Pentecost 21 B - Hebrews 5:1-10

Hebrews 5:1-10

I’m not a high priest but I suppose according to the writer of Hebrews I qualify as one chosen to be “put in charge of things pertaining to God” so as to “deal gently with the ignorant and the wayward.” Of course the people of God at Calvary are neither ignorant nor wayward. If you want to read some ignorant and wayward ideas just Google Melchizedek. The trouble with obscure Biblical characters is that people feel free to fill in the blanks. Can anyone say Jabez? What we do know is that Mel, the King of Salem, blessed Abram with bread and wine after Abram’s victory over the Elamites and Abram introduced the tithe – although the passage could be read in such a way that it could be King Mel who gave the tithe to Father Abe. (Genesis 14:18-20) That would be an interesting twist. What if in dealing with a wayward and ignorant humanity it is Jesus, the King of Peace, who gives the tithe to us? Except he didn’t just give ten percent but with loud tears and cries gave his whole life so as to deal gently with those who dealt cruelly with him. Maybe we need to do more than tithe as well?

Pentecost 21 B - Psalm 91:9-16

Psalm 91:9-16

I’d rather not tread upon the lion cub (they’re so cute!) or trample down the serpent (Why’d it have to be snakes – Indiana Jones) but I wouldn’t turn down a dwelling free from affliction. The fact of the matter is we all experience times full of trouble where the Lord as a refuge with angel hands to bear us up are a welcome relief from all the things that threaten. That does not mean we don’t have to deal with the evil all around us. It does mean that in the holy habitation that is the Most High we are delivered and upheld by the salvation that ultimately satisfies. 

Pentecost 20 B - Isaiah 53:4-12

Isaiah 53:4-12

Isaiah’s vision of the suffering servant seems to indicate God does not deal with transgressions the same way we do. We hold onto grudges and make people pay for momentary slights and hardly ever forgive unless we are sure the offending party is sufficiently sorry. God in Jesus does what no one expects by entering into and bearing the pain that must grieve God the most; the beautiful and terrible human mind that imagines and constructs ways to maximize pain and shame while delaying death as long as possible. But God picks up the pain of all of our inhuman history and bears the suffering we consider a sign of God's judgment or bad karma or rotten luck so as to bring peace to all including those who could care less about anyone else. So aren't there consequences for transgressions? In this life the consequence is found in the transgression itself. A life of corruption can never relax. A life of violence is never safe. A life of excess is never satisfied. But the poor and the put upon and those who bear the brunt of the transgressions of others wait for another day and in that day – if we can believe the scriptures – the last will be ushered in ahead of the first. Whether they are also gatekeepers remains to be seen. If they are I hope they are as merciful as the God who let them cut in line ahead of us. 

Pentecost 20 - Mark 10:17-31

Mark 10:17-31

The rich young man’s wealth and life-long obedience to the law means he has every reason to believe his eternal life inheritance is in the bank and yet he still asks the question, “what must I do?”  The disciples who don’t understand his question or Jesus’ response for that matter have their deposit in the same account. If he’s not in the money what hope do we have? Even their response “we have left everything…” is a way of gaming the “what must I do” system so that God has to pay out on whatever winning hand we think we have. But “for God all things are possible” means we have nothing to do with whatever God has decided is possible for God to do which of course is all things including the unthinkable. God can give eternal life to whomever God pleases to give it to. But that also means God can withhold eternal life from whomever God chooses to withhold it. Truth is God can do whatever God wants to do. Of course in the cross we see the One who was obedient since the beginning give up all he had for the sake of a world impoverished by sin which might lead one to believe the love God has for the human family makes the question “what must I do?” meaningless. That doesn’t mean obedience to the commandments or giving up everything for the sake of the poor are not desirable things to do only that in God’s way of gaming there are no winning tickets to eternal life except Jesus Christ.

Pentecost 20 B - Hebrews 4:12-16

Hebrews 4:12-16

It is more than a little frightening to know that we are laid naked and bare to the eyes of the One who can judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And even more so since it is to that One that we will have to render an account. Shortly after the beginning the first humans hid in the bushes because they heard the sound of God walking in the garden and they were naked and ashamed and afraid. We hide behind bushes of our own design hoping that no one will notice our nakedness and while we are pretty good at disguising our dysfunction from ourselves and one another there is no hiding from God. But then the One who is just is also the One who justifies (Romans 3:28) and was himself stripped naked and nailed to wood so as to be fully sympathetic to the weakness of human flesh. Therefore, we have no fear of and no need to hide from the One who invites us to approach the throne of grace with confidence – not because we are worthy but because God was willing to enter the bushes in which we hide.

Pentecost 20 B - Psalm 90:12-17

Psalm 90:12-17

I don’t need to be a math major to know there are more days behind me than ahead of me 

so I’d rather not number the days I have left, thank you very much. Of course a heart of wisdom isn’t troubled by the passing of time because it understands each day is a gift and no one is guaranteed another when the current day is done. So the heart of wisdom awakes each morning grateful that it has been given a new dawn to greet. That is not to say the burden of each day is easy to bear when days are full of trouble and nights are wearied by weeping. But maybe the heart of wisdom is able to endure them all because the days of trouble are numbered and the future day of resurrection dawn is endless. So satisfy us this day, O Lord, with unfailing love that anticipates the eternal song of joy.

Pentecost 20 - Amos 5:6-7; 10-15

Amos 5:6-7; 10-15
You can’t seek the good God desires without seeking the good that blesses others. That is not to say you don’t have your own “personal Jesus” (Depeche Mode) it’s just that God is personally concerned with more people than just you. Like a parent who desires competing children to not just play nice but deeply care for one another the fact that some of God’s children live in luxury while others live in poverty is upsetting to God. There are no easy answers to income inequality and we are less than honest if we don’t acknowledge that even the most generous of us have far more than we actually need. But God doesn’t deal in half measures and if Amos speaks for the Almighty the day of reckoning will be same sort of reversal of fortunes that Jesus preached about on more than one occasion. So what if we were not distracted or discouraged by the issues that are beyond our ability to deal with but instead provided for the needy in the “gate” we pass through every day? We can change the part of the planet we inhabit one person at a time and in doing so we will more fully love the God who fully loves the people we pass by in the gate.

Pentecost 19 B - Mark 10:2-16

Mark 10:2-16

When the disciples ask Jesus about this matter he invokes the “thou shall not…” to what Moses allowed for so that the hypocrisy of the Pharisee test might be exposed. The secondary law that is a concession to the hardness of the human heart is easily coerced so that the “from the beginning of creation” purpose of God is corrupted. That does not mean the “from the beginning of creation” purpose of God is not in place when the one flesh of marriage is separated only that like so many other things about our present circumstance divorce is not what God intended. The second half of this week’s lectionary might seem unrelated but like the perfect law corrupted the human heart hardens the gift of the kingdom of God into something we put in a doctrinal box of human rules and regulations. So a little child is the image the Almighty chooses to take up so that the hardness of the human heart might be softened in the same way that Jesus takes little children into his arms and blesses them.

Pentecost 19 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 distant. 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. 

Pentecost 19 B - Psalm 8

Psalm 8

The “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name” is mindful of mortals. Within the human community the mighty generally ignore the lowly. There are exceptions, of course, but more often than not human beings are only mindful of themselves. 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 in a country occupied by a foreign power. He 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, 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) David imagines God’s mindfulness as crowning mortals with glory and honor and giving them dominion over every living thing. Mortals crowned the majestic name with thorns and heaped scorn and abuse on that sacred head. But the glory of God was the cross (John 12:28) where God elevated mortals by being brought low. “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth…”

Pentecost 19 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 help mate partners have never been the same despite the fairy-tale optimism of happily ever after. Not that help mate 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, though 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 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.

Pentecost 18 B - Mark 9:38-50

Mark 9:38-50

I’d rather not give up my hand, foot or eye even if the consequence of keeping what causes me to sin is hellish. That’s the literal truth of this passage and one that is not that hard to understand. Giving up what causes us to sin is as difficult as cutting off a hand or a foot or plucking out an eye. The fact that the text makes us uncomfortable is a good indication that we know we have grown accustomed to stumbling through life and are not all that anxious to do the painful but necessary work of removing from our being the thoughts, words and deeds with which we harm ourselves and others and ultimately offend the Lord.  But when the word of the Lord salts us with fire we hear the truth about our faltering footsteps which is always an invitation to be set free from whatever impedes peace within ourselves. And if we are at peace within ourselves we are more likely to be at peace with others and that always pleases the Lord.

Pentecost 18 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 those who are cheerful rejoice. There may be some who think it is the righteousness of the one who prays that determines the outcome but I prefer to believe the “powerful and effective” nature of the prayer has more to do with persistence in the face of circumstances beyond one's 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. Every day is a gift despite the difficulties we face when we recognize we are in this thing together. So Elijah was indeed just like us even though some folks that farm and ranch in west Texas might like to have his ability to make it rain.

Pentecost 18 B - Psalm 19:7-14

Psalm 19:7-14

We tend to think of the law as limiting, for good reasons of course, 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 is not all that pleasant for us (there is a reason our faults prefer to remain 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 are all about. Love God. Love others. Such words and thoughts of the heart are always pleasing to the Lord, our rock and redeemer.

Pentecost 18 B - Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29

Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29

The children of Israel, subsisting on manna and quail, weep in the wilderness because they long for the days in Egypt when they imagine they dined on finer fare. Truth is they were slaves in Egypt so it is unlikely that 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 was better than it could have been. Often we imagine it was worse than it was. But either way we are not satisfied with whatever is and therefore we long for what never was. And so the children of Israel throw a temper tantrum and Moses becomes despondent and the Lord becomes exceedingly 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 the same bird everyday.

Pentecost 17 B - Mark 9:30-37

Mark 9:30-37

On Christmas Eve 1988 I attended worship in the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool, England. I sat somewhere in the middle of the second longest nave in the world that houses the largest pipe organ in the United Kingdom. The organ lived up to its reputation while over a thousand voices sang “O Come All Ye Faithful” and choirs and cantors and canons processed down the center aisle with considerable pomp and circumstance. At the very end of the liturgical parade, resplendent in garments of gold and crowned with jeweled miter while leaning on an ornate shepherd’s crook, the bishop of Liverpool walked with a small child in his arms. December 24, 1988 is by far my favorite Christmas Eve ever but I’m guessing the bishop of Liverpool carrying a borrowed baby is not what Jesus meant by “whoever wants to be first must be last…” I don’t mean to disparage that experience but the truth is the institutional church has not only pursued power but on far too many occasions has been consumed by it. I think the current crisis of declining participation in the life of faith in the church is due to the lack of faith people have in the life of the church. And even if we embrace and live into being last our sinful nature will likely turn it into a strategy for being first. The good news is that resurrection is always on the other side of death and that even if wonderful spaces like the Cathedral of Liverpool were to crumble into dust the faithful people who created such spaces have already been built into living stones. (1 Peter 2:5)

Pentecost 17 B - James 3:13-4:8

James 3:14-4:8

If “submit yourselves to God, resist the devil and he will flee from you” was as easy as it sounds 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 that God holds back until we act since “draw near to God and God will draw near to you” seems 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 to God is what God 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. So perhaps submitting to God is not about denying oneself but rather choosing to become the child of God we already are. (St. Augustine) 

Pentecost 17 B - Psalm 54

Psalm 54
The lectionary often skips over verses that call for the destruction of enemies even if there are good reasons for enemies to be destroyed. Repaying evil with evil doesn’t fit the pattern of following the Christ who instructs his disciples to turn the other cheek and pray for those who persecute them.Truth to be told we are sorely tempted to ignore Christ's pacifist teaching in a world where people believe inhuman acts of violence are justified to defend their religious world view. 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 can take care of God's honor, thank you very much. We can and should pray for the ruthless to experience just consequences for what they have done to others. 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 because a merciless life hell bent on the destruction of others already reaps what it sows. 

Pentecost 17 B - Jeremiah 11:18-20

Jeremiah - Marc Chagall

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 obscurity. 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 will have to pray forgiveness for things done and left undone, things said and left unsaid. It may be that we who waited for God to act on behalf of those who suffer while God waited for us to act will be judged as 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 is not willing to conform to the kingdom of God and indeed actively 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. 

Pentecost 16 B - James 3:1-12

James 3:1-12

James does not mean to discourage “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 she found it difficult 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 most of us should look for some other work. However, since Christ is the well she drew from we can all tap into the same source and be as gracious as she was (and still is) although I imagine very few will be as remarkable.