Proper 28, Year B, November 17, 2024

Prayer
You keep vigil, O God, over the fortunes of your people, guiding their destiny in safety as the history of the world unfolds.  Increase our faith that those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall rise again and give us your Spirit to bring forth in our lives the fruit of charity, so that we may look forward every day to the glorious manifestation of your Son, who will come to gather the us into your kingdom.  We ask this through Christ, with whom you have raised us up in baptism, the Lord who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.

From Prayers for Sunday and Seasons, Year B, Peter J. Scagnelli, LTP, 1992.

Some Thoughts on Mark 13:1-8

"Apocalyptic eschatology is essentially about God working on behalf of humanity, and that is what is introduced in the beginning of this discourse. It leaves God alarmingly free and open to the future."
Commentary, Mark 13:1-8, Micah D. Kiel, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.


"Despite the global disasters that surround us -- some instigated by First World policies -- we'd rather think about a messianic figure who has already arrived and called on us to be kind to our neighbors. But, occasionally, it may be an important reminder to hear an ancient prophet cry out about the fragile nature of the world."
Commentary, Mark 13:1-8, Emerson Powery, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2015.

"In the end, 'what larges stones' is itself a statement of faith and it's a statement of faith that Jesus asks us to reconsider."
"Storied Stones," Karoline Lewis, Dear Working Preacher, 2015.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

God makes me nervous. Can I just be honest about that for a moment. When I sit quietly and think about the nature of God, God's unfolding work, my human place within his cosmos, I am aware that I am very nervous about God and how "alarmingly free" the God I believe in actually is.

In our passage today we begin a series of teachings by Jesus which make clear that God's purpose is both great and forever.  At the center of the events unfolding is Jesus in relationship to the Temple.

Not unlike the prophets who offered a vision of Jerusalem's future, or the future of the kingdoms, Jesus offers in our passage today a clarity about nature of the Temple and the downfall which is part of the cosmic plan. 

For our comfort we might easily want to remove the power of these words from taking hold of our hearts by locating the passage historically within the writing of the Markan Gospel following the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 a.d.  Though I agree with this scholastic and critical view, we must always caution ourselves to keep from removing the prophetic voice from our own ears by making this passage simply about the past. Jesus has spoken but the living word also offers us a challenging word today.

The purpose here in Mark is to clearly not speak about the Temple. That is not the point of the text at all! The point of the text is to reveal that the old world is passing away.  Not unlike the passage from Revelation we read last week where in it is clear that a new heaven is already rooting itself in the world and upon taking root is forcing out the world of man.  The point of Jesus' words and the prophecy is to show the reality that this is the new age of God and this is an age that is to be marked by faithfulness and following the living God and Jesus Christ.

Jesus tells us: be careful though because humans will always build new temples and new religions and new teachings.  People will come and they will be false prophets and false leaders. They will tell you a truth that you will want to hear - the church is ruined.  They will seek to lead you - follow me for I know the truth. They will offer a vision that the things of the past are not fading away in the midst of a new future.  What is rooted in Jesus' warnings is not so much that there will be these false teachers but humans out of their desire to be comfortable will seek after them hoping to extinguish the discomfort of God's unfolding destruction of the age of man. 

When human beings get uncomfortable we follow instead of disciple.  When we are feeling the very foundations turn into ashes below us we want a new stronger foundation; and we rarely look forward but look to those who will comfort us with the past. We look for false teachers who offer us a shelter from the storm, the safety of a castle keep, and the island home.  We look for teachers and prophets who will lie to us and tell us that God is safe and predictable and not free.

I am reminded of the Grand Inquisitor in Doestoevsky's Brothers Karamazov as he questions the Messiah upon his return. The Inquisitor is a cardinal and promises that the world the church is creating is better than the world Jesus promises.  He says to the Lord, "So we have done. We have corrected Thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority.  And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the terrible gift that had brought them such suffering, [your gift of freedom] was, at last, lifted form their hearts.  Were we right teaching them this? Speak!  Did we not love mankind, so meekly acknowledging their feebleness, lovingly lightening their burden, and permitting their weak nature even sin with our sanction? " The temple is passing away even as we speak and it shall be rebuilt as the new heave takes root in our midst.

Nostalgia is after all the idea that we look back at a time that never really existed and make it into a reality which can be compared to the reality we experience in the here and now. It is a way of looking back to a time and place that keeps us from facing the time and place we inhabit today.

Christians have always lived in between the earth which is falling away and the heaven which is not yet fully revealed.  We live in a time which calls not for seeking shelter in the storm but rather for being the shelter in the storm for the world's fearful.  We are the ones, like Jesus, to see the times and the seasons, to know that the what we cling to as humans is passing, that heaven is coming and that safety is not guaranteed but adventure is promised.  This God we worship is free and alarmingly so. This God we worship has a plan and the plans of men are falling in the wake of its eternal progression.

We are as a Christian people invited to cling to Jesus and his love and to counteract the seasons of change.  We are invited to counteract the seasons of change, not by clinging to the temple which is crumbling, or by following every fad that promises a return to a golden age - but rather to counteract the world with love.  So let us endure the birth pangs for the kingdom that is to come requires disciples and apostles to midwife its labors through a mission and proclamation of love.

Some Thoughts on Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18), 19-25

"What is new about the New Covenant, therefore, is not the idea that God loves the world enough to bleed for it, but the claim that here he is actually putting his money where his mouth is."

"Covenant," sermon discussion from Frederick Buechner, Frederick Buechner Blog.

"As the author grounds his goal for church participation in the eschatology of Christ's session, he grounds the guarantee of Christ's session in the character of God. They can hold their confession without wavering, because the one who promised is faithful."

Commentary, Hebrews 10:11-14 [15-18] (Pentecost 25B), Amy L.B. Peeler, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

"An intimate and frank relationship with God, openness with one another, and bold public witness that perseveres in the fact of opposition these are the characteristics of the confident community portrayed in today's lesson."

Commentary, Hebrews 10:11-14 [15-18] (Pentecost 24B), Susan Eastman, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2009.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

So it is that we come to the end of our readings in Hebrews. We understand now clearly from the author all that is meant by Jesus as our great high priest. We understand that he has transformed the ritual sacrifice of other religions of the day by making a one time offer.

And, we are given a revelation of Christ as king of heaven. That he is seated at the heavenly throne. He has completed his work.  He has completed his faithful work. 

Here the author then turns to make it clear that this image he offers is none other than the suffering servant image of the old testament. The author is doing a quite remarkable job of weaving the story together. We get a sense here then not simply of the continuation of ancient ritual and sacrifice but a greater theme of a creative trajectory. 

The author then invites us to respond to the eternal movement of God and the high priestly sacrifice. We are invited to respond with a clarity of purpose and livelihood crafted as a gift in response to God's work. We are also invited to hold fast to our faith. We are marked as Christ's own forever in baptism and our reciprocity is to express this faith through love and good deeds. We are no longer to be bound by other sacrifices, but instead a response to God's mercy and love with mercy and love. 

And, in case you were wondering if the author of Hebrews was an Episcopalian...you are correct. This work is always to be yoked to a worshiping community! 

Some Thoughts on 1 Samuel 1:4-20 or and 1 Samuel 2:1-10

"As political theologians we may be peculiarly vulnerable to the error of neglecting ”or even denying”the significance of the obscure and personal struggles and victories of the faithful that do not assert themselves onto the grand public stage of society."
"The Politics of Hannah's Opened Womb," Alastair Roberts, Political Theology Today, 2015.

"Our heart is looking to increase our abundance, to decrease our suffering, to set free our unique giftedness. When this happens not only do we experience relief, our energy becomes a place of grace for others around us."
"Hannah's Story: When Good Enough is Just Not Enough," Anna Shirey, The Labyrinth Way, 2015.

"God does not operate within a closed system. God is the God of hope, not the God of despair! In God's system, the world operates based on promises that point toward a future with hope and life. The Christian faith is at heart the hope that God already doing that through Jesus Christ and the Spirit of Life poured out on all creation."
"Future," Alan Brehm, The Waking Dreamer, 2015.

"This is a song of revolution where the bows of the mighty are broken and the poor are raised from the dust. Hannah's song penetrates the surface, pointing to the pillars of injustice that must be pulled down. Some of those pillars may be the very ones that put her in such a desperate situation in the first place."
Commentary, 1 Samuel 1:4-20, Karla Suomaia, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

You probably know the story...Hannah cannot bear a child and Elkanah her husband loves her. She is sad, though they have a good family of size and Elkanah's other wife has provided for them. But Hannah wants her own children. This is seen as an outgrowth of her love for Elkanah and her faithfullness. So, Hannah goes to God and prays:

“O Lord of hosts, if only you will look on the misery of your servant, and remember me, and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a male child, then I will set him before you as a nazirite until the day of his death. He shall drink neither wine nor intoxicants, and no razor shall touch his head.”

She does this in the temple where Eli is the priest. Eli, in an almost Jesus like moment, confronts her and they have a bit of a misunderstanding. Eli thinks she is drunk. Then, when he realizes her trouble he says, “Go in peace; the God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him.”

Now, in time, Hannah bears a son and names him Samuel. Of course this is the young Samuel who will grow up into the great prophet.

The story is important because it is the birth story of Samuel who is given over to Eli by Hannah, as promised. It is easy to have Hannah play only a bit supporting role in this story. I think there is more here though for the preacher.

Hannah is herself a prophet. She is the one who, in the very next chapter, gives voice to the poor. She calls out of her own pain, and she gives voice to the pain of the people. She sings, she prays to God:

“My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God. My mouth derides my enemies, because I rejoice in my victory. “There is no Holy One like the Lord, no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God. Talk no more so very proudly, let not arrogance come from your mouth; for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed. The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength. Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry are fat with spoil. The barren has borne seven, but she who has many children is forlorn. The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up. The Lord makes poor and makes rich; he brings low, he also exalts. He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor. For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world. “He will guard the feet of his faithful ones, but the wicked shall be cut off in darkness; for not by might does one prevail. The Lord! His adversaries shall be shattered; the Most High will thunder in heaven. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth; he will give strength to his king, and exalt the power of his anointed.”

I don't think you can preach on the first option for this weeks Old Testament without preaching on the second. Yes, Hannah gives birth to Samuel. Samuel will prophetically take on the work that Hannah invites God to undertake.

But here is the great connection. Hannah's song is the song that Mary remembers and brings forward when she hears the news of the birth of the messiah. Hannah is not simply giving voice to the people who struggle in her time. She is giving voice for people in every era who seek deliverance and call out to God from their anguish. Samuel is but the first answer by God to this invitation to intercede - to hear the cry of the people. No. It is the Messiah, God in Christ Jesus, who is the revelation and main actor on behalf of the people.

These are the words to be sung out in Psalm 113 at the Passover meal. These are the words echoed in Luke's account and in Paul's letters. These are the words that are unique to the people of Hannah but to every person persecuted by enemies, oppressed by the mighty, overthrown by armies, who prostitute themselves for bread and food for their children, who sit on the ash heap of life, who sit by the bedside of the dying. This is a song that gives voice to God's promise to care for the weak and the destitute. This is a song that calls out through the voices of Hannah, Mary, around the table at passover in the homes of Jews today and during the Holocaust. This is a song that gives voice to the people of Israel in their imprisonment in Egypt and Babylon. And, and, it is the song of those oppressed, suffering, lost, and selling their souls for bread in our day. This is the song of the street corner and the back alley. This is the song for the people living life in Sheol who are in desperate need of God's mighty hand to reach out and free them.

This is indeed a revolutionary song of the poor. Hannah prophesies not only Mary and the birth of the Messiah. Hannah prophesies the truth about the God we worship - this God cares for the poor, the oppressed, and the imprisoned. This God raised Jesus from the dead, after first raising the people out of Egypt. This God raises people out of their tomb and delivers them.

Hannah, herself and in her own right, is a prophet of the Most High God. Make some space, and giver her some room to speak.

Sermons Preached

Proper 25, Year B, October27, 2024

Prayer
God our Savior, from the ends of the earth you gather the weak and the lowly.  You make them a great and glad multitude, refreshed and renewed at your hand.  Throwing off the burden of sin, they run to the Teacher for healing.  Let the faith Christ bestows restore to the church this vision of the gathering that embraces the weary and wounded of this world.  We ask this through Christ, with whom you have raised us up in baptism, the Lord who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

From Prayers for Sunday and Seasons, Year B, Peter J. Scagnelli, LTP, 1992.

Some Thoughts on Mark 10:46-52

"...what would you do if failure didn't matter? What would you endeavor, dare, or try? What mission would you attempt, what venture would you risk, what great deed would you undertake?"

"Bartimaeus, Luther, and the Failed Reformation," David Lose, Working Preacher, 2012.


"How do we retell the story without sidelining blind people today? That is easier said than done. If we play up the miraculous we heighten the pain where healing is not happening and may be impossible. Piety can easily race by in the euphoria of symbolism and the only abiding message is; we are irrelevant and you are irrelevant."

"First Thoughts on Year B Gospel Passages in the Lectionary," Pentecost 22, William Loader, Murdoch University, Uniting Church in Australia.

"If your prayer isn't answered, this may tell you more about you and your prayer than it does about God. If God doesn't seem to be giving you what you ask, maybe he's giving you something else."

"Bartimaeus," sermon discussion from Frederick Buechner, Frederick Buechner Blog.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

Jesus has been teaching that the society of the kingdom of God is one marked by servanthood rather than rank or power.  He has prophesied that his own life will end as the suffering servant and that he will be raised.  He has offered a vision of a new world; a recreated world. 

Jesus has also offered an understanding of discipleship which is one in which the follower leaves the comfort of life in order to help the lives of those who are comfortless.

So it is that we come to the roadside outside Jericho.  This passage is filled with drama and symbolism. 

Jesus makes his way in the business of a crowd towards Jerusalem; always with his face set like a flint to the cross.  And from the margins, from the edge of this mission, comes the cry of the blind man.  He is at first hushed by those around Jesus.  This is a reminder of how easy it is while trying to be faithful to be deaf to those on the edge who faith is intended to help.   How blind the crowd of Jesus followers is to the cries from the edge.  And, I imagine them hushing him again, and saying, "We are too busy following Jesus."  So it is the blindness of the followers of Jesus that is revealed as Bartimaeus' sight ever sharpens.

Bartimaeus knows all that is happening and in the story and he cries out.  Sometimes I think in the midst of life we are unaware of just how aware those on the margin are - prophetically aware. This hit me squarely as I read through Joel Marcus' textual exegesis and he offered this from a boot entitle Memory; about the holocaust: 

The uncanny effect of this sort of blind sight is evoked by Douglas' description of a Holocaust survivor who wore dark glasses during her testimony at Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem:  "She appeared, then, to be blind (though she was not), an impression made all the more striking as the dramatic force of her testimony found focus in the words 'I saw everything.'" (Joel Marcus, Mark, vol 2, 763)

As the passing diorama makes its way, Bartimaeus shouts ever louder.  Jesus stops, invites his petition, and then heals him.  The response to this event is the throwing off of his clothes, the clarity of sight about the world around him, and then Bartimaeus follows.

Joel Marcus and others remind us that the passage is very much linked to early baptismal rites.  For example this one from Marcus' commentary.

Baptizand: "Have mercy on me!"
Deacon, in the role of Jesus to the congregation: "Call him."
Congregation: "Be brave, get up, he's calling you."
Baptizand removes his clothes and approaches the deacon.
Deacon to Baptizand: "What do you want me to do?"
Baptizand: "I want to be illuminated."
Deacon, baptizing him: "Your faith has saved you."
(Mark, vol 2, 765)

So in our passage today we are given wonderful new ways of seeing ourselves and our following.  We are able to see the world of servanthood to the comfortless.  We are to interpret our own faith journey in light of being given sight to see and to follow.  We are given an encouraging word to cast off our clothes, to move from the edge into the center of the stage, and to participate in the new ways of this strange emerging kingdom of God.

We should be careful first not to punish our own crowd that will sit before us as preachers this weekend.  We should remember they too are there like Bartimaeus, on the fringe of society, doing something most people will not do this week's end - go to church. They are there calling out for a bit of grace and mercy and kindness. They are calling out for love. 

The preacher has a dual-task this week's end, both to stop as Jesus did, and remind the blind of his love for them. To stop and pause for a moment so that their sight might be restored and so they can follow along the way.  That they might cast off their clothes that bind them, so that they may enter the crowd of life and along the way help others to see as well. 

The passage reminds me that the Christian Church is not a society of the wealthy who redistribute their wealth for the sake of the poor, but a community of blind people seeking clarity of sight so that we might in turn help our brothers and sisters see.

Epistle Hebrews 7:23-28

"While of major interest in the first century, most Christians today do not think much about the nature of the priesthood. Amidst this comparison, however, the author makes some very important statements about how Jesus accomplished human salvation."

Commentary, Hebrews 7:23-28, Scott Shauf, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

"He died once; he intercedes perpetually."

From Wesley's Notes.

"One reason that Jesus the High Priest can offer this eternal salvation is that he can focus his priestly work on intercession because he has already taken care of the problem of sin. Other priests are daily occupied with sin removal (Hebrews 7:27)."

Commentary, Hebrews 7:23-28, Amy L B. Peeler, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2015.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

Jesus is the new high priest and the author here reiterates this work in case the reader/hearer did not understand the first time.  So it is that we are told (as if from a different vantage point) that Jesus is able to provide this once for all intercession on our behalf. The cross of Christ is a one-time victory for all sin and not a rehearsal each time there is sin. Christ is not continually offering Christ's self for humanity but instead, this one-time defeat and victory over sin and death is a "sufficient sacrifice once offered" as our prayer book liturgy reminds us.

This one-time offering is therefore also a better offering than human priesthood and a new and better covenant than the many old ones. For here in this new covenant, we are redeemed forever and marked as Christ's own.

Furthermore, this offering is perfect(ed) in that it is God's offering instead of our own human offering. It is God's offering and of such a quality that it is everlasting. 

Sometimes, I think our faith is tested not by our belief that God reached across the cosmos to embrace us and has forever mended the gulf between us but that such an occurrence and work of Jesus is forever. I think we sometimes lack the belief that Christ is victorious. So we might say that we know that Christ is our intermediary, our great high priest, but we should get to work saving ourselves just in case.

In this lack of faith in Christ's sufficient work on our behalf, we return to an old law. In this old law we are the priest who is completely imprisoned by our sin, brokenness, and fallen-shortness of the kingdom. Here we must continually offer new sacrifices trying to live into some ideal. Here we attempt to acquire a list of qualities that we might repeatedly purify ourselves. Each of our sacrifices, like the sacrifices of the religious priesthood of Jesus' own day, were made over and over again for the sake of salvation. 

The high priesthood of Christ is once and for all, there is no more sinful economic exchange required on our part.

Some Thoughts on Job 42:1-17

"What can Job possibly say to God after hearing God finally speak?"
Commentary, Job 42:1-6, 10-17, Karla Suomala, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2015.

"The only hope for a truly 'happy ending' for us all is that we truly do serve a God of all grace who is rich in mercy and compassion and kindness."
The Center for Excellence in Preaching commentary and sermon illustrations, Scott Hoezee, 2015.


"The resolution to the crisis of injustice in our world is found neither in giving up on God nor in the simplistic presumption that God won't let bad things happen to good people It is found in continuing to believe that God will never abandon you or me or anyone in this world, especially in the midst of suffering."
"Where Is Justice?" Alan Brehm, The Waking Dreamer, 2015.

"This epilogue to the book of Job is, for many readers, hard to accept."Commentary, Job 42:1-6, 10-17, Kathryn Schifferdecker, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

"In one sense I find the epilogue disappointing because it appears to support the idea that the righteous come out alright in the end and the wicked are punished. Job is rewarded for being faithful. Some scholars try to put an interpretation which says it was a free gift of God and not a reward. This is a bit difficult to sustain in light of the context."
Job 42:1-17, Pentecost 21, Commentary, Background, Insights from Literary Structure, Theological Message, Ways to Present the Text. Anna Grant-Henderson, Uniting Church in Australia.

"I've always appreciated how the Lutherans of the Reformation made this point. They distinguished between earthly "security" (securitas), a presumption that no one should expect as an entitlement or reward for faith, and "certitude" (certitudo), the unfailing promise of God's presence whatever comes your way."

"The Story of Job: Personal Disaster Reveals Genuine Faith," The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself, Daniel B. Clendenin, Journey with Jesus Foundation, 2009. 2006 reflection.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

Like many folks the ending of The Book of Job is disappointing. Like a poorly crafted "happy ending," the book falls short of bringing the complexity of the book into a good theological finish. The end is a kind of, almost sickly sweet, hands in the air, kind of "oh well" to the whole affair. Good faithful people who have had to deal with terror in their lives will find that the passage has very few life-giving words to take with them after the sermon is said and done.

Therefore, I want to make the case that the redactionist poor theology who crafted the passage (on one of their better days) must not have the last word.

While the God we worship, who comes near in Jesus, is the God of the Whirlwind, this God cannot make humanity do God's will without taking away free will. [The paragraphs that follow are based upon Girard's work. An Excerpt from René Girard's Job: The Victim of His People (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), pages 154-168.]

Not only would the God of the Whirlwind be without the freedom to love but this God would become the God of the persecutors! To force human goodness would require God of the victims to become God who victimizes. There are plenty who claim a persecuting God and such a God is often promoted by those who know best and themselves would be the persecuting God.

Job himself has well made the case that this is true. The book itself highlights how his frenemies are exactly the persecutors who worship the persecuting God. God reminds us in this last passage that they have this quite wrong. Job's friends suggest that Job is attacking God. Job's friends are present with us today and would suggest that a God who does not persecute leads to atheism (Ibid.) René Girard writes:

When Job proves that justice does not hold sway in the world, when he says that the sort of retribution Eliphaz implies does not exist for most men, he thinks he is attacking the very concept of God. But in the Gospels, Jesus very explicitly claims as his own all Job's criticisms of retribution. 

Remember Jesus deals with this in Luke 13:1-5. And, Jesus says:

"Do you suppose these Galileans who suffered like that were greater sinners than any other Galileans? They were not, I tell you. No; but unless you repent you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen on whom the tower at Siloam fell and killed them? Do you suppose that they were more guilty than all the other people living in Jerusalem? They were not, I tell you. No; but unless you repent you will all perish as they did."

There are plenty of Christians who wish to contradict Jesus and Job and take up the case and view promulgated by Eliphaz and Job's friends. (Ibid.)

Violence, persecution, scapegoating, cancer, sickness, starvation, accidents, and all the other terrible parts of human life are very real. The persecuting lesser gods and their followers are quick to show how the blessings and the curses are God's.  They forget not only Jesus' teaching from Luke 13, but Jesus' teaching in John 9:2-3: "Neither he nor his parents sinned . . . he was born blind so that the works of God might be displayed in him". (Ibid.)

Girard writes:

All the parables have much the same meaning. God always plays the role of the absent master, the owner who has gone on a long journey. He leaves the field free for his servants, who prove themselves either faithful or unfaithful, efficient or timid. He does not allow the wheat to be separated from the tares, even to encourage the growth of good grain, whereas Aeschylus does the reverse. God makes his sun shine and his rain fall on the just as well as on the unjust. He does not arbitrate the quarrels of brothers. He knows what human justice is. (Ibid.)

The persecuting demigods and their followers may quickly point out that this all seems to be a lazy God. This God of the victims is a God who simply lets the people suffer. (Ibid.) But we should quickly say, as a Gospel people, this God is the God who gives his very self for the life of the world. This is the God who gives all that humanity may have life and have it abundantly. This is the God who becomes a true victim in order to share victimhood and redeem it. This true God does not let persecution, violence and death have the last word.

His very life in this world reveals as Girard points out, that "they are dedicating themselves to the scandal by their desires that are crisscrossed and thwarted by imitation." (Ibid.)

It would be easy to take the last words of Job and make them about abundance in this world and wealth. But I think a bit of Gospel redaction enables us to preach that what God gives the Job-like victim is companionship in suffering and in victimhood. God gives mercy and forgiveness plenty. And, God gives life everlasting. These truly are gifts greater than what Job started with at the beginning!

Some Thoughts on Jeremiah 31:27-34

"Lent is a time for honesty that may disrupt the illusion of well-being that is fostered by the advocates of indulgent privilege and strident exceptionalism that disregards the facts on the ground. Against such ideological self-sufficiency, the prophetic tradition speaks of the brokenness of the covenant that makes healthy life possible."

"Ferguson and Forgiveness," Walter Bruegemann, ON Scripture, Odyssey Networks, 2015. Video: Race in America.

"Hope for the future in Jeremiah involves the same divine message known from Sinai, 'I will be their God and they will be my people' (verse 33); but this time, that covenant relationship will be the defining mark of each person rather than something that must be learned."

Commentary, Jeremiah 31:31-34, Amy Erickson, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

Oremus Online NRSV Text 

We just had this passage this last summer - so if you didn't preach on it you get a second chance. It will appear again this coming year.

Jeremiah continues his prophecy saying that God will bring about a bounteous future. God has not stayed the hand of those who have undone the power of Israel as a civilization rooted in the authority of this world. Remember it was Israel's political and religious machinations that brought it down. Yet, God will in the days to come bring about a resurrection from the death they brought on themselves. God will bring about life from their rubble. 

While the people have suffered and have been deported this will not be the final word. Out of lostness, leastness, and death, God brings about life. From the children whose teeth are set on edge to those who at sour fruit, God will bring about a bounteous feast and plenty for the children. Jeremiah prophesies:

"The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge. The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 

God promises a new covenant - a new relationship. Christians understand this prophecy to be about the promise of God to deliver all people. The temple's politics intermixed with the state, the civil war between tribes (between the northern and southern kingdoms) has undone the original covenant that was made with God. They forgot who delivered them out of Egypt and so they thought they were responsible for delivering themselves. They forgot who fed them in the wilderness and thought that it was by their own hands that they had wealth. They forgot that God brought water from the rock and thought instead that their future and the future of their kingdoms would flow from their own power.

God speaks through Jeremiah and he writes:

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

Walter Brueggeman calls this part of the prophetic book of Jeremiah "the book of comfort." God is watching and planting and build the new community of hope. While we may well remember the proverb that the parent's sins are visited upon the children (even Jesus quotes this), we see in the passage that the people have an opportunity to begin again. The proverb is "null and void" says Brueggeman. All exiles have the possibility of the new. (Brueggeman, Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming, 504)

The covenant intends that people not work against one another but rather that they see one another face to face and see God face to face. Again a radical message says that God will forget all their sin.

For Christians, this is the very mission of God in Christ Jesus. That God in Christ comes and is incarnate such that they meet God face to face, and can no longer look at each other without seeing the face of God looking back. That God in Christ will be the very law himself. We are to understand that the highest law shall be the writing of commandments and actions by Jesus himself. Humanity will know, both by sight and by relationship and by story/witness God. The living word shall come and be part of the community and with him he shall bring forgiveness of every iniquity.


While we may wonder why Jeremiah remains in the scripture because of his obvious entanglement with the Babylonian court, what we see is that his words prophesy a new faith. The first Christians, without a New Testament, understood their work as community and the person of Jesus Christ as revealed in the prophecy of Jeremiah.

Sermons Preached on these Passages

Proper 22, Year B, October 6, 2024

Prayer
Beyond all human boundaries, O God, your deeds of power take place, and your healing mercy is at work. Ours is not to restrict the wonders of your saving grace but to give joyful thanks for your compassion wherever we may find it. Teach us to use well the riches of nature and grace to care generously for those in need and to look carefully to our own conduct. We ask this through Christ, with whom you have raised us up in baptism, the Lord who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.

From Prayers for Sunday and Seasons, Year B, Peter J. Scagnelli, LTP, 1992.

Some Thoughts on Mark 10:2-16

No longer running interference for Jesus--or creating interference for ourselves--we, like Abraham, know ourselves to be blessed in order to be a blessing to others, embraced by our Lord so that we may embrace others.


"Tuned Out, Tuned In," Chris Repp, Sabbatheology, The Crossings Community, 2009.

The anecdote on divorce may well derive from an historical encounter between Jesus and Pharisees busied with the issue of divorce, wanting his view. If this was anything like the earlier forms which most of Mark’s anecdotes took, it probably had as its punch line a typical two-liner quip on the part of Jesus: ‘What God has yoked let no human being separate.’ We have already found such quips in 2:9; 2:17; 2:27; 3:4; and 7:15. It is clever: of course it is outrageous for human beings to undo what God has done up, to un-join what God has joined. The effect was to shift the focus from what might justify divorce to the more fundamental issue: breaking apart what God has joined must be seen as departure from God’s intention.
"First Thoughts on Year B Gospel Passages in the Lectionary," Pentecost 18, William Loader, Murdoch University, Uniting Church in Australia.


"A text like this already has taken, and will continue to take on, a life of its own given the current circumstances surrounding and challenges to definitions of marriage. A sermon, whether explicitly or implicitly, needs to acknowledge these assumptions."
Commentary, Mark 10:2-16, Karoline Lewis, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

We begin our lesson today with a conflict between the religious leaders of Jesus day and himself.  Perhaps they are hoping to catch him in debate; perhaps to make him look foolish. They are engaging in a discussion on marriage and divorce.

Jesus switches the conversation which begins focused upon human beings and reorients it towards a focus upon the nature of God to bring people together and build up communities.  Jesus is clear that God draws us together and that we often defile this drawing together. 

We could spend quite a bit of time on the nature of marriage as offered in the Gospels.  I think Joel Marcus on Mark, vol 2, does a good job of taking a part Jesus and Paul's teaching on marriage.  I want to focus on the broader theme which appears when we attach the second part of the lesson. 

If we take a step back what we see is that God is constantly drawing people together.  Mark's Gospel is a gospel of the new creation a recreation of drawing people together.  God is drawing people who are different together and Jesus is clear that we are the ones who defile these relationships. We defile marriage relationships and we defile communal relationships. We do this by turning away from the "other".  We are drawn away from the "other" into relationships that boost our power, our voice, and our authority.  We engage in relationships that diminish the "other" with whom we are bound. 

God is remaking a new community. God in Christ Jesus as bridegroom is recreating the world and his bride the community of "little ones" (the term Mark uses for the first followers of Jesus).  So as we look and we read we must remember that the defilement of this wedding garment will take place with Peter at the cock's crow. It will be the crowd who shouts "crucify him." 

Jesus knows all too well perhaps the fickle nature of God's people. Perhaps he is already aware of how easily they will be drawn to save themselves while he makes his way to the cross.  Regardless what we see as he offers this message is that God is working in the world. God is bring and joining and knitting the fabric of creation and disparate lives together in Christ.  God is joining many together and how easily we will chose another spouse and let loose the one who troubles us.

So it is that Jesus then offers an icon of this joining together.  Jesus chooses the weakest, the poorest, the most powerless as an example of God's faithfulness.  While the crowds and even followers will chose another lover of convenience, God will be faithful and will reach out and continue to love and embrace God's friends the poor and those in need.

Jesus embraces a child and in so doing he is offering us a view that God embraces the lowly. The children have no voice, no cultural value, an no political or religious worth.  As Jesus embraces them he offers a vision of the kingdom of God that exists for those who are outside of the world's systems of power and authority. Just as Jesus is continuously clear with his followers that he has come for the sinner and not the righteous, so too here at the end of our reading he shows us through this physical embrace, through access to himself, that God is present in the world for just such as these.  He blesses, he touches, and he embraces those wholly other.

God is faithful. God will not chose a marriage of convenience with the righteous, but the God we believe in will chose a marriage of trial with the very ones most in need.

As I reflect on both of these pieces, here combined into one reading, I realize that I am blessed by God. I am the other. I am one who is loved and upon whom God's grace falls.  For my sins, for those things done and left undone, and so I am sure that God loves me and God embraces me. I am beloved of God and I trust that God will be faithful no matter how often I stray into convenience and ego satisfaction.

And, at the same time I am keenly aware that in my powerful, loud voice of authority, and influence I must be challenged to look around me and see those to whom Jesus is embracing.  I must own my own unfaithfulness.  I think this lesson always reminds me that our lord will always be about embracing those who live and move and have their being in my blind spots.  God have mercy on my soul for not seeing my own infidelity to the join the wedding feast of our Lord - the kingdom of God, the dominion and mission of God.

Some Thoughts on Hebrews 1:1 - 2:12

"In the city of Macon, Georgia, the Harriet Tubman African-American Museum honors the memory of the 'Black Moses,' the best-known conductor on the Underground Railroad..."

Commentary, Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12, Pentecost 18, Bryan J. Whitfield, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2009.

"...Hebrews holds together a profound image of Jesus as God's very reflection with a very earthy and human figure just like us. That reinforces also our understanding of God and of the spiritual life not as something from or in another world, but as something which fully enters the here and now of flesh and blood."

"First Thoughts on Passages on Year B Epistle Passages in the Lectionary,"Pentecost 18, William Loader, Murdoch University, Uniting Church in Australia.

"The concept of incarnation is an affirmation that Jesus really and truly does show us what God is like. When we look at Jesus, we see him embracing the ones nobody else would embrace. We see him confronting the religious people with the falseness of their self-righteousness. We see him forgiving sinners and restoring people to their right mind. And we see him freely and joyfully playing with children!"

"We See Jesus," Alan Brehm, The Waking Dreamer, 2009.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

In seminary we were taught that there is no such thing as a God of the Old Testament and a God of the New Testament. Yet, Christians have struggled to always put into context the reality of violence throughout the scripture including in the New Testament. Somehow we have never really quite figured out how to deal with the various rules, covenants, demands, and variety of things God wants or doesn't want for us. Even Walter Brueggeman when asked about such things says something like, "I like to think God is getting over his use of violence."

The author of Hebrews is certainly trying to figure out how to speak of these things and to parse clearly the trajectory of a God who is both alpha and omega while at the same time exhibiting different behaviors and desires.

God communicates to Israel and God communicates to us. We believe as theologian Ben Johnson once remarked, a God who raised Jesus out of death and raised Israel out of Egypt.

What is clear for the author of Hebrews and for Christians there is a clarity that all is to be defined now through the words and actions of God through Christ Jesus. It is his work and words that are to define and radically focus our attention across the great expanse of God's communication with his creatures.

The Incarnation of God in Christ Jesus is a particular vision of God - revealing to us God's intent to be with us and to bridge the chasm between heaven and earth.  Sin and death will not be victorious over this divide. Moreover, that this person of Jesus is a forerunner of our humanity.

We are in some miraculous and mysterious way to become like Jesus in this world making here heaven on earth - just like we pray in the Lord's Prayer. We are to make here God's neighborhood.

What is an interesting part of this passage is the unique and important reality that the author offers a special place for humanity within the cosmos. Using the words of the psalmist (Psalm 8:4-6), the author reminds us, "What are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals, that you care for them? You have made them for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honor..." I once mentioned that the angels are jealous of humanity for what we have in Jesus and in the holy communion and how special this is for us in the order of things. We are blessed as humans to experience God in and through Jesus in this world and through the inbreaking of God in the incarnation and in the bread and wine. I really got skewered online when I said this. People thought it was heresy. I am of course in good company with the psalmist, the author of Hebrews
and the polish Roman Catholic St. Maximilian Kolbe who once said, "If Angels could be jealous of men, they would be so for one reason: Holy Communion."

We are to see who God is and how God is moving in the world through Christ Jesus as is present in scripture and in the communion itself. And what do we see? We see a God who lowers God's self and breaks God's self open for the sake of those other than God or even godlike. God becomes one with the other and so raises the other up into community. Here is the Gospel.


Some Thoughts on Job 1:1; 2:1-10 

Job and his friends by William Blake

"The first two chapters of Job are the curtain raiser of the drama, the opening act of the play, designed to present to us the old God, the God whom Israel so often claimed to know and worship. A new God is set to emerge later in the play."
"Just Who Is God, Anyway?" John Holbert, Patheos, 2015.


"Perhaps the biggest question for people of faith is this: How can a God whom we believe to be good and just allow or even instigate what we see and experience as evil?"
Commentary, Job 1:1, 2:1-10, Karla Suomala, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

"We enter this week into one of the most difficult and theologically sophisticated books of the Old Testament: the book of Job."
Commentary, Job 1:1, 2:1-10, Kathryn Schifferdecker, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

"The idea that God blesses the faithful, rewarding the righteous with what they deserve, and that the opposite, trials and tribulation, are signs of being out of sync with God?apparently the prosperity gospel is nothing new under the sun?is rejected outright by Job."
Commentary, Job 1:1; 2:1-10, Karl Jacobson, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2009.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

So let us talk about Job the devil and me. 

We have a precious few weeks to talk about Job as it is rare that the book comes up in our reading. This is a very important biblical text, almost always misunderstood, and avoided because of its odd nature. Job is God's suffering servant. Quotes about Job fill our cultural vocabulary like "suffering like Job" or the "patience of Job". 

The text is a really a tale, a story, a narrative with characters of virtue. It is one meant to be told and listened to. I find it loses a bit when it is read. There is some biblical criticism that seems to prefer the unity of the soliloquies of Job to his friend's speeches. Moreover, there is some critical argument about the integrity of the text. There is a popular theological view that winds its way from the discourse that invites us to think that Job is God's suffering, patient, and faithful servant. 

We in church have a kind of popular sentimentality towards Job's cause. We recognize his complaining in our own complaints. We make Job into a modern man with modern sensibilities and philosophies. His internal angst is appealing and his speaking out against God gives voice to our own hostility towards transcendence. In Job we project all of our post modern anxiety. Out of his mouth we hear our own frustration with our adopted therapeutic moral deism. In Job we see our frustration with God's distance and our fractured narratives.

We enjoy the friends' taunts and their holding him accountable. We allow him to be our psychological scapegoat for our feelings of theological discomfort with a God who allows evil in the world. Job is a book that allows us to in a sense put God, the Bible, theology, and religion on trial for the horrors we find in the world around us.

When we do this, and this is how we so often read and talk about job, we engage, as René Girard the religious philosopher explains, 

"a naive theodicy that would serve as a paradoxical pretext to its contrary, the questioning of this theodicy, and from there the shaking up of religion, which modern interpreters consider the necessary goal of all sincere reflection on the misfortune of human beings... So concerning what is essential in the book of Job, there are two responses. The first is the patience of Job, his obedience to the will of God. The second, the modern response, is Job the rebel, Job the protester en route toward the virulent atheism of the contemporary Western world."

There is a second reading here as well. Perhaps it is a subtext to the first. This reading proposes that Job is actually poorly treated by God. This may appear like the same argument. It is but from a slightly different angle. But the angle is important. The first reading allows us to focus on God and God's seeming injustice. This second subtext is about how evil and bad things are completely exterior to human control. In other words, evil in the world is divorced from humanity. It is independent. Such a reading verges on the ancient heresy of dualism where God and the Devil have equal power and humanity is caught in the middle. You can read about dualism here or here.

[Before we go much further, I want to be transparent and say that the most influential writing that has both enlivened a rereading of Job and challenged me is the work of René Girard. If you are not new to the blog you know that I like his writing a great deal. As we parse out this passage I am going to lean heavily on Girard here - shall we say exclusively? I am going to paraphrase Girard's argument in part to continue to deepen my own understanding and in part to connect it to our present day work. I am writing with with the following in mind: Chapter 12 - Job as a Failed Scapegoat, by René Girard found in Excerpt from The Voice from the Whirlwind: Interpreting the Book of Job, edited by Leo G. Perdue and W. Clark Gilpin, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992, pages 185-207. You can read this chapter here.]

The problem as Girard points out is that both readings don't actually go with the book/story. Satan is not equal to God and must get God's approval to act. This leads us down the road that God takes our parents and our children from us. "God needs them in heaven" we suggest poorly. Or, "God is punishing us", we tell ourselves. This of course is hogwash theology and really bad pastoral and self care!

There is another problem as well. We are tempted to put Job in the part of a character in a Greek tragedy. He was happy, now he suffers. Job was a good and faithful man. Job had friends, family, and wealth. He was looked to as a leader and a man of honor. All of this is lost. In his lostness he must be being punished. The friends who taunt, cajole, and practically celebrate his demise are those who appear to speak for God. What is interesting though...is that in the Greek tragedy the hero who falls quickly understands his place in the drama. He agrees with the voices of the God's. Girard exegetes Oedipus as an example of a Greek character who "quickly agrees with his persecutors."

Job on the other hand does not do this. Job takes the role of living out the psalmist's cries to God. In this way the place of Job and his suffering in the world rejects the notion that God is the one who is making the suffering happen. The psalmist, like Job, defends himself against the "collective" voices and ideas of those who surround him like dogs surround carrion.

What do we have left? Who is this Job? How are we to interpret the texts over the next few weeks? How do we do so with integrity to the tale as a whole steering clear of poor dualistic theology and even worse pastoral approaches to evil?

What the friends mimic an perpetuate is the misinformed notion that religious violence is acceptable. In this way the friends see Job as the scapegoat. He protests his innocence, which is not a lie. Yet his friends offer a theology of violence where God punishes the deserving. But this is not at all what is happening in the story! Not at all.

What the friends do is what people do when they perpetuate mimetic violence in religion, they side with and justify the idea of a violent God. They have a false piety that places them with the lesser mythological gods of violence that demand sacrifice. Girard writes, "

"...The theology of the four friends is nothing but an expression, a little more refined and evolved, of the theology of violence and the sacred. Any sufferer could not suffer except for a good reason in a universe governed by divine justice. He is therefore punished by God, and pious conduct for those surrounding him consists in their conformity with the divine judgment, treating him as guilty and so multiplying further his sufferings. This is indeed the theology of the hidden scapegoat. Every sufferer must finally be guilty because every guilty person ends up by falling into misfortune, and if God delays a little too long in executing his justice, human beings will take it upon themselves to speed up the process. Everything is thus for the best in the best of worlds."

The poor, the migrant, the homeless, the hungry, and the abused (sexually, violently, and psychologically) must in the end deserve what they get. This is how pervasive violence is in the subtext of our religion and how it misinforms the subtext of politics and societal norms. Again, Girard,

"The evil one is cursed by God, and the worst disasters will certainly befall him. And when the friends of Job speak to him, they evoke plague, the sword, fire, flood, famine, and poison (see 20:22-29)."

Why is Job so difficult? Because we in our own time perpetuate mimetic desire, that leads to violence, and scapegoating. In this way our society and culture informs the narrative of Job instead of the other way around. 

But the theology is clear once the enmeshed culture of violence and its hermeneutical lens is removed. In this way we cannot preach this first passage without first removing the lens of religious and cultural violence; and secondly, without reading the whole passage. 

As you do so you will no doubt see at the climax Job is surrounded by his frenemies and begins to echo their own words. Here is the high point of the false God proclaimed, here is the climax of religious violence sanctioned, and here is the worst of prehistoric violent religion. See 19 when Job himself echoes the words of his friends: "Pity me, pity me, you, my friends,for the hand of God has struck me.Why do you hound me down like God, will you never have enough of my flesh?" (19:21-22)

Yet this is when things change radically. As if waking from a dream Job realizes that this theology, his religious understanding of suffering and who God is, is quite different. Here then is the God of the Bible. Here is the God of peace. Here is the God of love. Here what was hidden by our human blindness, our own self orientation, is now seen clearly. Job, as if having his eyes open, rejects the hermeneutic lens of religious violence that his friends have suggested. Job instead sees the situation that he is in as that which is perpetrated by humanity. He sees that his suffering is not condemnation by God but instead a deep theology of shalom. Job sees clearly he has been a pawn all along in the game of religious violence. Here then he takes up this theology over and against those that surround him. Job reveals, what Jesus reveals, and that is that God and God's ways are stumbling block for humanity.

Job says that the people have made him a dung heap, a burning pitch, a burnt offering. (17:6) Job has become, he suggests, their scapegoat. he has become their example. Societal violence, political violence, justifies itself by suggesting the guilt of the innocent. Here is an important precursor to Jesus...is it not? 

Job has been the sacrificial offering to help purify his community, he has been the exemplar of what happens when you do not behave, for surely this man is guilty say his friends. This is of course the opposite of the servant girl's words at the thought of Jesus unjust death, where at the same moment Peter (Jesus' friend) denies him, and should these not be the words of the reader of Job, surely this man was innocent!

Girard picks up Aristotle here and points out that we need, like his friends, for Job to be guilty. There is a lesser god mythology played out in our religious violence when we read the text. That is one of greek katharsis. This of course is not at all what is going on. Yet, so pervasive is our own civil myth and cultural religious and societal violence that we must read see Job as God's victim so that we might live just lives. Job himself points out the truth of his friends' theology, and the truth of our own when he says,

As for you, you are only charlatans,
physicians in your own estimation. (13:4)
And in a passage of closely related meaning he says:
You would even cast lots over the fatherless,
and bargain over your friend. (6:27)

The friends themselves are the ones who perpetuate the myth. Read now again, as for the first time, their words:

Think now, who that was innocent ever perished?
Or where were the upright cut off?
As I have seen, those who plow iniquity
and sow trouble reap the same.
By the breath of God they perish,
and by the blast of his anger they are consumed. (4:7-9)

In this theology, as we have said above, only the wicked suffer. God punishes the wicked and Job must be wicked for he is suffering. This is the lie that unravels the Gospel paradox: in death one gains life, in suffering one is Christ like, in being lost one is found. What becomes ever more clear then as we read our passage for this week and over the next few Sundays, is that Job sees clearly that humanity relishes violent religion. Moreover, the lesser violent gods of society, politics, and religions are not the God he worships. In this way Job suggests (13:7-8) that humans are taking the role of the satan - of the accuser.

Girard is brilliant in framing what happens next. He writes,

"Unable to find a defender among human beings, Job has no choice but to address himself to God. It is there that the Judaic religious genius shows through so brilliantly: Job addresses God against every probability, so it seems, for everyone agrees in saying that God himself punishes him, that God himself puts him on trial. Very often he bends before it, and the appeal that he launches is so contrary to good sense (even he himself thinks) that it sounds almost ridiculous:

Even now, in fact, my witness is in heaven,
and he that vouches for me is on high.
My friends scorn me;
my eye pours out tears to God,
that he would maintain the right of a mortal with God,
as one does for a neighbor. (16:19-21)

Here is what is so beautiful. The God that Job begins to speak about is the God of the victims. This is a God who takes up for the victims. This is the God who heard people crying out in slavery. This is a God who looks for the lost. This is a God who cares about the widow and the orphan. This is a God who is interested, very interested, in the victims of political, social, and religious violence. This is a God who weeps at the religious sacrifice of Abel by Cain who is jealous. It is the same God who rejects the religious sacrifice of Isaac.

Ahhhh...and here enters the Incarnation. Here enters the Christ! Job suggests that if God could be go'el (19:25), the redeemer, the defender of the oppressed, the advocate, then this god would be truly the messianic God.

I, like Girard, recognize conflicting material here. It is the same in the story of Isaac and elsewhere. Girard generously says, "the text hesitates." It is, Girard, suggests the Holy Spirit, that supports Job in this moment over and against his friends who so clearly want to see this as religious violence. It is the living word I believe that bolsters Job in this moment.

Girard points out that the traditional read deals with theodicy where in bad things happen to good people and the problem of evil in the world. But this is nothing more than repeated the ancient theology of the victimizing religion of Job's friends. Evil that is done by humanity is very present and to project that into the divine is to repeat the victimization and scapegoating of that old time religion. Girard puts it this way, "The evils due to human agency are the most terrible and must engage our attention more than the evils produced by nature." This becomes ever clearer when we put the hermeneutic of the gospel over this story. Think of Jesus speaking about the accidental collapse of the tower and how this is not divine action at all. (Luke's Gospel chapter 13) Jesus clarifies and puts an end to the theology that perpetuates that the good things and bad things that happen out of circumstance and context, by weather, by storm, by accident are some how divinely ordained. Here then is the affirmation of the Gospel lens attached to Job.

No, the true evils suffered by Job are those that come from his fellow brothers and sisters.

Girard has a great metaphor for the theology of the friends: tourist theology. They inhabit a metaphysics of those who think life is a deluxe voyage. Girard writes:

"To pose the question of evil as though evil were in every case a matter of one problem, that is, anything that affects my own precious self, making it suffer, or simply irritating me, is not to pose the question of Job. This self-concern is rather what I would call the metaphysics of the tourist, who conceives that his or her presence in this world is essentially like a deluxe voyage. He or she happily admires the lovely terrains and sunsets, is moved by the monuments left by past civilizations. He or she deplores modern ugliness and complains of the general insipidness, because now everything resembles everything else and there are no more differences. He or she becomes noisily indignant about the poverty encountered, is perpetually engaged in head-shaking, like Job's friends. But above all this tourist complains about the organization of the voyage and is going to transmit a complaint to the management. He or she is always ready to return his or her ticket, and the expression "return one's ticket" is typical of those who travel for their own pleasure or who go to a spectacle. This mentality of the frustrated tourist produces vehement curses concerning what is called the problem of evil. If God exists, how can he tolerate the evil present in the world? If God exists, he can be only the supercop, and in his mode of being as supercop he could at least protect us against the many disagreeable incidents of our passage through the world."

There is one response to this which says, "Yes, but what about death. No one escapes the grave." But the Gospel again comes to the Job's of this world with help. Christ is the conqueror of this death. Christ put the end to human sacrifice. Christ put an end to needing to adhere to religious scapegoating. Christ put an end to the violence of humankind (in word and deed) that works on behalf of powers and authorities. When we go down to the grave, making our claim, "hallelujah, hallelujah, death meets there not our fallen selves but the Christ of the cross, death, and resurrection.

Not even our sibling rivalry of mimetic desire can possibly keep us from an eternity spent in the grave.

What I am saying here, and I find myself in deep agreement with Girard, is that we must read the book of Job not as a text that in itself is self referential. To do so is just another humanism that pulls from the text the Gospel and incarnation that is present within the story. No, we are to read with the eyes of the Gospel of Resurrection and Jesus.  Girard concludes his essay/chapter on Job with these words, "In the world where the vicious cycle that imprisoned Job is opened up, everything becomes allusion to the Resurrection!"

Turning to Job's Text this week

In today's passage we have the story's context set up for us. Job is from the land of Uz. He was blameless and upright. He was faithful and turned away evil.

Where is evil from? Evil is from humanity and has been dwelling in the midst of humanity. It is not an equal power God or even a creature of God. 

We then see in our passage that old time religion where God punishes humanity. That religion tells people that God allows Satan to test people through natural illness, plague, collapsing towers, and even human towers. This God becomes a sinister being and the preacher who undertakes this preaching must lean on the above and proclaim the Gospel that redacts this teaching. 

This is a difficult passage for you must redact the words of Job. Our lectionary does you no favors. And, to let Job's words echo in the ears of our people is to do perpetual religious damage. God does not give some evil and some bad; and, certainly not to test people. 

What you can do is speak to the fact that Job denies the idea that God should be cursed for the evil in this world - the corrupted human desire that uses violence for the gaining of powers. God is not to be cursed for human perpetuated evil and religious sacrifice. God is not to be cursed for our human love to devour each other, or enact the great sacrifice of Isaac. No, that is humanity's work. God is not to be cursed at all but instead praised for not allowing evil, violence, victimization, scapegoating, and even death to have the last word. 

No God in Christ Jesus becomes a fellow victim of human evil. The Christ becomes a scapegoat. Christ even joins us in the grave. Moreover, Christ suffers all at the hands of humanity's search for stable power and religion. Christ suffers all by the hand of human violence that seeks to quiet the truth of God's love. 

We might end by saying that only the foolish perpetuate the old old religion of mimetic desire and violent scapegoating!

Sermons Preached on these Passages

Proper 21, Year B, September 29, 2024

Prayer

O God, whose hand shelters the just and righteous, and whose favor rests on the lowly, banish hypocrisy from our hearts and purify us of all selfish ambition.  Let your word sown among us bring forth a harvest of peace.  We ask this through Christ, with whom you have raised us up in baptism, the Lord who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.

From Prayers for Sunday and Seasons, Year B, Peter J. Scagnelli, LTP, 1992.



Some Thoughts on Mark 9:30-37

"In our own time, no one wants to look uninformed, confused, or clueless. We withhold our toughest questions, often within our own churches and within Christian fellowship. We pretend we don't have hard questions."

Commentary, Mark 9:30-37, Amy Oden, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

"...once again Jesus is challenging us to reverse long-standing, ingrained, human habits. To set aside our common human understanding of how to win fame and glory, and instead learn from Jesus God's deep hospitality and honouring."


Holy Textures, Understanding the Bible in its own time and in ours, Mark 9:30-37, David Ewart, 2012.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

Jesus is teaching and teaching and teaching.  The opening verses tell us that this one not a one off kind of teaching but regular occurrence. So the disciples have been listening to him teach over and over again and for days.

What is he teaching?  He is telling the disciples, and anyone who will listen, that he has to be turned over to suffer and die.  Prophets of God do this regularly of course, but Jesus is saying something different. Jesus is saying this is the way of the kingdom. I am going to be turned over to authority and I am going to suffer and die. But there will also be resurrection.  It is a "reversal of the way it ought to be." (Joel Marcus, Mark, vol 2, 669)  And, no matter how you look at this first part of the text it is clear that there is "apostolic silence" and a complete disengagement with the message. (Ibid, 670).

It just isn't the way it is supposed to be.  The disciples with clarity continue to manifest an understanding of Messiahship that will bring them power and authority.  They are seeing through their lenses of the Temple and government structures of the day. Leaning heavily on the terms and images from Daniel, they often cast Jesus as a military leader and king of a worldly empire. It is an empire that Jesus already rejected in the desert. This discontinuity between what the disciples hear and Jesus' own vision is shown with clarity as he confronts them about their discussion on who gets to sit where in the new kingdom. 

I found it interesting that Jesus' engagement with Peter, and likewise his engagement with the disciples does not include shame them. Nor does Jesus belittle them for not getting it right. Sometimes there is a tendency to play the disciples off as dunces and in so doing we actually build up a straw man to knock down. In so doing we inadvertently shame our listeners...when it is highly likely they too do not understand what we are talking about.

Instead, Jesus continues teaching.  Jesus seems unfazed or at least disinterested in convincing his most intimate followers. He is teaching and teaching and teaching.  He offers instead of a rebuke and an image. 

Jesus picks up a child (though the word may also mean slave) and puts the child in the middle of the circle and embraces the child.  (Marcus, 681)  The image is certainly about receiving others (the child/slave) means receiving Jesus, and receiving Jesus is about receiving God. 

Now here is what is most fascinating.  How many sermons have you heard where the topic is about receiving Jesus like a child?  Thousands, millions, billions?  That is right...BUT that is not what the text says.  Jesus is saying receive the child/slave receive me.

The text says that when one receives another human being, embraces that human being, one welcomes and embraces Jesus and thereby the Father who sends him.  Moreover, that those in their midst who have no standing, no wealth, no voice, no value (the child/slave) are the ones we are to embrace.

How quickly we, like the disciples, skip to our place next to Jesus.  In the Gospel of Mark it is clear that if we are to come to God in Christ Jesus we must do so by embracing the child/slave and the outsider.
 

Some Thoughts on James 3:13-4:8

"Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are."

"Envy," sermon discussion from Frederick Buechner, Frederick Buechner Blog.

"After several chapters of warnings and vivid illustrations of the consequences of living contrary to the plan of God, James moves in this passage to describe the good life and give some positive guidance for pursuing it."

Commentary, James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a, Sandra Hack Polaski, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

"The kind of wisdom the Scriptures envision is a way of life that is born of walking humbly with God. It is a way of life that is inspired by the presence of God’s Spirit. When you live in such a way that you are consciously aware of God’s presence, it tends to create a sense of inner strength; but it is always a strength that manifests itself in gentleness, in humility, in self-sacrifice, and in kindness."

"Gentle Wisdom," Alan Brehm, The Waking Dreamer, 2009.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

The author of James begins to pull and tug at a sin he believes is found in all Christian community: boasting in one's self.  

Christians can be very proud people. We can be proud in our traditionalism, our conservatism, our biblicism, our purity, our liberality, our generosity, our correctness, and even our justice making. 

We Christians are good at boasting about ourselves and shaking our fist at the others. Why, I even have known Christians who have proudly proclaimed their suffering. 

The author writes:

But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. 15Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. 16For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.

Christians and their communities are instead to be known for something quite different. The author writes:

But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. 18And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

Here is a key to understanding the work of reconciliation. We are to be at work healing history, celebrating and honoring our difference, and we are to create a peaceful commons. Only in peace may we find righteousness. 

We as Christians and as Christian communities are to be known not for our violence against others or the world, but for our peacemaking.

It is clear to the author, but I say it is clear to the world and to God, that when we are not peace makers we are not of Christ who is our peace maker. We are showing the world an marred vision of the reign of God. We are in fact not fooling anyone. The author says it is clear:

4Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? 2You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.

What is so very true is that we cannot be in love with ourselves or our stuff, we cannot be in love with what we have and fear what we might lose. We are not as Christians to worry or hold tightly to the things of this world because we are to be people of a different place, a peaceful place, a place where God's love reigns. This is not courtly or Victorian idea of love either - this is a sacrificial love. This is a love which brings peace (not because another makes the sacrificial offering) because we make the sacrificial offering of ourselves, our security, our truthiness, our rightness. 

It is no wonder that most Christians don't want to spend much time on James. The author holds up a mirror to our Christian way of life and reveals a very earthly and sordid affair that is in much need of a house cleaning.

Some Thoughts on Jeremiah 11:18-20

"Jeremiah has good reason to complain. In this passage, he begins by declaring the disturbing news, which the Lord had revealed to him, of the plot to assassinate him because of his apparent lack of patriotism (see also 18:18)."
Commentary, Jeremiah 11:18-20, Amy Merrill Willis, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2015.

"These laments of Jeremiah reveal that the prophet is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Jeremiah lives in a pressure cooker."
Commentary, Jeremiah 11:18-20, Terence E. Fretheim, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

"How are the faithful to respond in times of pressing difficulty?"Commentary, Jeremiah 11:18-20, Frank M. Yamada, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2009.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

The prophet Jeremiah gives word to his suffering spirit as he sees how the people are neglected. (Jeremiah 4:19; 9:1; 10:19-20; 23:9) For it to be well, the people must remember the past and how their faith ancestors created a just and righteous society wherein the defense and cause of the poor and needy were taken into account. (Jeremiah 22:15-17) Jeremiah locates our responsibility within God’s creative imaginary. (Jeremiah 10:12-16; 51:15-19) He sees God not only as the God of Israel but of all nations. His is a universal call to serve the poor. Jeremiah understands that this national responsibility for the poor is met by the individual too. The problem is not something that exists at the monarchial level alone - the whole society from individual to the government is responsible for the poor. 

It is out of this deep prophetic tradition that Jeremiah reacts to those who find his politics lacking. They are out to kill him. Like the prophets of God in every age the powers and dominions of this world seek their demise and the quiet of their voice. 

Jeremiah, in our passage today, begins by reminding the hearer that God invites him to prophecy. Like many who have faced the backlash of inviting a different kind of thinking about God, God's people, and their work in community...Jeremiah finds the backlash troubling. He is so upset he himself wants God to take action.

The passage itself does not have a parallel in the New Testament gospels. However, we know these words. They are the words of Jesus when he longs to gather the people. He had the prophets on his mind as he did his own work. How long have I wanted to gather you in? How long have you killed the prophets? He muses, well knowing that the prophetic message to remember the poor and be responsible for the least, the long and stranger in the midst is a message that is never welcomed by the patriots, the nationalists, nor the powers of this world. Freedom from such Godly accountability is much more a welcomed message. It is always difficult for the reigning powers in every age to hear the prophetic voice reminding them of their responsibility.





Sermons Previously Preached

Travis Elementary School Cakewalk Championship 1975

Sep 26, 2012; Sermon preached at Grace Episcopal Church, Houston Sept 2012; Mark 9:30ff


Jesus Loves a Flash Mob

Oct 8, 2009; Jesus Loves a Flash Mob, sermon given at St. Mark's, Bay City, September 20, 2009, Proper 20, Mark 9.30ff.

A passage from my upcoming book entitled Citizen: Prophet in a Strange Land

Jesus engages once more reinventing social norms in concert with God’s narrative in Mark 9:36, Matthew 19:13, and Luke 18:15. People began to bring children to Jesus - even babies. The inner circle around Jesus said, “Not so fast.” This scene is memorialized in church windows all over as a sweet “let the little children come to me” spirituality. Now, I am quite sure that Jesus did actually want the children to come to him regardless of their parents’ place in the wider social system. But Jesus was suggesting a community where all strata are connected and in relationship. So his invitation is one that runs parallel with the previous conversation. Meanwhile, it is evident in this story that the social imaginary even of the teacher/disciple remains hierarchical. Jesus though took the children and put them at the center of the community. (Mark 9:36) He also explained that he was in relationship with them. In a culture where most of the family’s value was placed upon what you did for the family, to consider a child a person, to put one of the least of the members of community at the center, to recognize an unproductive (indeed vulnerable) person there, once again reorders the social structures to be garden-like.

This then is part of the orienting of the Christian citizen’s responsibility: that the structures of state should be oriented at the well-being of children. Children are oftentimes the most vulnerable in power systems of honor/shame or sacred/degregation. They are the first to go hungry and without food and nutrition, brains don’t form well in the first three years of life, perpetuating poverty into the next generation. They are seen as the property of the parents or the ward of the state. They are seen as assets for our future: future church members, future workers, future soldiers, and future consumers. Jesus changed this orientation. Children are no longer appendages to the social imaginary of a tribe, city, state, or nation until they are productive members. In this act, Jesus turns the tables upside down. Literally making the least the first, Jesus orients every member of the society as part of God’s narrative.

Jesus in his relationship with the crowd, with the two women and children, reveals how God’s narrative offers a different social imaginary that is necessary to keep our natural ways of shaming/honoring under check. It isn’t enough that a transcendent God far away is in relationship with us. Jesus is revealing that in fact our relationships are intertwined, as is our story. Our futures are tied together and so our politics, economics, and health are tied together.

One of the values of American civil religion is individualism. It is a value that is strong, and is tied to freedom and self-determination. It is reinforced by our national birth story, our mythic characters, speeches by our leaders, and our civil liturgies. Think of those mythic tall tales of George Washington, Molly Pitcher, Daniel Boone, "Davy" Crockett, John Henry, the unsinkable Molly Brown, Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, and Calamity Jane. We have Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill as two mythical stories. It is as if individualism has become our dominant language as well as our frame.[i] However, “individualism” is not a strong enough shared value to help this country deal and manage the conflict and challenges that face us in our next age. In fact it may undermine our future as a country if it is the sole arbiter of truth.

In God’s social imaginary, we have described community in terms of relationship and responsibility. What we see in the stories of Jesus is something more. What we see is a value close to interconnectedness.

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[i] Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 2.