First cut
1) Notice please that this chapter precedes the instructions for the tabernacle, the portable temple of the presence of god. it follows the 'covenant code." In its way, it is a communion liturgy. Look at v. 9-11 just prior to our reading.

 

2) Earlier, Moses is to be alone, but Joshua is with him still. Even Aaron is left behind. He and Hur are resolvers of disputes.

 

3) Now Moses is at the pinnacle. The sabbath day God calls Moses from within the cloud. Notice that it looks different to those below. If you are so inclined, this is a good time to get a handle on the transcendent God, the holy God.

 

4) Right before Lent, we get forty days communing with God. I tend to read glory as the presence of god. Moses gets to be in the abode of god. Moses is a mediator between God and Israel.

 

5) the way this is lined up with transfiguration, some slow time noting similarities and difference would be worthwhile.

First cut
1) Notice please that this chapter precedes the instructions for the tabernacle, the portable temple of the presence of god. it follows the 'covenant code." In its way, it is a communion liturgy. Look at v. 9-11 just prior to our reading.

 

2) Earlier, Moses is to be alone, but Joshua is with him still. Even Aaron is left behind. He and Hur are resolvers of disputes.

 

3) Now Moses is at the pinnacle. The sabbath day God calls Moses from within the cloud. Notice that it looks different to those below. If you are so inclined, this is a good time to get a handle on the transcendent God, the holy God.

 

4) Right before Lent, we get forty days communing with God. I tend to read glory as the presence of god. Moses gets to be in the abode of god. Moses is a mediator between God and Israel.

 

5) the way this is lined up with transfiguration, some slow time noting similarities and difference would be worthwhile.

(Please realize that these notes were prepared for a goodbye Communion serve to the churches where I've served for over 15 years)

Anxiety is an  issue whenever we face change. A good response to anxiety is not to meet it with more anxiety and responding to it, but to cleave to your own sense of self, your own goal. All anxiety does is to drain energy away from what we are able to do. it clouds our sight into a flurry of images, like looking out the window from a speeding train. I've been asked if I am anxious to go to a new challenge. My response is the same: when I was in high school, I lived into college my senior year instead of living in those moments. It is better to try to live one day at a time. In an anxious time, we do our best work when we try to remain calm amidst difficulty. This congregation is pushing toward its bicentennial. God was with this church at its founding in the cold of 1823 (or 1825 at Springhill). God is with us now. God will be with this congregation in its future directions.

Sometimes one looks back and wonders about impact. We've had too many funerals and not enough baptisms and weddings. I do know that I have tried to offer quality for us in preaching, teaching, and pastoral care and said as much in my exit interview with Alan Thames, our executive presbyter just last week.  We have faithfully worshiped God here. We have being of support and comfort in our time together. That is a good measure of church work: faithfulness. A pastor in our tradition does not join a congregation, only the session. We may represent the church, but the congregation is the church, not the pastor.

 

In our readings we get a full parental view of God, father and mother. Even when you forget people in the life of this church, God does not forget. Even if we feel abandoned and forgotten, God remains faithful. God remembers what we need. god knows what needs we have personally or together in the congregation.  So Jesus can say with equanimity: God knows what you need. Does worrying help at all? Doesn't it sap our energy? If we can't control it, why worry about it? Both readings point to better days. For the readers of Isaiah they faced a large promise but were uncertain about how to reach it. the answer is that god was with them and will continue to be with them. god is fully capable of doing new things for a new situation, even changing the whole of nature.

 

Recall that the Last Supper was a goodbye supper for Jesus and his friends. It has a sense of "until we meet again" more than a final parting. Communion is medicine for the anxiety-ridden soul. It is a tangible act of God to reinforce God's presence with us. That parental care, from both a maternal and paternal angle, is ours. The generosity of that God in our readings continues to be lavished on us, for us, in us. As we ingest it, we get the point that God penetrates our lives to the very cells. In Hebrew, to remember is to make the past a present reality. It reminds us that we are bound up with all lives, living or dead. We are all kept safe in the living memory of God. This congregation will always be kept alive in the very life of God. In that sense we are, all of us, being gathered up into the life of God, no matter where we are, no matter where life, or death, may find us.

First Cut
1) v.8 refers back to 42:6 that Simeon uses when seeing baby Jesus. Paul cites the first part of the verse in 2 Cor.6:2. Ross Wagner of Princeton did a monograph of Paul's use of Isaiah.

2) Hanson in Interpretation (Is. 40-66) at 132 speaks of "the one who chooses the unremarkable to accomplish remarkable things."

3) Now notice that the servant has real work to do of announcing a change. That change is in nature as well as in the renewed vision of a people. look how far the hand of God stretches from the exile community of Babylon and all the way to Egypt's south to the first cataract In v.13 that new nature sings and the words that start Is.40 are renewed here in reality.

4)Zion/Jerusalem is Dame or Widow or Mother Zion here.She personifies the feeling of being forsaken and forgotten.

5) The response is remarkable. Human mothers may fail but the divine motherly love of god cannot. Recall that compassion ruhammah is related to womb rehem,. in Hebrew.

6) No tattoos for God's people, but it surely sounds as if they are engraven in the hands of the Holy One.

Leviticus is usually ignored by Christians as a book of ritual. Not only does Jesus quote from it to form what we call the golden rule, it serves as a model for other Christian writing such as the book of James. This morning, we see it making a vital point: God wants us to keep our lives together, church and work, worship and family. As we said recently, we are to look at the our lives through stained glass. Worship, including the reading of Scripture allows us to gain a heavenly perspective on life. Our passage this morning  links worship life and social l.fie into a seamless whole.

 

Jesus takes the injunction to love our neighbor, and even Leviticus includes in its parameters the stranger in our midst, and makes it even more radical. Jesus calls us to love the enemy. For 2000 years the Christian church has known this passage from the Sermon on the Mount.and seems to have disregarded it for most of our history. Jesus describes social reality, where his hearers were on the receiving end of insult. A blow to the face as an insult with back of the hand. The insulted party is saying:  I do not have to follow your rules. Even the mile marker is taken from Roman usage, not the word that usually applies in the gospels. (This is like learning to say liter for us oldsters). I am a human being who makes choices. I will not, in the wrods of paul, repay evil for evil.

 

Do not take on the attitudes and actions of evil directed at us, not an individual expose the system-not coerced, we can still choose to respond in a new way. Walter Wink argues that Jesus is against violence but also passivity. Jesus here is subversive. By refusing to take the role of the victim, we open the doors to claim self-respect but also put the enemy in the position of seeing us as human beings worthy of respect, not as a thing to be manipulated. We have seen this at the public level of the civil rights mvoement in our country and inother palces around the world. If Christians adopt the work of the enemy, and violence is at the top of the list, what distinguishes us from the enemy. So many old spy movies follow the descent of the shadow world where the work of the good guys and the bad guys become utterly blurred.

 

Walter Wink has done some good work on our Matthew passage, where he insists that Jesus provides a third way in rejecting both violence and being a victim. The enemy allows us to project our evil on to someone else. The enemy allows us to sharpen our skills at hating and revenge. Jesus insists that we look at the enemy as a neighbor, as a human being. I can think of few things that demand as much discipline as that, as much moral courage as that.. it is so easy to hate, to dismiss a person or a whole group of people. I have to swallow hard not to lump Muslims into a group, or more specifically see no possibility for change, no redemption for the violent purveyors of radical Islam. (Sports is a harmless way of doing this)

 

Wink goes further and asks us to consider using the enemy as a spiritual guide into ourselves. What we hate in the enemy is what we may well most hate within ourselves. Does God look at us as enemies? Paul says that even with our enmity toward God, we are given Jesus Christ. God sees the enemy as someone still capable of being redeemed, still getting a second chance for them to do right by others and to receive that consideration. In the end, all of us deal with human beings. made in the image and likeness of God, we are at our best when we treat people we accord each other in worship.

Leviticus is usually ignored by Christians as a book of ritual. Not only does Jesus quote from it to form what we call the golden rule, it serves as a model for other Christian writing such as the book of James. This morning, we see it making a vital point: God wants us to keep our lives together, church and work, worship and family. As we said recently, we are to look at the our lives through stained glass. Worship, including the reading of Scripture allows us to gain a heavenly perspective on life. Our passage this morning  links worship life and social l.fie into a seamless whole.

 

Jesus takes the injunction to love our neighbor, and even Leviticus includes in its parameters the stranger in our midst, and makes it even more radical. Jesus calls us to love the enemy. For 2000 years the Christian church has known this passage from the Sermon on the Mount.and seems to have disregarded it for most of our history. Jesus describes social reality, where his hearers were on the receiving end of insult. A blow to the face as an insult with back of the hand. The insulted party is saying:  I do not have to follow your rules. Even the mile marker is taken from Roman usage, not the word that usually applies in the gospels. (This is like learning to say liter for us oldsters). I am a human being who makes choices. I will not, in the wrods of paul, repay evil for evil.

 

Do not take on the attitudes and actions of evil directed at us, not an individual expose the system-not coerced, we can still choose to respond in a new way. Walter Wink argues that Jesus is against violence but also passivity. Jesus here is subversive. By refusing to take the role of the victim, we open the doors to claim self-respect but also put the enemy in the position of seeing us as human beings worthy of respect, not as a thing to be manipulated. We have seen this at the public level of the civil rights mvoement in our country and inother palces around the world. If Christians adopt the work of the enemy, and violence is at the top of the list, what distinguishes us from the enemy. So many old spy movies follow the descent of the shadow world where the work of the good guys and the bad guys become utterly blurred.

 

Walter Wink has done some good work on our Matthew passage, where he insists that Jesus provides a third way in rejecting both violence and being a victim. The enemy allows us to project our evil on to someone else. The enemy allows us to sharpen our skills at hating and revenge. Jesus insists that we look at the enemy as a neighbor, as a human being. I can think of few things that demand as much discipline as that, as much moral courage as that.. it is so easy to hate, to dismiss a person or a whole group of people. I have to swallow hard not to lump Muslims into a group, or more specifically see no possibility for change, no redemption for the violent purveyors of radical Islam. (Sports is a harmless way of doing this)

 

Wink goes further and asks us to consider using the enemy as a spiritual guide into ourselves. What we hate in the enemy is what we may well most hate within ourselves. Does God look at us as enemies? Paul says that even with our enmity toward God, we are given Jesus Christ. God sees the enemy as someone still capable of being redeemed, still getting a second chance for them to do right by others and to receive that consideration. In the end, all of us deal with human beings. made in the image and likeness of God, we are at our best when we treat people we accord each other in worship.

OT Lectionary Questions for Feb. 20 Lev. 19:1-2, 9-18

1) We are in the middle of holiness material. This is read in some Jewish gatherings on the Day of Atonement/Forgiveness Yom Kippur.



2) Holiness is a diffiuclt sense for us in this new century. One could go back to Rudoplh Otto's The Idea of the Holy, a book our eldest just read for class. At 1135-6 NIB it syas "holiness is to imitate God...to roll up one's sleeves and join in with wahtever God is doing in the world."



3) 9-18 has clear links to the 10 Commandments, with some interesting additions. (See NIB 1131-6) See Jacob Milgrom's work as well. I need to look it up, but Interpretation had a theme issue on Leviticus. some time ago..



4) This is a proof text for those who argue for the God of the poor, but notice that vv.15-16 look toward the rights of the rich as well, thereby preventing the wholesale attacks of a Robert Mugabe.



5) We have the golden rule here. I wonder if it was to summarize what preceded it?



6) v. 17 stands against the idea of legalism as it speaks of the inmost being, not only behaviors.



7) Tinothy Luke Johnson long ago noted that this chapter may have served as an organizing ext for the book of James. (JBL, 1982)

8) How do you react to rules? I tend to push against them immediately.

Sermon February 13, 2011, Mt. 5:21-37, I Cor. 3:1-9

In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew presents Jesus as a new Moses on the mount, giving a new teaching. As starting point. Jesus uses the 10 Commandments as the milk to move into the meat of Christian ethics. At the heart of Christian ethics is an awareness of attiudes and decision. Jesus the psychologist realizes that the inner drives we share can reult in not only poor decisions but evil actions.

The church has long viewed these words as both aspirational and formational. They call us beyond what we think we can do. to focus on these deepening commandments change our whole way of living. In time we will become more fully Chrisitan in attiude, thought, and behavior.

Anger is a proper and useful reaction. I think a better use of the word would be constant rage, or a constantly stoked, simmering anger, like the fire in a steam engine train. Its trouble starts to emerge when we act on it by impulse or careful planning. Revenge, not forgiveness, tends to be its method.

Words of anger can poison a relationship Sometimes they can be a factor in moving from lust to adultery to divorce. Think of how a relationship that is confirmed with words such as to have and to hold turn into you idiot or more vulgar epithets. Instead of love and care, words can mutate into signs of derision and contempt.Of course, the emphasis on truth telling toward the end of the passage could lead to divorce as well, I would think.

Jimmy Carter was lampooned for referring to this passage when he spoke of lust in the heart. Quite simply it means seeing someone purely as a sexual object, not a person. Indeed in all these examples people are seen not as persons to be respected but as mere things, objects. Divorce itself is a sign of a broken relationship just as the other sins are evoked by an existing attiude. Divorce is the sad consequence, sometimes, of stopping to see the spouse as a loved person, instead of a role.

All of the material on oaths means to tell the truth, not to take the truth as meaningless, or jsut words to be manipulated or spun.. Secretary Rumsfeld has a new memoir out where he shrugs his shulders at the misleading statements fo the administration by saying that the world is better off with saddam dead. He misses that point that the ends do not justify the means in a democracy nor in Christian ethics.

I'd like to see more churches named after the Sermon on the Mount. One day that would not be necessary. The church will be composed of people who really seek to live them out.

1) What is remarkable in this covenant renewal is that it brings us into the original setting. Perhaps more imporatantly with its use of the present, it speaks to us directly in our own time. This is not bible land as far away and distant; this is the bible addresses us, in our circumstance, today, right now.

 

2) Earlier, Moses admits that obedience is difficult (29:4), so this section has the sense of saying that in spite of that seeming inability, the liturgy calls us to obedience in the covenant.

 

3) This has become a bumper sticker for the pro-life viewpoint. OK, but it cannot be permitted to become only that. Waht promotes a culture of life. Dallas Willard once said something to the effect that it is as great a sin not to enjhoy life as it is to waste it.

 

4) The liturgy has the aspect of being in a trial. (See Richard Fenn's book on this point).

 

5) I contend that the entire wisdom corpus is commentary on seeking the path of life and rejecting the path of deaht. Pope John Paul II did important work in speaking of a culture of death that aflcits contemporary social life.

 

6) It stirs the Reformed tradition's soul to see such an emphasis on idolatry as the primary problem in our relationship with God and the impetus toward disobedience.