March 21. 2010

In Jn 12 a place of raising from the dead becomes the locale for the impending sentence of death. This pivotal scene moves us through the gospel story. This supper with friends is linked to the last supper with disciples. When she wipes his feet it leads us to Jesus wiping the feet of the disciples.  We are certainly in the realm of the body with the scent of perfumes, the smell of feet, the stench of death at the tomb. At issue here is using a year's wages for one act of devotion-time and urgency push an astounding act of devotion. She shows the extravagance of love here (indeed a prodigal act). She  reveals what it is to follow Jesus fully-defined by love and service that may appear to go overboard. On one hand, it looks as if it is an extravagant act of devotion. In the eyes of Christ, the anointing is a prophetic act that launches his march to the cross and to our eyes marks Jesus as messiah, anointed one in his work as priest, prophet, and king, all of which come to a climax in Holy Week. So often, people use these words  of Jesus about the short time left to him as an excuse to ignore the poor, since they are a longstanding concern. He is defending her apparently rash decision to anoint him at great expense since his time was short. We all have plenty of time to deal with those in need.

 

Is. 43:16-21-Some time ago, I was made aware of a impressive book by Patrica Tull of LPTS, Remember the Former Things, that looks at the dense interplay of this section of Isaiah with other prophets.Here,  I am struck by God's instruction to not remember the former things. In 46:10 God says to remember the former things. Some would call that sheer contradiction. That's part of the balancing act of life, isn't it? We live between memory and hope, between past, present, and future, all being woven together. We can't live in the past only, but we do ourselves no favors to ignore its lessons. I'm not sure what the former things are, but I'll proffer two this morning. One is that the impending punishments of the book are not finished and gone. the other would be the powerful memory of the miracles associated with the freedom from slavery that led to Passover observance that we have transformed into Maundy Thursday. I have a sense that to spend a life waiting for a miracle prevents us from living life the best we can right now.(In searching for the one, we may well miss a partner, as the book Settling for Mr Good Enough argues). God's goals may be consistent for us, but the mechanisms may well change, so we should not be looking for repeat episodes from the unfettered creativity of the Almighty. Bakhtin said  "past and present make up the warp and woof of the present moment." New contexts do furnish new ways of understanding Scripture. The bible is a living book as we can see our situations in it. God is always doing a new thing. The living God is fully capable of responding in new, genuine, effective ways in our world. God works on an emerging, open future. The Christian faith insists that the past does not have to be endlessly repeated. the faith is not chained to the way things are.At the cusp of spring, some of the early plants are sprouting; every day we hear more birds outside. In the structure of the seasons, God is doing a new thing. Every time we wake up in the morning, God is doing a new things with us.

Prodigal's father

 

The story starts about a father, a man with two sons. He gave the son what he asked for. It was rare, apparently, to ask for an early inheritance. Jesus has the father give him a share of his life. The younger son has left the family, cut ties with them. In a way, the payment for the inheritance was redemption money for him to be free of his family and their rules. Everyone said he was too good to the young man. Perhaps the father feared that he were not gracious, he feared worse rebellion, insolence, maybe theft or ruining the estate.  Or worse, he'd become like the elder brother. Maybe he knew that he would get in trouble if given enough rope, but that he would have sense enough to return home. He would have to learn the consequences of his prodigal actions through experience, not a lecture.

 

We don't know how the father handled things in the interim. I'm sure he worried some. Maybe he was like Jinkins who speaks of a Zen Calvinism, of a calm assurance that the world is in "God's hands in the end, not his." We are told that the son "came to himself, or recovered his senses." Some suspect why he rehearsed the lines. Some suspect that he was practicing to manipulate his father with a show of repentance and offer to be treated like a servant. The father won't let him finish his speech.

 

When the prodigal returned the father did not act like a patriarch whose pride and reputation had been damaged.(Ken Bailey material)-  he celebrated. He brings him back into the family fold. He threw a party, a big party.

 

The father handled the elder brother with kindness, maybe how he needed to be handled. Maybe the father  did he take him for granted too much. He does tell him that all that I have is yours. I think it includes his heart. The elder son has as much emotional distance as the younger brother had in a far country. The father has to handle the distance now here. Again the father goes out to meet the son; he makes a move to close the gap. The elder son feels like a servant. He needs to learn to say brother Possibly, we see the essence of forgiveness, to be able to see someone not as an enemy, but as family, as close to us again.

 

This makes a story out of Paul's words where the father is an instrument of reconciliation. it is not always easy, as it causes strife with the elder brother. For the father, the past is finished and gone. His relationship with the son is a new creation I think of the movie The Straight Story, where an old man who has no license, gets on a lawn mower from Iowa to Wisconsin to patch things up with his brother.As Jeremias wrote "repentance is learning to say father or brother again." Trying to patch things up is worth going to extremes sometimes.

 

The word prodigal doesn't appear in the story. Prodigal means profligate, wasteful spending, to squander something. In this way, we could speak of the prodigal father, for he is abundant, maybe wasteful, in forgiveness and reconciliation, an ambassador for the soft side of parental love. Who are we to judge the loving reactions of someone else? Worse, who are we to withhold love and forgiveness when someone does not live up to our standards for them? Is it possible to ever squander love? In its very nature, isn't  love prodigal, profligate? Is it love when it isn't? Look at the exuberance of divine love in light of this story and Zeph. 3:17.

Is. 43:16-21 Third cut
1) Two good Is. books-the commentary  by the late Brevard Childs and Patricia Tull (Willey) of LPTS, Remember the Former Things.

2) It seems clear that we are making reference to the exodus. I don't know if that is a former thing or does it refer to the sins and punishments of exile. If it is referring to exodus, it could mean not to look for a climatic miracle but something within our power with God. If the former things are the promised punishments, then Israel is entering a new future.

3) OK, God is making a new way, through wilderness instead of sea, but the wilderness did precede the Promised Land. NIB (378) mentions a change from murmurs to praise, but I'm not so sure.

4) This wilderness is a transformed wilderness, more zoo than threat, or better a wilderness church.

5) When is dwelling on the past dangerous? Think of folks at reunions. think of a church always looking for its glory days as the baseline. Is dwelling on past hurts a sign that forgiveness has yet to take hold?

6) How does one keep alert to God doing a new thing? What dulls our perception?

7) Elsewhere in the book, God says to remember the former things (46:9-10) so I would assume this is a matter for discernment. The Russian literary critic, Bakhtin said that the "old and new make the warp and woof of every moment." New contexts can demand new readings of God's ways. Indeed, here God's new thing is a new way out, but it is the same redemptive impusle. the past cannot be a stranglehold on the present and future, but it lives anew in its refashioning in new contexts.

 

Ps 126 see Limburg in WBC on living between memory and hope (Long's new preaching book shares the sense)  This is part of the ascent psalms it could have been part of liturgy as one moved toward the temple. Mays (Int. series- speaks of joy remember and joy anticipated. Hebrew prayer often has this anticipation of answered prayer.

1)It ends with bringing in the sheaves, that has an apocalyptic sense as well.

2) It's an odd arrangement: of the thrill of seeing Zion restored but still needing fortunes restored. On the other hand, that sounds just like life.

3) This is a bold psalm to use for the grieving. It won't last forever.

4) One could work wonders with the early phrase we were like those who dream(ed). It could be "like people renewed in health" as well

5) The Negev is often dry but the wadis can rush with water at times.

6) One could link to to Eccl.3 and the seasons/time issue for different sets of actions and feelings.

Holy Week 2010

 

Palm Sunday has readings for the entry to Jerusalem or readings that leap into the dark scenes of the Passion of Jesus Christ. They certainly fit the highs and lows of life and those often are squeezed into a short period of time. It may even be a spiritual diagnostic test to see which ones we gravitate toward on this day, the triumph or the tragedy. What part of the palm Sunday story stands out for you in the different gospel versions? What parts of the Passion accounts stand in stark relief for you?

 

Monday-Calvin wrote on Holy Week: (Jn. 19:11) "we ought to be prepared for enduring the cross.Knowing that we must die, we should be prepared for death.The time of death is unknown to us, and the Lord permits us to defend our life with the defenses God has appointed.We must patiently endure diseases...yet we ought to seek alleviation of them...let this be fixed in our hearts, let the will of God be done."

 

Tuesday-Jinkins quotes George MacDonald (p.53, Called) "sometimes it seems I cannot pray for doubts and pain and anger and all strife....All things seem to be rushing straight into the dark. But the dark still is God." In the darkness of Gethsemane God was there. God is there in the midst of our worst struggles.In that knowledge, the light will emerge.

 

Wednesday-Grief and Holy Week have an uneasy equilibrium. Easter tends to blow the doors off our grief, but the events of the days prior are full of grief. the women weep as they visit the empty tomb. Nothing shows how well acquainted God is with our grief than in the cross. christian grief acknowledges the pain of loss that is always present, but it is softened by the Easter story and given wings in the hope that we will meet again in heaven.

 

Maundy Thursday I picked up a book of Communion sermons by Marice Fetty, The Feasts of the Kingdom. In the great banquet of Lk. 14, he says that (68-9) "Jesus was an outsider, rejected by insiders... Communion invites all of us, insiders and outsiders into the great banquet feast. This is the right invitation. This is a dinner party not to be missed. You are invited. Are you coming?"

 

Good Friday-Douglas John Hall wrote in Lighten our Darkness (117-9) "Luther wrote preach one thing, the wisdom of the cross...we are devoid of wisdom..our natural tendency is to regard ourselves as sufficient, autonomous, masters..theology is a broke statement on life's brokenness...we find God in the midst of peril..God is the one who manifest himself on the cross." It is a full extension of the Incarnation, of the human condition.

 

Holy Saturday-I continue to be touched by a posthumous work on Holy Saturday by Alan Lewis. At the end of the preface (5) he writes:" We relive annually the growing tensions of the climatic week; the grieving farewells, shameful betrayal, guilty denial, and agonizing fear of the night before the end; the long dark, deadly day of pain and forsakenness itself; an ecstatic daybreak of miracle and color, song and newborn life; and in between one eerie, restless day of burial and waiting."

Josh 5:9-12, Psalm 32 Second cut
1) OK, I must be thick as I do not get why this passage from Joshua appears in the readings. But here we go.

2) We are after the setting up of a memorial, a cairn,  at Gilgal for the crossing of the Jordan on dry land.My guess is that Gilgal was a cultic site of some importance at some point. With that, it is good to note that Joshua is not a particularly reliable source of accurate information; but it is history with a point. In particular, it uses the conquest story as a way for its readers to reflect on one's present experience. Many people are fascinated when digs bring up material that may coincide with a Biblical narrative, but evidence rarely backs up the Joshua material for dating. See the entry on the book before the commentary in the NIB, for instance. National Geographic has an excellent new picture book atlas on the bible and Oxford published some years ago a wonderful edited volume on the biblical world. One could introduce maximalist v. historical minimalist views from BAR or bible World as well.

3) We are in transition where the manna ceases, because they can eat the crops of the land. abar means to cross over and abur is a word for produce, so a pun may be involved that they have crossed over to eat the produce.

4) Passover figures prominently in the book. i do not think it  goes too far to see it linked as a passover from sin's and slavery's deadly effect to a new start. It is as if the wilderness experience cleansed the people of the stench of slavery's pervasive effects on them.

5) Surely we are facing a priestly insertion about circumcision in the chapter.

6) Perhaps one could link this to the prodigal's story of lack of food and ritual issues with the pigs. ould look at the issue of being responsible v. dependent, of starving when abundance is available.

 

 

Psalm 32

1) First we need to face squarely the decline of guilt in our culture, so the power of the psalm is lessened automatically. Do you sense any relief during our confession of sin and declaration of pardon in Reformed churches?

2) this is one of the traditional penitential psalms:6,38, 51, 102, 130, 143.

3) we get a Hebrew breviary of sin here. Sin =pesa, like the Gk. hamartia is to miss the mark. transgression has a sense of rebellion (awon) hata-a=iniquity an enduring stain of sin's effects. Sin is not merely doing something against the rules but a disposition that ranges across time, space, and society itself.

4) Still, the emphasis here is on forgiveness=sins been 'covered' Perhaps this is in the sense of out of sight out of mind.

5) Blessed works in v. 1 but happy would work better here, I think.

6) Notice the effect of denial and silence in v. 3 to the cathartic openness of v. 5

5March 7, 2010  I Cor. 10:1-13, Lk. 13:1-9

 

It was 9:30 in the morning of All Saints Day in the most devout country in the world. First, the earthquake struck, killing people in the churches and throughout the city. Then the fires started. The people fled for the water to escape the flames, and then, the tidal wave came. It was Lisbon, Portugal 1755 and 3/4 of the city was ruined. The priests responded by searching for heretics to burn slowly, for the heretics were the obvious cause of the earthquake.

 

How do we regard God and human suffering? I hear versions of our passage from Paul a lot. It goes something like this. God doesn't give us more than we can take or tackle. First, the pronoun is the collective you, not singular. Second, the key trouble with it is the underlying assumption that God deliberately gives us troubles, especially ones over which we have no choice. Another way to go at it would be that God gives us a doable regimen of improvement but God will not overtax our limits. What some call radical suffering, unjust, arbitrary, senseless suffering does not, ever, come from the hand of God. That includes the common phrase that god takes our loved ones. Third, the emphasis of the passage is on the way out, an exodus, that replicates God's deliverance from the sore troubles of slavery in Egypt for the people. Life is hard enough without having God act as our enemy. 

 

Jesus faces two types of evil in the gospel. First, Pilate's act is pure human evil an example of arbitrary, innocent suffering at the hands of a tyrant. The collapse of a tower probably would be a form of natural evil, an unfortunate event of the blind forces of nature, the forces of tornadoes or earthquake. First, notice that Jesus does not assign blame to the victims of evil. He does not say that they somehow deserved it, that they weren't positive-thinking enough, that God was punishing them. Second, Jesus does not assign God a role in this suffering.

 

Instead of seeing a punitive, controlling God, Jesus gives a parable that speaks of patience, of willingness to give more time. Much of this land was covered with trees.When land was opened up for farming, trees were removed as impediments to the long straight rows of crops. If a tree is supposed to be productive, all well and good, but don't waste energy on trying to save it. Plant something else. Here the emphasis is on trying to save the one little fig tree, to do everything in one's power to bring it to full life. I've read that the fruit starts to appear before the leaves.Instead of an impatient demand for results, the gardener is willing to give time and effort toward making the conditions for the tree to be productive. It did not escape notice that the fig tree was a Biblical symbol for Israel, or was a sign of the coming of the Messiah. God is patient with our failings to bear the fruit with the gift of life. Put differently, God is not chomping at the bit to get at us for our failings; God continues to work with us.

 

One fine day, God's fond hope for all the world will come to fruition. Until that time, trials and temptations will not cease. The exodus, the way out for us when we fall prey to temptations is the road of repentance, of course.  The trials of death await us all. Even there, God provides a way out, the road to heaven.In the meantime, with infinite patience and care, God continues to tend the garden of our lives, giving us the precious gift of time, to bloom like the coming daffodils, to grow toward the beauty intends for this life.

Lent 6

Sunday-Ps. 126 is reflected in the hymn, Bringing in the Sheaves. It is a wonderful evocation of the reversal from bad fortune to good times, like the Depression-era song, happy Days Are Here Again. What bad place or time were you in when you dreamed of escape? When have you a dream come true?

 

Monday-Earthquakes have ravaged Haiti and Chile.I've already heard some fools blame some elements of religion in Haiti for the earthquake. I'm sure that they can think up something in Chile to cast aspersions on suffering people and to blame them for their plight. the Christian response to suffering is to have compassion and seek to ease the suffering, not to heap on piles of blame on top of the rubble.

 

Tuesday-Frances Taylor Gench teaches at Union Seminary, Richmond. In a fine book, Encounters with Jesus, she writes on the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) "much has been made of her irregular marital history but little of her witness, or missionary endeavor, or the vindication of her role by Jesus...Kysar observes... "the reader knows, because of her, that no matter who you are...the revelation of God in Christ is for you." (38) Who is a surprising embodiment of the faith for you? How does it surprise you that you embody the Christian faith? Where does it shine out in your life?

 

Wednesday-Calvin had a realistic view of human nature. On  I Cor. 15:58 on abounding in the work of the Lord: "unquestionably,if the hope of reward is taken away and extinguished, alacrity in running will not merely grow cold, but will be completely destroyed." Earlier he says," who would not turn aside from the way if not by thinking of a better life, so they are kept in reverence of God?" What are you7r hopes for heaven?

 

Thursday-Using people, taking advantage of people, is a sin against our creation in the image and likeness of God. Sometimes we will say thing such as, it not personal, it's just business. People are sacred and should not be treated as mere objects for our own selfish desires or plans. People are too vital to be considered merely part of statistics or especially mere means toward some larger end, no matter how well-intentioned.

 

Friday-Terence Fretheim has written his magnum opus, God and World in the Old Testament. In its closing paragraph on the relations of God, nature, and human beings he writes: "Human beings give voice to nonhuman praise, to a world highly charged with wonder and praise. On the other hand, the heavens will proclaim the glory of God with less clarity on a smoggy day."(284) He sees us involved in a triadic relationship always: human beings, nature, and our God. As creatures of the earth itself, we are charged as being its representative; our fates are intertwined in the divine drama.

 

Saturday-Donald Capps is  a recently retired pastoral theologian at Princeton. In Agents of Hope, he sees the enemies of hope as despair, apathy, and shame. The allies of hope are trust, patience, and modesty. Emily Dickinson imagined hope as a bird, the thing with feathers. It lifts us from the tyranny of what is into the rarefied air of what could be. What fond hopes to you have that lift you from the mundane?