The Feast of Reformation - John 8:31-36

 John 8:31-36

Freedom: i.e. "the power to determine action without restraint." Even in a nation founded on the principle of freedom we are constrained by laws that limit our power to determine action. But then personal freedom, to do and say and act as I desire, is ultimately a selfish ambition that in some ways denies others their freedom to do say and act as they like. So Jesus is not speaking about personal freedom to do and say and act as we desire. He is speaking of a freedom that changes the way we understand our relationship with God. The Jews “who had believed in him” were still depending on their connection with Abraham to claim their non-slave status as God’s own people even while their land was occupied by the Roman Empire. The freedom Jesus offers is summed up in the idea that those who believe have passed from death to life. (John 5:24) No one is more free than the one who by believing can confess “whether we live or whether we die we are the Lord’s” (Romans 14:8) trusting that “nothing can separate us from the love of God”. (Romans 8:38-39) Here’s the twist. Being made free by the Son makes you the slave of all. (John 13:12-17) Go figure. 

The Feast of the Reformation - Romans 3:19-28

Romans 3:19-28

It is God’s righteousness that matters because none are justified in God’s sight without the divine forbearance that passes over the sins of the “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Faith in Jesus matters as well because without it there is no reason to be confident. However, when Jesus is reduced to a private password for paradise then faith becomes another version of the law where the work of faith saves one from “the wrath that is to come” and not the grace of God. But if faith proves “in the present time” that God determines what “the future time” will be then our hope is in divine forbearance rather than retribution. 

The Feast of Reformation - Psalm 46

 Psalm 46

Outside the city made glad by streams, the Lord of Hosts was led like a lamb to the slaughter. The "Refuge and Strength" that comes to those who are in trouble was himself in need of help but there was none to be found. On the day the voice of the “be still and know that I am God” was silenced the earth quaked and darkness descended on the earth and the curtain that hid the habitation of the most high was torn in two. If that were the end of the story there would be no help for us when morning dawns but as it is the earth could not contain the one who created the heavens and the morning that dawned on him was resurrection for us all. Our refuge and strength, our very present help in time of trouble, is in our confidence that if we have died with Christ we shall also rise with him and therefore we will not fear when the ground of our lives gives way. There may yet be a day when God causes wars to cease and the human race sings “ ain't gonna study war no more” but in these days the help we receive is that God stills our souls and calms our fears even though kingdoms totter and nations make noise. 

The Feast of Reformation - Jeremiah 31:31-34

Jeremiah 31:31-34

I shudder whenever someone says “the days are surely coming” because it sounds like whatever is coming is bad news. But Jeremiah, the bad news prophet, is talking about a good news day that is “surely coming” where “know the Lord” will be in human DNA. Of course the “surely coming” days still seem to be a long way off and in the waiting time children continue to suffer for sins of parents and covenants are broken before the ink dries on the dotted line. But we who wait in expectant hope of the good news day that will surely come have the advantage of knowing that the future will not be like the present no matter what the bad news prophets of our day may say. That means in some ways we already know the Lord which means the day that is surely coming has already arrived.

Lectionary 29 Year B - Mark 10:35-45

 Mark 10:35-45

“When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John” presumably because the ten were sorry they hadn't been as bold as the two. All twelve imagined the cup was power and the baptism the laurel wreath of victory but Jesus is destined to be enthroned on a cross and the places on the right and left of that throne were reserved for criminals. Jesus stills the sons of thunder with the promise that they will drink the cup of suffering and be baptized with death without getting anything in return except the promise that being first, for the follower of Jesus, is like being last in the ways of the world. In so many ways that lesson has been lost on the church as the places of honor are reserved for those who “pastored up” say the prayer or for big box church rulers who drive Mercedes and live in Mc-Mansions provided by people who like the widow with a mite can hardly afford to tithe. Thank God that the “ransom for many” serves and saves in ways that go beyond the limited understanding of the two and the ten and the church so that Jesus is proclaimed despite our propensity to translate the Gospel into ways that make us great.

Lectionary 28 Year B - Mark 10:17-31

Mark 10:17-31

Maybe if we don’t ask the rich young man’s question, “what must we do to be saved” we don’t have to apply Jesus’ answer, “give everything away and follow me.” But then there is always a nagging doubt that Jesus says what he means and means what he says and the rich will have a hard time finding a hole in the kingdom gate big enough to squeeze through. So what if we just divest ourselves of ten percent and give the poor the proceeds from a garage sale of the stuff we haven’t used in years? Peter feels like he’s done that and more, "we've left everything and followed you” but then he didn't have much to begin with so he thinks giving away the little he had will boost his bottom line. Jesus' answer to Peter is that the balance sheet will not be all that pretty as persecutions are the gate of the kingdom come. This is the problem with both the question, “what must I do to be saved” and the answer, "do this". I do not think Jesus answered the question the rich young man asked. He was responding to the nagging doubt the young man had that despite keeping all the commandments from his youth and being rewarded with riches he needed something more. The trouble for him is that getting more involved having less. The trouble for Peter is that having less involved giving more.

Lectionary 28 Year B - Hebrews 4:12-16

 

Hebrews 4:12-16

The first humans hid in the bushes when after eating the forbidden fruit they suddenly realized 

they were naked. The writer of Hebrews understands what the first couple found out pretty quickly. “There ain't no hiding place from the Father of Creation” (Bob Marley – One Love) So if all is laid bare and exposed to the One to whom we all will have to give account how is it that we can approach the throne of grace with boldness? Of course the answer we know by heart is Jesus because Jesus knows a thing or two about being stripped naked. But to trust Jesus so completely as to be comfortable being exposed before the “one to whom we must render an account” is something else entirely. In many ways we are still hiding but now it is behind the bushes of religious rules and regulations that clothe us with respectability. I’m not saying piety doesn't have a prominent place in the life of faith, but there really is “no hiding place” when even the most pious (in the best sense of the word) are guilty of thoughts and intentions of the heart far removed from perfect. If I can be totally honest with you (which is as close to naked as we come with each other) my greatest fear is that my current confidence in God’s grace will fail me in the time of my ultimate need i.e. my last breath when all pretensions are put aside and things done and left undone can never be corrected and we have to take the last step of life alone, even if we are surrounded by those who love us and wish us well. The only way I know how to deal with that nagging doubt is to believe God is more interested in honesty than piety. And so I hold fast to the confession that I am afraid and trust that the living and active two edge sword of the scripture is truer than I am able to believe – Jesus sympathizes with my weakness.

Lectionary 28 Year B - Psalm 90:12-17

 

Psalm 90:12-17

The last lesson we seem to learn is to number our days aright since we act as if we have an unlimited supply. “Bet your bottom dollar the sun will come up tomorrow…” There is a wisdom to be gained in living each day as if it were your last, but only if you choose to make your last day worth living and not an excuse for excess. Of course you’d think the psalmist crying out, “Turn, O Lord, how long?” might wish for fewer days rather than a long life of suffering but instead there is a confidence that steadfast love in the morning will satisfy. When the balance sheet of life is tallied there will be cause for rejoicing in the Lord whose favor rests upon the children of God despite the difficulty of any particular day. So we number our days not to keep count but to make each day count more. 

Lectionary 28 Year B - Amos 5:6-15

 Amos 5:6-15

There is no mistaking the economic element in the prophet Amos’s description of sin. Those who rule the house of Joseph despise the truth and hate the one who rightly exposes them as lovers of the lie. They trample the poor and take what little the poor have in order to plant pleasant vineyards and build houses of hewn stone. They take bribes and neglect the needy. They love evil and hate good and their mockery of justice leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of the righteous. So “the prudent will keep silent in such a time” presumably because their words fall on deaf ears, or worse, they’ll be heard and despised for telling the truth. So do the ancient words of Amos have anything to say to us in our time? I’m not saying, which some may take as saying too much.

Lectionary 27 Year B - Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12

 Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12

If “in these last days” Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory and the very imprint of God’s very being” then God (in Jesus) was, for a little while, lower than the angels as well. By that I mean Jesus cannot taste death for everyone while the one Father who sanctifies remains separate. Even if we reduce the relationship of the inner workings of the mystery of the Trinity to something a little lower, like human parent and child, God experiences the death Jesus drinks. More to the point, it is not just any death that Jesus tastes. He does not die in his sleep. The cancer doesn’t get him. He doesn’t drop dead of a heart attack. It isn’t an accident. Crowned with thorns, stripped naked and nailed to wood Jesus’ death is as creative as humans can get when it comes to inflicting shame and pain on one another. And given that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, knew our nature from the beginning… (in subjecting all things to them God left nothing outside their control)  it was not only fitting but really the only option that salvation for savages such as ourselves should come through suffering. And by that I mean Jesus descends into our corruption and rises above our much lower status so that we might ascend above and beyond our beginnings to become like the pioneer of our salvation. 

Lectionary 27 Year B - Psalm 8

 Psalm 8

Psalm 8 marvels that the “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name” is mindful of mortals. I suppose it does beg the question since within the human community the mighty generally despise the lowly. There are exceptions, of course, but when there is only so much wealth and power to go around human beings tend to hold onto whatever they have. Not so with the majestic name that is above all names. God in Jesus enters the human story as a baby born to an unwed mother and a confused carpenter in a country occupied by a foreign power.  God in Jesus is the opposite of what we would expect. “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by humans, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.” (Isaiah 53:2-3) So while the psalm imagines God’s mindfulness as crowning mortals with glory and honor and giving them dominion over every living thing. God determines to elevate us by being brought very low and dying on the cross the death of a criminal. “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth…”

Lectionary 27 Year B - Genesis 2:18-24

 Genesis 2:18-24

The trouble in paradise comes in chapter three but in the beginning everything was perfect. The “one flesh” couple lived without fear or guilt or shame or any of the ways of being and doing and thinking that rip one flesh apart and cause untold heartache. But once the two lusted after the forbidden fruit and crossed the line between creature and creator they no longer felt comfortable in their own skin. Relationships between helpmate partners have never been the same despite the fairy-tale optimism of happily ever after. Not that helpmate partners cannot be “one flesh” in a way that benefits both. It just takes more clinging to each other than we may care to or are able to do. So going back to the beginning is helpful. Not the first blush of love, although that is very nice, but the beginning of this story. It was not good for the first human to be alone and so God gave us the gift of the other who can be “one flesh” with us. If we think of ourselves as taken out of and given to each other we might cling to one another in ways that make the best parts of the fairy-tale come true.

Lectionary 26 Year B - James 5:13-20

James 5:13-20

I am confident Elijah was a human being but I’m not so sure about “quite like us.” On the other hand he was fully dependent on God for rain or lack thereof in the same way that those who suffer pray and the cheerful rejoice. There may be some who think it is the prayer of the righteous that determines the outcome but I prefer to believe the “powerful and effective” nature of the prayer has more to do with the persistence of prayer in the face of circumstances beyond our ability to control. We know that we were not meant to live forever in bodies of flesh and blood and bones and so the healing that happens in the temporal is not nearly as “powerful and effective” as the healing that allows one to take life as it comes without being overcome by whatever one must endure.

Lectionary 26 Year B - Psalm 19:7-14

 Psalm 19:7-14

We tend to think of the law as limiting, maybe for good reasons, but restrictive none-the-less. The psalmist sees the law as the kind of freedom that revives, rejoices and enlightens. That is because the law of the Lord reveals the truth about the One who desires all good things for us including clearing us from hidden faults, which may not be all that pleasant per se (there is a reason our faults prefer to be hidden) but it is certainly a good thing to know oneself well enough to avoid being dominated by errors that are not easily detected. So when we embody the perfect law of the Lord we live the love of the Lord which Jesus said is what the law and the prophets is all about. Love God. Love others. Such words and thoughts of the heart are always pleasing to the Lord, our rock and redeemer.

Lectionary 26 Year B - Numbers 11:4-29

 Numbers 11:4-29

The children of Israel, fairly well fed on manna and quail, weep in the wilderness because they long for the days when they imagine they dined with dignity. Truth is the Egyptians stopped giving them straw to make bricks so it is unlikely their task masters gave them fish to eat “for nothing”. We tend to color the past in ways that fill in the blanks of our present complaints. Sometimes we imagine the past better than it could have been. Often we imagine it worse than it was. But either way we are not satisfied with whatever is and therefore long for what never was. And so the children of Israel throw a tantrum and Moses becomes despondent and the Lord becomes very angry and the dysfunctional Exodus family tries to figure out how to live together in the desert when no one is happy. When the very angry Lord calms down the despondent Moses is instructed to share the load and the solution to the people’s displeasure is the Spirit of the Lord resting upon the seventy appointed along with two others who were not approved which is often how God acts because the Spirit of the Lord cannot be contained or easily explained. The person who is most moved is Moses which means he will refrain from complaining, “why have you treated your servant so badly?” at least for the time being and get back to leading which is what God called him to do. And the children of Israel will quiet down and be grateful they have something to eat, even if it is “what is it” (manna) and a small bird with not much meat. 

Lectionary 25 Year B - James 3:13-4:8

 James 3:13-4:8

If it were as easy as James makes it sound “submit yourselves to God, resist the devil and he will flee from you” the devil would be forever on the run. But then it’s the first part “submit yourselves to God” that is the most difficult to do which is why we are always dealing with “the devil inside.” (INXS) We might be tempted to think God holds back until we act as in “draw near to God and God will draw near to you” which is why submitting to God would seem to be all about us. But if submitting to God is predicated on the belief that God gifts us with wisdom from above then what we become in submitting is what God already is – “pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy” and the devil cannot long endure such good gifts.

Lectionary 25 Year B - Psalm 54

 Psalm 54 The lectionary often skips over verses that call for the destruction of enemies even if there is good reason for enemies to be destroyed. Repaying evil with evil doesn’t seem to fit the pattern of following the Christ who instructs disciples to turn the other cheek and pray for those who persecute them. There is good reason to follow Christ in a world where pious people believe acting in ruthless ways to defend the honor of a prophet is justified. But the psalmist does not advocate for actively striking his enemies and even though his prayer is not for their welfare he leaves vindication in the hands of the Lord. (Romans 12:19) That is because “vindicate me” assumes that the psalmist is in relationship with the Lord and that in their rising against the righteous the ruthless are rising against God as well and God is more than able to defend God's honor, thank you very much. We can and should pray for the ruthless to experience consequences for what they have done to others if for no other reason than to spare the innocent from the designs of the insolent. But in the spirit of the Christ we might also pray that the ruthless be freed from the ways of deceit and violence for their own sake, for a merciless life hell bent on the destruction of others will reap what it sows. 

Lectionary 25 Year B - Jeremiah 11:18-20

 Jeremiah 11:18-20 Jeremiah gives voice to the cry and complaint of the un-numbered and un-named throughout human history who led to the slaughter have looked to God, (or anyone who will listen) for help. But help does not always arrive in a timely fashion as Jeremiah himself will find out when his story of lament and complaint ends in silence. Despite all indications to the contrary we believe justice will have its day and the cause of the righteous will be upheld by the God who judges the heart and the mind. However, it may be that we who pray forgiveness for things done and left undone, things said and left unsaid, who have waited for God to act on behalf of those who suffer while God waited for us to act, will be judged equally guilty. “It was the Lord who made it known to me” means we are God’s agents of mercy and justice in a world that devises evil schemes against the weak and powerless. Too often Christian backs bristle at slights against the practice of our individual piety while the plight of those literally “led to the slaughter” hardly registers a reaction. Granted, the world has never conformed to the kingdom of God and always works against the principles of God’s reign, but when we are silent in the face of suffering we acquiesce to the evil schemes that would cut off the word of life from the land of the living.

Lectionary 24 Year B - Mark 8:27-38

Mark 8:27-38 If Jesus thought of his generation as adulterous and sinful what would he say of ours? I know there are a number of well-meaning people of faith who think we've gone to hell in a hand basket and fear it’s fixin’ to get worse. But since the rebellion in the garden there has never been a time in human history when we have not been an adulterous and sinful generation. That doesn't mean there are not degrees of separation when it comes to what was meant to be and what is. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” (A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens) Peter publicly confesses the Christ; “you are the Messiah” and then privately rebukes Jesus when Jesus defines what it means to be Messiah in a way that does not conform to Peter’s preconceived notion. Messiahs are not meant to undergo great suffering and be killed, even if they promise to rise again. If Peter missed the Messiah boat before the resurrection we are more likely to do so on the other side of the empty tomb and so cast Jesus in our own image of power and glory. No one is ashamed of a mighty Messiah coming in majesty to smash the enemies of God to pieces. But if we preach Christ crucified, the King of Glory is never far removed from the place where the world was saved. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” It was God’s design that the Messiah should be stripped naked and nailed to wood by religious authorities and Roman soldiers so that the Jewish rabbi from the Gentile region of Galilee could change all our ideas about power and prestige. Our problem is that we belong to an adulterous and sinful generation that holds onto to this life with a death grip and denies everything except ourselves believing we understand the divine mind when truth to be told we remain mired in human thinking.

Lectionary 24 Year B - James 3:1-12

 James 3:1-12

James does not mean to discourage “my brothers and sisters” to become teachers, nor does he expect them to be perfect, he just wants them to be aware that teachers (and preachers) are held to a higher standard by virtue of the task they have taken on. I’ve had some great teachers in my life but one of my favorites was Miss Kruse. She was my fifth grade teacher at Grace Lutheran School in River Forest, Illinois and years later I had the great gift of being her student teacher. She was a remarkable educator, well ahead of her time, but more importantly she embodied this text. I imagine there were days that were more difficult for her to be gracious and kind but as far as I could tell her way of being was her way of saying. That is, you cannot simply decide to be more disciplined in your speech while harboring anger and resentment in your heart. In the same way springs of water draw from what is down deep and not from what is on the surface. So if Miss Kruse is the bar for who should presume to teach we should all look for some other work. But because Christ is the well she drew from we can all tap into the same source and be as gracious and kind, not that we will ever be as remarkable.