PALM SUNDAY — 24 March 2013
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls – 9:15 am
Luke 19:28-40 | Psalm 118:1-2,19-29
Isaiah 50:4-9a | Psalm 31:9-16 | Philippians 2:5-11 | Luke 22:39-23:49
One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
The story of the penitent thief is unique to St. Luke’s Gospel. The other three Gospels do not mention it, although they do all record that Jesus was crucified with two other men. That all four Gospels mention this is a pretty clear indication that the triple crucifixion at Golgotha that day comes from very early tradition, i.e., there’s no reason to think it didn’t actually happen that way. But only St. Luke tells of the penitent thief. Is it possible that Luke knew something, had access to a story, which the other evangelists did not? Sure. Is that likely? Well…. Luke, like the other three evangelists, and also like Hellenistic historians generally, is certainly willing to tell a story to make a theological point. So what’s up with this story?
First of all, in this story, we have over the ages easily slipped into thinking that this is about a penitent thief (for whom we invented the name “Dismas” along about the fourth century) and his colleague, an impenitent thief. Well, that’s not what the Gospel says, and certainly not what it means. These two guys may well have been thieves, but that’s really incidental. They weren’t being crucified for mere thievery. The Romans couldn’t be bothered with petty crimes. They would have left that up to the local Jewish authorities, who would indeed have dealt with them. Crucifixion was the penalty for political offenses, and was reserved – to the extent that the Romans were ever “reserved” about crucifying people – for major threats to the Pax Romanum when the Romans wanted to make a public point. So it’s probably safe to assume that these two guys were anti-Roman revolutionaries. Today we might call them terrorists.
Matthew and Mark call them by a word that today we often translate as “bandit” [lêistês], although we should understand that as having clear political overtones. Luke uses a simple Greek word [kakourgos] that means literally “evil-doer,” and today’s translation as “criminal” isn’t far off. (St. John just calls them “the other two guys.”) Now here’s a pure speculation, but maybe I’m right: A little earlier in St. Mark’s version of the story, Mark writes, “Now a man called Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection.” Barabbas, of course, was released by Pilate at the instigation of the high priests’ claque, but it may be that the other rebels with him may have been these two guys who were now being crucified together with Jesus. This leaves us with the picture of three Jewish insurgents being marched out to Golgotha for crucifixion, except that as a substitute for their leader Barabbas, instead we see the prophet Jesus of Nazareth. That may be worth some meditation.
Remember that these two guys aren’t just crooks. If C-4 had been invented in those days, one can well imagine them strapping some around their waists and walking into the Roman barracks in the Antonia fortress. But as it was, whatever they did, they got caught at it. And I think the only thing they were really sorry about was that they got caught. These two saw themselves as patriots, as Jewish freedom fighters. Already full of years of anger about the oppression of their people, they are now enraged by their own failure. Presumably they knew, or at least had some vague idea, of who this Jesus of Nazareth was. They may even have hoped that he would be one of them, that if he was indeed the Messiah he would lead a popular uprising to restore the independence of Israel. But obviously not. “So, ‘Messiah,’ if that’s who say you are, wouldn’t now be a good time to get on with it, and save us in the process!”
But, says St. Luke, the second guy has a deeper perception.
(Please forgive me for a brief digression here: Luke is writing, probably, towards the end of the first century, well after the fall of Jerusalem to the Roman legions in 70. He is also writing, probably, to a Gentile or predominantly Gentile Christian readership, likely in Greece or maybe even in Rome (including his dedicatee Theophilus). The Jewish war of independence is many years past. The Jews lost. The Romans won. Get over it. Many of the political dimensions of the proclamation of the Kingdom of God that were still live issues when St. Mark’s Gospel was being written are now dead embers best not stirred up. Therefore the two insurrectionists crucified with Jesus are now depoliticized as just “criminals,” “malefactors,” "evildoers," as indeed also is Barabbas in a brief earlier reference. We might keep that in mind as we reflect on the man we call the “penitent thief.” End of digression.)
“Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Thus says the second guy. But let’s consider. In the event, “fearing God’ is not really likely to have been at issue. These guys ended up on Roman crosses precisely because they “feared God,” or at least that’s what they thought they were doing. Their hero was Judas Maccabeus, after all. They didn’t think their condemnation was at all just, nor did they deserve it. They just had the bad luck to have been caught by the Romans. The worst-case scenario for them would have been that God had abandoned them; they too like Jesus could have quoted the opening verse of Psalm 22. “This man has done nothing wrong”? According to whom? In Luke’s account, after Jesus dies the Roman centurion says, “Certainly this man was innocent.” No he wasn’t! The sign over his head said “The King of the Jews,” and that was treason, and then some: Jesus in fact is the King of the World, and Caesar wasn’t having any of that! In St. Mark’s earlier version, you may remember, the centurion says, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” (Or as John Wayne put it, “Truly this man was the Son o’ God!”) That was not so much a Christological statement as it was the recognition that after all, this Jesus is Lord, and therefore Caesar isn’t. A significantly gutsy remark in the mouth of a Roman centurion, even John Wayne! But within a Roman context, Luke can’t exactly put it that way. He has to appeal to the Roman sense of justice (never mind that “Roman justice” is part of the problem!). But I think Luke hints at it pretty broadly when he has the second insurgent say. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He’s not, I think, being ironic. This fellow actually does repent. But his confession is not so much “I’ve been a bad guy,” but “I’ve been wrong about the Kingdom of God. We thought we could restore God’s Kingdom to Israel by violence, but that was a huge mistake. Now I finally see who God’s Anointed One really is – the one who brings good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, God’s justice to the oppressed. [Luke 4:18-19; Isaiah 61:1-2] I finally get it about your true Kingdom; Jesus, remember me when it comes!” And Jesus replies, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”
By the way, I don’t think Jesus means, “I’m going to take you to Heaven with me in a few minutes when we die.” “Paradise” is a Greek (originally a Persian) word for “garden,” God’s garden, where God’s faithful people await the fullness of the Kingdom in the resurrection. It seems to me that what Jesus is getting at here is to assure his fellow, “God’s Kingdom which I have proclaimed and enacted, and even in this very moment am proclaiming and enacting – this Kingdom is not just yet to come sometime in the future, but in an important sense is coming and is here right now, and you are with me beginning here and now sharing in and awaiting the fullness of the victory of this Kingdom, for which you have longed so fervently if not so wisely.”
Many years ago, a colleague and friend of mine made this statement about Palm Sunday, and Holy Week, and it has always stuck with me: “It begins with a defeat that looks for all the world like a victory, [and] moves on to a victory that appears to everyone to be a defeat.” St. Luke understood what was defeat and what was victory, and he shares this with us in the Palm Gospel and the Passion Gospel today.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Sunday, February 24, 2013
24 February 2013 -- 2nd Sunday in Lent
2ND SUNDAY IN LENT — 24 February 2013
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:15 a.m.
Genesis 15:1-12;17-18 | Psalm 27 | Phil. 3:17-4:1 | Luke 13:31-35
“For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.…their minds are on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”
I think we’re all aware of the distinction we commonly make, specifically in a religious or spiritual context, and even more particularly in a Christian context, between “heaven” and “earth.” To take perhaps the most obvious example, we pray — not only every Sunday morning but I hope a number of times in every day — in the words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” But what do we mean by that? Well, there is a variety of things we could mean, and do mean, when we talk about “heaven” and “earth.” But I suspect that for lots of us lots of the time, the default meaning is something like, “Heaven is ‘up there’ somewhere, and that’s where God lives, and earth is ‘down here’ and this is where we live. And further, earth is ‘now,’ whereas heaven, at least to the extent that it includes us, is “then,” “someday,” “in the sweet by and by.”
Perhaps you have already suspected that I suggest that this is not what St. Paul means in today’s Epistle, nor is it what Jesus means when he talks about the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God (which are essentially equivalent phrases).
You perhaps noticed that the Epistle this morning is from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Philippi was a city in northeastern Greece, named after King Philip of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) who founded it in the fourth century B.C. It languished for a time, but was re-established by Octavian, shortly to become Caesar Augustus, Emperor of the Roman Empire, in the 30’s B.C. He used it as a colony to settle retired legionnaires — a form of military pension — and part of what made this a good deal for these army veterans was that they all were granted Roman citizenship, a status which had a variety of political, social, and economic advantages, even though they did not actually live in the city of Rome. Philippi was organized as a “miniature Rome,” a mini-version of the imperial capital, as it were a colony of Rome.
Well, now, that was a fascinating excursus into ancient history! (And now let’s move out of Sheldon Cooper mode…) I think this underlies Paul’s remark to the Philippian Christians, “But our citizenship is in heaven.” Now for the people of Philippi, “Roman citizenship” was a big deal. It gave them an important identity, even though they did not live in central Italy but in northeastern Greece. A major event in the life of one of these Roman colony-cities would be when the Roman Emperor came to visit them. (Although I can’t find any indication of whether Augustus or any of his successors as Emperor actually did visit this city.) And we might note that it was not the Emperor’s intention in granting Roman citizenship to the veterans settled in Philippi that they should ever retire back to Rome – he really did not want them to do that! – but to bring Roman culture to northern Greece as Roman colonists.
But Paul, who had founded the church at Philippi, is now reminding them, “our true citizenship is not from Rome but in heaven, and the savior whose visitation we await is not the Emperor [whose titles routinely included ‘Savior’ and ‘Lord’], but the true Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” (We might recall that to say “Jesus is Lord” was not just a pious sentiment, it was treason.) Our real identity, political or otherwise, is not defined from within this world, but is defined from beyond the limits of the merely human. This present world is not our ultimate home, and we must beware lest we define ourselves too completely by it. But we are here now, and we must take seriously our vocation and mandate to be colonists in this world – even subversive colonists – here and now of the life of the Kingdom of God from which we hold our true citizenship.
Which means that complacency about our lives, and the values by which we direct our lives, can be a great enemy. Even the holy city Jerusalem itself was not immune to faithless complacency. How moving is Jesus’ lament over her: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often I have desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Jerusalem was not, as it turned out after all, the City of God.
“Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory.” We march to the beat of a different drummer. We are in this world, but we do not belong to this world but to God’s world. In this world’s eyes we are weird. Not silly weird stuff, like not going to the movies or dancing or playing cards — some Christians are weird, but often about the wrong issues. But we are weird because we do not buy into this world’s “sensible,” “practical,” ‘realistic” value system. Weird because we keep mumbling a little too loudly that anybody who looks at this world and the way it does business — poverty, exploitation, oppression, injustice, war — all rooted in greed and the lust for power — and insists that that’s being “sensible, practical or realistic” obviously doesn’t have both oars in the water. We are weird because we will not let this world define reality for us, we are weird because we believe (and how absurd and arrogant of us, unless of course it’s true) that it is we who have a definition of a deeper reality to proclaim to this world. If this world does not think we are weird — if the world thinks we are safe and harmless — then maybe we’d better ask ourselves where our citizenship really is, and where our minds are really set.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” Are we the prophets sent to proclaim the word of the Lord and to be colonists for God’s Kingdom? Or are we Jerusalem?
(These are the only options.)
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:15 a.m.
Genesis 15:1-12;17-18 | Psalm 27 | Phil. 3:17-4:1 | Luke 13:31-35
“For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.…their minds are on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”
I think we’re all aware of the distinction we commonly make, specifically in a religious or spiritual context, and even more particularly in a Christian context, between “heaven” and “earth.” To take perhaps the most obvious example, we pray — not only every Sunday morning but I hope a number of times in every day — in the words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” But what do we mean by that? Well, there is a variety of things we could mean, and do mean, when we talk about “heaven” and “earth.” But I suspect that for lots of us lots of the time, the default meaning is something like, “Heaven is ‘up there’ somewhere, and that’s where God lives, and earth is ‘down here’ and this is where we live. And further, earth is ‘now,’ whereas heaven, at least to the extent that it includes us, is “then,” “someday,” “in the sweet by and by.”
Perhaps you have already suspected that I suggest that this is not what St. Paul means in today’s Epistle, nor is it what Jesus means when he talks about the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God (which are essentially equivalent phrases).
You perhaps noticed that the Epistle this morning is from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Philippi was a city in northeastern Greece, named after King Philip of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) who founded it in the fourth century B.C. It languished for a time, but was re-established by Octavian, shortly to become Caesar Augustus, Emperor of the Roman Empire, in the 30’s B.C. He used it as a colony to settle retired legionnaires — a form of military pension — and part of what made this a good deal for these army veterans was that they all were granted Roman citizenship, a status which had a variety of political, social, and economic advantages, even though they did not actually live in the city of Rome. Philippi was organized as a “miniature Rome,” a mini-version of the imperial capital, as it were a colony of Rome.
Well, now, that was a fascinating excursus into ancient history! (And now let’s move out of Sheldon Cooper mode…) I think this underlies Paul’s remark to the Philippian Christians, “But our citizenship is in heaven.” Now for the people of Philippi, “Roman citizenship” was a big deal. It gave them an important identity, even though they did not live in central Italy but in northeastern Greece. A major event in the life of one of these Roman colony-cities would be when the Roman Emperor came to visit them. (Although I can’t find any indication of whether Augustus or any of his successors as Emperor actually did visit this city.) And we might note that it was not the Emperor’s intention in granting Roman citizenship to the veterans settled in Philippi that they should ever retire back to Rome – he really did not want them to do that! – but to bring Roman culture to northern Greece as Roman colonists.
But Paul, who had founded the church at Philippi, is now reminding them, “our true citizenship is not from Rome but in heaven, and the savior whose visitation we await is not the Emperor [whose titles routinely included ‘Savior’ and ‘Lord’], but the true Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” (We might recall that to say “Jesus is Lord” was not just a pious sentiment, it was treason.) Our real identity, political or otherwise, is not defined from within this world, but is defined from beyond the limits of the merely human. This present world is not our ultimate home, and we must beware lest we define ourselves too completely by it. But we are here now, and we must take seriously our vocation and mandate to be colonists in this world – even subversive colonists – here and now of the life of the Kingdom of God from which we hold our true citizenship.
Which means that complacency about our lives, and the values by which we direct our lives, can be a great enemy. Even the holy city Jerusalem itself was not immune to faithless complacency. How moving is Jesus’ lament over her: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often I have desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Jerusalem was not, as it turned out after all, the City of God.
“Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory.” We march to the beat of a different drummer. We are in this world, but we do not belong to this world but to God’s world. In this world’s eyes we are weird. Not silly weird stuff, like not going to the movies or dancing or playing cards — some Christians are weird, but often about the wrong issues. But we are weird because we do not buy into this world’s “sensible,” “practical,” ‘realistic” value system. Weird because we keep mumbling a little too loudly that anybody who looks at this world and the way it does business — poverty, exploitation, oppression, injustice, war — all rooted in greed and the lust for power — and insists that that’s being “sensible, practical or realistic” obviously doesn’t have both oars in the water. We are weird because we will not let this world define reality for us, we are weird because we believe (and how absurd and arrogant of us, unless of course it’s true) that it is we who have a definition of a deeper reality to proclaim to this world. If this world does not think we are weird — if the world thinks we are safe and harmless — then maybe we’d better ask ourselves where our citizenship really is, and where our minds are really set.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” Are we the prophets sent to proclaim the word of the Lord and to be colonists for God’s Kingdom? Or are we Jerusalem?
(These are the only options.)
Sunday, February 10, 2013
10 February 2013 - Last Epiphany
LAST AFTER EPIPHANY — 10 February 2013
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls – 9:15 am
Exodus 34:29-35 | Psalm 99 | 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 | Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]
Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.
If you’re not already aware, and I’m sure most of you are, a reminder that for the last generation or so the Church has concluded the season following the Epiphany on the Sunday before Lent begins by reading in the Gospel the account of what we call the Transfiguration of Christ. (We rotate through the three synoptic Gospels every three years; this year it’s the version from St. Luke. St. Luke’s account is also used every year on August 6, when we celebrate the Transfiguration as a major Holy Day.) Some of us recall further back than a generation, when we used to lead into Lent by observing three Sundays yclept Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima. (Don’t ask.)
In the Epiphany season we have been reflecting on various modes of the Manifestation of Christ – to the gentile Wise Men, at his Baptism, to the wedding guests at Cana – and we conclude with this one to Peter, James, and John, following which Jesus turns his face to Jerusalem, a journey that will take him to the Cross. Appropriate as we move toward Lent.
Actually, by strange coincidence, I was here on this Sunday three years ago, when we read this Gospel from Luke, and I preached on this same text, and I started from a point where I am going to start again today, although today I think I will then go in a somewhat different direction. Luke of course got this story from St. Mark, as also does St. Matthew, but Luke adds a line, which I think is not really a new thought but just makes more explicit what was already implicit in Mark’s story, in which Moses and Elijah are seen talking with Jesus; and then Luke adds: “They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” “Speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” Well, yes, that’s a reasonable enough translation, except that it kind of misses the point that I think Luke is trying to make. In the Greek text they are speaking of Jesus’ exodus. His Exodus. And if that word rings a bell, maybe it’s because Luke is banging on it with a clapper! It sure rang a bell for the first Christian communities, Jewish-Christian communities initially, that heard and read it.
“Exodus” is a loaded term. The word itself literally means “the way out,” ex odos, “the going-out,” but it’s not very widely used in classical Greek and despite what the lexicons say, it doesn’t really have a generalized use in the New Testament either. What it does mean in the context of the Greek scriptures is “The Exodus” of the People of Israel from slavery in Egypt.
The early story of Israel begins of course with the patriarch Abraham, but the book of Genesis is basically a family saga. The history of the Israelite nation begins in Egypt with their liberation from slavery under the leadership of Moses, with the reception of God’s Law at Sinai, and their entry into the Promised Land across the Jordan. But, as the question goes, “So how did that work out for you?” and the honest answer is, “Not very well.” There was something of a resurgence under King David, a Golden Age which gleamed more brightly in retrospect than in the events themselves. Under David’s son Solomon, who is remembered for his wisdom as a denial of the historical fact that he was actually a fool, the nation of Israel began to fall apart, until finally there was a new enslavement, this time in Babylonia to the east. The “anointed one” (the Messiah) who liberated Israel (more or less) this time was Cyrus, the King of Persia (of all people!). Persian domination was replaced by the empire of Alexander, a Macedonian Greek, which then broke up and left Israel to be dominated in turn by the Ptolemaic Greek subempire in Egypt and then the Seleucid Greek subempire in Syria. The next liberation came under Judah the Hammer, Judas Maccabeus, who led a successful war of independence and gave his people the feast of Hanukkah. But once again, “How did that work out for you?” And a century later, the Romans decided they needed a better buffer against the Parthian Empire to the east, and they took over Israel militarily. Initially the Romans ruled through a puppet king named Herod, known as Herod the Great especially by himself, but later through a variety of other kinglets, tetrarchs, and direct Roman prefects and procurators. The Jews didn’t like this very much, and the Romans didn’t like it that the Jews didn’t like it, and so the Romans finally lost patience and shut the whole nation down.
So that’s the backstory (and a bit of the frontstory) of what’s happening on the mountain of the Transfiguration in the Gospel today. Jesus, in consultation with Moses and Elijah (the two great figures of Israelite history), is preparing to accomplish a new Exodus, a new Passover, at Jerusalem. They appear in glory, what the Hebrew Scriptures call the shekinah, the Presence of the Lord God. For Israel the Presence of the Lord was preeminently in the Temple in Jerusalem, where heaven and earth touch. Yet we are now being shown that the Presence of the Lord is preeminently in Jesus. One of the points Jesus will make after his procession into Jerusalem is to imply not too subtly that the Temple is now no longer the preeminent place of God’s presence, and indeed its days are numbered, as indeed they were. (What Jesus is doing is not “cleansing the Temple” but proclaiming God’s judgment on the Temple.) He himself is God’s Presence, he is Immanu-El, God with us. And at Jerusalem he will indeed accomplish a new Exodus, a whole new liberation of the renewed People of God, far beyond what Moses did, or David, (or even Cyrus of all people!) or Judah the Maccabee.
Because when Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God, he meant something very different from all those past attempts at liberation. He did not mean a kingdom established by political or military power, winning victory by violence, as all these past attempts had been. (And once more: “How did that work out for you?”) That was what many people who heard Jesus hoped he meant – apparently including Judas Iscariot, who when he realized that that wasn’t what Jesus was up to, he betrayed him. Presumably the Jewish religious leaders thought and feared that Jesus intended a political revolution, and certainly that’s why the Roman prefect Pilate had him crucified. But many claiming to be followers of Jesus thought, and even today still think, that the Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed and enacted had to do not with this world but with some otherworldly realm in the sweet by and by. But very little that Jesus said has anything much to do with the sweet by and by. Heaven is where God reigns, but God is not up in the sky, off in the future somewhere. It was Jesus’ vocation to launch God’s sovereign rule on earth, but to win the victory in this new Exodus not with the power of violence but with the power of justice, of which the flip side is love. And he does this as now God’s presence in the world. His presence in his Body. And his Body is …
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls – 9:15 am
Exodus 34:29-35 | Psalm 99 | 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 | Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]
Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.
If you’re not already aware, and I’m sure most of you are, a reminder that for the last generation or so the Church has concluded the season following the Epiphany on the Sunday before Lent begins by reading in the Gospel the account of what we call the Transfiguration of Christ. (We rotate through the three synoptic Gospels every three years; this year it’s the version from St. Luke. St. Luke’s account is also used every year on August 6, when we celebrate the Transfiguration as a major Holy Day.) Some of us recall further back than a generation, when we used to lead into Lent by observing three Sundays yclept Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima. (Don’t ask.)
In the Epiphany season we have been reflecting on various modes of the Manifestation of Christ – to the gentile Wise Men, at his Baptism, to the wedding guests at Cana – and we conclude with this one to Peter, James, and John, following which Jesus turns his face to Jerusalem, a journey that will take him to the Cross. Appropriate as we move toward Lent.
Actually, by strange coincidence, I was here on this Sunday three years ago, when we read this Gospel from Luke, and I preached on this same text, and I started from a point where I am going to start again today, although today I think I will then go in a somewhat different direction. Luke of course got this story from St. Mark, as also does St. Matthew, but Luke adds a line, which I think is not really a new thought but just makes more explicit what was already implicit in Mark’s story, in which Moses and Elijah are seen talking with Jesus; and then Luke adds: “They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” “Speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” Well, yes, that’s a reasonable enough translation, except that it kind of misses the point that I think Luke is trying to make. In the Greek text they are speaking of Jesus’ exodus. His Exodus. And if that word rings a bell, maybe it’s because Luke is banging on it with a clapper! It sure rang a bell for the first Christian communities, Jewish-Christian communities initially, that heard and read it.
“Exodus” is a loaded term. The word itself literally means “the way out,” ex odos, “the going-out,” but it’s not very widely used in classical Greek and despite what the lexicons say, it doesn’t really have a generalized use in the New Testament either. What it does mean in the context of the Greek scriptures is “The Exodus” of the People of Israel from slavery in Egypt.
The early story of Israel begins of course with the patriarch Abraham, but the book of Genesis is basically a family saga. The history of the Israelite nation begins in Egypt with their liberation from slavery under the leadership of Moses, with the reception of God’s Law at Sinai, and their entry into the Promised Land across the Jordan. But, as the question goes, “So how did that work out for you?” and the honest answer is, “Not very well.” There was something of a resurgence under King David, a Golden Age which gleamed more brightly in retrospect than in the events themselves. Under David’s son Solomon, who is remembered for his wisdom as a denial of the historical fact that he was actually a fool, the nation of Israel began to fall apart, until finally there was a new enslavement, this time in Babylonia to the east. The “anointed one” (the Messiah) who liberated Israel (more or less) this time was Cyrus, the King of Persia (of all people!). Persian domination was replaced by the empire of Alexander, a Macedonian Greek, which then broke up and left Israel to be dominated in turn by the Ptolemaic Greek subempire in Egypt and then the Seleucid Greek subempire in Syria. The next liberation came under Judah the Hammer, Judas Maccabeus, who led a successful war of independence and gave his people the feast of Hanukkah. But once again, “How did that work out for you?” And a century later, the Romans decided they needed a better buffer against the Parthian Empire to the east, and they took over Israel militarily. Initially the Romans ruled through a puppet king named Herod, known as Herod the Great especially by himself, but later through a variety of other kinglets, tetrarchs, and direct Roman prefects and procurators. The Jews didn’t like this very much, and the Romans didn’t like it that the Jews didn’t like it, and so the Romans finally lost patience and shut the whole nation down.
So that’s the backstory (and a bit of the frontstory) of what’s happening on the mountain of the Transfiguration in the Gospel today. Jesus, in consultation with Moses and Elijah (the two great figures of Israelite history), is preparing to accomplish a new Exodus, a new Passover, at Jerusalem. They appear in glory, what the Hebrew Scriptures call the shekinah, the Presence of the Lord God. For Israel the Presence of the Lord was preeminently in the Temple in Jerusalem, where heaven and earth touch. Yet we are now being shown that the Presence of the Lord is preeminently in Jesus. One of the points Jesus will make after his procession into Jerusalem is to imply not too subtly that the Temple is now no longer the preeminent place of God’s presence, and indeed its days are numbered, as indeed they were. (What Jesus is doing is not “cleansing the Temple” but proclaiming God’s judgment on the Temple.) He himself is God’s Presence, he is Immanu-El, God with us. And at Jerusalem he will indeed accomplish a new Exodus, a whole new liberation of the renewed People of God, far beyond what Moses did, or David, (or even Cyrus of all people!) or Judah the Maccabee.
Because when Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God, he meant something very different from all those past attempts at liberation. He did not mean a kingdom established by political or military power, winning victory by violence, as all these past attempts had been. (And once more: “How did that work out for you?”) That was what many people who heard Jesus hoped he meant – apparently including Judas Iscariot, who when he realized that that wasn’t what Jesus was up to, he betrayed him. Presumably the Jewish religious leaders thought and feared that Jesus intended a political revolution, and certainly that’s why the Roman prefect Pilate had him crucified. But many claiming to be followers of Jesus thought, and even today still think, that the Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed and enacted had to do not with this world but with some otherworldly realm in the sweet by and by. But very little that Jesus said has anything much to do with the sweet by and by. Heaven is where God reigns, but God is not up in the sky, off in the future somewhere. It was Jesus’ vocation to launch God’s sovereign rule on earth, but to win the victory in this new Exodus not with the power of violence but with the power of justice, of which the flip side is love. And he does this as now God’s presence in the world. His presence in his Body. And his Body is …
Friday, February 1, 2013
27 January 2013 -- 3rd Sunday after Epiphany
3RD EPIPHANY — 27 January 2013
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls – 9:15 am
[Not preached, due to hazardous weather conditions that cancelled the service. I reserve the right to resurrect this sermon on this Sunday in 2016!]
Nehemiah 8:1-3,5-6,8-10 | Psalm 19 | 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a | Luke 4:14-21
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. [1 Corinthians 12:27]
The human body is a remarkable thing. I think we instinctively know that; most of us, I suspect, have given some explicit thought to it at one time or another. Have you ever meditated upon your own body, or some part of your own body? Even some of the silliest little things are occasions of wonder. Why do we have two hands, and not four? (God knows there are times when four hands would come in handy!) Why don’t we have eyes in the back of our heads? (That might have a certain usefulness too, especially for parents!) Why do children take so long to grow up? I don’t mean, “Why do children take so long to grow up!!??!” but, some little animals like mice grow to maturity in a few weeks. Even big animals like horses and cattle are mature in, what? three or four years. Depending on how you define “grown up,” it takes us twenty years, plus or minus. (A few generations ago it was about sixteen; these days it’s closer to thirty!) Human beings—just as bodily creatures, without getting into all our personal diversity—are astoundingly complex and sophisticated systems. We often discover this precisely when something breaks down: we are very fragile, and malfunctions in some apparently minor part of the body can hamper and even seriously threaten the whole organism. Consider the toothache!
I think we’d probably do well to consider “bodiliness” more deeply than we do. “Bodiliness” is an important way of being. And it doesn’t just have to do with our own individual bodies; it has to do with the way we are in relationship with each other.
The Latin word for “body” is corpus. That may be a boring piece of information; but it’s the root of the English word “corporate.” We talk about our “corporate life”—in the Church, in business, in human society—and what we mean is our life together as a body. In the Epistle this Sunday, St. Paul talks about the Church as the Body of Christ.
In thinking about human society, there are two extreme poles which we need to avoid. One of those poles is “collectivism.” That’s the notion that human society is just like a beehive; it is the group that is important, the individual is not (unless, of course, you are the queen bee!). One person is but a cog in a machine; conformity is all-important. If any of you were television science-fiction fans, you may remember “The Borg” on Star Trek; more recently we might think of “The Observers” on Fringe. More realistically historically, this “collectivism” has been represented in the world by Marxist-Leninist regimes. Part of their internal contradiction is shown in that while Communism claimed to be the party of the “working class,” it had little real care for working men and women as persons; “the people” were simply “the masses.” It’s not surprising that it was primarily the working people themselves who brought about the demise of Marxism, especially in Eastern Europe. But there were also significant collectivist elements in Nazism, which exalted the state and the ethnic and racial identity of the nation above any concern for individual persons; conformity was essential there, too.
The other pole is “individualism.” That’s the notion that every single human being is complete in him- or herself, by him- or herself; that we do not need other people (except in certain instrumental ways), and that dependence upon another is a sign of weakness. Individualism sees human society, and any human relationships, as a matter of practical convenience, no more. Life becomes a matter of competition rather than cooperation; life is a zero-sum game, so that if I am to win, you have to lose; the goal is the self-fulfillment of the individual. Our own society has a very heavy streak of individualism in it, and we are not the better for it. Extreme forms of libertarianism, a la Ayn Rand, would be examples.
As you might suspect, I suggest that the truth is at neither of these poles. It’s not so much a matter of the truth being “somewhere in between,” as if it were a compromise, “half a cup of collectivism and half a coup of individualism, beat briskly for two minutes on ‘high’.” No, human life is really a different kind of thing, not on the scale between those two poles at all. As human persons, we have our own integrity, our own autonomy, our own value, our own importance, and yet we are created to live not by ourselves but in relationship to each other; we are persons in ourselves but we cannot be persons by ourselves. (My seminary professor told us that, and I’ve always remembered it. So should you! We are persons in ourselves but we cannot be persons by ourselves! We are meant to live in “community,” which is a very different sort of thing either than an all-subsuming collective or a mere aggregate of individuals. We are, in short, as human beings, very much like the organs of a body. Our life as human beings is, and is meant to be, corporate. We might note that this is part of what is involved in our being created in the image of God, the Triune God.
And so our life in the Church is corporate; and in fact, the life of the Church, as a corporate community, is meant to be a model for the life of the human world as a whole. It’s a model in which (and this is what Paul is getting at in the Epistle this Sunday) every member has his or her own uniqueness and importance. It’s a model which requires cooperation and participation. It’s a model characterized by mutual responsibility and interdependence (to revive a good expression once common in the Church), in which the common good and the individual good converge. And what makes it work, and what makes the corporate life of the Church a model for the common life of the whole of humankind, is precisely that we are the Body of Christ. It is the grace and power of Jesus Christ’s love which is the life of the Body. For in the end it is only love which makes true human community possible; and it is our calling as Christians to enact and model the true human community in the world.
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls – 9:15 am
[Not preached, due to hazardous weather conditions that cancelled the service. I reserve the right to resurrect this sermon on this Sunday in 2016!]
Nehemiah 8:1-3,5-6,8-10 | Psalm 19 | 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a | Luke 4:14-21
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. [1 Corinthians 12:27]
The human body is a remarkable thing. I think we instinctively know that; most of us, I suspect, have given some explicit thought to it at one time or another. Have you ever meditated upon your own body, or some part of your own body? Even some of the silliest little things are occasions of wonder. Why do we have two hands, and not four? (God knows there are times when four hands would come in handy!) Why don’t we have eyes in the back of our heads? (That might have a certain usefulness too, especially for parents!) Why do children take so long to grow up? I don’t mean, “Why do children take so long to grow up!!??!” but, some little animals like mice grow to maturity in a few weeks. Even big animals like horses and cattle are mature in, what? three or four years. Depending on how you define “grown up,” it takes us twenty years, plus or minus. (A few generations ago it was about sixteen; these days it’s closer to thirty!) Human beings—just as bodily creatures, without getting into all our personal diversity—are astoundingly complex and sophisticated systems. We often discover this precisely when something breaks down: we are very fragile, and malfunctions in some apparently minor part of the body can hamper and even seriously threaten the whole organism. Consider the toothache!
I think we’d probably do well to consider “bodiliness” more deeply than we do. “Bodiliness” is an important way of being. And it doesn’t just have to do with our own individual bodies; it has to do with the way we are in relationship with each other.
The Latin word for “body” is corpus. That may be a boring piece of information; but it’s the root of the English word “corporate.” We talk about our “corporate life”—in the Church, in business, in human society—and what we mean is our life together as a body. In the Epistle this Sunday, St. Paul talks about the Church as the Body of Christ.
In thinking about human society, there are two extreme poles which we need to avoid. One of those poles is “collectivism.” That’s the notion that human society is just like a beehive; it is the group that is important, the individual is not (unless, of course, you are the queen bee!). One person is but a cog in a machine; conformity is all-important. If any of you were television science-fiction fans, you may remember “The Borg” on Star Trek; more recently we might think of “The Observers” on Fringe. More realistically historically, this “collectivism” has been represented in the world by Marxist-Leninist regimes. Part of their internal contradiction is shown in that while Communism claimed to be the party of the “working class,” it had little real care for working men and women as persons; “the people” were simply “the masses.” It’s not surprising that it was primarily the working people themselves who brought about the demise of Marxism, especially in Eastern Europe. But there were also significant collectivist elements in Nazism, which exalted the state and the ethnic and racial identity of the nation above any concern for individual persons; conformity was essential there, too.
The other pole is “individualism.” That’s the notion that every single human being is complete in him- or herself, by him- or herself; that we do not need other people (except in certain instrumental ways), and that dependence upon another is a sign of weakness. Individualism sees human society, and any human relationships, as a matter of practical convenience, no more. Life becomes a matter of competition rather than cooperation; life is a zero-sum game, so that if I am to win, you have to lose; the goal is the self-fulfillment of the individual. Our own society has a very heavy streak of individualism in it, and we are not the better for it. Extreme forms of libertarianism, a la Ayn Rand, would be examples.
As you might suspect, I suggest that the truth is at neither of these poles. It’s not so much a matter of the truth being “somewhere in between,” as if it were a compromise, “half a cup of collectivism and half a coup of individualism, beat briskly for two minutes on ‘high’.” No, human life is really a different kind of thing, not on the scale between those two poles at all. As human persons, we have our own integrity, our own autonomy, our own value, our own importance, and yet we are created to live not by ourselves but in relationship to each other; we are persons in ourselves but we cannot be persons by ourselves. (My seminary professor told us that, and I’ve always remembered it. So should you! We are persons in ourselves but we cannot be persons by ourselves! We are meant to live in “community,” which is a very different sort of thing either than an all-subsuming collective or a mere aggregate of individuals. We are, in short, as human beings, very much like the organs of a body. Our life as human beings is, and is meant to be, corporate. We might note that this is part of what is involved in our being created in the image of God, the Triune God.
And so our life in the Church is corporate; and in fact, the life of the Church, as a corporate community, is meant to be a model for the life of the human world as a whole. It’s a model in which (and this is what Paul is getting at in the Epistle this Sunday) every member has his or her own uniqueness and importance. It’s a model which requires cooperation and participation. It’s a model characterized by mutual responsibility and interdependence (to revive a good expression once common in the Church), in which the common good and the individual good converge. And what makes it work, and what makes the corporate life of the Church a model for the common life of the whole of humankind, is precisely that we are the Body of Christ. It is the grace and power of Jesus Christ’s love which is the life of the Body. For in the end it is only love which makes true human community possible; and it is our calling as Christians to enact and model the true human community in the world.
Monday, January 7, 2013
6 January 2013 - The Epiphany
THE EPIPHANY — 6 January 2013
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls – 9:15 am
Isaiah 60:1-6 | Psalm 72:1-7,10-14 | Ephesians 3:1-12 | Matthew 2:1-12
“Where is the child who has been born King of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”
When I was a child, in the Christmas decorations in our house we made a Big Deal of the fact that the Wise Men did not show up at the manger until the Epiphany, the twelfth day after Christmas Day. We still follow that in our home today, at least in some of our crèches. We have a magnetic nativity set on the door of the kitchen refrigerator, and until today the wise men were around the corner on the side panel, still traversing afar. Down at Trinity in Iowa City the other day, the wise men were still over on the window sills along the east aisle, although I assume that as of this morning they’ve gotten to the crèche in front of the altar. I see you all follow the same custom. My mother would have been pleased.
Of course, if we were actually paying attention to the Gospel reading this morning – one which we have heard and read many many times – we know that the Wise Men did not show up at the manger at all. They came to Joseph’s house, where in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus had presumably been born.
And so I hope we have at some time noticed that for hundreds and hundreds of years we have relentlessly ignored the blatantly obvious fact that if we read the accounts of the birth of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel and in Luke’s Gospel, we see that there are obviously some major historical problems. The stories don’t match up, and that’s only the start! A lot has been written about this, including some work by very fine and faithful New Testament scholars, and wallowing around in the back of my mind is a paper of my own, which still hasn’t made it through my fingers to the keyboard and into a computer file. One of these years. I’ll let you know. But I’m going to bracket all that and set it aside for right now, because that misses the point of St. Matthew’s story as well as the point of St. Luke’s quite different story. (And clearly neither Matthew nor Luke knew each other’s stories.) Suffice it for now to say that wondering about exactly what kind of astronomical phenomenon the Wise Men observed is a lot like wondering at just what mileage point on the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho the Good Samaritan found the man who had been beaten and robbed by bandits. Not what the story is about!
And this story is so rich and wonderful, whatever its relation to what we might in our narrow-mindedness call “historical facts.” (The story is historical, because it gives a true insight into a real historical situation; but to blither on down that road is for another time.) The Christian community quickly built up images and legends that go beyond what is actually recounted in the Gospel story. The wise men – magoi in Greek, in Anglicized Latin magi, by which Matthew presumably meant wizards or astrologers – quickly became kings in Christian tradition, for reasons that should be obvious to us today, starting off as we did with Isaiah 60: “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn …. They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.” And then we went on to Psalm 72: “The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall pay tribute, and the kings of Arabia and Saba offer gifts. All kings shall bow down before him, and all the nations do him service.” Were these and similar verses from the Hebrew Scriptures in the back of Matthew’s mind as he was writing? Surely so! As was Balaam’s oracle in the book of Numbers [24:17]: “A star shall come forth out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel.” (Thus any astronomical identification of the star of Bethlehem misses the point.) In the story the wise men come seeking “the King of the Jews”; it’s worth noting and meditating upon that the only other time in the Gospels that Jesus is referred to by the title “the King of the Jews” is by Pilate and the Roman soldiers, mockingly, at his crucifixion. “The King of the Jews” was actually Herod’s title, one that had been given him by the Romans.
So today wise men from the East come to worship the Messiah at his birth. Foreigners, we note; but also we note, not Romans from the West. They were from beyond the Empire. They are the world. The Epiphany is the celebration of the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, as the Prayer Book calls it, obscurely on page 31. But this means that the Epiphany is not just the Adoration of the Magi, as every Renaissance artist worth his salt painted, but the taking of the Good News of Jesus to all the world. Matthew himself makes this clear as he moves from the beginning of his Gospel with the visit of the magi to the conclusion of his story with Jesus’ words: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” [28:19].
It is not enough that we worship, though that is where we start, as we remember especially today, for only from worship can true and faithful mission come. We are called as the Body of Christ not only to adore our Lord, but to follow him, to let it be his life that lives in us, to accept his work as our work. We are called not just to give Jesus presents, but to give him ourselves, that he may form us, change us, renew us, use us for his work of reconciling the world in love to God. We come with the magi to worship him; but unlike the magi, it is not for us just to go home quietly by another road. For us, for us who are called to be the truly wise men and women, it is to go out into the world and to be ourselves the epiphany, the showing-forth of Christ to the world. The Feast of the Epiphany is not the end of the celebration of the Incarnation of God in Christ, but only the beginning.
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls – 9:15 am
Isaiah 60:1-6 | Psalm 72:1-7,10-14 | Ephesians 3:1-12 | Matthew 2:1-12
“Where is the child who has been born King of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”
When I was a child, in the Christmas decorations in our house we made a Big Deal of the fact that the Wise Men did not show up at the manger until the Epiphany, the twelfth day after Christmas Day. We still follow that in our home today, at least in some of our crèches. We have a magnetic nativity set on the door of the kitchen refrigerator, and until today the wise men were around the corner on the side panel, still traversing afar. Down at Trinity in Iowa City the other day, the wise men were still over on the window sills along the east aisle, although I assume that as of this morning they’ve gotten to the crèche in front of the altar. I see you all follow the same custom. My mother would have been pleased.
Of course, if we were actually paying attention to the Gospel reading this morning – one which we have heard and read many many times – we know that the Wise Men did not show up at the manger at all. They came to Joseph’s house, where in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus had presumably been born.
And so I hope we have at some time noticed that for hundreds and hundreds of years we have relentlessly ignored the blatantly obvious fact that if we read the accounts of the birth of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel and in Luke’s Gospel, we see that there are obviously some major historical problems. The stories don’t match up, and that’s only the start! A lot has been written about this, including some work by very fine and faithful New Testament scholars, and wallowing around in the back of my mind is a paper of my own, which still hasn’t made it through my fingers to the keyboard and into a computer file. One of these years. I’ll let you know. But I’m going to bracket all that and set it aside for right now, because that misses the point of St. Matthew’s story as well as the point of St. Luke’s quite different story. (And clearly neither Matthew nor Luke knew each other’s stories.) Suffice it for now to say that wondering about exactly what kind of astronomical phenomenon the Wise Men observed is a lot like wondering at just what mileage point on the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho the Good Samaritan found the man who had been beaten and robbed by bandits. Not what the story is about!
And this story is so rich and wonderful, whatever its relation to what we might in our narrow-mindedness call “historical facts.” (The story is historical, because it gives a true insight into a real historical situation; but to blither on down that road is for another time.) The Christian community quickly built up images and legends that go beyond what is actually recounted in the Gospel story. The wise men – magoi in Greek, in Anglicized Latin magi, by which Matthew presumably meant wizards or astrologers – quickly became kings in Christian tradition, for reasons that should be obvious to us today, starting off as we did with Isaiah 60: “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn …. They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.” And then we went on to Psalm 72: “The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall pay tribute, and the kings of Arabia and Saba offer gifts. All kings shall bow down before him, and all the nations do him service.” Were these and similar verses from the Hebrew Scriptures in the back of Matthew’s mind as he was writing? Surely so! As was Balaam’s oracle in the book of Numbers [24:17]: “A star shall come forth out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel.” (Thus any astronomical identification of the star of Bethlehem misses the point.) In the story the wise men come seeking “the King of the Jews”; it’s worth noting and meditating upon that the only other time in the Gospels that Jesus is referred to by the title “the King of the Jews” is by Pilate and the Roman soldiers, mockingly, at his crucifixion. “The King of the Jews” was actually Herod’s title, one that had been given him by the Romans.
So today wise men from the East come to worship the Messiah at his birth. Foreigners, we note; but also we note, not Romans from the West. They were from beyond the Empire. They are the world. The Epiphany is the celebration of the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, as the Prayer Book calls it, obscurely on page 31. But this means that the Epiphany is not just the Adoration of the Magi, as every Renaissance artist worth his salt painted, but the taking of the Good News of Jesus to all the world. Matthew himself makes this clear as he moves from the beginning of his Gospel with the visit of the magi to the conclusion of his story with Jesus’ words: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” [28:19].
It is not enough that we worship, though that is where we start, as we remember especially today, for only from worship can true and faithful mission come. We are called as the Body of Christ not only to adore our Lord, but to follow him, to let it be his life that lives in us, to accept his work as our work. We are called not just to give Jesus presents, but to give him ourselves, that he may form us, change us, renew us, use us for his work of reconciling the world in love to God. We come with the magi to worship him; but unlike the magi, it is not for us just to go home quietly by another road. For us, for us who are called to be the truly wise men and women, it is to go out into the world and to be ourselves the epiphany, the showing-forth of Christ to the world. The Feast of the Epiphany is not the end of the celebration of the Incarnation of God in Christ, but only the beginning.
Friday, December 28, 2012
28 December 2012 -- Holy Innocents' Day
THE HOLY INNOCENTS — 28 December 2012
Trinity – 12:15 pm
Jeremiah 31:15-17 | Psalm 124 | Revelation 21:1-7 | Matthew 2:13-18
"A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more." [Matt. 2:18; cf. Jer. 31.15]
Some of us Old Guys remember when it was the custom to use purple as the liturgical color on Holy Innocents' Day, the color of repentance, mourning, and solemn reflection. This was something of a downer just three days after Christmas, when we had finally gotten past four weeks of Advent purple (as we generally used in those days), and now it was back again, a sour moment in the midst of the festivity of Christmastide. Then the Church decided to change to liturgical red for today, the color of martyrs, the color of blood, the color of the Spirit. And at the time many of us said, Oh, Good Idea. The thought apparently was that the infants of Bethlehem were indeed martyrs for Christ, albeit unwittingly.
But in retrospect I’m not so sure it has been such a Good Idea after all. Particularly not after the past two weeks.
First of all, I’m going to bracket and set aside for the moment the question of the historicity of the story of the massacre of the little boys in Bethlehem. There is no evidence for this outside St. Matthew’s Gospel. The Jewish historian Josephus, who had absolutely no love for Herod the Great and who does not hesitate to recount Herod’s many atrocities, doesn’t mention it, and he probably would have if he had known about it, and he probably would have known about it. Obviously this massacre in defense of his own royal power would certainly not have been out of character for Herod – he was a serial murderer, including of some of his own children – but the fact that an atrocity like this would have been in character doesn’t mean that he actually did this one. But the whole matter of the historicity of the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke is another question for another time. I keep meaning to write a paper about it and so far haven’t followed through, and anyway it’s beside the point. So. Bracketed and set aside.
My present concern is that it may be wrong-headed of us to describe the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem as “martyrs.” Martyrs are those who witness to the Kingdom of God at the cost of their own lives, as, for instance, St. Stephen two days ago. The massacre at Bethlehem did not witness to the Kingdom of God. The only kingdom it bore witness to was Herod’s. The children were not martyrs, they were victims. And I wonder whether celebrating them as “martyrs” isn’t just putting a pious religious gloss on what was in fact a horrendous atrocity. To call this “martyrdom” is a form of denial. Celebrating today as a Major Feast can be a way we deny the awful reality of the ongoing victimization of people, and especially including children, in countless ways to this very day, and thus deny our need to do something about it. Yes, by all means we must observe Holy Innocents’ Day. And use it by remembering also Sandy Hook Elementary School and Columbine, and Virginia Tech and the University of Iowa (All Saints' Day, 1991). And the Holocaust (the Shoah). And 9/11. And the genocide in Rwanda, and in Sudan, and elsewhere in Central Africa. And Wounded Knee and Sand Creek. And the Crusades. It just goes on and on. And it keeps going on and on. In terms of numbers of victims, the Innocents of Bethlehem would have been a relatively minor incident – Bethlehem wasn’t a very big town at the time.
Ben noted the other night that T. S. Eliot, speaking as St. Thomas Becket, reminds us of the close relationship of birth and death, that the joyous celebration of the birth of Jesus is immediately followed by the observances of the death of his first martyr, of the long life of persecution and exile of one of his chief apostles, and of the “collateral damage” (as we so daintily term it) that followed Jesus’ birth. We both rejoice and mourn. Yes, we do and must celebrate the Incarnation of God the Word, but we do and must also remember the need and the cost of that Incarnation, not only then but now in our own world today. Christmas is not cheap grace.
Trinity – 12:15 pm
Jeremiah 31:15-17 | Psalm 124 | Revelation 21:1-7 | Matthew 2:13-18
"A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more." [Matt. 2:18; cf. Jer. 31.15]
Some of us Old Guys remember when it was the custom to use purple as the liturgical color on Holy Innocents' Day, the color of repentance, mourning, and solemn reflection. This was something of a downer just three days after Christmas, when we had finally gotten past four weeks of Advent purple (as we generally used in those days), and now it was back again, a sour moment in the midst of the festivity of Christmastide. Then the Church decided to change to liturgical red for today, the color of martyrs, the color of blood, the color of the Spirit. And at the time many of us said, Oh, Good Idea. The thought apparently was that the infants of Bethlehem were indeed martyrs for Christ, albeit unwittingly.
But in retrospect I’m not so sure it has been such a Good Idea after all. Particularly not after the past two weeks.
First of all, I’m going to bracket and set aside for the moment the question of the historicity of the story of the massacre of the little boys in Bethlehem. There is no evidence for this outside St. Matthew’s Gospel. The Jewish historian Josephus, who had absolutely no love for Herod the Great and who does not hesitate to recount Herod’s many atrocities, doesn’t mention it, and he probably would have if he had known about it, and he probably would have known about it. Obviously this massacre in defense of his own royal power would certainly not have been out of character for Herod – he was a serial murderer, including of some of his own children – but the fact that an atrocity like this would have been in character doesn’t mean that he actually did this one. But the whole matter of the historicity of the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke is another question for another time. I keep meaning to write a paper about it and so far haven’t followed through, and anyway it’s beside the point. So. Bracketed and set aside.
My present concern is that it may be wrong-headed of us to describe the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem as “martyrs.” Martyrs are those who witness to the Kingdom of God at the cost of their own lives, as, for instance, St. Stephen two days ago. The massacre at Bethlehem did not witness to the Kingdom of God. The only kingdom it bore witness to was Herod’s. The children were not martyrs, they were victims. And I wonder whether celebrating them as “martyrs” isn’t just putting a pious religious gloss on what was in fact a horrendous atrocity. To call this “martyrdom” is a form of denial. Celebrating today as a Major Feast can be a way we deny the awful reality of the ongoing victimization of people, and especially including children, in countless ways to this very day, and thus deny our need to do something about it. Yes, by all means we must observe Holy Innocents’ Day. And use it by remembering also Sandy Hook Elementary School and Columbine, and Virginia Tech and the University of Iowa (All Saints' Day, 1991). And the Holocaust (the Shoah). And 9/11. And the genocide in Rwanda, and in Sudan, and elsewhere in Central Africa. And Wounded Knee and Sand Creek. And the Crusades. It just goes on and on. And it keeps going on and on. In terms of numbers of victims, the Innocents of Bethlehem would have been a relatively minor incident – Bethlehem wasn’t a very big town at the time.
Ben noted the other night that T. S. Eliot, speaking as St. Thomas Becket, reminds us of the close relationship of birth and death, that the joyous celebration of the birth of Jesus is immediately followed by the observances of the death of his first martyr, of the long life of persecution and exile of one of his chief apostles, and of the “collateral damage” (as we so daintily term it) that followed Jesus’ birth. We both rejoice and mourn. Yes, we do and must celebrate the Incarnation of God the Word, but we do and must also remember the need and the cost of that Incarnation, not only then but now in our own world today. Christmas is not cheap grace.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
18 November 2012 - Proper 28 / Pentecost 25
PROPER 28 / PENTECOST 25 — 18 November 2012
St. Paul’s, Durant – 9:00 am
[Track Two] Daniel 12:1-3 | Psalm 16 | Hebrews 10:11-25 | Mark 13:1-8
"Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down."
In the Collect for the Day for this Sunday, we prayed: “Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ.” This is a familiar prayer to us, I think; it was composed for the first English Prayer Book in 1549 as a Sunday collect, and it is also sometimes used as an opening prayer at Bible study groups.
The prayer reminds us that we need not only hear and read the Scriptures, but also mark, learn, and inwardly digest them. One of the ways we do this is by reading them over and over and over again.
I’m not suggesting that you need to read the whole Bible over and over, going back to Genesis 1 when you finish Revelation 22. (Some people do that, and I won’t gainsay them, but although all of the Bible is worth reading, some parts of it are worth reading more than others, so it’s okay to be a little selective. God can and does speak to us in Second Chronicles, but I think God usually says a lot more to us in the Gospels! Remember that this Church is committed to the belief that all things necessary to salvation are contained in Holy Scripture, but that does not mean that all things contained in Holy Scripture are necessary to salvation, and in fact some of them are simply wrong. And it’s by reading them over and over again that we are given the grace to discern which is which!)
Anyway, I was reading the Bible again, and specifically St. Mark’s Gospel, since that’s what we have been reading on Sundays this year. And I discovered, again, that sometimes on the umpty-umpth reading, a perfectly familiar passage suddenly speaks a Word that I have never heard before. I expect some of you have had the same experience. I am now speaking of the Gospel readings for last Sunday and this Sunday.
So I think we need to start by going back to last Sunday’s Gospel reading, because it’s really continuous with today’s. (Remember that the chapter divisions weren’t added to the Bible until the Middle Ages, and the verse divisions not until the Renaissance/Reformation.) Last week we heard, as I trust you recall!:
And so now we come to today’s Gospel. The disciples are staring with their mouths hanging open, like a bunch of Galilean hicks in the big city. And we should not underestimate how impressive the Jerusalem Temple was, even by the standards of the Roman Empire. Here’s what the Jewish historian Josephus, who was by no means a Galilean hick, says: “Now the outward face of the temple … was covered all over with plates of gold of great weight, and, at the first rising of the sun, reflected back a very fiery splendor, and made those who faced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away, just as they would have done at the sun’s own rays. But this temple appeared to strangers, when they were at a distance, like a mountain covered with snow; for, as to those parts of it that were not gilt, they were exceeding white.” [Jewish Wars 5.5.6]
So what we have heard is Jesus first of all (and once again!) sitting in the Temple and harshly condemning the hypocrisy of the religious establishment that exploits and oppresses the people, and then we hear Jesus stepping out, looking back, and predicting the utter destruction of one of the greatest, perhaps even the very greatest, religious edifices in the ancient world. It would be like proclaiming a solemn curse against the National Cathedral, or St. Peter’s Basilica, or the Kaaba in Mecca. I’m not sure we fully realize how very subversive Jesus of Nazareth was. And is.
And of course that’s how it played out. A few years after St. Mark composed his Gospel (I think it was after, though that’s not completely certain) the Temple was burned to the ground by the Roman Legions under the general Titus, who was the son of the Emperor Vespasian, and who himself became Emperor nine years later.
Well, we started out with today’s Collect: “Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” I suspect that as we continue to read and study the Bible over and over – and never allow ourselves to say “Oh, yes, well, I’ve already read that! I understand that! I already know what that means!” – we will find that God uses the Word to open our minds and hearts to new, enriching, and often startling and challenging new insights into the meaning and demands of God’s Kingdom.
St. Paul’s, Durant – 9:00 am
[Track Two] Daniel 12:1-3 | Psalm 16 | Hebrews 10:11-25 | Mark 13:1-8
"Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down."
In the Collect for the Day for this Sunday, we prayed: “Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ.” This is a familiar prayer to us, I think; it was composed for the first English Prayer Book in 1549 as a Sunday collect, and it is also sometimes used as an opening prayer at Bible study groups.
The prayer reminds us that we need not only hear and read the Scriptures, but also mark, learn, and inwardly digest them. One of the ways we do this is by reading them over and over and over again.
I’m not suggesting that you need to read the whole Bible over and over, going back to Genesis 1 when you finish Revelation 22. (Some people do that, and I won’t gainsay them, but although all of the Bible is worth reading, some parts of it are worth reading more than others, so it’s okay to be a little selective. God can and does speak to us in Second Chronicles, but I think God usually says a lot more to us in the Gospels! Remember that this Church is committed to the belief that all things necessary to salvation are contained in Holy Scripture, but that does not mean that all things contained in Holy Scripture are necessary to salvation, and in fact some of them are simply wrong. And it’s by reading them over and over again that we are given the grace to discern which is which!)
Anyway, I was reading the Bible again, and specifically St. Mark’s Gospel, since that’s what we have been reading on Sundays this year. And I discovered, again, that sometimes on the umpty-umpth reading, a perfectly familiar passage suddenly speaks a Word that I have never heard before. I expect some of you have had the same experience. I am now speaking of the Gospel readings for last Sunday and this Sunday.
So I think we need to start by going back to last Sunday’s Gospel reading, because it’s really continuous with today’s. (Remember that the chapter divisions weren’t added to the Bible until the Middle Ages, and the verse divisions not until the Renaissance/Reformation.) Last week we heard, as I trust you recall!:
Teaching in the temple, Jesus said, "Beware of the scribes…They devour widows' houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation." [Mark 12:38,40]And then there follows the episode of the poor widow who put her last two copper coins into the Temple treasury. We typically read the story of the widow’s mite as an “Awww…” story that fills us with admiration for her devotion and encourages us to greater generosity, especially along about Church stewardship season! But I have a suspicion that we may have missed the point that St. Mark is trying to make. Remember that in ancient Jewish society – and most other ancient societies, for that matter – widows were really at the bottom of the economic ladder, at least if they didn’t have a son or a brother who could take care of them. (Thus the repeated emphasis in both the Old and New Testaments on the need to care for the widows and orphans, who were utterly powerless in a patriarchal society.) And maybe what Jesus wants us to see in looking at the poor widow putting her last two cents into the collection is not how devoted she is (though she obviously is that), but how the religious establishment – the scribes and the priests and all that gang – lay a piety trip on everyone, including poor widows whom they exploit rather than support. In other words, Jesus points to the poor widow as an example of the moral corruption of the religious system that “devours widows’ houses.” He cares about her, and respects the tragedy of her devotion, but that’s not his point.
And so now we come to today’s Gospel. The disciples are staring with their mouths hanging open, like a bunch of Galilean hicks in the big city. And we should not underestimate how impressive the Jerusalem Temple was, even by the standards of the Roman Empire. Here’s what the Jewish historian Josephus, who was by no means a Galilean hick, says: “Now the outward face of the temple … was covered all over with plates of gold of great weight, and, at the first rising of the sun, reflected back a very fiery splendor, and made those who faced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away, just as they would have done at the sun’s own rays. But this temple appeared to strangers, when they were at a distance, like a mountain covered with snow; for, as to those parts of it that were not gilt, they were exceeding white.” [Jewish Wars 5.5.6]
So what we have heard is Jesus first of all (and once again!) sitting in the Temple and harshly condemning the hypocrisy of the religious establishment that exploits and oppresses the people, and then we hear Jesus stepping out, looking back, and predicting the utter destruction of one of the greatest, perhaps even the very greatest, religious edifices in the ancient world. It would be like proclaiming a solemn curse against the National Cathedral, or St. Peter’s Basilica, or the Kaaba in Mecca. I’m not sure we fully realize how very subversive Jesus of Nazareth was. And is.
And of course that’s how it played out. A few years after St. Mark composed his Gospel (I think it was after, though that’s not completely certain) the Temple was burned to the ground by the Roman Legions under the general Titus, who was the son of the Emperor Vespasian, and who himself became Emperor nine years later.
Well, we started out with today’s Collect: “Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” I suspect that as we continue to read and study the Bible over and over – and never allow ourselves to say “Oh, yes, well, I’ve already read that! I understand that! I already know what that means!” – we will find that God uses the Word to open our minds and hearts to new, enriching, and often startling and challenging new insights into the meaning and demands of God’s Kingdom.
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