Prayer
You are one God, O Lord, and beside you there is no other. You alone are we to love with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, and our neighbor as ourselves. Sharpen our ears to hear this great commandment. Arouse our hearts to offer this twofold love. 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.
*Most people will transfer All Saints to this Sunday. If you do not, this is the set of lessons for the day.
Some Thoughts on Mark 12:28-34
"Sacrifices and outward worship never pleased God unless we first did the things which we owe to God and our neighbours."
From the Geneva Notes.
"All of us who spend our days swimming in the fickle currents of the church, at war with things both petty and impossible -- tired, sometimes, before the meeting begins -- that we are not far from the kingdom."
"Extra Credit," Robin R. Meyers, The Christian Century, 2000. At Religion Online.
From the Geneva Notes.
"All of us who spend our days swimming in the fickle currents of the church, at war with things both petty and impossible -- tired, sometimes, before the meeting begins -- that we are not far from the kingdom."
"Extra Credit," Robin R. Meyers, The Christian Century, 2000. At Religion Online.
The passage is one set with a narrative of confrontation between the religious leaders of Jesus' day and the message that he brings to the world. The re-genesis of the world is now and the kingdom and dominion of God is now.
God is one, not a static one, but one forever. God is unity and unifying. God is working the unity of the world with God and has been doing so from the beginning of time. The world above and the world below are being unified in the work of Jesus and the work of God. (Marcus, Mark, vol 2, 845)
In a time when God seems distant and when all seems lost, both for the first followers of Jesus and for the Jewish empire itself, this is a radical message. God is even now joining heaven and earth.
And even more radical is the message it entails: Love God and love neighbor and we shall be connected. Part of the very work from the creations time is the work of becoming a loving community focused upon God and the neighbor.
I am rereading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky and remember now the Elder's words in the section entitled "An Unfortunate Gathering," chapter 4. Here the Elder speaks of active love.
"By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbour actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbour, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain." (1912 trans by Constance Garnett, p53)
This is love which Jesus speaks about is a "one way love" as my friend the Rev. Dr. Paul Zahl talks about it. God has one way unifying love for the creation and for the creature wherein the two dominions are to be joined together beyond any one man's ability to try and put it asunder. Jesus tells us that we are to be about this one way love as well. Our one way love is to be directed towards God and towards others.
On this occasion when I read the passage I enjoyed most Jesus last words to his dear inquisitor: "You are not far from the kingdom of God." This one way active love is greater than all burnt offerings and sacrifices to be sure; and yet it is so very hard to do!!!
As the Elder offers consolation to the young woman seeking to communicate how hard this active love is he comforts her and then offers:
"I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sigh to fall. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting further from your goal instead of nearer to it -- at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you." (Ibid, 55)
How easy is the dream of doing Jesus' guiding commandment, how hard to be constantly about active love. So you see we are all so very near the kingdom of God. Just in the moment when all is lost we may in fact clearly recognize the one way love of God and so be redeemed. And, in the moments when we offer such love on way to the other we are near.
That is good news it seems to me. We are being joined and knit together in a new creation by God through God's love. And, we in life, as we draw close we automatically begin to give that love to others.
I doubt this Sunday that a "work harder on loving God and neighbor" sermon will produce the desired results. But a sermon of God's one way, uniting love, may in fact be just the medicine for the wounded heart and just the thing to knit our own fractured lives together.
Some Thoughts On Hebrews 9:11-15
"We might even seek to emulate the level of creativity our author has shown when we face the challenge of speaking this same message to people in our day who live in a different symbolic world but face substantially the same needs."
"First Thoughts on Passages on Year B Epistle Passages in the Lectionary,"Pentecost 23, William Loader, Murdoch University, Uniting Church in Australia.
Jesus is our great high priest, and while we are called to remember his sacrifice - this is not a repeat of it. We are invited to ponder instead the perfection of Jesus' sacrifice and to worship a living God who has broken open the temple, mended the gulf between heaven and earth, and who invites us once again out into the world, into the wildness for we are free and a redeemed people.
"Ruth followed her mother-in-law's advice to the letter, and it worked like a charm. Boaz was so overwhelmed that she'd pay attention to an old crock like him when there were so many young bucks running around in tight-fitting jeans that he fell for her hook, line, and sinker and, after a few legal matters were taken care of, made her his lawful wedded wife."
Ruth," sermon discussion from Frederick Buechner, Frederick Buechner Blog.
This reading tells us there is a famine in the land. That the land is ruled by judges. Elimelech migrates to Moab to escape the famine with his wife Naomi. There are two sons. They marry and then they die. There are three widows now and they are trying to discern what to do. They find out the famine is over and they want to go back...to return.
This very first chapter reveals God's faithfulness and the faithfulness, the steadfastness, of faith that is a characteristic of God's people. It is a characteristic found even in the foreigner who comes and dwells among the chosen. She will go where Naomi goes. Ruth is a character in the narrative of God marked for her tenacity of faith.
While she will not be welcomed and even seen as part of the "calamity" that befell Naomi, Ruth will be a key ingredient to the health and vitality of the people of Israel.
How often we see the other, the foreigner, the migrant person seeking life among a new people as a burden. God's story, God's narrative flips this on its head. Not unlike most of God's narrative, the story of Ruth takes what we see in the world and flips it so we see the world differently. In this story, we will discover, the migrant and foreigner are essential ingredients to the overall faithfulness and steadfastness of the people of God. We discover that we are not complete without the outsider.
Sermons Preached
Some Thoughts On Ruth 1:1-19
"Ruth followed her mother-in-law's advice to the letter, and it worked like a charm. Boaz was so overwhelmed that she'd pay attention to an old crock like him when there were so many young bucks running around in tight-fitting jeans that he fell for her hook, line, and sinker and, after a few legal matters were taken care of, made her his lawful wedded wife."
Ruth," sermon discussion from Frederick Buechner, Frederick Buechner Blog.
"People are often surprised to find that the words from Ruth 1:16b-17, often heard at weddings, are not about the joys of beginning a new life together."
Commentary, Ruth 1:1-18, Alphonetta Wines, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2015.
Commentary, Ruth 1:1-18, Alphonetta Wines, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2015.
"I wish the church could be as open-hearted and buopen-minded and free as it was on that little patch of front lawn as the sun came out from behind the clouds. I wish that we could affirm as truly as we did there that wherever people love each other and are true to each other and take risks for each other, God is with them and for them and they are doing God's will."
"Buechner on Marriage Equality," sermon discussion from Frederick Buechner, Frederick Buechner Blog.
"I hear in my own life a call to love those who chose to stay behind in a theology of literalism and punitiive justice AS WELL AS those who are determined to journey with me into a life with the God of love, radical hospitality and social justice."
"And She Blessed Them Both," Kimberly Knight, Day1, 2009.
"Buechner on Marriage Equality," sermon discussion from Frederick Buechner, Frederick Buechner Blog.
"I hear in my own life a call to love those who chose to stay behind in a theology of literalism and punitiive justice AS WELL AS those who are determined to journey with me into a life with the God of love, radical hospitality and social justice."
"And She Blessed Them Both," Kimberly Knight, Day1, 2009.
First, It is too bad that this Sunday lesson falls where it does. We get so few chances to read Ruth! I do hope that in the coming few weeks you will recapture this first reading and do some preaching on this part of God's narrative.
Now, so you don't have to look through your books, let us have a bit of a refresher. The story takes place sometime before 1000 B.C.E. Israel is ruled by tribal chiefs. Mostly these are small communities that are internally focused. From time to time they might have to fight but for the most part they are a people living unto themselves. There is no overall unity and the scripture describes the time as one without a leader. The story is important for a number of reasons. Partly, the story is important because the scribes will link David to Ruth's son. He is to be David's grandfather.
This is a story about migration. It is a story about people on the inside and people on the outside. It is a story about how foreigners were blamed for the problems of the society to which they came. It is about scapegoating foreigners and migrants who wander into the land. There is intermarriage, as we will see, and this causes no shortage of consternation for the tribal elders.
It is Naomi's thought that she will leave the two widows to live and remarry in their own native land. She will return to her family. There are no more sons to marry. Naomi frees the two women as she leaves.
But Ruth says the following:
“Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. 17Where you die, I will die— there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!”With these words Ruth pledges herself to Naomi. So it is that they all leave and go with Naomi back to Judah. What is profound is that Ruth does not have to do this. Ruth returns to a land where she will not be welcomed, where she will be seen as a foreigner, and where she has no future.
This very first chapter reveals God's faithfulness and the faithfulness, the steadfastness, of faith that is a characteristic of God's people. It is a characteristic found even in the foreigner who comes and dwells among the chosen. She will go where Naomi goes. Ruth is a character in the narrative of God marked for her tenacity of faith.
While she will not be welcomed and even seen as part of the "calamity" that befell Naomi, Ruth will be a key ingredient to the health and vitality of the people of Israel.
How often we see the other, the foreigner, the migrant person seeking life among a new people as a burden. God's story, God's narrative flips this on its head. Not unlike most of God's narrative, the story of Ruth takes what we see in the world and flips it so we see the world differently. In this story, we will discover, the migrant and foreigner are essential ingredients to the overall faithfulness and steadfastness of the people of God. We discover that we are not complete without the outsider.
Sermons Preached
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