PROPER 19 / 15 PENTECOST — 13 Sept 2009
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:15 am
Proverbs 1:20-33 Psalm 19 James 3:1-12 Mark 8:27-38
Jesus asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”
We call this incident “The Confession of St. Peter” and we also celebrate it every year as a holy day on January 18, as well as on this Sunday every three years and also in August of Year A, in Matthew’s telling. It’s a turning point in the course of Jesus’ ministry. Before this, in Mark’s narrative, Jesus has been puttering about the Galilee in the north of the land of Israel, teaching, healing, gathering his followers, proclaiming the Reign of God. From here on out, things take a more foreboding turn: it’s right after this that Jesus turns south, to Jerusalem, and although the teaching and healing continue, the conflicts with the religious establishment intensify, and more and more Jesus himself becomes the issue, until matters finally reach a crisis in Jerusalem at the Feast of the Passover.
But at this point, where we are in the Gospel today, the sun is still shining and the birds are still singing, and trooping about the highways and byways of the Galilean hills is still something of a lark for Jesus’ followers. As we have seen in the Gospel readings this summer, from the early chapters of Mark mostly, Jesus has been proclaiming God’s Reign, and not only proclaiming it but enacting it, performing the signs of the Reign of God, what we might call the signs of the Messiah.
And so now Jesus and his friends are hiking around up north of the Sea of Galilee. (Near where today the borders of Israel, Syria, and Lebanon meet, the area we call the Golan Heights. In Jesus’ time this was not within Galilee, which was ruled by Herod Antipas, one of the sons of Herod the Great [the Herod who was King of Judaea when Jesus was born]; it was in a district ruled by another son of Herod the Great, Antipas’s brother Philip. Philip had rebuilt a city and renamed it for Tiberius Caesar as a way of currying the Emperor’s favor; the city was renamed “Philip’s Caesartown,” or, as it was actually put in Latin, “Caesarea Philíppi.” As distinguished from Caesarea Maritima, on the Judean Mediterranean coast. And as distinguished from Caesarea of Cappadocia, in the highlands of eastern Anatolia. Actually the Roman Empire had more towns named “Caesarea” than we have “Washington” in the United States. And for much the same reason. But I digress…)
Anyway, Jesus and his friends are walking down the road, and Jesus says, “So. What are they saying about me?” As it happens, people are saying a lot about Jesus, some of it pretty much off the wall. “Well,” say the disciples, I heard one guy saying he thought you were John the Baptist come back to life.” (John the Baptist had recently been arrested and then executed by Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee, the brother of the Philip who had built Caesarea Philippi. [Are you getting all this? It’s a little like the episode summaries on the websites of the TV dramas — sometimes it’s hard to keep track!] Remember Salome and the dance of the seven veils and John Baptist’s head on a platter? Of course, some of that is in the Gospel and some of it is Richard Strauss. [I’m digressing again, aren’t I?] Anyway, that was still hot news just then, and some people thought Jesus was the Baptist come back to life.)
And, the disciples went on, “Some other people are saying that you’re the prophet Elijah come back from heaven.” Elijah, you recall, was the great prophet of the Kingdom of Israel, and been carried up to heaven in a fiery chariot, and it says in the book of Malachi that Elijah will return before the final Day of the Lord. So. If you’re following the reading sequence in the Daily Office Lectionary, we are currently wading into the Elijah saga.
Anyway, the disciples went on, “Some say you’re one of the other prophets come back to life — or maybe ‘The Prophet Like Moses’” predicted in Deuteronomy — whom many expected the Lord to send to bring in God’s Kingdom.
“Mmm,” says Jesus. “But what about you? You’ve been with me for a while now. You’ve heard what I’ve said. You’ve seen what I’ve done. Who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter, as so often the spokesman, answers him, “You are the Messiah.”
I’m not sure our English Bibles always catch the full flavor of that reply. Oh, the translation is word for word — Su ei ho Christos — “You are the Christ.” But what does Peter mean by that?—when he actually said it, not in Greek but in Aramaic? “Christ” (Christos) is a Greek word, meaning “the anointed one,” and it translates the Hebrew Mashiah or Aramaic Meshikha, “Messiah,” “anointed one.” But for us Christians almost two thousand years later, “Christ” has simply become the common title for Jesus, almost his surname; for Peter to say “You are the Christ” seems perfectly obvious to us. It wasn’t obvious for Peter. What did Peter think he was saying when he said “You are the Messiah”? And why does Jesus seem not exactly tickled to death about it? Why did he tell them not to talk about it?
For Peter, “Messiah” means “savior-king.” The Messiah is the one whom God is going to send to rally the people, purge the sinners, expel the imperial Roman occupation army, and restore the nation of Israel to its glory. The Messiah is the one who is going to come and fix everything for us.
And, in effect, Jesus says, “Not me.”
Jesus goes on to explain that he will be rejected, and finally put to death; and Peter says, “No way! Not God’s Messiah!” And Jesus says, “‘No way!’ to you, Peter—you’re the one who is opposed to God. What you mean by ‘Messiah’ is not who I am. That isn’t what I’m doing here. I am not the one who is going to come and fix everything. You’re going to have to learn a whole new definition of what God’s Messiah is, because I have come to die on a Roman cross.”
Much of the Church, through much of our history, and probably most of us at least much of the time, range ourselves on the side of Peter; and thus we are not on the side of God but of corrupt self-seeking humanity. Because we expect that God is a God who is supposed to come and fix everything for us. We demand that of God. And the plain truth is, God doesn’t do that. Oh, in the ultimate end, in the fulfillment of the Reign of God, all will be well. But in the meantime, God doesn’t come and fix everything. We still lose, we still suffer, we still die.
But winning, and power, and having everything fixed for us, is not what life is about. We live by giving our lives away. That’s the Gospel. Listen to what Jesus says: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” That’s God’s truth. That’s the kind of Messiah Jesus is, one who gives it all away. And what God gives us in this life is not any promise of success, or prosperity, or health, or satisfaction, but limitless opportunities to give our lives away to each other. What God gives us is limitless opportunities to give our lives away to each other, because that’s what it’s really all about.
And it is really — almost — just as simple, and just as difficult, as that.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Sermon - 23 August 2009
PROPER 16 / 12 PENTECOST — 23 August 2009
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:00 a.m.
1Kgs 8:1,6,10-11,22-30,41,43 Ps 84 Eph 6:10-20 John 6:56-69
For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” an old French proverb runs. History is a fascinating tension of change and identity, of continuity and discontinuity. I myself think that people are pretty much the same as we have always been — human nature as such isn’t a lot different now from what it was a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, or two thousand years ago. But the world has changed, in important ways. It really has. And the world has changed in two senses. First, the actual conditions of the world have changed. The world itself is a different place from what it was just a few generations ago. This is largely the result of the building of the infrastructures of human society. Much that was formerly wilderness is now under cultivation. (Some real problems arise from this, but I’m certainly not suggesting that in itself this is a Bad Thing!) Communications with virtually any place in the world are instantaneous, and very difficult to impede. Still new to many of us is the notion that from your own telephone — in your own home or in your pocket! — you can call directly to almost any other telephone in the world. And travel to anywhere in the world isn’t that much more difficult (only somewhat more expensive!). (I’m still not quite used to all the ordinary folks I run into who want to tell me about their trip to China or Russia or West Africa. It used to be a big deal just to go to Chicago!)
And as a direct result of all this (what we might call the “infrastructural change” of the world), the second sense in which the world has changed is that we perceive the world in a different way. Our technology has brought the world largely (not completely! but largely) under our control, and we assume that things will continue in this direction. The world is the venue of human action, the object of human manipulation, configured by human infrastructures.
In the world when the New Testament was being written, and in fact in the world in any pre-modern period, people had a much clearer sense of their world, their universe, as a personal living environment — not a dead impersonal thing to be used, and manipulated, and exploited. Even the stars of the heavens were seen as gods, or powers, or angels. Nature around us was often (not always, but often) seen as the habitat of spirits, and of demons. The world was enchanted.
The “modern” view of the world, which began to be operative somewhere along about the sixteenth century — in part because of the foundational scientific work of people like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and others who demonstrated that we are not at the center of the universe, that nature obeys discoverable rational laws and not just the whims of the gods, or even God, and (more arguably) that human consciousness is the measure of reality — this “modern” view dis-enchanted, de-divinized, de-spiritualized, de-demonized, de-personalized the world. Now, that’s not all bad! Sometimes we get very romantic about (for instance) Native American, or African, or Aboriginal Australian perspectives on our relation to the natural world, and indeed there is much wisdom among these peoples. But the enchanted, personalized, divinized world of pre-modern societies can also be a place of fear and terror, where human beings are at the mercy of famine and flood, ravaged by disease, tossed to and fro by the whims of gods and demons over whom they have no control and whom they can only desperately try to placate by magic or sacrifice. (Well, we’re still at the mercy of famine and flood, but at least we now understand that in large part it’s our own fault.) For our forebears, the world was different than it is for us, and not always for the better. The “modern,” scientific, technological view of the world brings with it (or should bring with it; it certainly demands) a maturity, a sense of responsibility, which is appropriate and necessary to our full stature as human beings created in God’s image. Superstition is not a fitting stance or behavior pattern for the children of God redeemed by the blood of God’s Christ! But clearly also there is a very real danger of overemphasizing and overestimating our own competence and our own degree of control over the world, and we very easily assume that the evils of the world just need a little more applied technology, a bit of sociological adjustment, one more Federal program, and everything will be made well again.
St. Paul is telling us this morning — for our purposes I’m assuming Paul wrote the Letter to the Ephesians; there’s a fair amount of serious and legitimate dispute about that, but for the moment let’s just go with it — St. Paul is telling us that the enemies of the Kingdom of God are not just private evils and personal sins; something much more is at stake. (And thus Christian faith is not, cannot be, must not be concerned just with personal morality and private spirituality.) (Bishop Katharine said this a few weeks ago and a bunch of people beat up on her about it. But of course she was right. She reads Paul.) Paul talks about “the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers of this present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” — within his own world framework what he’s talking about are demonic spirits, and that’s probably not the way we’d put it; nor should it be the way for us to put it, I don’t think. But the truth is that there are powers of evil which are bigger than private hearts; the evil of the world is greater than the sum of its parts. Technologies, ideologies, “isms,” political and economic structures, vested interests, communications media, public opinion polls, the infamous “They” (as in, “They say that...”) — all of these can be “evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.”
Against all this we as Christians are called to stand.
And as the evil against which we must stand and struggle is larger than our own personal petty sinfulnesses, even, apparently, larger than all our own personal petty sinfulnesses put together, so we cannot rely simply upon our own strength, our own wisdom, our own virtue. They aren’t enough. They are too easily corrupted. No, St Paul calls us to rely on “the whole armor of God.”
But let us note carefully what that armor is (listen to St Paul again): “Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” Here are God’s weapons: truth, righteousness, the good news of peace, faith, salvation, the Word of God. Not our own swords, but only the “Sword of the Spirit.” We cannot use evil’s own weapons against it. In this realm of what ultimately matters, we cannot fight fire with fire. We don’t need any more Crusades, no more wars of religion, no more inquisitions, no more persecutions. God’s Kingdom is served not by power and force and craft, but by humility and patience and love. And always, in all things, by constancy in prayer, through which the powers of evil within ourselves are vanquished by God’s grace, and we, ever more closely conformed to the Reign of God, are strengthened as faithful soldiers of the Cross of Jesus Christ our Lord.
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:00 a.m.
1Kgs 8:1,6,10-11,22-30,41,43 Ps 84 Eph 6:10-20 John 6:56-69
For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” an old French proverb runs. History is a fascinating tension of change and identity, of continuity and discontinuity. I myself think that people are pretty much the same as we have always been — human nature as such isn’t a lot different now from what it was a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, or two thousand years ago. But the world has changed, in important ways. It really has. And the world has changed in two senses. First, the actual conditions of the world have changed. The world itself is a different place from what it was just a few generations ago. This is largely the result of the building of the infrastructures of human society. Much that was formerly wilderness is now under cultivation. (Some real problems arise from this, but I’m certainly not suggesting that in itself this is a Bad Thing!) Communications with virtually any place in the world are instantaneous, and very difficult to impede. Still new to many of us is the notion that from your own telephone — in your own home or in your pocket! — you can call directly to almost any other telephone in the world. And travel to anywhere in the world isn’t that much more difficult (only somewhat more expensive!). (I’m still not quite used to all the ordinary folks I run into who want to tell me about their trip to China or Russia or West Africa. It used to be a big deal just to go to Chicago!)
And as a direct result of all this (what we might call the “infrastructural change” of the world), the second sense in which the world has changed is that we perceive the world in a different way. Our technology has brought the world largely (not completely! but largely) under our control, and we assume that things will continue in this direction. The world is the venue of human action, the object of human manipulation, configured by human infrastructures.
In the world when the New Testament was being written, and in fact in the world in any pre-modern period, people had a much clearer sense of their world, their universe, as a personal living environment — not a dead impersonal thing to be used, and manipulated, and exploited. Even the stars of the heavens were seen as gods, or powers, or angels. Nature around us was often (not always, but often) seen as the habitat of spirits, and of demons. The world was enchanted.
The “modern” view of the world, which began to be operative somewhere along about the sixteenth century — in part because of the foundational scientific work of people like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and others who demonstrated that we are not at the center of the universe, that nature obeys discoverable rational laws and not just the whims of the gods, or even God, and (more arguably) that human consciousness is the measure of reality — this “modern” view dis-enchanted, de-divinized, de-spiritualized, de-demonized, de-personalized the world. Now, that’s not all bad! Sometimes we get very romantic about (for instance) Native American, or African, or Aboriginal Australian perspectives on our relation to the natural world, and indeed there is much wisdom among these peoples. But the enchanted, personalized, divinized world of pre-modern societies can also be a place of fear and terror, where human beings are at the mercy of famine and flood, ravaged by disease, tossed to and fro by the whims of gods and demons over whom they have no control and whom they can only desperately try to placate by magic or sacrifice. (Well, we’re still at the mercy of famine and flood, but at least we now understand that in large part it’s our own fault.) For our forebears, the world was different than it is for us, and not always for the better. The “modern,” scientific, technological view of the world brings with it (or should bring with it; it certainly demands) a maturity, a sense of responsibility, which is appropriate and necessary to our full stature as human beings created in God’s image. Superstition is not a fitting stance or behavior pattern for the children of God redeemed by the blood of God’s Christ! But clearly also there is a very real danger of overemphasizing and overestimating our own competence and our own degree of control over the world, and we very easily assume that the evils of the world just need a little more applied technology, a bit of sociological adjustment, one more Federal program, and everything will be made well again.
St. Paul is telling us this morning — for our purposes I’m assuming Paul wrote the Letter to the Ephesians; there’s a fair amount of serious and legitimate dispute about that, but for the moment let’s just go with it — St. Paul is telling us that the enemies of the Kingdom of God are not just private evils and personal sins; something much more is at stake. (And thus Christian faith is not, cannot be, must not be concerned just with personal morality and private spirituality.) (Bishop Katharine said this a few weeks ago and a bunch of people beat up on her about it. But of course she was right. She reads Paul.) Paul talks about “the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers of this present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” — within his own world framework what he’s talking about are demonic spirits, and that’s probably not the way we’d put it; nor should it be the way for us to put it, I don’t think. But the truth is that there are powers of evil which are bigger than private hearts; the evil of the world is greater than the sum of its parts. Technologies, ideologies, “isms,” political and economic structures, vested interests, communications media, public opinion polls, the infamous “They” (as in, “They say that...”) — all of these can be “evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.”
Against all this we as Christians are called to stand.
And as the evil against which we must stand and struggle is larger than our own personal petty sinfulnesses, even, apparently, larger than all our own personal petty sinfulnesses put together, so we cannot rely simply upon our own strength, our own wisdom, our own virtue. They aren’t enough. They are too easily corrupted. No, St Paul calls us to rely on “the whole armor of God.”
But let us note carefully what that armor is (listen to St Paul again): “Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” Here are God’s weapons: truth, righteousness, the good news of peace, faith, salvation, the Word of God. Not our own swords, but only the “Sword of the Spirit.” We cannot use evil’s own weapons against it. In this realm of what ultimately matters, we cannot fight fire with fire. We don’t need any more Crusades, no more wars of religion, no more inquisitions, no more persecutions. God’s Kingdom is served not by power and force and craft, but by humility and patience and love. And always, in all things, by constancy in prayer, through which the powers of evil within ourselves are vanquished by God’s grace, and we, ever more closely conformed to the Reign of God, are strengthened as faithful soldiers of the Cross of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
More on Absalom
Here's another -- and much better! -- sermon on David and Absalom from last Sunday. This is by the Very Rev. Kelvin Holdsworth, Provost of St. Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow.
http://www.thurible.net/20090809/davids-lamentation/
A hat tip to the Mad Priest ("Of course, I could be wrong..." http://revjph.blogspot.com/) who passed this on.
http://www.thurible.net/20090809/davids-lamentation/
A hat tip to the Mad Priest ("Of course, I could be wrong..." http://revjph.blogspot.com/) who passed this on.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Sermon - 9 August 2009
PROPER 14 / 10 PENTECOST — 9 August 2009
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:00 am
2Sam 18:5-9,15,31-33 Ps 130 Eph 4:25-5:2 John 6:35,41-51
“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!”
I have commented before — I think it was to you last summer, but perhaps it was in another
parish — that one of the great opportunities of the Revised Common Lectionary, and particularly Track One thereof, is that we read great stories from the Hebrew Scriptures at the Sunday Eucharist, stories that in the past never quite fit in with the rest of the Sunday readings. (Well, they still don’t fit in, but we no longer care!) Of course we have always read them if we have some systematic way of reading through the Bible, such as the Divine Office (Morning and Evening Prayer), By the way, the Office Lectionary just this Friday and yesterday caught up with the David and Bathsheba story we read at the Eucharist on the last two Sundays; and for fun I got the old Gregory Peck-Susan Hayward movie from Netflix and watched it last night! Yeah, well… Very Hollywood. An interesting take on the story, though. An imaginative incorporation of some tales from elsewhere in the Books of Samuel. Somewhere there a Strict Rule that Hollywood can never do a story from the Bible straight.)
For the next two weeks the Office Lectionary will be working through the Absalom saga, of
which we get just a little piece today. Which is the downside of Track One of the lectionary. The Absalom story goes on for eight chapters (beginning with Chapter 13 of the Second Book of Samuel), and it is a rich, fascinating, and complex tale. I encourage you to go home today, or this week, asking yourself, “What was that Absalom business all about?” and take your Bibles and start in with 2nd Samuel 13. It’s a story that has inspired other stories — I think of the novel Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner, which I’m sure some of you have read and I suspect others of you have not read (not yet; that would include me!).
The Absalom saga is a story about how we manage to mess up our lives by a series of bad
decisions. And the fact that they may have been well-intentioned at the time really doesn’t help. The roots of it are actually a consequence of the Bathsheba story; you may recall last Sunday we heard the prophet Nathan chew David out about his murder of Uriah the Hittite, and he said, “Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house.…Thus says the Lord: I will raise up trouble against you from within your own house.…” (In the movie the prophet Nathan was played by Raymond Massey, so you know this was serious business!) What goes around comes around, and it starts coming around when David’s son Amnon has the hots for his half-sister Tamar (his half-brother Absalom’s full sister). Well, the Hebrew text says he “loved” her, and that’s how it’s usually translated into English, but “had the hots for” seems to be more to the point, since it quickly becomes clear that “love” is not the issue. This is not a Sunday School Bible story, by the way. So if the kids would like to color on their bulletins for a while now, that might be a good idea. (We might also note that the folks who talk a lot about “the Biblical doctrine of marriage” might want to explain themselves a little more clearly.)
Anyway, Amnon manages to get Tamar up to his room, where he rapes her, and then in disgust throws her out. (The biblical scholar Phyllis Tickle includes this passage as one of the Bible’s “Texts of Terror.” Yes.) When King David finds out about this, he is very angry, but he — does nothing. Amnon is his firstborn and heir-apparent, the “crown prince.” And after all, David is hardly on the moral high ground, as you will recall from the last couple of weeks. Still: Absalom is not only enraged at his brother for having violated his sister, he is also deeply angry with his father for not doing anything about it. Absalom bides his time, but in due course he engineers Amnon’s murder, and then flees into exile. The story goes on; ultimately Absalom comes back to Jerusalem, but he is already plotting rebellion to dethrone and replace his father David. And by the time we get to today’s part of the story, Absalom is leading an open revolution; he declares himself king at Hebron (where David had originally become king in Saul’s place before his conquest of Jerusalem). David flees to the Jordan valley, and Absalom occupies Jerusalem. (There is a whole series of intriguing little subplots in connection with all this. This is not a simple story!)
Well, now, comes the great climactic battle. The royal army of David — apparently mostly men of Judah, David’s own tribe — defeat Absalom’s insurgents, apparently mostly Israelites from the northern tribes. (The tension between the northern tribes of Israel and the southern tribe of Judah goes back long before the division of the kingdom following the death of King Solomon.) Absalom himself gets his hair caught in a tree. We learned earlier [14:26] that Absalom had a magnificent head of hair, which he cut annually, and the hair trimmings weighed five pounds; so let this be a lesson for you boys: Get a haircut! (Not a problem for some of us.) But I digress. Absalom gets his hair caught in the branches of an oak tree as he rides under it (Israel in those days was heavily forested, before the loggers and the sheepherders over the centuries turned it into a desert; there’s an environmental lesson in that; but I digress again). Today’s reading leaves out a few verses of plot here; it’s actually David’s general and all-purpose hit-man Joab who first plunges three javelins into Absalom’s heart, before his flunkies finish him off. We might note that Joab has a long history of
being David’s hired gun: it was he who killed King Saul’s general Abner after the death of Saul; it was he who set up the death of Uriah the Hittite at David’s order. Joab was the guy whom David used to keep his own hands clean of blood. Now after the death of Absalom David can mourn the death of his son, in a scene which is well known, and deeply touching, the deep grief of a father who has lost his son — a grief which is, alas, not an unknown experience in any age. But we should also realize that David’s grief should not be taken completely at face value. In the chapter after today’s reading, Joab challenges David about this — he reminds me of Dr. Phil: “David, what were you thinking? We all just risked our lives to save your throne, and you’re whining about that faithless brat of a boy. Get over it!”
I said at the beginning that the Absalom saga is a story about how we manage to mess up our
lives by a series of bad decisions. And the fact that they may have been well-intentioned at the time really doesn’t help. I think this is the appeal of David especially among the figures of Jewish history recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures. A great leader, a hero, most certainly, but a very real and deeply flawed human being. Intensely devoted to the Lord God of Israel, and yet over and over he keeps finding ways to mess up — for which he must pay very high and painful prices. Just like us? Well, I hope that we are not just like him. But, alas, we too manage to mess up our lives by bad decisions, if usually, I hope, in less catastrophic ways. But in any case, I hope we understand that God is with us — God is with us even when we abandon him. God will not save us from our own consequences, as he did not save David. But God does not leave us. God stays with us. God weeps for us. God loves us.
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:00 am
2Sam 18:5-9,15,31-33 Ps 130 Eph 4:25-5:2 John 6:35,41-51
“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!”
I have commented before — I think it was to you last summer, but perhaps it was in another
parish — that one of the great opportunities of the Revised Common Lectionary, and particularly Track One thereof, is that we read great stories from the Hebrew Scriptures at the Sunday Eucharist, stories that in the past never quite fit in with the rest of the Sunday readings. (Well, they still don’t fit in, but we no longer care!) Of course we have always read them if we have some systematic way of reading through the Bible, such as the Divine Office (Morning and Evening Prayer), By the way, the Office Lectionary just this Friday and yesterday caught up with the David and Bathsheba story we read at the Eucharist on the last two Sundays; and for fun I got the old Gregory Peck-Susan Hayward movie from Netflix and watched it last night! Yeah, well… Very Hollywood. An interesting take on the story, though. An imaginative incorporation of some tales from elsewhere in the Books of Samuel. Somewhere there a Strict Rule that Hollywood can never do a story from the Bible straight.)
For the next two weeks the Office Lectionary will be working through the Absalom saga, of
which we get just a little piece today. Which is the downside of Track One of the lectionary. The Absalom story goes on for eight chapters (beginning with Chapter 13 of the Second Book of Samuel), and it is a rich, fascinating, and complex tale. I encourage you to go home today, or this week, asking yourself, “What was that Absalom business all about?” and take your Bibles and start in with 2nd Samuel 13. It’s a story that has inspired other stories — I think of the novel Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner, which I’m sure some of you have read and I suspect others of you have not read (not yet; that would include me!).
The Absalom saga is a story about how we manage to mess up our lives by a series of bad
decisions. And the fact that they may have been well-intentioned at the time really doesn’t help. The roots of it are actually a consequence of the Bathsheba story; you may recall last Sunday we heard the prophet Nathan chew David out about his murder of Uriah the Hittite, and he said, “Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house.…Thus says the Lord: I will raise up trouble against you from within your own house.…” (In the movie the prophet Nathan was played by Raymond Massey, so you know this was serious business!) What goes around comes around, and it starts coming around when David’s son Amnon has the hots for his half-sister Tamar (his half-brother Absalom’s full sister). Well, the Hebrew text says he “loved” her, and that’s how it’s usually translated into English, but “had the hots for” seems to be more to the point, since it quickly becomes clear that “love” is not the issue. This is not a Sunday School Bible story, by the way. So if the kids would like to color on their bulletins for a while now, that might be a good idea. (We might also note that the folks who talk a lot about “the Biblical doctrine of marriage” might want to explain themselves a little more clearly.)
Anyway, Amnon manages to get Tamar up to his room, where he rapes her, and then in disgust throws her out. (The biblical scholar Phyllis Tickle includes this passage as one of the Bible’s “Texts of Terror.” Yes.) When King David finds out about this, he is very angry, but he — does nothing. Amnon is his firstborn and heir-apparent, the “crown prince.” And after all, David is hardly on the moral high ground, as you will recall from the last couple of weeks. Still: Absalom is not only enraged at his brother for having violated his sister, he is also deeply angry with his father for not doing anything about it. Absalom bides his time, but in due course he engineers Amnon’s murder, and then flees into exile. The story goes on; ultimately Absalom comes back to Jerusalem, but he is already plotting rebellion to dethrone and replace his father David. And by the time we get to today’s part of the story, Absalom is leading an open revolution; he declares himself king at Hebron (where David had originally become king in Saul’s place before his conquest of Jerusalem). David flees to the Jordan valley, and Absalom occupies Jerusalem. (There is a whole series of intriguing little subplots in connection with all this. This is not a simple story!)
Well, now, comes the great climactic battle. The royal army of David — apparently mostly men of Judah, David’s own tribe — defeat Absalom’s insurgents, apparently mostly Israelites from the northern tribes. (The tension between the northern tribes of Israel and the southern tribe of Judah goes back long before the division of the kingdom following the death of King Solomon.) Absalom himself gets his hair caught in a tree. We learned earlier [14:26] that Absalom had a magnificent head of hair, which he cut annually, and the hair trimmings weighed five pounds; so let this be a lesson for you boys: Get a haircut! (Not a problem for some of us.) But I digress. Absalom gets his hair caught in the branches of an oak tree as he rides under it (Israel in those days was heavily forested, before the loggers and the sheepherders over the centuries turned it into a desert; there’s an environmental lesson in that; but I digress again). Today’s reading leaves out a few verses of plot here; it’s actually David’s general and all-purpose hit-man Joab who first plunges three javelins into Absalom’s heart, before his flunkies finish him off. We might note that Joab has a long history of
being David’s hired gun: it was he who killed King Saul’s general Abner after the death of Saul; it was he who set up the death of Uriah the Hittite at David’s order. Joab was the guy whom David used to keep his own hands clean of blood. Now after the death of Absalom David can mourn the death of his son, in a scene which is well known, and deeply touching, the deep grief of a father who has lost his son — a grief which is, alas, not an unknown experience in any age. But we should also realize that David’s grief should not be taken completely at face value. In the chapter after today’s reading, Joab challenges David about this — he reminds me of Dr. Phil: “David, what were you thinking? We all just risked our lives to save your throne, and you’re whining about that faithless brat of a boy. Get over it!”
I said at the beginning that the Absalom saga is a story about how we manage to mess up our
lives by a series of bad decisions. And the fact that they may have been well-intentioned at the time really doesn’t help. I think this is the appeal of David especially among the figures of Jewish history recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures. A great leader, a hero, most certainly, but a very real and deeply flawed human being. Intensely devoted to the Lord God of Israel, and yet over and over he keeps finding ways to mess up — for which he must pay very high and painful prices. Just like us? Well, I hope that we are not just like him. But, alas, we too manage to mess up our lives by bad decisions, if usually, I hope, in less catastrophic ways. But in any case, I hope we understand that God is with us — God is with us even when we abandon him. God will not save us from our own consequences, as he did not save David. But God does not leave us. God stays with us. God weeps for us. God loves us.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Sermon -- 2 August 2009
PROPER 13 / 9 PENTECOST — 2 August 2009
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 a.m.
2 Sam 11:26-12:13a Ps 51:1-13 Eph 4:1-16 John 6:24-35
The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.
A few Sundays ago over at Trinity in Iowa City I was observing that one of the features of the Revised Common Lectionary that we are now following is that it takes the Old Testament readings seriously as stories, indeed our stories, not just as some kind of prophecy of the Gospel reading for the day. That’s fine. The downside of that is that sometimes the stories themselves are fairly long, and so we don’t always get the full picture in any one Sunday. The selection from Second Samuel this morning assumes we remember last Sunday’s reading. We have to recall that the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of David’s generals in the Israelite army, was named Bathsheba? Remember Bathsheba? Well, David had an affair with Bathsheba and got her pregnant, and then arranged to have her husband Uriah killed in battle against the Ammonites. But at the end of today’s reading the lectionary gnomes leave out the final part, another ten verses or so, after David confesses his sin: the Lord still punishes David by striking his and Bathsheba’s baby with a fatal illness. How just of God! (I’m not at all sure what the fundamentalists make of this story. I suspect that those who interpret the Bible strictly literally probably haven’t actually read it.) The story of David and Bathsheba was made into a fairly awful movie with Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward back when even I was very young. I’ve put it in my Netflix queue. So we’ll see!
I have absolutely no idea how to link this story with the Gospel today. But it’s an important story for its own sake.
In the Gospel we have been hearing about the feeding of the five thousand. The folks got fed last week, you recall, as we switched from St. Mark’s Gospel to the sixth chapter of St. John to hear his account of the feeding. (The feeding of the multitude is the only story, apart from the Passion narrative, that occurs in all four Gospels. Actually, it occurs six times in four Gospels. But I digress.) This Sunday we continue working through John’s sixth chapter, and we will keep that on for a few weeks yet, hearing Jesus' discourse about the Bread of Life, before going back to St. Mark at the end of the month.
So today the folks catch up with Jesus again after the feeding of the five thousand, and Jesus tells them, "You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves." (Not because you put your faith in the in-breaking Reign of God, but because you got your own perceived needs met.) "Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you." God does not always agree with us about what is really important, or about what we really need.
Well, then, the folks go on, "what must we do to perform the works of God?" And Jesus replies, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent."
Believe in Jesus. What's this about? I've come to the conclusion that "believing in Jesus" is one of the most misunderstood notions in the Bible. "Believing in Jesus" is not the same thing as assenting to certain doctrines about Jesus. I don't mean that doctrines about Jesus aren't important, or that what the Church teaches about Jesus isn't true, or that we shouldn't believe them. I just don't think that's what Jesus was talking about when he said, "Believe in me." I also don't think Jesus meant anything very much like, "Accept me as your personal savior." I don't mean that personal commitment to Jesus isn't vitally important, I just mean that I don't think Jesus intended to present himself as an object of religion. Being doctrinally correct, and having a personal relationship with a savior, however important they may be, can still be ways that we satisfy our own perceived needs rather than commit ourselves to God's cause. When Jesus says, "Believe in me," I think he means, "Believe in the message I am telling you, believe in the word I speak to you as God's Word, believe in the Kingdom of God which I am proclaiming and enacting among you, believe in me as the one who embodies God's Reign." To believe that Jesus is the true bread which gives life to the world - not just that "Jesus is the True Bread," but that the bread which gives real life to the world is indeed precisely that which Jesus proclaims and enacts and embodies, the loving sovereignty of the living God — to believe that Jesus is the true bread which gives life to the world is to commit ourselves to his pattern of life as true human life, to commit ourselves to his values, to his cause, to his vision, as the values and cause and vision of God, to commit ourselves to him precisely as the Way and the Truth and the Life.
Specifically how does all this play out? Well, that's what we're given this life to work out. I don't think there are any cheap or easy answers. I certainly think we need to question all those assumptions which self-servingly try to turn God into the provider for our own perceived needs. I am convinced that when God is really providing for us, God is giving us what we really need in order to share with our Lord in giving life to the world.
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 a.m.
2 Sam 11:26-12:13a Ps 51:1-13 Eph 4:1-16 John 6:24-35
The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.
A few Sundays ago over at Trinity in Iowa City I was observing that one of the features of the Revised Common Lectionary that we are now following is that it takes the Old Testament readings seriously as stories, indeed our stories, not just as some kind of prophecy of the Gospel reading for the day. That’s fine. The downside of that is that sometimes the stories themselves are fairly long, and so we don’t always get the full picture in any one Sunday. The selection from Second Samuel this morning assumes we remember last Sunday’s reading. We have to recall that the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of David’s generals in the Israelite army, was named Bathsheba? Remember Bathsheba? Well, David had an affair with Bathsheba and got her pregnant, and then arranged to have her husband Uriah killed in battle against the Ammonites. But at the end of today’s reading the lectionary gnomes leave out the final part, another ten verses or so, after David confesses his sin: the Lord still punishes David by striking his and Bathsheba’s baby with a fatal illness. How just of God! (I’m not at all sure what the fundamentalists make of this story. I suspect that those who interpret the Bible strictly literally probably haven’t actually read it.) The story of David and Bathsheba was made into a fairly awful movie with Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward back when even I was very young. I’ve put it in my Netflix queue. So we’ll see!
I have absolutely no idea how to link this story with the Gospel today. But it’s an important story for its own sake.
In the Gospel we have been hearing about the feeding of the five thousand. The folks got fed last week, you recall, as we switched from St. Mark’s Gospel to the sixth chapter of St. John to hear his account of the feeding. (The feeding of the multitude is the only story, apart from the Passion narrative, that occurs in all four Gospels. Actually, it occurs six times in four Gospels. But I digress.) This Sunday we continue working through John’s sixth chapter, and we will keep that on for a few weeks yet, hearing Jesus' discourse about the Bread of Life, before going back to St. Mark at the end of the month.
So today the folks catch up with Jesus again after the feeding of the five thousand, and Jesus tells them, "You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves." (Not because you put your faith in the in-breaking Reign of God, but because you got your own perceived needs met.) "Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you." God does not always agree with us about what is really important, or about what we really need.
Well, then, the folks go on, "what must we do to perform the works of God?" And Jesus replies, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent."
Believe in Jesus. What's this about? I've come to the conclusion that "believing in Jesus" is one of the most misunderstood notions in the Bible. "Believing in Jesus" is not the same thing as assenting to certain doctrines about Jesus. I don't mean that doctrines about Jesus aren't important, or that what the Church teaches about Jesus isn't true, or that we shouldn't believe them. I just don't think that's what Jesus was talking about when he said, "Believe in me." I also don't think Jesus meant anything very much like, "Accept me as your personal savior." I don't mean that personal commitment to Jesus isn't vitally important, I just mean that I don't think Jesus intended to present himself as an object of religion. Being doctrinally correct, and having a personal relationship with a savior, however important they may be, can still be ways that we satisfy our own perceived needs rather than commit ourselves to God's cause. When Jesus says, "Believe in me," I think he means, "Believe in the message I am telling you, believe in the word I speak to you as God's Word, believe in the Kingdom of God which I am proclaiming and enacting among you, believe in me as the one who embodies God's Reign." To believe that Jesus is the true bread which gives life to the world - not just that "Jesus is the True Bread," but that the bread which gives real life to the world is indeed precisely that which Jesus proclaims and enacts and embodies, the loving sovereignty of the living God — to believe that Jesus is the true bread which gives life to the world is to commit ourselves to his pattern of life as true human life, to commit ourselves to his values, to his cause, to his vision, as the values and cause and vision of God, to commit ourselves to him precisely as the Way and the Truth and the Life.
Specifically how does all this play out? Well, that's what we're given this life to work out. I don't think there are any cheap or easy answers. I certainly think we need to question all those assumptions which self-servingly try to turn God into the provider for our own perceived needs. I am convinced that when God is really providing for us, God is giving us what we really need in order to share with our Lord in giving life to the world.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Sermons -- 21 June 2009
PROPER 7 | 3RD PENTECOST — 21 June 2009
Trinity, Iowa City — 7:45 & 11:00 am
[Track One] 1Sam 17:32-49 | Ps 9:9-20 | 2Cor 6:1-13 | Mark 4:35-41
“This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army this very day to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth, so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.”
I’ve told this story before in other contexts — I don’t remember whether I’ve told it to you. Many years ago (!) I saw an advertisement in a church magazine from a publisher of Christian Education curriculum material. And in the ad there was a very cute little boy running and waving the paper he had colored, and shouting, “Mommy! Today in Sunday School we learned how to kill a giant with a slingshot!”
Well. The point of the advertisement, as I recall, is that this is not the approach this publisher takes in their Sunday School curriculum. (And I feel quite confident that this is not the approach that Meg and her staff take in our parish’s Christian Formation program!)
Nevertheless, here it is in the first reading from Scripture this morning. Actually, it gets even better. The Revised Common Lectionary gnomes apparently figured that this story had gone on long enough (you’ll note that we left out a bunch of verses at the beginning as it is!), but if it had gone on for a couple more verses we would have gotten: “So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone, striking down the Philistine and killing him; there was no sword in David’s hand. Then David ran and stood over the Philistine; he grasped his [the Philistine’s] sword, drew it out of its sheath, and killed him; then he cut off his head with it. When the Philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled.” [vv. 50-51]
As the Church Lady used to say, “Well, isn’t that special?”
I think most of you are aware — well, some of you are aware — and perhaps there are a few of you who even care! (and that’s okay!) — that for the past few years on Sundays we have been reading the Scripture lessons according to the Revised Common Lectionary, a plan or schedule of the Sunday readings over a three-year period which is widely used by many churches around the world, ecumenically, not just Anglicans. Generally speaking, it’s not very different from the previous three-year lectionary that has been in the Book of Common Prayer for the last thirty years and which was based more or less on the Roman lectionary. But one respect in which the Revised Common Lectionary is a bit different shows up in the “Green” half of the church year, from Trinity Sunday to Advent, when there is the option for the readings from the Hebrew Scriptures to follow stories in sequence. We call them “course readings.” We’ve been doing this all along with the Gospel readings — last year we read Matthew, this year we’re reading Mark, next year we’ll read Luke, and John is read in all three years, especially during Lent and Eastertide. We’ve also been doing it with the Epistle readings — we’re currently reading our way through Second Corinthians, which we will continue for a couple more weeks, and then we’ll read Ephesians for a while. This summer for the Old Testament reading we basically hear the King David saga. Last year it was the Patriarchal stories and the Moses saga from Genesis and Exodus; next year it will be the history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah up until the exile to Babylonia; and later in the fall of these years we also get some further selections from the Prophets (from whom we hear a lot during the first half of the year) and from the Hebrew Wisdom literature (like Proverbs and Job).
Well, why do we do this? I think there has been a concern that we have been missing out on much of the story of God and God’s people in what we call the Old Testament. We’ve been reading from the Old Testament every Sunday for over thirty years, but they have been selections that are usually keyed to the Gospel reading and often lose their original context. Well, in itself that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and in fact Track Two of the Revised Common Lectionary still does that, like our previous lectionary and that of the Romans. But it is thought, and I think, that it is important on a regular basis that we actually get the story of the Chosen People straight, without any specific relation to the other readings of the day. And so today we get David killing Goliath and cutting off his head. (Well, it’s an important part of the story of God’s People! That is, it is our own story!)
And one of the reasons why it is important for us to know our story is so that we can understand our story — who we are as God’s People, where we came from, where we have been, how we got to where we are now, the stories we have heard and told along the way, what meanings they may have for us, and what God is continuing to call us to be and to do, especially through these stories.
So it’s a good thing, I think, that the Church is now encouraging us to actually read these stories which are in a sense the pre-history of Christ, to read them as stories and not just out-of-context snippets that are presumably somehow related to the Sunday Gospel reading (which is what we’ve been doing for the last thirty years!) The downside of this of course is that some of these stories are fairly long, as stories often are, and you’ll note that even today we omitted a chunk. Oh well. Take your bulletins home and get out your Bible and re-read each Sunday’s story and include a couple more chapters on each side! And experience them as the stories of God’s People — as our stories — but not as God’s News Bulletin downloaded from On High, because they’re not that. (The message of today’s first reading is not that God wants us to go and behead any giant Philistines we encounter! Not even with a slingshot!)
I think we understand that from the Scriptures we learn about God and who God is and what God desires for us. But remember that the foundation and the starting point is Jesus: We know God first of all as the Father of Jesus Christ. We often didn’t get that right before Jesus, which is one of the reasons why God became Incarnate in Christ. (Sadly, we haven’t always gotten it right even after Jesus, either, but that’s our own fault.) Let us pray that the more deeply we study the Gospels, and also the Epistles, the deeper will be our insight into God’s actions in the history and the stories and the poetry of the Hebrew Testament.
PROPER 7 | 3RD PENTECOST — 21 June 2009
Trinity, Iowa City — 8:45 am
2Cor 6:1-13 Ps 9:9-20 Mark 4:35-41
“Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
Have you ever been in a situation where you were really afraid? Especially, really afraid for your life? I’m sure that some of you have been, and I don’t want to suggest anything that would diminish the profound reality of that experience for you. (Other than to say, I’m certainly glad you’re still here!) Military combat, or a terrible auto accident (or even a near-accident for a few terrifying moments), or — well, you have your own story and I won’t presume to try to tell it for you.
I’ve been lucky, I guess. The only really scary moment I can recall was when I was a small boy (small enough that I can’t clearly remember just when or where this was). My family was participating in a group picnic at what I remember as being a state or a county park (it wasn’t like City Park). I think maybe it was an office picnic for the company my father worked for, and so I didn’t know any of the people and they didn’t know me. (This makes me fairly certain it wasn’t a parish picnic.) Apparently the picnic was over and it was time to go home, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t know where my parents were. I didn’t see them anywhere. I ran all over the picnic ground, where all the families were packing up to leave, and I didn’t see my father or my mother anywhere. I was lost! I was afraid I would be left behind, and they would be able to find me, and I didn’t know how to get home! I had been abandoned! I was in a panic for what seemed like hours! Well, of course it was really only two or three minutes, I suppose, and then I saw my dad coming back from the parking lot to look for me. How relieved I was! I suppose they had gone to put away our picnic stuff and didn’t notice that I wasn’t tagging along. (And my mother needed to put my sister, who is several years younger than I am, probably a toddler at the time, in the car. Alas, no, we didn’t have infant car seats in those days, or even car seat belts.)
Hmm. Reminds me a little of the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple. (But Jesus wasn’t panicked, it was Mary and Joseph who were panicked.) “Oh — were you looking for me?” Jesus may have been the Incarnate God, but he must have been a handful for his mother. But I digress.
In the Gospel today, Jesus has been sitting in a boat just offshore a few yards, teaching the people in parables about the Kingdom of God. (You remember that we heard a couple of these stories in the Gospel last week.) And at the end of the day Jesus says, “Let’s go over across the lake.” It doesn’t say whose boat it was — since the disciples were with him, we can presume that it was Peter and Andrew’s boat, but it doesn’t say so. And “other boats were with him” but we never hear anything more about them. Presumably they included James and John’s boat, but it doesn’t say that either, and we don’t know what happened to them in the storm, but apparently everybody ended up safe over on the eastern shore, although it doesn’t say so! Mark tends to start stories with bits and pieces of details that he forgets to finish. He could have used an editor! Oh, that’s right — he had one. Matthew. But I digress. Again.
Telling parables of the Kingdom is apparently hard work, and Jesus falls asleep in the boat. Even when a storm comes up. The disciples — at least some of them, Peter and Andrew and James and John at least — were skilled and experienced fishermen, and we can fairly assume that this storm was a pretty serious business, as I’m told storms on the Sea of Galilee can be. So they are madly bailing out the boat and not making much headway, and they say, “Master, you’re not helping!” or words to that effect. So Jesus gets up and calms the wind and the sea. (I haven’t figured out yet whether Jesus said, “Peace! Be still!” or whether he said, “Oh, peace, just be still.”) And the disciples were filled with great awe and said to one another, “What was that all about?” or words to that effect.
Our lives may encounter great storms, too, even if we don’t go boating on the Sea of Galilee. Or even on the Coralville Reservoir. They may be physical storms — floods or tornadoes, just to name a couple of recent local instances. Or financial storms, or professional storms, or storms within our families, or storms within our own hearts (and sometimes, especially, all of the above). And we cry out in our hearts, or even aloud, “Lord, do you not care that we are perishing?” And maybe the storm abates — and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s still raging. Is Jesus still sleeping? I don’t have any quick or cheap responses to that.
Jesus asks his disciples in the boat, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” Not, I think, “Didn’t you believe that I would keep you safe from drowning?” but “Didn’t you have faith that as long as you are with me nothing else really matters?”
We look for answers, but I’m not so sure that God always gives us an answer, not the kind of answer we’re looking for. God is not a divine vending machine, into whom we deposit our spiritual coins and wait for the desired response to come down the chute. God is a divine companion and our final lover. What God says is, “I who made you am with you always. Therefore whatever befalls you in this life, nothing can harm you forever; and in the end I shall make all things new.”
Trinity, Iowa City — 7:45 & 11:00 am
[Track One] 1Sam 17:32-49 | Ps 9:9-20 | 2Cor 6:1-13 | Mark 4:35-41
“This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army this very day to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth, so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.”
I’ve told this story before in other contexts — I don’t remember whether I’ve told it to you. Many years ago (!) I saw an advertisement in a church magazine from a publisher of Christian Education curriculum material. And in the ad there was a very cute little boy running and waving the paper he had colored, and shouting, “Mommy! Today in Sunday School we learned how to kill a giant with a slingshot!”
Well. The point of the advertisement, as I recall, is that this is not the approach this publisher takes in their Sunday School curriculum. (And I feel quite confident that this is not the approach that Meg and her staff take in our parish’s Christian Formation program!)
Nevertheless, here it is in the first reading from Scripture this morning. Actually, it gets even better. The Revised Common Lectionary gnomes apparently figured that this story had gone on long enough (you’ll note that we left out a bunch of verses at the beginning as it is!), but if it had gone on for a couple more verses we would have gotten: “So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone, striking down the Philistine and killing him; there was no sword in David’s hand. Then David ran and stood over the Philistine; he grasped his [the Philistine’s] sword, drew it out of its sheath, and killed him; then he cut off his head with it. When the Philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled.” [vv. 50-51]
As the Church Lady used to say, “Well, isn’t that special?”
I think most of you are aware — well, some of you are aware — and perhaps there are a few of you who even care! (and that’s okay!) — that for the past few years on Sundays we have been reading the Scripture lessons according to the Revised Common Lectionary, a plan or schedule of the Sunday readings over a three-year period which is widely used by many churches around the world, ecumenically, not just Anglicans. Generally speaking, it’s not very different from the previous three-year lectionary that has been in the Book of Common Prayer for the last thirty years and which was based more or less on the Roman lectionary. But one respect in which the Revised Common Lectionary is a bit different shows up in the “Green” half of the church year, from Trinity Sunday to Advent, when there is the option for the readings from the Hebrew Scriptures to follow stories in sequence. We call them “course readings.” We’ve been doing this all along with the Gospel readings — last year we read Matthew, this year we’re reading Mark, next year we’ll read Luke, and John is read in all three years, especially during Lent and Eastertide. We’ve also been doing it with the Epistle readings — we’re currently reading our way through Second Corinthians, which we will continue for a couple more weeks, and then we’ll read Ephesians for a while. This summer for the Old Testament reading we basically hear the King David saga. Last year it was the Patriarchal stories and the Moses saga from Genesis and Exodus; next year it will be the history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah up until the exile to Babylonia; and later in the fall of these years we also get some further selections from the Prophets (from whom we hear a lot during the first half of the year) and from the Hebrew Wisdom literature (like Proverbs and Job).
Well, why do we do this? I think there has been a concern that we have been missing out on much of the story of God and God’s people in what we call the Old Testament. We’ve been reading from the Old Testament every Sunday for over thirty years, but they have been selections that are usually keyed to the Gospel reading and often lose their original context. Well, in itself that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and in fact Track Two of the Revised Common Lectionary still does that, like our previous lectionary and that of the Romans. But it is thought, and I think, that it is important on a regular basis that we actually get the story of the Chosen People straight, without any specific relation to the other readings of the day. And so today we get David killing Goliath and cutting off his head. (Well, it’s an important part of the story of God’s People! That is, it is our own story!)
And one of the reasons why it is important for us to know our story is so that we can understand our story — who we are as God’s People, where we came from, where we have been, how we got to where we are now, the stories we have heard and told along the way, what meanings they may have for us, and what God is continuing to call us to be and to do, especially through these stories.
So it’s a good thing, I think, that the Church is now encouraging us to actually read these stories which are in a sense the pre-history of Christ, to read them as stories and not just out-of-context snippets that are presumably somehow related to the Sunday Gospel reading (which is what we’ve been doing for the last thirty years!) The downside of this of course is that some of these stories are fairly long, as stories often are, and you’ll note that even today we omitted a chunk. Oh well. Take your bulletins home and get out your Bible and re-read each Sunday’s story and include a couple more chapters on each side! And experience them as the stories of God’s People — as our stories — but not as God’s News Bulletin downloaded from On High, because they’re not that. (The message of today’s first reading is not that God wants us to go and behead any giant Philistines we encounter! Not even with a slingshot!)
I think we understand that from the Scriptures we learn about God and who God is and what God desires for us. But remember that the foundation and the starting point is Jesus: We know God first of all as the Father of Jesus Christ. We often didn’t get that right before Jesus, which is one of the reasons why God became Incarnate in Christ. (Sadly, we haven’t always gotten it right even after Jesus, either, but that’s our own fault.) Let us pray that the more deeply we study the Gospels, and also the Epistles, the deeper will be our insight into God’s actions in the history and the stories and the poetry of the Hebrew Testament.
PROPER 7 | 3RD PENTECOST — 21 June 2009
Trinity, Iowa City — 8:45 am
2Cor 6:1-13 Ps 9:9-20 Mark 4:35-41
“Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
Have you ever been in a situation where you were really afraid? Especially, really afraid for your life? I’m sure that some of you have been, and I don’t want to suggest anything that would diminish the profound reality of that experience for you. (Other than to say, I’m certainly glad you’re still here!) Military combat, or a terrible auto accident (or even a near-accident for a few terrifying moments), or — well, you have your own story and I won’t presume to try to tell it for you.
I’ve been lucky, I guess. The only really scary moment I can recall was when I was a small boy (small enough that I can’t clearly remember just when or where this was). My family was participating in a group picnic at what I remember as being a state or a county park (it wasn’t like City Park). I think maybe it was an office picnic for the company my father worked for, and so I didn’t know any of the people and they didn’t know me. (This makes me fairly certain it wasn’t a parish picnic.) Apparently the picnic was over and it was time to go home, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t know where my parents were. I didn’t see them anywhere. I ran all over the picnic ground, where all the families were packing up to leave, and I didn’t see my father or my mother anywhere. I was lost! I was afraid I would be left behind, and they would be able to find me, and I didn’t know how to get home! I had been abandoned! I was in a panic for what seemed like hours! Well, of course it was really only two or three minutes, I suppose, and then I saw my dad coming back from the parking lot to look for me. How relieved I was! I suppose they had gone to put away our picnic stuff and didn’t notice that I wasn’t tagging along. (And my mother needed to put my sister, who is several years younger than I am, probably a toddler at the time, in the car. Alas, no, we didn’t have infant car seats in those days, or even car seat belts.)
Hmm. Reminds me a little of the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple. (But Jesus wasn’t panicked, it was Mary and Joseph who were panicked.) “Oh — were you looking for me?” Jesus may have been the Incarnate God, but he must have been a handful for his mother. But I digress.
In the Gospel today, Jesus has been sitting in a boat just offshore a few yards, teaching the people in parables about the Kingdom of God. (You remember that we heard a couple of these stories in the Gospel last week.) And at the end of the day Jesus says, “Let’s go over across the lake.” It doesn’t say whose boat it was — since the disciples were with him, we can presume that it was Peter and Andrew’s boat, but it doesn’t say so. And “other boats were with him” but we never hear anything more about them. Presumably they included James and John’s boat, but it doesn’t say that either, and we don’t know what happened to them in the storm, but apparently everybody ended up safe over on the eastern shore, although it doesn’t say so! Mark tends to start stories with bits and pieces of details that he forgets to finish. He could have used an editor! Oh, that’s right — he had one. Matthew. But I digress. Again.
Telling parables of the Kingdom is apparently hard work, and Jesus falls asleep in the boat. Even when a storm comes up. The disciples — at least some of them, Peter and Andrew and James and John at least — were skilled and experienced fishermen, and we can fairly assume that this storm was a pretty serious business, as I’m told storms on the Sea of Galilee can be. So they are madly bailing out the boat and not making much headway, and they say, “Master, you’re not helping!” or words to that effect. So Jesus gets up and calms the wind and the sea. (I haven’t figured out yet whether Jesus said, “Peace! Be still!” or whether he said, “Oh, peace, just be still.”) And the disciples were filled with great awe and said to one another, “What was that all about?” or words to that effect.
Our lives may encounter great storms, too, even if we don’t go boating on the Sea of Galilee. Or even on the Coralville Reservoir. They may be physical storms — floods or tornadoes, just to name a couple of recent local instances. Or financial storms, or professional storms, or storms within our families, or storms within our own hearts (and sometimes, especially, all of the above). And we cry out in our hearts, or even aloud, “Lord, do you not care that we are perishing?” And maybe the storm abates — and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s still raging. Is Jesus still sleeping? I don’t have any quick or cheap responses to that.
Jesus asks his disciples in the boat, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” Not, I think, “Didn’t you believe that I would keep you safe from drowning?” but “Didn’t you have faith that as long as you are with me nothing else really matters?”
We look for answers, but I’m not so sure that God always gives us an answer, not the kind of answer we’re looking for. God is not a divine vending machine, into whom we deposit our spiritual coins and wait for the desired response to come down the chute. God is a divine companion and our final lover. What God says is, “I who made you am with you always. Therefore whatever befalls you in this life, nothing can harm you forever; and in the end I shall make all things new.”
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Sermon -- 14 June 2009
PROPER 6 / 2ND PENTECOST — 14 June 2009
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 am
1 Sam 15:34-16:13 | Ps 30 | 2 Cor 5:6-17 | Mark 4:26-34
“With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?”
This may have occurred to you at some time, though I suspect most people (other people, not us, of course!) have never given it any thought and would find the idea quite surprising: Jesus was not particularly religious. Now, let me be clear: it is obvious from the Gospels that Jesus prayed; in fact, he prayed a lot. Apparently he often went off by himself, up a hill or whatever, and spent the whole night in prayer with his Father. Sometimes his followers would find him and interrupt him because there were people who wanted, for instance, healing and who needed his attention, and he always gave it. And obviously Jesus talked a lot about God. But most of what he said about God really wasn’t very what-we-would-call “religious.” One of the reasons why the Pharisees disliked Jesus so much was that he was clearly not as religious as they were. And that’s true!
In fact, the words that we translate into English as “religion” or “religious” occur very rarely in the New Testament, and not in a very positive sense. For example, in the Epistle of James he writes: “Religion [I’m actually tempted to suggest that James is putting quotes around the word: “Religion”] — “'Religion’ that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” [James 1:27] True “religion” has to do with love and justice and integrity.
Another place where the word “religion” occurs in the English bible is in the Acts of the Apostles, where Paul is preaching in Athens, and he says “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” [Acts 17:22] He says this with a straight face, but I suspect with his tongue in his cheek a bit. In this case the Greek word is not the same one James uses, but a word that can reasonably be translated “superstitious.” And Paul goes on to say, “I am here to tell you about the real God, the Lord of heaven and earth” — not, he implies, the deity of human religion.
Later on in Acts, Paul says in his self-defense before Agrippa and Festus: “I have belonged to the strictest sect of our religion and lived as a Pharisee.” [Acts 26:5] (The Greek is the same word that James used in his letter.)
And that’s pretty much about it for “religion” in the New Testament. The word never appears in the Gospels. The word only becomes common as denotative of Christianity later on, after the Church had spread out into the Empire and particularly after Latin become the dominant language of Western Christianity.
Jesus does not talk about “religion.” Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God. Typically he begins by saying something like “The Kingdom of God is like this:” and then he tells a story, or paints a little word-picture. (“Parable” has a fairly broad definition.) Jesus’ parables are not particularly “religious” — mostly they depict situations or activities from normal everyday life. But they are designed “to get you thinking,” to present “a different perspective” on some aspect of life that we thought we were very familiar with. They provide an insight into the Kingdom of God.
Okay, having tromped around on the meaning of “religion” for a few minutes, now let’s tromp around on the meaning of “Kingdom,” specifically when we are talking about the “Kingdom of God.” We have a tendency, especially given the fact that culturally if perhaps not ethnically we are to a fair extent British by history, to think of “kingdom” as a political or geographical entity, as in “the United Kingdom” (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland). A “kingdom” is a place, and that place is ruled by someone called a king. Or, in the case of Britain for the last 57 years, a queen. (Did you know that the longest-reigning monarchs of England have been queens? — Elizabeth I, Victoria, and Elizabeth II. At least until you get back to the Plantagenet kings Henry III and Edward III. But I digress.) But actually, it works the other way: The king comes first, and then his sovereignty, his reign, his rule, his kingship, may be referred to as his “kingdom.” In the Biblical languages, beginning with the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and continuing in the related language Aramaic that Jesus actually spoke, and true also in the Greek into which Jesus’ teachings were quickly translated, the words that we are likely to translate into English as “kingdom” actually have the sense of “kingship,” or “kingly rule,” or “sovereign reign.” The sense is more personal and relational than geographic or political.
So the Kingdom of God is not some place, some other place, especially not some other place in some other time, a time yet to come. But, as Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is within you” (you plural) or “among you.” {Luke 17.21] Jesus told Pilate, “My kingship is not a merely worldly kingdom — it’s nothing at all like Caesar’s empire.” [John 18:36] The Kingdom of God is now; the Kingdom of God is here! All we have to do is to open our eyes to it, to open our hearts to it, to follow Jesus who leads us into it, here and now. Jesus did not say, “Come join my church” (although in due course that might be appropriate!). Jesus said, “Follow me!” Jesus still says “Follow me!” Follow me into God’s Kingship! This is what the Gospel, the Good News, really is: That the God who created us loves us and wants us to share God’s love with one another, and to share in the building and spreading of the Kingship of God throughout God’s World.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Jesus did not say “I have come that you may have religion, and have it abundantly.” Jesus said, “I have come that you may have life — life in God’s Kingship — and have it to the full.” [John 10:10b]
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 am
1 Sam 15:34-16:13 | Ps 30 | 2 Cor 5:6-17 | Mark 4:26-34
“With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?”
This may have occurred to you at some time, though I suspect most people (other people, not us, of course!) have never given it any thought and would find the idea quite surprising: Jesus was not particularly religious. Now, let me be clear: it is obvious from the Gospels that Jesus prayed; in fact, he prayed a lot. Apparently he often went off by himself, up a hill or whatever, and spent the whole night in prayer with his Father. Sometimes his followers would find him and interrupt him because there were people who wanted, for instance, healing and who needed his attention, and he always gave it. And obviously Jesus talked a lot about God. But most of what he said about God really wasn’t very what-we-would-call “religious.” One of the reasons why the Pharisees disliked Jesus so much was that he was clearly not as religious as they were. And that’s true!
In fact, the words that we translate into English as “religion” or “religious” occur very rarely in the New Testament, and not in a very positive sense. For example, in the Epistle of James he writes: “Religion [I’m actually tempted to suggest that James is putting quotes around the word: “Religion”] — “'Religion’ that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” [James 1:27] True “religion” has to do with love and justice and integrity.
Another place where the word “religion” occurs in the English bible is in the Acts of the Apostles, where Paul is preaching in Athens, and he says “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” [Acts 17:22] He says this with a straight face, but I suspect with his tongue in his cheek a bit. In this case the Greek word is not the same one James uses, but a word that can reasonably be translated “superstitious.” And Paul goes on to say, “I am here to tell you about the real God, the Lord of heaven and earth” — not, he implies, the deity of human religion.
Later on in Acts, Paul says in his self-defense before Agrippa and Festus: “I have belonged to the strictest sect of our religion and lived as a Pharisee.” [Acts 26:5] (The Greek is the same word that James used in his letter.)
And that’s pretty much about it for “religion” in the New Testament. The word never appears in the Gospels. The word only becomes common as denotative of Christianity later on, after the Church had spread out into the Empire and particularly after Latin become the dominant language of Western Christianity.
Jesus does not talk about “religion.” Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God. Typically he begins by saying something like “The Kingdom of God is like this:” and then he tells a story, or paints a little word-picture. (“Parable” has a fairly broad definition.) Jesus’ parables are not particularly “religious” — mostly they depict situations or activities from normal everyday life. But they are designed “to get you thinking,” to present “a different perspective” on some aspect of life that we thought we were very familiar with. They provide an insight into the Kingdom of God.
Okay, having tromped around on the meaning of “religion” for a few minutes, now let’s tromp around on the meaning of “Kingdom,” specifically when we are talking about the “Kingdom of God.” We have a tendency, especially given the fact that culturally if perhaps not ethnically we are to a fair extent British by history, to think of “kingdom” as a political or geographical entity, as in “the United Kingdom” (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland). A “kingdom” is a place, and that place is ruled by someone called a king. Or, in the case of Britain for the last 57 years, a queen. (Did you know that the longest-reigning monarchs of England have been queens? — Elizabeth I, Victoria, and Elizabeth II. At least until you get back to the Plantagenet kings Henry III and Edward III. But I digress.) But actually, it works the other way: The king comes first, and then his sovereignty, his reign, his rule, his kingship, may be referred to as his “kingdom.” In the Biblical languages, beginning with the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and continuing in the related language Aramaic that Jesus actually spoke, and true also in the Greek into which Jesus’ teachings were quickly translated, the words that we are likely to translate into English as “kingdom” actually have the sense of “kingship,” or “kingly rule,” or “sovereign reign.” The sense is more personal and relational than geographic or political.
So the Kingdom of God is not some place, some other place, especially not some other place in some other time, a time yet to come. But, as Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is within you” (you plural) or “among you.” {Luke 17.21] Jesus told Pilate, “My kingship is not a merely worldly kingdom — it’s nothing at all like Caesar’s empire.” [John 18:36] The Kingdom of God is now; the Kingdom of God is here! All we have to do is to open our eyes to it, to open our hearts to it, to follow Jesus who leads us into it, here and now. Jesus did not say, “Come join my church” (although in due course that might be appropriate!). Jesus said, “Follow me!” Jesus still says “Follow me!” Follow me into God’s Kingship! This is what the Gospel, the Good News, really is: That the God who created us loves us and wants us to share God’s love with one another, and to share in the building and spreading of the Kingship of God throughout God’s World.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Jesus did not say “I have come that you may have religion, and have it abundantly.” Jesus said, “I have come that you may have life — life in God’s Kingship — and have it to the full.” [John 10:10b]
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