Month: January 2013

Epiphany 4C: ‘Tis Love

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OLD TESTAMENT:  Jeremiah 1: 4-10
The next two weeks we will deal with the call stories of two of the best-known prophets (Jeremiah and Isaiah).  In the case of Jeremiah, as with Isaiah, the call takes place within conversation and the prophet protests in some way.  In Jeremiah’s case, God reassures him that “now I have put my words in your mouth”.  From that moment on, Jeremiah is single-minded in what God is calling him to do.  So much, in fact, that he becomes a typical outsider in his own society.  The passage contains indications that Jeremiah will probably be at odds with those to whom he is sent to prophesy.  He, in fact, is essentially rejected by his own people.  Jeremiah’s work involves destroying and overthrowing, then building and planting.  Essentially, his message was one of turmoil as the people journeyed toward God’s promise.
The work of the prophet Jeremiah spanned a period of about 40 years, from the 13th year of the reign of Josiah (which would be about 627 BCE) until the “captivity of Jerusalem”, which occurred about 587 BCE.  The temple was destroyed a year later.  For those 40 years, the prophet maintained a message of destruction.  All that the people knew and hold dear would soon be gone.  Needless to say, this did not go over well.  In fact, on more than one occasion, the people tried to kill Jeremiah.
These verses are the witness of those years.  They are written by one who has been tested in the fire and has stood firm, one who has experienced the strength and empowerment of God in the most unimaginable of circumstances.  God had promised to always be with Jeremiah and the prophet now looks back on a life and did indeed see God’s presence woven through it.
The order of what Jeremiah is supposed to do is important—pluck up, pull down, destroy, overthrow, build, plant.  Before building and planting, you break down and pluck up.  Spiritually we prefer just some building addition, some planting to spruce up the place a bit, so that we can hang on to what we already have; we are attached to it, we earned it.  But recreation is about starting over, it is about giving God room to work.  James C. Howell makes this observation:  Interestingly, Jeremiah uses four verbs for this deconstruction (break down, pluck up, overthrow, destroy), but only two for the new creation.  Is the deconstruction harder labor.   (James C. Howell, Homiletical Perspective from Jeremiah 1: 4-10 in Feasting on the Word:  Advent Through Transfiguration, Year C, Volume 4 (Louisville, KY:  Westminster-John Knox Press, 2009), 295.
Now I don’t think that Jeremiah was being called at this moment into some sort of alternative career path.  He was being called to look at life differently, to take on a new creativity in doing what God called him to do.  But before he launched out into building something new, he had to deal with what was there.  He had to start over.  You know, God was not clearing the path of Jeremiah to be a beloved leader of the people; rather, God was pushing him out of the fray, asking him to lead a new charge.  And, the Scripture says, God had had this in mind from the very beginning.  Jeremiah’s whole life—all the misdirections, all the roads, all the times that he just flat screwed up his life—have brought him here, to this moment.  It’s a new day, but a day that has been coming.
And the lection ends not with a directive to finish or accomplish.  It ends with a call to plant.  To plant, to seed the earth with a vision of what will be.  Jeremiah may not see it grow to fruition.  He may never see it break the top of the soil at all.  But he will know that he has done his part.  Henderson Nelson (or someone else—I’ve seen this attributed to gobs of people), said that “the true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”  Maybe our completion-driven society would do well to listen to that. Maybe, like Jeremiah, we are called to plant and to water and to nurture so that change will take root and then to hand off the doing to those who come after us that they, too, might be who God calls them to be.  We are not called to build the world into what we perceive God is calling it to be; we are rather called to do what God is calling us to do so that plant by plant, brick by brick, and faithful response by faithful response, the earth will reflect not our image of who we think God is, but the true Kingdom of God in all its mystery. 
a.      What is your response to this passage?
b.      How does this speak to you about faith?  What about courage?
c.       What reaction do you have to the message that something must essentially be destroyed before something can be built?
d.      What do you think of the idea that the tearing down may be “harder labor”?
e.       How does this speak to you about your own calling and your own spirituality?
NEW TESTAMENT:  1 Corinthians 13: 1-13
This passage is obviously a familiar one.  You’ve probably heard it read at 80% of the weddings that you’ve attended.  So try to let it float on its own, free from the way you’ve heard it.  It is, obviously, about love.  But, ironically, it’s not really talking about human love.  Instead, it’s talking about that deep and abiding love to which we are all called.  It speaks of the love that is the very essence of God.
In the passages that we read the last two weeks, Paul was concerned about the spiritual gifts of the Corinthian community and how they viewed those gifts.  This is a follow-up to that.  His point is that even the incredibly zealous and competent use of gifts—speaking in tongues, prophesying, wisdom, knowledge, even faith—is absolutely useless without love, without the very essence of God.  It is that love, that which is of God, that will survive when everything else slips away.  Everything else is really just a bunch of noise.
Even faith and hope can slip away if they are not borne within the right Spirit, if they are not part of God.  It is love, though, that survives.  The essence of that love is something toward which we must journey.  We may not even completely understand it.  But it is the very essence of life.  But it is not blind love.  This is a seeing love, a knowing love, a love that we must strive to understand and strive to come near.  The point is that when you boil our Christian understanding down to its very core, what remains is not doctrine or rules or creeds or confession but rather the very face of love.  It is the face that we struggle to find, the face that we struggle to see, and the face we struggle to grow into.  It is the face of Christ.  It is the face of Love.
Paul’s idea of love sounds a lot like perfection (or maybe it’s just the Methodist in me that is coming up with that!).  It’s not a picture of what love is but a picture of what love is supposed to be.  It’s that vision that God holds for us all.  Pure and true love is essentially that vision.  It’s that to which we all aspire, that to which we all journey in this life of faith.  It is that which bear all, believes all, hopes all.  It is that which surpasses whatever it is that you think it is.  That’s right.  Think about what love is.  And then go farther.  Now, there…go farther than that…farther…farther…farther…THAT is love.  Our life is one that seeks that love and knows that it has already found us.  ‘Tis love, ‘tis love…
This pursuit of this love IS our faith journey.  For us, it is the journey itself that brings light into the darkness and unity to our world.  God isn’t commanding us to be perfect; God is calling us to love—“to love God with everything we are and to love our neighbor as ourself.”  It is pure, unadulterated, selfless giving.  It is God.  ‘Tis love.
a.      What  meaning does this passage hold for you?
b.      What does this depiction of love mean for you?
c.       What gets in the way of this type of love for most of us?
d.      What does this depiction of love mean in terms of reaching out to the world?
e.       What does this depiction of love mean in terms of loving our enemies?
GOSPEL:  Luke 4: 21-30
This Scripture is a continuation of the Gospel passage that we read last week.  Jesus is still in his hometown, having unrolled the scroll and read from it.  But Jesus was not seen as a prophet or as the Messiah by these people that had known him for so long.  He was just one of them, that little kid who they had known when his nose was running and he was getting in trouble for getting too dirty.  But he was one who had made good and of whom they were very proud.  They probably thought that Jesus’ ministry would be a reflection on them—something they could chalk up to “You know, I knew him when…”.  And now here he is saying things that were not the things to which they were accustomed.  Jesus was actually calling them to change, calling them to step out of their boxes and away from their temples and become who God was calling them to be.
But they rebelled.  This was not part of what they knew.  Now we need to be careful that we do not assume a sort of anti-Semitic stance on this.  Jesus was not against the religious “establishment”.  He was just trying to get people to realize its true meaning, he was trying to compel them to realize that it was not about rules but about openness, about (remember!) love.
And, to be honest, we could put ourselves in the same story.  We are comfortable being open and exercising radical hospitality as long as they leave us be, as long as we don’t have to change, as long as we can go home and be warm and comfortable and relax when it is all over.  Isn’t that right?  But that’s not the way it works.  After all, when you think about it, this level of commitment, this pure untainted love, did not elevate Jesus to the point of having his own mega-church on the freeway and a Sunday morning televised service.  Instead, it led to the Cross and, ultimately, to Life.
Bishop William Willimon says of this passage:

A friend of mine returned from an audience with His Holiness the Dali Lama. “When his Holiness speaks,” my friend said, “everyone in the room becomes quiet, serene and peaceful.” Not so with Jesus. Things were fine in Nazareth until Jesus opened his mouth and all hell broke lose.  And this was only his first sermon! One might have thought that Jesus would have used a more effective rhetorical strategy, would have saved inflammatory speech until he had taken the time to build trust, to win people’s affection, to contextualize his message — as we are urged to do in homiletics classes.
No, instead he threw the book at them, hit them right between the eyes with Isaiah, and jabbed them with First Kings, right to the jaw, left hook. Beaten, but not bowed, the congregation struggled to its feet, regrouped and attempted to throw the preacher off a cliff. And Jesus “went on his way.”
And what a way to go. In just a few weeks, this sermon will end, not in Nazareth but at Golgotha. For now, Jesus has given us the slip. Having preached the sovereign grace of God — grace for a Syrian army officer or a poor pagan woman at Zarephath — Jesus demonstrates that he is free even from the community that professes to be people of the Book. The Book and its preachers are the hope of the community of faith, not its pets or possessions. Perhaps the church folk at Capernaum won’t put up such a fight. Jesus moves on, ever elusive and free….
Kierkegaard noted that many great minds of his century had given themselves to making people’s lives easier — inventing labor-saving machines and devices. He said that he would dedicate himself to making peoples lives more difficult. He would become a preacher…
In a seminar for preachers that I led with Stanley Hauerwas, one pastor said, in a plaintive voice, “The bishop sent me to a little town in South Carolina. I preached one Sunday on the challenge of racial justice. In two months my people were so angry that the bishop moved me. At the next church, I was determined for things to go better. Didn’t preach about race. But we had an incident in town, and I felt forced to speak.  “The board met that week and voted unanimously for us to be moved. My wife was insulted at the supermarket. My children were beaten upon the school ground.” My pastoral heart went out to this dear, suffering brother. Hauerwas replied, “And your point is what? We work for the living God, not a false, dead god! Did somebody tell you it would be easy?”
Not one drop of sympathy for this brother, not a bit of collegial concern. Jesus moves right on from Nazareth to Capernaum, another Sabbath, another sermon, where the congregational demons cry out to him, “Let us alone!” (Luke 4:34). But he won’t, thank God. He is free to administer his peculiar sort of grace, whether we hear or refuse to hear. This is our good news.
As for us preachers: “See, today I appoint you over nations and over Kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy, and to overthrow.” (Jer. 1:10) — with no weapon but words. (Bishop William Willimon, “Book ‘Em”, in The Christian Century, January 27, 2004, p. 20, available at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2955, accessed 27 January, 2010.)

a.      What  meaning does this hold for you?
b.      Where do you find yourself in this story?
c.       How does this story read to you in light of the 1 Corinthians reading?
d.      What about “faith” makes you the most uncomfortable?
Some Quotes for Further Reflection:
The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.  (Flora Whittemore)
Too many religious people make faith their aim.  They think “the greatest of these” is faith, and faith defined as all but infallible doctrine.  These are the dogmatic, divisive Christians, more concerned with freezing the doctrine than warming the haeart.  If faith can be exclusive, love can only be inclusive.  (William Sloane Coffin)
Like a love who spends all his time thinking of his distant love, God has been thinking of me since before I was born, for all eternity. (Ernesto Cardenal)
Closing
Come, O thou Traveler unknown, whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone, and I am left alone with thee, with thee all night I mean to stay and wrestle till the break of day.
I need not tell thee who I am, my misery and sin declare; thyself hast called me by my name, look on thy hands and read it there.  But who, I ask thee, who art thou?  Tell me thy name, and tell me now.
With thou not yet to me reveal thy new, unutterable name?  Tell me, I still beseech thee, tell, to know it now resolved I am; wrestling, I will not let thee go, till I thy name, thy nature know.
My strength is gone, my nature dies, I sink beneath thy weighty hand, faint to revive, and fall to rise; I fall, and yet by faith I stand; I stand and will not let thee go till I thy name, thy nature know.
‘Tis Love! ‘tis Love! Thou diedst for me, I hear thy whisper in my heart.  The morning breaks, the shadows flee, pure Universal Love thou art: to me, to all, thy mercies move—thy nature, and thy name is Love.  Amen. (From “Wrestling Jacob” (aka “Come, O Thou Traveler Unknown”), by Charles Wesley, from The United Methodist Hymnal, # 387.

Epiphany 3C: More Than Words

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OLD TESTAMENT:  Nehemiah 8: 1-3, 5-6, 8-10
This passage that we read from Nehemiah may be a strange one for us.  Essentially, in very detailed precision, it recounts a public reading of the Law of the Torah for a community, not totally unlike the Scripture readings in which we participate each and every Sunday.  The public reading took place on the day that would be the Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the seventh month, late in September or early October, according to our modern-day calendar.  The day would be a holy day.
This was not merely a requisite reading as part of a worship service, though.  It was instead a gathering of the community to celebrate and hear the word of God for that community. It was a time of thankfulness, a time of realizing what God had done, a time of becoming who they were called to be before God.  And this community was receptive, was indeed hungry for this word.
The context of this eighth chapter of Nehemiah is set soon after 539 BCE after Cyrus and the Persians conquered Babylon and the Jewish exiles began to return home.  But the city to which they were returning was very different from the one that their community had left.  Their land had been taken and redistributed so they had no way of making a living.  The infrastructure that had previously been there was no more and even the temple, long since destroyed, had not been rebuilt.  They were returning home but for most of them, there was no home to which they could return.  And so, for the most part, the fledgling city of Jerusalem remained unpopulated and unable to move forward and rebuild their lives.
The Book of Nehemiah is mainly about the work of the man Nehemiah, the Persian appointed governor of Judea whose responsibility it was to see that the city of Jerusalem was rebuilt following the return of these exiles.  The walls had to be rebuilt, the city had to be repopulated, the social abuses had to be corrected, the worship life had to return as a central part of the community, and the community of faith had to once again become who God intended them to be.  Needless to say, this was no small feat!  The first six chapters of the Old Testament book that we know as Nehemiah outlines the beginning of that rebuilding process.  Then in chapter 7, we are given a long list of returned exiles who have settled back in their towns.  These were the ones who had come home.  These were the ones whose character and traditions would lay the foundations to rebuild the community.  They knew what they needed to do that.  They knew that they needed some help.  And so, they ask Ezra to read the “law of Moses” to them.
Here they are, it says, gathered in a square opposite the Water Gate.  This was an area of the worship space in which laypeople could enter.  It may have been in the vicinity of the spring of Gihon, which was once Jerusalem’s main water source.  And they all came—men, women, and at least some children (all who could “hear with understanding”).  This was a very inclusive gathering.  And here were these people—concerned about their homes, their families, whether or not they would ever recover from what they had been through.  So they asked Ezra the scribe to read from the book of Law, the Torah, those words that had guided them for centuries and provided a compass for their very lives.
So Ezra stood on a raised platform, surrounded by some of the lay leaders, unrolled the scroll, and began to read.  And as he began to read, the people stood, a sign of reverence and respect.  This was not a passive crowd.  They really wanted to hear.  They really wanted to understand.  They really wanted to find in those words the comfort and strength and hope that they had always found.  As he read, it says that there were responses of “Amen, Amen” as they listened and understood.  The Word of the Lord.  Thanks be to God.  The passage says that Ezra read from early morning until midday and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of law.  Can you imagine?  A Scripture reading that lasted at least four hours.  Oh admit it, most of our congregation would have been long gone.  (Good thing there wasn’t a football game that day!)  So the next time you complain about a sermon or a prayer that is too long, I want you to remember this passage.
This reading is about both the faithful and joyous reception of God’s Word seen in the people.  For them, the Word of God comes to life through these words.  The point is that these were not just words…this was the story, their story, and ours.  The celebration at the end is not, as we might think, because the reading is over.  It is because the sacred memories were alive once again.  Once again, the people have remembered who they are.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said this:  The Word of Scripture should never stop sounding in your ears and working in you all day long, just like the words of someone you love.  And just as you do not analyze the words of someone you love, but accept them as they are said to you, accept the Word of Scripture and ponder it in your heart, as Mary did.  That is all.  That is meditation…Do not ask “How shall I pass this on?” but “What does it say to me?”  Then ponder this Word long in your heart until it has gone right into you and taken possession of you.
a.      What is your response to this passage?
b.      What does it mean to you for the “Word of God” to come to life?
c.       What is a “faithful and joyous” reception of the Scriptures?  What stands in our way of having that?
d.      What does it mean to “hear with understanding”?
e.       What does it mean to you for the Word to “take possession of you”? 
NEW TESTAMENT:  1 Corinthians 12: 13-31a
This passage is a continuation of the Epistle that we read last week.  Once again, the passage focuses on our unity, our common body in which we live.  Paul is speaking here to some disunity and discord that had taken place because of views toward gifts.  Paul is affirming the presence of spiritual gifts but in his own way is also warning that just because someone possesses “spiritual gifts” does not necessarily make them “spiritual”.
According to Paul, whatever does not embody and reflect love is not Christian spirituality.  Paul claims that because we are of one body, the Body of Christ, there ought to be a sense of unity and solidarity.  According to the passage, all of these gifts, indeed, all of these roles are vital for the life of the whole Christian community.  The roles relate to particular functions, not to any sense of status on its own.  Paul’s list is not a complete compendium.  It is about functions within the roles that make up the community.
Paul challenges us to see ourselves as the embodiment of Christ in the world, not primarily as individuals but as local communities, yet belonging also to a larger whole. Difference is acknowledged. People are not all the same. They do not all have the same abilities. The common life is nothing other than the life of Christ, the life of the Spirit. This remains the constant. We are not asked as individuals to be Christ or Christs, let alone saviours of the world, although many suffer from this misconception and the burn out it produces. We are asked to be members of a body, of Christ, and to play our part – not more, not less.
It is essentially a discussion about stewardship, about using what God has given you and infused into your life to build up and bring in the fullness of the Kingdom of God.  But it is also about using the gifts of others, honouring them and empowering others to use their gifts.
a.      What  meaning does this passage hold for you?
b.      In what ways do gifts contribute to or deflect from the unity of Christ’s Body?
c.       What, then, does this say about what the Body of Christ is or what it should be?
GOSPEL:  Luke 4: 14-21
So, here, Jesus returns to his “hometown”, so to speak.  They had heard about how the hometown boy was doing good elsewhere and they all showed up to be taught by one of their own.  They had high praise for him.  As was the custom, Jesus stood in the synagogue to read.  He unrolled the scroll and began to read.  But something happened in the midst of the reading.  He saw himself differently after reading the lyrical words from the scroll.  So did those who heard him that day.  Through this reading, the community was born anew.  They saw things differently.
We probably pretty much take our ability to read or to hear the words read for granted.  But, there’s reading and then there’s reading.  Renita Weems says that “public reading of the Bible today would scarcely move anyone to weep or even to look up from reading the bulletin or filling out the offering envelope.  But every word in the Bible was written with the expectation that most of those who encountered it would hear it as a text read to them in a gathering of believers. This explains the lyrical, poetic, engaging style of much of the language found in the Bible.”
The point here is that reading the bible is more than entertainment or “information gathering”; it is transformation.  The Scripture that was read is a calling to something else.  It is meant to move the hearers (and the reader) beyond where they are.  The Word changes things.  Nothing will ever be the same again.
Hear the Scripture that was read: (Isaiah 61)
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,  and release to the prisoners; 2to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour,  and the day of vengeance of our God;
   to comfort all who mourn; 3to provide for those who mourn in Zion—
   to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
   the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.  They will be called oaks of righteousness,
   the planting of the Lord, to display his glory. 4They shall build up the ancient ruins,
   they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities,
   the devastations of many generations.
5Strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, foreigners shall till your land and dress your vines; 6but you shall be called priests of the Lord,
   you shall be named ministers of our God; you shall enjoy the wealth of the nations,
   and in their riches you shall glory. 7Because their* shame was double, and dishonour was proclaimed as their lot,
therefore they shall possess a double portion;  everlasting joy shall be theirs.
8For I the Lord love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing;
I will faithfully give them their recompense, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them. 9Their descendants shall be known among the nations,
   and their offspring among the peoples; all who see them shall acknowledge
   that they are a people whom the Lord has blessed. 10I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,
   my whole being shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation,    he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. 11For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.
            Much of that language is summarily tossed aside by us, relegated to a time gone by.  And yet, Jesus stood up before that crowd and read this aloud.  You could say that it was his manifesto.  He was meant to do this from the beginning, meant to shake the world out of its complacency and wake it up so that it might see where the need is the greatest, meant to show us what the world could be, and, indeed, what we were called to be.  Jesus was pointing to God and God’s vision for the world—a vision of good news and release, of recovery and freedom.
            So, what do these words mean for our time?  How are we supposed to take them today?  (OK, do we need to read them again.)  These words ARE the words.  What do they mean for our time?  They depict a vision of good news and release, of recovery and freedom.  The fact that words are not comfortable for us to hear does not mean that they are not the truth.  So, “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  Can you hear me now?  Take the words, roll them around in your heart, and then imagine what vision they hold.  That is the vision to which we are called.  We just have to learn to listen.  We just have to learn to open ourselves to the Spirit that they hold.
Scripture has been compared to a lake whose depths have never been fully plumbed.  On the surface it looks like any other lake; that is, we see human words like those in other books.  But when we jump into the lake and begin to swim downward, we may be unable to find the bottom.  It is as if those human words become transparent to some mysterious and infinite depth we can never fully grasp.  Perhaps that is why one writer can say “Sounding in and through the human words of scripture, like the sea within a conch shell, is another reality, vaster than mind or imagination can compass.  God has chosen to be bound to the words of Scripture; in and through them, the Holy One comes near…It is not that the words magically or mechanically contain God’s Presence, but that as we allow the same Spirit through which the scriptures were written to inform our listening, the presence of God in and beyond those words becomes alive for us once more. (Marjorie Thompson, Soul Feast:  The Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life (Louisville, KY:  Westminster-John Knox Press, 1995), 19-20)
a.      What  meaning does this hold for you?
b.      What would it mean to truly live these words, to digest them and make them a part of our very being?
c.       Why does our reading of Scripture today fall short of this?
d.      What would happen if we really heard what the Scripture was saying, if we really allowed the Spirit to trickle into our lives from the words?
Some Quotes for Further Reflection:
The larger the island of knowledge, the greater the shoreline of wonder.  (Huston Smith)
We do not always realize what a radical suggestion it is for us to read to be formed and transformed rather than to gather information.  We are information seekers.  We love to cover territory. (Macrina Wiederkehr)
If  then you are wise, you will show yourself as a reservoir than a canal.  For a canal spreads abroad water as it receives it, but a reservoir waits until it is filled before overflowing, and thus communicates, without loss to itself, its superabundant water. (Bernard of Clairvaux)
Closing
All-seeing One, above me, around me, within me.  Be my seeing as I read these sacred words.  Look down upon me; look out from within me; look all around me; see through my eyes; hear through my ears; feel through my heart; touch me where I need to be touched.  And when my heart is touched, give me the grace to lay down this Holy Book and ask significant questions.  Amen. (Marjorie Thompson, Soul Feast:  The Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life (Louisville, KY:  Westminster-John Knox Press, 1995), 23)