a dinner party for people who can’t invite them to an equally nice party in return. 
      3. Van Eck notes that some scholars say the inviting of the poor, crippled, blind and lame is something Luke has added to the parable, because it’s the kind of thing Luke likes to emphasize. However, says van Eck, you can also flip that: “Because eating with the poor, crippled, blind and lame was so important for Jesus, Luke included it [here].” There are other passages that support that conclusion! 
        1. Luke – third invitation – “roads and lanes” – the host wants to fill their home. 
          1. Social geography of first century Palestine. People in your neighborhood, likely invitees, would share your social status. The farther you go out, the bigger the social drop in who you’re bringing into your home. A big deal, in a very status- and honor-conscious society. 
          2. This third invitation feels very Lukan. Even though I think Luke is right to understand the inclusion of the marginalized as central to Jesus’ message and mission, it also seems very possible to me that Luke added on that final invitation to really drive the point home. 
      4. Thomas – More elaborate and specific excuses, and an explicit anti-business slant. Those making excuses are too busy making money off the backs of their neighbors to come to this party. “Buyers and traders will not enter the places of my father!” 
        1. Thomas is not interested in who *does* end up at the party. That part is totally absent here. 
          1. Lots of stuff in Thomas that does have parallels in the Gospels is shorter, abbreviated. 
          2. But also: In gnostic thinking, defining who’s out  can be as important as defining who’s in. So it tracks that Thomas frames this story as a story about how terrible business people are. 
        2. What Thomas’s text does, though, is possibly add weight to Luke’s version as being more likely closer to the original. A lot more like Luke than Matthew. 
  1. Jesus’ “original” parable? 
    1. Everybody takes whatever Jesus actually said, and tries to make sense of it and re-tell it reflecting their concerns. 
    2. Is it possible to peel away the layers and get to Jesus’ original teaching – and what Jesus meant by it? 
      1. Somebody hosts a party – a banquet. They start by inviting the usual suspects – people with existing connections and relationships, people of comparable social standing. 
      2. But those people don’t want to come. 
        1. Van Eck’s paper: A new idea for me – The excuses are snubs. I always kind of saw that, but had never thought about it. But the universal refusal of the first round of invitees means something. 
          1. The invited guests in the story feel like this party is not the place to be. Van Eck says: “Attendance was socially inappropriate.” Maybe they don’t want to be beholden to that host – to feel like they owe them a favor. Or maybe that host is not generally socially esteemed. 
          2. A surprising and provocative idea for me because this is one of the parables where it seems like the central figure is a stand-in for God.
            1. I can understand feeling cautious about owing God a favor, or getting drawn into God’s social circle! God is weird and unpredictable, keeps strange company, and often makes big demands! And in our time and place, being known to be a friend of God does not generally boost your social status!
      1. The rejection of the first round of invitees ties in with a lot of the passages in the Gospels about people who feel like they don’t need what Jesus is offering. It’s easy for me to see this as part of Jesus’ story. 
      2. But the host really wants to have this party. Everything is ready! The food, the drinks, the music! They need some people to join their celebration. So they send out their slave to invite literally anyone they can find. 
        1. People who are usually not invited to the party, get invited to the party. It becomes a wild chaotic gathering of misfits, outsiders and weirdos. Presumably they eat and drink and dance and have a grand old time. (And let’s be clear, nobody accuses them of wearing the wrong clothes and throws them into outermost darkness.) 
      2. It makes me happy to think about what this means for the guests. Lots of us know what it feels like to not be on the A-list of invitees for something or another. Joyful to think that God’s party isn’t like that. 
    1. Van Eck: Not just what this means for the guests but what it means about the host. 
      1. This host rejects the expectations of their time and their social class, and instead gives to those who cannot give back; breaks down social norms about who does and doesn’t belong, status and class, purity and pollution; and treats everybody as family. (Van Eck, paraphrased) 
      2. The glimpse of God’s way of doing things that we get through this parable, as Jesus likely told it, is a glimpse of a world in which those with social standing and power do not “ostracize or marginalise the so-called unclean or expendable.” 
      3. And, Van Eck points out: “Like the host in the parable, Jesus regularly associated with the so-called ‘impure’ and ate with the so-called ‘sinners’ of his day.” And seemed profoundly unconcerned about how this might affect his own social status – choosing instead to care about those with whom he spent his time, their needs, their hopes, their hearts and souls. 
    2. That’s the core of this parable, which it’s almost impossible to pry out of Matthew’s terrifying anti-party. That’s the message of a Savior I want to follow – and the vision of a holy banquet I’d like to attend. Amen. 

Source:

VAN ECK, Ernest. When patrons are patrons: A social-scientific and realistic reading of the parable of the Feast (Lk 14:16b-23). Herv. teol. stud.,  Pretoria ,  v. 69, n. 1, p. 1-14,  Jan.  2013 .   Available here. Accessed on  10  Oct.  2023.

scripture, Sermons

Homily, July 2

In Genesis chapter 16, Abram and Sarai get tired of waiting for God to fulfill the promise to give them a son, and take matters into their own hands. Sarai tells Abram to spend some private time with her enslaved Egyptian servant, Hagar.  Hagar gets pregnant, and tensions arise between Sarai and Hagar. Sarai treats Hagar so harshly that she runs away into the wilderness. But the Angel of the Lord finds Hagar, sitting near a spring in the desert, and tells her to return to Sarai and submit to her. The Angel also promises Hagar that she will have many descendants, more than can be counted – which sounds a lot like the promise to Abraham! The angel gives Hagar’s son a name: Ishmael, meaning, God has heard you. And Hagar in turn names the being who addresses her,  “You are El-Roi” – meaning, The god who sees me. 

Wait – isn’t it an angel who addresses her, not God? Yes and no. Often in these early parts of the Old Testament, there is not a clear distinction between God and angel. Chapter 18 begins, “The LORD appeared to Abraham…” and goes on to describe the visit of three men. Those strange visitors are later described again as the (singular) Lord, and then as messengers or angels (which are the same word; “angel” or “messenger” is a translation choice). So: We think of angels as separate and lesser beings, but for this part of the Biblical text, it’s not that clear. Hagar knows she has encountered God, and she’s not wrong. 

We need that story to fully understand today’s Genesis reading, from chapter 21, which takes place when Isaac and Ishmael are children. Let me say that we’re taking things out of order – the binding of Isaac, which we heard last week, happens after this – and that the editing in this part of Genesis is a little sloppy; a few verses earlier it said that Ishmael is thirteen years old, but here it sounds like he’s a very small child again. 

Anyway: Isaac is born, a baby half-brother for Ishmael, and Abraham and Sarah dote on him. But Sarah’s jealousy smolders. One day Sarah sees Ishmael and Isaac playing together and gets angry. She tells Abraham to cast them out – “for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” 

Abraham is distressed about this! But God tells him not to worry, and that Ishmael, like Isaac, shall become the father of a nation. So Abraham gives Hagar some bread and a canteen of water, and sends her and the child out into the desert. Bye! Good luck! 

When the angel of God speaks to Hagar, as she sits weeping and waiting for death, they are meeting again – not for the first time. God repeats the promise that Ishmael’s descendants will become a great nation. And this time God does not send Hagar and Ishmael back to Sarah’s abuse, but lets them start their own lives as free people. 

I love the story of Hagar and want to make sure it’s told, every three years when we cycle through the book of Genesis in our Sunday readings. I think it’s important for me because – very early in the story of God’s people – the Biblical text is already laying out some central, holy paradoxes that will carry through. Yes, God calls Abraham and Sarah to be the parents and grandparents of a special, set-apart nation, God’s covenant people; Yes, God also claims Ishmael and makes him part of God’s larger plan.  Yes, God appears to Abraham, making him the honored faith-ancestor of three world religions; Yes, God also appears to Hagar, an enslaved woman of another ethnicity. 

Hagar names God as “The one who sees me.” God as the one who sees – and cares about – those at the margins, the pushed out, the excluded, the vulnerable and those in need, is a strong theme throughout our Scriptures, Old and New Testament alike. 

Many of the founding figures of the United States – and many people today – talk about America as a Christian nation, a country that should enshrine and embody the values and ethics of the Bible. I wonder what it would look like to build a nation on a foundational commitment to this core Biblical value: seeing, honoring, caring for and uplifting those who are poor, vulnerable, excluded, and at risk. 

scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Jan. 15

When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day.

In our calendar of Sunday scripture readings, we’re in the year of Matthew’s Gospel. But this is one of the Sundays when we get a little chunk of John’s Gospel for some reason. 

Next week we’ll hear Matthew’s version of the calling of Jesus’ first disciples. That might be more familiar: Jesus walks along the shore of the sea of Galilee and calls these young men away from their nets and their boats. 

John’s version of the calling of the first disciples isn’t really a calling at all. It’s more of a sending. 

Andrew is a disciple of John the Baptist. He’s already left home and work and family to follow a rabbi, a teacher. 

But then his rabbi, John the Baptist, tells him that Jesus is the real deal. The Lamb of God. 

So Andrew and another guy go follow Jesus. 

And Jesus, naturally enough, sees them following him and asks, What’s up?

Actually, he asks: What are you looking for? 

This question makes a lot of sense when we realize Jesus surely knew that these men – who may have been quite young, teenagers even – have literally just walked away from John the Baptist to start following him. 

This rabbi-hopping suggests that they were seekers, looking for someone to offer them meaning, purpose, hope, a way to spend their days. 

So he asks: What are you looking for? 

And they don’t know how to answer. 

I love that; it’s so real. I wouldn’t have an answer ready either.

I’ve had those moments, when somebody asks an unexpectedly profound or intense question, and I just stare at them and say, “Um. Huh.”  

And then maybe I say something like, “So where are you staying while you’re in town?”

Which is what Andrew and the other guy do. 

And Jesus says, Come and see. 

So they go with him to where he is staying. Some cheap first-century AirBnB or hotel room in a nearby village, probably. 

It’s clear that the where isn’t really that important.

The who is what’s important. 

The text notes that it was about four o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe that means it was coming up on dinnertime by the time they arrived, so they decided to stick around. 

Some commentators think we’re meant to assume it was a Friday, so sunset and the Sabbath were approaching, and that these disciples ended up spending the Sabbath with Jesus – Friday evening and all day Saturday. 

I wonder what happened, during those hours. Was Jesus preaching or teaching? Were they just sitting together over some simple food and a little wine and talking, talking, talking about the world? 

Were they doing ordinary everyday things? Was Jesus, whom Mark describes as a carpenter, doing little woodwork to earn his keep? Maybe building a bench, or a storage box, or a cradle? 

Who knows? Just being around him, being near him, listening to him, awakened something in Andrew. 

Curiosity. Hope. Love. Loyalty. 

We meet someone like that, now and then, in life… Someone who earns our esteem or our devotion very quickly, for reasons it’s hard to put a finger on.  

And sometimes it turns out that our first instincts were wrong. Sometimes charisma misleads us; sometimes people who are compelling, who draw others to them, turn out not to have much substance, or worse, to be selfish, exploitative, abusive. 

But other times, when you keep abiding with that person, you find that they are what they seem to be, and more. Not perfect, but true. Not perhaps always nice, but good. 

A person who looks at you and you can see in their eyes that they really do love you just the way you are, but also, they’re not going to leave you that way. And you want to step up to being the person they know you could be. 

A person who you just want to hang around because they are going to make something happen, something that matters, and you want to be there to see it. 

Andrew finds something like that, in his hours abiding with Jesus.

Something that makes him give Jesus a particular name, when he describes him to his brother Simon: We have found the Messiah. 

John offers us a translation of Messiah, a Hebrew word. It means, the Anointed. (In Greek, that’s Christos – the source of the word Christ, which is a title we give Jesus, not part of his name.) 

What would that word have meant to Simon – to Andrew? To say that Jesus was the Messiah? 

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg wrote a piece just this week about the history of the idea of the Messiah. The practice of anointing someone with oil as a sign of their taking on a new special, sacred role begins in the time of Moses, during the wilderness journey, with the ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests to serve God in the tabernacle, the sacred tent.  

Anointing as a mark of a new status came to extend to kings as well as priests, in the following centuries. 

After the time of King David, the peak of Israel’s political and economic power, expectations that God would send an Anointed One focused on a King, a political leader who would bring back the good old days. Ruttenberg writes, “The hope for a Messiah was a hope to get back to how things should be soon in the current timeline.”

But as first the Northern Kingdom, then Judea, are conquered by the great empires of the time, hopes for an earthly king start to feel more and more distant. 

The Messiah becomes e a more otherworldly figure. Someone who will bring in the World-to-come, the coming Age. 

Our Isaiah text this morning hints at that turn: extending the vision for God’s Holy One beyond restoring Judah to its pre-conquest state, to bringing Light and Salvation to all nations of the earth. 

That’s the vision of Messiah that would have been circulating in Jesus’ time – someone sent by God to transform the world. 

That’s the name Andrew puts to what he is hearing and seeing and experiencing as he spends time with Jesus. 

That’s what motivates him to bring Simon along – Simon Peter, who will become one of Jesus’ closest friends and, later, the central leader of early Christianity. 

I want to turn back to Jesus’ words in this Gospel passage. 

What are you looking for? 

Come and see. 

I think John kind of means for Jesus to break the fourth wall, in theater terms, when he asks: What are you looking for? When he says: Come and see. 

I think John’s Jesus is looking directly into the camera when he says these lines. 

The Gospel writer we know as John is well aware that the readers of his Gospel will not have a chance to abide with the earthly Jesus. That’s why he’s writing a Gospel: to try to pass on something he finds so important, so compelling, so transformational, that he urgently wants to share it, to pass it on. 

He wants his readers to be drawn into this scene. To hear Jesus speaking to them. To us. 

And both of the things Jesus says – the question, the invitation – point towards an important word that’s hiding in today’s Gospel. 

The word is Abide. 

Well: In New Testament Greek, it’s meno. 

In reading about this passage, I saw somebody say that it’s a very Johannine word – a word typical of John’s Gospel.

Well, I didn’t take their word for it – I looked it up. There are tools for this kind of thing! 

That word is used three times in Matthew’s Gospel.

Twice in Mark’s. Six times in Luke’s. 

And somewhere in the ballpark of forty, in John. 

So. Okay. Fair to say this word matters to John.

In John’s often poetic and mystical writing style, there are lots of words that mean more than they mean. 

(That’s one of the reasons I wish we had a John year in the lectionary is that we could really explore that and follow through!)   

So Meno means remain. Also translated as dwell, stay, and abide. 

It’s an important term for John, somehow. 

I wonder if John chapter 15 is the key text for understanding what “abide” means. This is part of Jesus’ long speech at his last supper with his friends. 

Jesus tells them, Abide in me as I abide in you. 

I am the vine, you are the branches; the branches can only be sustained by the vine if they abide in the vine. 

As the Father has loved me, so I love you; abide in my love. 

I like that the NRSV, the Bible translation we usually use, chooses the word Abide here. 

It’s not an everyday word and it makes us pause and perhaps think about how abiding is different from just staying or remaining. 

“Remain in my love” just doesn’t have the same feel. 

But I wish that our translation used abide other places too, to make it clearer that this is a core word for John. In fact, by the time we get to the disciples staying with Jesus in chapter 1, verse 39, John has used meno three times already.

John the Baptist twice says that he saw the Holy Sprit abide on Jesus at his baptism. And the disciples’ question uses meno too – Where are you abiding? 

I find Abide to be a beautiful and evocative word. 

“Abide” is related to “abode”, a place where you live; “dwell” also captures this sense of really settling in somewhere with intention, not just hanging around between other things. 

For me “abide” – as opposed to “stay” or “remain” – has overtones of slowing down, being present, belonging, putting down roots. 

And even though John’s Jesus won’t talk about the deeper meanings of abiding until much later, his words in this Gospel text invite abiding. 

What are you looking for? 

The question takes our outward-bound energy and turns it inward: what’s this really about? What feels unfulfilled or insufficient in you, that’s driving your busy-ness, your seeking and striving? 

What do you really need? What do you want, deep down inside?

I don’t think it bothers Jesus at all that they can’t answer. 

That I can’t answer. 

It’s a question to sit with – to abide with. 

But in the meantime, while we’re asking ourselves, What am I looking for?… in the meantime, John’s Jesus says, Come and see. 

Next week we’ll hear the call of Simon and Andrew again. 

In Matthew’s version, Jesus’ first words to them are: Follow me.  

Follow me. A command, an invitation? A little of both?

Here, instead, John’s Jesus says: Come and see. 

It is a command, grammatically speaking. 

But it’s an interesting contrast with Follow me.

Follow me calls for movement: get up and go.

Come and see invites arrival followed by attentive presence. 

Follow me means decide, commit, NOW. Immediately. 

Come and see calls the disciples closer – calls us closer – but leaves the next step in our hands. 

In Greek as in English, the meaning of “see” spreads out beyond literal sight to mean understand, comprehend, experience, know. 

If we come and see – if we abide a while with Jesus – will we find something there that deepens our love, our loyalty, our curiosity? Our hope?  

There’s a lot to wonder and a lot to say about what it means to abide with Jesus when we can’t sit down for a meal or watch the sunset with the living breathing man, as Andrew could. 

But I’m grateful to know John’s Jesus.

I do strive to follow Jesus, with all the energy and direction that implies. 

But it is a balm to my soul to be reminded that movement and activity isn’t the only thing – or in John, even the primary thing – that Jesus asks of us. 

I’m grateful for Jesus’ invitation, here, to abide with my own deep self, to wonder what I am really looking for. 

And I’m grateful to be reminded that in my life with Christ, when I’m not sure where to go, it is sometimes okay to just be.

 

 

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on the Messiah idea: 

https://lifeisasacredtext.substack.com/p/anointed

Baptism, Church Seasons & Holy Days, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, January 8

  1. About the Gospels.
    1. Start with basics; bear with me
      1. Bible – a collection of many kinds of texts spanning over a thousand years that, together, tell the story of God’s relationship with God’s people. 
      2. Old Testament – before Jesus, scripture we share with the Jews; New Testament – foundational texts of Christianity. 
      3. New Testament includes letters, sermons, prophetic texts, a chronicle of the early church, and four different accounts of the life, teaching, works, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. = Gospels. 
      4. Sunday lectionary (calendar of readings) – three of these get their own “year”. 
    2. Some folks find those many voices confounding. If all this Jesus stuff was real, why don’t we have one clear account of it? Why, instead, four, that differ on many details & some big stuff too? 
      1. I find the four voices of the Gospels very human, very real, and very reassuring. I’d go so far as to say that it’s one of the anchors of my faith. 
      2. An analogy for us: Imagine a funeral, or a gathering before or after. 
        1. People share memories, stories, what that person was like and what they meant to them. 
        2. Some things – big events, oft-repeated stories – will be told much the same by everyone, though perhaps some differences – how you understood that person, your relationship with them, your own personality and perspective. 
        3. Other memories or impressions aren’t shared as widely – part of someone’s particular relationship with the deceased, or an experience that only a couple of people shared. 
        4. When you put it all together, you get a sense of who that person was. But no one person has the whole picture. And often people’s impressions don’t all line up neatly. 
        5. If you asked four people to write down that person’s life, those four versions would be pretty different. 
      2. Now, in our funeral analogy, those four people probably all knew the deceased. It’s unclear whether any of our Gospel writers knew Jesus directly. 
        1. The Gospels seem to have been written down between thirty and sixty years after Jesus’ death. 
        2. But let me clear up a minor pet peeve. You might have heard that the life expectancy in Jesus’ time was around forty. That does not mean that people dropped dead at forty! 
          1. Numbers like that are an average that includes infant mortality, which was really really high right up to the mid-20th century. 
          2. Most people who survived early childhood might easily live to 55 or older; and many lived to seventy, eighty, or ninety. 
          3. Many of Jesus’ followers were younger than him. The Gospel writers seem to have used earlier written sources, now lost; but they could also easily have known people who did know Jesus and were present at the events they describe. 
          4. And talking with people with different memories and interpretations could be part of why the Gospels are different. 
  1. Let’s talk about the voices of the Gospels.
    1. Seminary exercise: read the first verse of all four Gospels – gives you a good sense of their voices and agendas. 
    2. Baptism of Jesus kind of does too. 
      1. It’s in all four, which doesn’t go without saying. 
      2. Look at your sheet. Vaguely chronological order, though Matthew and Luke may have been written around the same time, or Luke may be a little later than Matthew. 
        1. How John the Baptist is introduced, and whatever is said about Jesus’ actual baptism, in all four. (There’s more about John in all four, and there are interesting differences – but beyond our scope!) 
  2. First, and briefly: what is happening here? 
      1. John was a prophet and religious ascetic – meaning he chose simplicity and poverty – who hung out in the wilderness outside Jerusalem. He preached a message of metanoia, to use the Greek word. I dislike the translation of metanoia as “repentance”; it feels limiting to me. 
        1. Fave translator, David Bentley Hart: “a baptism of the heart’s transformation”; John: “Change your hearts, for the kingdom of the heavens has come near!” 
      2. Baptism – an adaptation of Jewish practices of ritual washing or bathing. Greek word baptizo just means to immerse or dunk. 
      3. There’s a whole thing about how John’s baptism was just a water baptism, but Christian baptism is with water and the Holy Spirit. That is important but we will not go down that rabbit hole today. 
      4. In all four Gospels, Jesus’ baptism by John is the beginning of his public ministry. Apart from the birth stories and one childhood story, he has been invisible for thirty years, presumably living an ordinary life and waiting for the right time. 
  1. MARK
    1. First written Gospel, perhaps as early as 66 – soon after the death of the apostle Paul, whose letters are our earliest window into the beliefs and life of the early church. 
    2. (When we say 66, by the way, the Zero that we’re counting from is in theory the year Jesus was born. And he would have died around the year 33, give or take.) 
    3. Mark dives right into the story – Jesus is baptized by John in the ninth verse – the sixth sentence – of his Gospel. 
    4. Jesus is coming from Nazareth of Galilee – his hometown and region. About 30 miles to the Jordan River, depending on where exactly John was baptizing. Not just a casual day trip, or stopping by on his way somewhere else. 
    5. As he is baptized, Jesus has a vision, hears a voice: “YOU ARE my Son, the Beloved.” Affirmation and comfort. And then – immediately – the divine Spirit drives him into the wilderness. We get that story at the beginning of Lent, late in February!
    6. What’s Markan about it? Brisk, clear, no nonsense. Purposeful. It happens and the story moves on. 
  1. MATTHEW
    1. Matthew and Luke both knew Mark’s Gospel and used it as a source. 
    2. Matthew follows Mark pretty closely here, but adds this dialogue between John and Jesus: “John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then John consented.”
      1. Maybe this happened; maybe Matthew is capturing the testimony of an eyewitness that Mark didn’t have.
      2. But maybe Matthew adds this to address a discomfort that all the Gospels besides Mark seem to share. 
        1. Why would Jesus, God’s Son, the Beloved, need this weird wilderness preacher to shove him down in the water of this muddy river, as a sign of repentance? 
        1. Furthermore: There are hints in the Gospels that John had followers, disciples, and that his movement continued at least for a while beyond his death – which probably happened just a few months after Jesus’ baptism. 
          1. Some of John’s followers came to follow Jesus instead, but others may have felt like John was the real deal. The fact that Jesus came to John for baptism could seem to seal their guy’s position. 
        2. Jesus’ answer in Matthew is vague: Let it be so, to fulfill all righteousness. Okay, boss. John does as he is told. And again, Jesus has a vision – heavens open, dove-like Spirit, voice. 
          1. But this time the voice says, THIS IS my Son, the Beloved. Not YOU ARE. Implies a broader audience – not just Jesus hearing, but others receiving this revelation of Jesus’ true identity. 
      2. What’s Matthean about this? Not the most distinctive; John calling people a brood of vipers, a few verses earlier, is more on brand. 
        1. Emphasis on fulfillment – though usually Matthew has a specific passage from the Hebrew Bible that he describes Jesus as fulfilling. 
  1. LUKE
    1. Luke does not actually describe John baptizing Jesus. He says, “When all the people had been baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized…” I think that’s how Luke manifests his discomfort about this baptism – by kind of rushing past it. 
      1. Again, the heavens open, there’s a dove, there’s a voice. But this isn’t just Jesus’ vision anymore – the words “he saw” drop out. And the Holy Spirit descends IN BODILY FORM like a dove. Maybe Luke is trying to make sense of Mark’s metaphorical language and decides there must have been an ACTUAL REAL HOLY DOVE. 
      2. What’s Lukan about this? 
        1. “John son of Zechariah” – Luke is the Gospel that gives John a backstory. 
        2. Also: Luke doing this very Lukan thing of naming a bunch of government officials. He likes historical details, though he sometimes gets them wrong, and he likes contrasting the big global-empire scale stuff with the very local events he’s describing, which secretly have cosmic significance. 
  2. JOHN
    1. Confusing that this is another John. And the John of Revelation is yet another John. What can you do? 
    2. John’s language is cosmic and poetic right from the start. The first verse of his Gospel is, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That sets the tone! 
    3. What’s Johannine – John-ish – about this? Lots. 
      1. One of John’s themes: bearing witness. The role of the Church and her members – to bear witness or testify to what we have seen and experienced, and how God has acted in our lives. 
      2. John describes the Baptist’s mission: to testify to the Light, which is Jesus.
        1. Luke’s birth story for John the Baptist has a similar upshot – he is destined from before his birth to prepare the way for God’s Messiah. This is just John’s very Johannine way of saying the same thing. 
      3. John goes a step further than Luke and doesn’t “show” Jesus’ baptism at all; it happens offscreen, so to speak. 
        1. This is another John thing. I think John – the latest-written Gospel – assumes people have read one of the others and know the basic plot. So sometimes he doesn’t tell about the big events, but comments on them instead.
        2. The biggest example: the Last Supper. John’s Jesus has a long farewell speech that evening, but he does not describe the meal itself. He assumes you know. 
        3. Here – John’s John the Baptist tells about baptizing Jesus, bears witness to what he has seen and heard:  God’s Spirit descending on Jesus, marking him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
    4. So there we have it. The baptism of Jesus, the beginning of his public ministry, refracted through the lenses of four different Gospel voices. 
  1. VIII. The baptism of Christ – the Gospel event that the church always celebrates on the first Sunday of the season of Epiphany – raises a kind of riddle for the church. Jesus was baptized; Jesus told his followers to baptize people; but Jesus did not baptize people. Why not?
    1. One possibility: Jesus’ insight into how best to build his movement. In the early phases, you just need people to follow and listen and spread the word. 
      1. It’s later in the process of movement-building and eventually institution-building that you need a boundary rite, something to mark who’s fully committed, and who’s an outsider or inquirer.
    2. Second – there’s a cranky bit in one of Paul’s letters where it sounds like people are arguing about who’s most important, based on who baptized them. (Paul is disgusted and wants none of it.) 
      1. I can imagine that Jesus knew that kind of thing would happen, and that it would be counter to his hopes for equity and mutual service within the church. 
      2. He never baptized anyone so that there could not be people who would try to set themselves apart as having been baptized by Christ himself. 
    3. I think those are both good reasons. But it’s completely possible that there are other reasons we cannot know. It’s definitely on my list of questions to ask someday!
  2. What our baptism, the church’s practice of baptism, means for US is another sermon, or several. But let’s wonder briefly what Jesus’ baptism means to us. Why DID Jesus need – or choose – to be baptized by John? As John says in Matthew: Why are you coming to me? 
    1. There’s much of mystery here too – no clear or complete answers on this side of things. But when I put these four accounts side by side, I noticed something I hadn’t thought about before.
      1. In three of the Gospels, Jesus’ baptism follows some kind of birth story. 
        1. Luke has the one we all know best, with Caesar Augustus and the stable and the shepherds. 
        2. Matthew has the angel telling Joseph in a dream that he should take Mary as his wife despite her mysterious pregnancy; and he has the wise men, the astrologers, who come to visit the child, and King Herod trying to kill him, forcing the family to flee. 
        3. John’s birth story is very different, but it’s there. He names Jesus as the Word, and the Light; he tells us that from the beginning of everything, Jesus was with God, and was God. And then in the fulness of time, the true Light came into the world; the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. 
        4. And then there’s Mark. The only thing Mark says about where Jesus comes from is Nazareth. There is no birth story in Mark.
      2. Or is there? 
        1. When I’m talking with families about baptism, I like to say that baptism is, among other things, a symbolic birth. There’s water and mess and crying and joy and naming and welcome. 
        1. What if Jesus’ baptism is Mark’s birth story? 
          1. There is water, and there is rending open.  
          2. There is naming, and beginning. 
          3. There is a Voice crying out with joy: My Son! I am delighted with you! 
        2. I like thinking of Jesus’ baptism as another birth story. It helps ease the sudden jump in the church’s calendar from the babe in the manger to the full-grown man standing in the river. 
      2. Just as the other Gospels tell us that God chose to be born among us as a baby, Mark tells us that God chose to join that crowd gathered by the Jordan – the desperate, the confused, the curious, the skeptical, dusty and poor and weary and wary.  God chose to join that crowd, and then to step out from among them, and into the waters, to be born among us and for us. Amen. 
Church Seasons & Holy Days, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Dec. 4

The readings for today, the second Sunday in Advent, call us to attend to the relationship between Christians, Jews and Judaism. 

While perhaps not as loaded as Holy Week, Advent and Christmas raise these questions too: do we think Jesus fulfilled Judaism, completely and finally?  If so, do we see Jews as irrelevant, spiritually extinct? And if we don’t think that: Are we using language in church that suggests that we do? 

These questions matter. The consequences range from the kind of causal Christian cultural supremacy that results in public school classrooms being decorated for Christmas – to the kind of violence that means synagogues routinely hire armed guards to watch their doors during worship. And that my rabbi colleagues are still tending to the pastoral needs of families shattered across generations by the experience of the Holocaust. 

Today each of our Scripture readings raise questions of how Christians think about Judaism – in three different ways. We’ll start with our Gospel reading, from Matthew. 

In our 3 year cycle of Sunday Scripture readings, which we share with many churches, we have readings from one primary gospel each year – with chunks of John, the fourth gospel, scattered all around. We just started a new church year on the first Sunday in Advent, last week; and our gospel for this year is Matthew. 

Let me confess right now: Matthew is my least favorite Gospel – in part because of his often violent and frightening language. 

Why is Matthew like this? About thirty years after Jesus’ death, in the year 66, some of the Jews of Judea began to rebel against Roman colonial rule. The rebels never really had a chance against Rome’s military might, and the revolt quickly turned bloody. Rome crushed the rebels and burned Jerusalem. The Great Temple was destroyed. Many people died; many lost everything. 

This earth-shaking event profoundly shaped both Christianity and Judaism, from that moment onward. All the Gospels are marked by it – but perhaps Matthew most of all. His Gospel text boils over at times with his grief and rage. He seems to blame the Jewish leadership for what happened – feeling that it’s their rejection of Jesus that brought down this destruction, rather than the predictable eruption of the tensions inherent in colonial rule always and everywhere.

Turning to today’s passage: Matthew introduces John the Baptist. The Gospels are pretty consistent in their picture of John: A preacher who separated himself from society to live in the wilderness, wearing simple clothes he made himself and eating what he could find, and proclaiming that people need to change their hearts and their lives and turn back towards God and God’s ways – and to be baptized, a ritual washing, in the Jordan River. 

To all that, Matthew adds this angry speech against the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We know this is Matthew, because later, in chapter 12 and again in chapter 23, Matthew’s Jesus says almost the exact same thing, calling groups of Pharisees and Sadducees “brood of vipers” and yelling at them: “How can you speak good things, when you are evil?” And “how can you escape being sentenced to hell?” Those passages are NOT echoed in the other Gospels. 

Who were the Pharisees and the Sadducees? The Pharisees were a reform movement within Judaism at the time of Jesus, focused primarily on the common people. The Sadducees were an elite and privileged group who more or less ran the Great Temple in Jerusalem. The Pharisees and Sadducees would not have been natural friends; I suspect it’s Matthew throwing them together as enemies of Christianity in his eyes. 

Far too much of Matthew’s hatred of these groups seeped into Christianity as a general suspicion and hatred towards Jews – which in turn has spawned unimaginable violence. I read this passage with pain and repentance. 

It’s ours, but it’s not comfortable, and it shouldn’t be. 

Then there’s our Epistle – a portion of the apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, written in the late 50s. Paul is writing here to the Christians of Rome, who included both Jewish and non-Jewish Christians, and he’s trying to help them respect one another and get along.

Before he became a Christian, Paul was not just any Jew. He had studied Jewish texts and scholarship deeply. He had become a Pharisee, a member of that reform movement that sought to spread more active and heartfelt Jewish practice among the folk of Judea. He was an up and coming young Jewish leader, when Jesus called his name and changed his life on the road to Damascus. 

Scholars have wondered, over the centuries, what to make of the fact that Paul was a Roman citizen, as we learn in the book of Acts. Maybe one of his parents was a Roman. Maybe his family was gifted citizenship, a major privilege, as thanks for service to the Empire. 

Either way, perhaps young Paul threw himself into his Jewish faith as a way to resolve the tensions of divided allegiances, of having ties to both subjects and empire. And perhaps it’s by growing up both Roman and Jew that Paul learned some of the skills of both/and living. Of holding ambiguities within yourself; of finding the value in different worlds and ways – even when they seem at odds. 

That’s the wisdom that Paul brings to this letter to the church in Rome, as he urges Jewish and non-Jewish Christians to welcome one another just as Christ has welcomed them. In today’s passage, he is trying to help the Jewish members of the Roman church see that it’s right and joyful! for God’s saving work to extend to non-Jews – without their having to first convert to Judaism. He quotes a series of texts from the Old Testament, the Jewish Scriptures, that mention God’s intentions to also bring Gentiles – the nations, the goyim – into God’s saving purposes. 

A few chapters earlier he was urging Gentiles, in turn, to feel humbled and grateful for being grafted onto the living tree of God’s covenant people, the Jews. 

He concludes this passage with this beautiful prayer for the Roman Christian community in its diversity: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Paul is dealing here specifically with Jews who have become Christian, like himself. But Paul’s attitude towards Judaism is nuanced and interesting. He knows that he was called to something different – something more; but he honors the beauty and integrity of what he came from. He’d like other Jews to become Christians too, but I think he’d also like to see Christianity stay pretty Jewish. 

It’s complicated! But I do think a truly Pauline Christianity would have a much more open and humble heart towards Judaism than historical Christianity has had. 

For Matthew, Christianity fulfills Jewish faith – and leaves Jews behind. For Paul, it’s less clear: he loves his Jewish heritage and kin, but feels called to a new way of faith beyond Judaism.

Who’s right about God and salvation: Jews or Christians? What if it’s not up to us to decide – or even to know? 

One of the texts Paul quotes is today’s Isaiah passage: “The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope.”

Back in Lent of this past year, Father Tom McAlpine led us in a study of how Christians read the book of Isaiah. We were looking specifically at a set of texts from much later in Isaiah, known as the Suffering Servant songs. Today’s passage is somewhat different – focusing on a wise and righteous leader who will bring peace to God’s people – but it raises similar questions. 

Historically, the prophet Isaiah and his eighth-century-before-Christ audience probably thought this prophecy was about King Hezekiah of Judah. Hezekiah was a young king who called his people back to exclusive and faithful worship of God.  But it’s the nature of prophetic language not to be fulfilled or exhausted by any given historical figure or event. Hezekiah did big things – but his reign did not usher in a cosmic realm of peace. It’s possible to see elements of a prophecy fulfilled, while other parts still hang in the air, waiting and shining. 

This text is here, in our Advent lectionary, because Christians have assumed for millennia that it’s about Jesus. That he is the “shoot of Jesse” – meaning, a descendant of Israel’s great king David, whose father was named Jesse. 

Now, Matthew and Luke both make a point of the fact that Jesus is born into a family with links to King David. But listen: David lived in Judea a thousand years before Jesus. And he had a lot of kids. By sheer dint of math and time, a heck of a lot of Judeans could have claimed Davidic ancestry by the time Jesus was born. 

It’s so, so hard for us not to read these Old Testament texts backwards from Christianity, as as inevitably and exclusively pointing to Jesus. In Father Tom’s class we kept tripping over that, how deeply-seated our impulse was to read these texts and think: “Well, this is obviously about Jesus; how could it not be? What else could it possibly mean?”

Texts from the Old Testament, and especially from Isaiah, shaped the language and hopes of the Jewish people for centuries. The way they thought and spoke about a coming Messiah, a holy leader sent by God to save and restore God’s people. And these texts likewise shaped the ideas and language of the first Christians, especially those steeped in the Hebrew Bible – like Matthew, like Paul. They used Isaiah and other Hebrew Scriptures to help them make sense of what they had experienced in Jesus’ life and ministry, and in his death and resurrection. 

We think we recognize Jesus in these Old Testament texts because how Christians think and talk about Jesus has been shaped by these Old Testament texts, literally from day one. 

I would rather say that everybody’s right than that everybody’s wrong. And I think that’s more faithful to the mystery of how holy texts can speak and speak again in new times and places. 

This passage is about Hezekiah and it’s about Jesus and it’s about the promised Messiah whom our Jewish siblings still await and it’s about the second coming of Christ that we still await. 

What passages like this tell us about God’s purposes for Israel and for the world can help us understand the person and work of Jesus. We can rightly treasure these texts as Christians. But we need to hold them carefully, with an awareness that they don’t only belong to us. 

At the Beth Israel Center across town, when my friend Betsy’s congregation opens the ark where the scrolls of Scripture are kept, and take out the scroll of the Nevi’im, the Prophets, and remove its silver end caps and its embroidered velvet cover and unroll it on the altar and chant it aloud in Hebrew – Isaiah’s words resonate differently in that space than they do here. 

Not entirely differently, to be sure. But importantly differently. And some of the difference is history and humanity – and some of it is holiness and mystery. 

It’s important for Christians to grapple with the anti-Judaism embedded in our history, our texts, our practices. Good citizenship and good ally-ship are part of our call to love our neighbors and serve the common good. 

But for me there’s something more here too – something a little hard to put my finger on, but I’ll try.

I find a sense of joy and freedom and possibility in the idea that God’s saving purposes are bigger and broader and honestly messier than any human mapping. We can’t pin down the meanings of ancient prophecy, or the mechanics of salvation, to fit within our categories of belonging and belief, doctrine and truth. 

This is one of the fundamental themes of Advent: The God who came among us as Jesus of Nazareth is coming again. 

We are people of expectation.

People called to expect mystery.

To expect disruption. 

To expect redemption. 

To expect, someday, whether in this world or the next, to come face to face with the Living One who both fulfills and transcends all our scriptures and theologies.  

May it be so. Come, Lord Jesus. 

 

scripture, Sermons

Sermon, January 9

I want to notice the first sentence of today’s Gospel. 

“As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah…”

Let’s back up: what else do we know about this crowd? 

The third chapter of Luke’s Gospel begins: In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, [and some other historical details] …the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. 

Back in Luke chapter 1 we heard about John’s parents and his birth, including Zechariah’s song of hope over his infant son:  “You, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins.”

Well, now it’s Go Time for John to fulfill that mission. So: He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins… And crowds came out to be baptized by him. 

Baptized: dipped or dunked into the waters of the Jordan River, as an outward and physical sign of their inward desire to turn their hearts and lives towards God. 

John seems to be re-interpreting Jewish practices of immersion for purification and re-integration into community. He’s making those ritual baths into something messy and muddy and spontaneous. Not a response to specific circumstances or causes of ritual impurity – but a physical acting-out of your recognition that your life is fundamentally askew, and your desire to turn towards the path of holiness and mercy. 

This crowd asks John what that renewed life would look like: “What then should we do?” We had this part of the text back in Advent. And John says things like, Share your extra food and your extra clothing with people who don’t have enough. Don’t use your position to take. Do your work honestly and kindly. 

And that brings us to the first verse of today’s text: As the people were filled with expectation… 

So what do we know about this crowd? There were undoubtedly some folks there who were just curious – or suspicious – or hostile, there to heckle this weirdo preacher. But probably most of them were there because of something they heard, or hoped to hear, from John. People who felt like the existing order wasn’t serving them very well. People who felt disconnected or marginalized by institutional religion. People who felt hopeless; people who felt incongruously hopeful. Maybe people who felt a deep need for change in their own lives, that nothing else spoke to.

In short: They were people who were looking for something. That’s what that word means – the word translated as “filled with expectation.” Prosdokao in Greek. Waiting for, looking for, expecting. 

It’s a very Lucan word. We’re in Luke’s Gospel here – one of the four accounts of the life of Jesus. Unlike the others, Luke has a sequel – the book of Acts. We started our walk through Luke at the beginning of Advent, and we’ll mostly be in Luke for the rest of this year. 

There are two related words here – Prosdokao, and Prosdechomai, meaning to look for, wait for, receive, or accept.  Together they show up 18 times in Luke and Acts. They are used twelve times in the **entire** rest of the New Testament – the other Gospels, epistles and writings. So I think it’s safe to say that Luke likes this word – these twinned words. That it’s part of his focal vocabulary. (The way that “immediately” is for Mark.)

In this specific verse in Luke 3, the crowd’s sense of expectation is explicitly eschatological. Eschatology is a fine big 50 cent word. It means relating to the Eschaton, which means, The Last Days. The time when God will turn things upside down and right side up. When there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and God will wipe away all tears. When the lion will lie down with the lamb, and nobody will study war any more. 

This crowd is wondering whether John is the Messiah, the divine chosen one sent by God to save and restore God’s people, and bring about that new time of peace and prosperity. 

When Luke uses these waiting-and-expecting words, it’s not always with a sense of eschatological anticipation. Sometimes it’s more mundane. People waiting for Zechariah to come out of the temple; somebody expecting to be given a coin.

But by my count, a little over half the time, the words are used with that sense – of not just casual, but cosmic, waiting.  We’re not talking about waiting for the bus. We’re talking about waiting for the consolation of God’s people. We’re talking about waiting for God. 

Things were not great, in early first century Judea. There were lots of reasons to feel fearful and hopeless and disconnected. People were waiting for signs that God was still out there. That they hadn’t been abandoned or forgotten.That God was still acting in the world, in human lives and human hearts; that God still had a plan, despite how fundamentally askew everything seemed. 

Prosdokao. Expecting, waiting, looking for. Why might this be such a central word and concept for Luke?

One of my favorite things about Luke is Acts. The other Gospels end soon after Jesus rises from the dead. Luke tells the next several chapters of the story. He tells us how people’s lives were transformed – not just by meeting Jesus, but by meeting people who had met Jesus, and by meeting people who had met people who had met Jesus. And by hearing the story of his life and death and rising, and the things he said and did… 

Our Acts lesson today is part of that longer narrative. A period of persecution in Jerusalem drives many out to preach elsewhere. A young man named Philip goes to the city of Samaria to proclaim the Messiah to them; people listen eagerly.  

Then Peter and John – Jesus’ close friends, leaders in the Jerusalem church – come to Samaria to fulfill Philip’s mission by baptizing the new believers there.

There’s some stuff in here about the baptism in the name of Jesus versus the baptism of the Holy Spirit; we understand the church’s baptism as encompassing both of those, but apparently they were separate for a while early on in the church’s story. 

The point is: These early Christians, Philip and the others – they’ve lost so much. They lost Jesus – twice. They’ve probably lost family, friends, social standing, by being part of this controversial new movement. They’ve had to flee persecution, at risk of their lives. And they’re still so excited about what God is doing through Jesus Christ that when they talk about it, people can’t help but listen. 

This is why I think Acts matters to us.  It shows us how our earliest faith ancestors carried on, after Easter, after Ascension. 

In many ways those closest to Jesus did not see the fulfillment they longed for. Jesus didn’t become the God-King of a restored Israel. Instead he died a degrading and painful death.  And when he rose from the dead, it wasn’t to kick butt and take names, or even just to keep hanging out with them. Instead, he gave them some assignments, and left. Again. 

They could have been bitterly disappointed. But instead, they seem really joyful. And more: They seem – expectant. 

Luke may have been part of some of the events of Acts. He uses “we” in some parts of the narrative. Or that may just be a literary device, to add immediacy to stories he’s heard about from others. Either way he’s clearly close to these events, to the highs and lows of the first couple of decades of Christianity. 

And there are both highs and lows. Successes and failures. There’s persecution and disappointment and conflict and loss. Acts ends with the implied death of the apostle Paul, one of the central figures of both the book of Acts and of early Christianity. 

But through it all, Luke has seen and heard and experienced enough to believe that God’s people are NOT abandoned.That God IS at work in the world and in human lives and hearts. I think that sense of holy waiting is a hallmark of Luke because that’s how Luke felt. He’d seen strange, wonderful, holy stuff happen – and despite everything, he expected strange, wonderful, holy stuff would keep happening, long after he laid down his pen.  

All the expectant people of Luke and Acts, crowds and individuals who are waiting and looking for something… Zechariah and Elizabeth, Simeon and Anna who greet the infant Jesus in the temple, the crowds gathered to hear John, and others… They don’t get to see Rome overthrown, Israel restored, Creation renewed. What they receive is much more partial and fragmentary. Signs and promises, glimpses and glimmers that tell them that God is still out there. That all is not lost. That there’s still meaning, and possibility, and promise. 

What happens in Luke and Acts isn’t that people see all that their dreams come to pass. What happens is that they are formed more and more deeply as people of faithful expectation. People who’ve been shown enough – whether in concrete signs in the world, or in God’s quiet revelation deep in their hearts – that they’re able to continue on in hope. And even choose to step into the baptismal waters and seek to become part of the slow unfolding of God’s purposes.  

May these faith-ancestors encourage us in our own heavy times. May we, too, be formed to live as the expectant people of God.