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Reveal to us the beauty of your image in each of our brothers and sisters, so that, respecting every person as our equal in your sight, we may show not only in words but in deeds that we are disciples of one Master, Jesus Christ, your Son.
From Prayers for Sunday and Seasons, Year A, Peter J. Scagnelli, LTP, 1992.
Some Thoughts: Matthew 22:34-46
"To what extent their positions were shaped by the social and economic status of their members, and to what extent those positions stem from particular readings of Torah, we can never know for certain. Suffice it to say that we heirs of Matthew's community soon adopted the culturally more comfortable view that this text is opposing."
Commentary, Matthew 23:1-12, Sharon H. Ringe, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2011.
"...focus on the core issue of waiting and admit, quite frankly, that the kind of waiting Matthew is encouraging through this parable is hard. Waiting for something way over due, waiting for something you're not sure will even come, waiting that involves active preparation when you're not even sure what you should be preparing for. That kind of waiting is challenging."
"Hope and Help for Foolish Bridesmaids," David Lose, ...in the meantime, 2014.
"To what extent their positions were shaped by the social and economic status of their members, and to what extent those positions stem from particular readings of Torah, we can never know for certain. Suffice it to say that we heirs of Matthew's community soon adopted the culturally more comfortable view that this text is opposing."
Commentary, Matthew 23:1-12, Sharon H. Ringe, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2011.
"...focus on the core issue of waiting and admit, quite frankly, that the kind of waiting Matthew is encouraging through this parable is hard. Waiting for something way over due, waiting for something you're not sure will even come, waiting that involves active preparation when you're not even sure what you should be preparing for. That kind of waiting is challenging."
"Hope and Help for Foolish Bridesmaids," David Lose, ...in the meantime, 2014.
Oremus Online NRSV Text
We continue our "dialogue" with the religious authorities of Jesus' day in this passage. I pause here again to warn the preacher to be careful to remember our Abrahamic family and our healthy relationship with our Jewish brothers and sisters. Words can easily be used to create a division between us and can even more easily lead to continued hatred. Furthermore, historically we need to recognize that while Jesus is speaking to these groups; these groups really are the leaders and religious authorities of Matthew's time - some 40 years later.
Leaning into the text we tease out Jesus' important teaching. Honoring the role of the religious teacher he tells the people to clearly hear the words and teachings about God. One can imagine these teaching are about the importance of life lived in God and how the body itself, animated by the soul, is for encountering God as is all of domestic life. Teachings that would have been normative in the tradition of the day. That being said though Jesus then offers a very clear distinction between listening and acting.
A rule for Christian community is being laid out before us; so don't get hung up on the foil of leadership being used. The message is clearly for us. The message is for those who hear Jesus' teaching. The message is for those who wish to follow Jesus and live in a community of disciples.
Disciples of Jesus are to listen and follow the Gospel imperatives. We are not to be a people who are more interested in getting others to follow while we remain hypocrites of our own teaching. It is this very real piece that seems to me to be of the utmost to Matthew as it is certainly repeated in different ways throughout the Gospel. Transformation begins with the individual in relationship to God in Christ and it is the transformed life lived (not hypocritically avoided) that is the most powerful witness to the Gospel -the Good News of Jesus.
4They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. 5They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. 6They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, 7and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. 8But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. 9And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. 10Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. 11The greatest among you will be your servant. 12All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.
We cannot read this passage without understanding that we are to be transformed by our relationship with God. Our bodily, physical, spiritual, soulful encounter with God. That we are to have as intimate a relationship with God as Jesus did; who called him Father. That we are to have only one teacher and that is the Messiah - Jesus Christ. And, we are to act out his teaching. We are in the words of C.S. Lewis to become little Christ's in the world - so intimately tied are we to the Godhead. Our wills and our lives are to be shaped and informed by our relationship with God in Christ.
In Lauren F. Winner's book Mudhouse Sabbath she talks about the ancient sabbath rule that a blind man is not to light a candle on the sabbath. One wonders, she muses, why a blind man would need to light a candle. She then goes on to relate a story about a rabbi who walking down the street in the evening comes upon a blind man making his way with a torch through the night. He stops and asks him why he is doing this (with the assumption perhaps we all make which is he needs no light). The blind man says, it is so that others will see me.
It is funny how what you are reading engages a conversation in your heart and mind with the scripture for the week. As I read that I thought of this Sunday's passage and the reality that the light of Christ so burns inside of us that when we are attentive to our own transformation; when we polish the lens of our own spiritually disciplined life the light of God shines more brightly about us.
Chris Webb of Renovare reminded us at a clergy conference long ago that outreach and service always flows out of our relationship with God and it's health and vitality. So too does Jesus caution. It will not be the phylacteries and fringes we wear, it will not be where we sit, or our titles of ministry that will reveal the Son of Man to the world. Rather it will be our deep relationship to him which in turn creates in us a servants heart enacting Christ's work in the world around us.
What a brightly burning torch would burn should our episcopal church family take up the challenge for renewed relationship with Jesus.
Some Thoughts: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
"We all long to hear a good word: a word that brings good news, a word that can sustain us, a word that can give us the vision and courage to make it through another day, a word that tells us God is with us."
Commentary, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, Holly Hearon, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2011.
Commentary, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, Holly Hearon, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2011.
"At the same time that Paul offers this extraordinary vision of consolation, he locates the act of consolation within the community as an ongoing (present imperative) expression of hope."
Commentary, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, Karoline Lewis, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2008.
Paul is clearly in didactic mode! He is trying to convey to his readers that there is a god word here. That there is hope in God's promise to be with them always even to the end of the ages - as Matthew says. And, there is hope in God's promise that he will return. While those who sleep wait, those who live have one another for comfort and to inspire hope in one another.
In a world of strife, injustice, fear, and anxiety about the future, Paul's good word for his readers in the first century can be a good word for us. It can provide for us a sense that we too are not alone. We have one another, the community, and in fact we have God. A God who will not in the end leave things the way they are but is even now working God's purposes out. God will return and we will return into God.
When I think of this passage I am reminded of this piece from the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams who said during a lecture at Lincoln Cathedral where he looked at how modern day society looks at understanding, remembering and wanting things, and how the Church can turn this outwards into faith, hope and love.
In a world of strife, injustice, fear, and anxiety about the future, Paul's good word for his readers in the first century can be a good word for us. It can provide for us a sense that we too are not alone. We have one another, the community, and in fact we have God. A God who will not in the end leave things the way they are but is even now working God's purposes out. God will return and we will return into God.
When I think of this passage I am reminded of this piece from the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams who said during a lecture at Lincoln Cathedral where he looked at how modern day society looks at understanding, remembering and wanting things, and how the Church can turn this outwards into faith, hope and love.
Hope, when it comes to birth, is not just a confidence that there is a future for us, it's also a confidence that there's a continuity so that the future is related to the same truth and living reality as the past and the present. Hope is again hope in relation; relation to that which does not go away and abandon, relation to a reality which knows and sees and holds who we are. You have an identity because you have a witness of who you are. What you don't understand or see, the bits of yourself you can't pull together in a convincing story are all held in a single gaze of love. You don't have to work out and finalise who you are and who you have been; you don't have to settle the absolute truth of your history or story; because in the eyes of the presence which does not go away, all that you have been and are is still present and real; it is held together in that unifying gaze as if you were to see a pile of apparently disparate, disconnected bits suddenly revealed as being held together by a string, twitched by the divine observer, the divine witness.
That's very abstract but it's put much more vividly and personally in an extraordinary poem written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian and martyr. It's a poem written when he was in prison for his share in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer writes, '... they tell me I step out into the prison yard like a squire going to walk around his estate'. (Bonhoeffer was a man of rather aristocratic background and bearing.) And the poem is about the great gulf between what 'they' see – a confident, adult, rational, prayerful, faithful, courageous person – and what he knows is going on inside; the weakness and the loss and the inner whimpering and dread. 'So which is me?' Bonhoeffer asks. Is it the person that they see or the person that I know when I'm on my own with myself? And his answer is surprising and blunt: 'I haven't got a clue; God has got to settle that. I don't have to decide if I'm really brave or really cowardly, whether I'm really confident or really frightened, or both. Who I am, is in the hands of God.' And that, I would say is the hope that St John of the Cross might be talking about. It goes beyond the assumption that I am only what I see or know. It tells me that I am more than I realize, in the eyes of God, for good or ill. It tells me to hope in 'what is unseen' (a good biblical phrase) and to hope in the one who doesn't need to be told about how human beings work because he knows the human heart (John 2.25). (Williams, Rowan. “Article.” Faith, Hope and Charity in Tomorrow's World, Lambeth Palace, 6 Mar. 2010, rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/584/faith-hope-and-charity-in-tomorrows-world.)
Some Thoughts: Joshua 24:1-25
"Bondage to a lie, or freedom's integrity."
Commentary, Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18, Anathea Portier-Young, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.
"The verb 'serve' is evocative in these verses. 'Serve' can mean 'worship' or it can mean 'show loyalty toward,' or, as v. 24 notes, it can also mean 'obey.'"
Commentary, Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25, Ralph W. Klein, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2008.
Oremus Online NRSV Text
God, the Holy and undivided Trinity, is at work throughout the sacred history of the old and the New Testaments. This is something that I have learned. The hermeneutical principle of mission combined with the belief that the same God is working through the people of Israel and their story as is working in the life of the disciples and fellowship of Jesus - is the only footing for the Christian preacher.
The Gospel evangelists themselves believe this and in so doing tie the very words of Joshua 24:1-25 into our understanding of the vocation of God and the call of Jesus.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks speaks of this passage as the great transition between Moses and Joshua. Moses has set his eye on the furthest horizon and concludes the Torah with both prophecy and the last commandments. Sacks writes:
In effect, Joshua is offering them freedom to walk away from God and their covenant with God.
It is the same with the evangelists of the New Testament. They, like Joshua, narrate God's mighty acts in the person of Jesus. They enumerate God's grace. And, like all the history of Israel, the Evangelists remind us who chose to follow this Christ that we are called to remember that we too are to be a blessing of peace - a blessing of shalom to the world. We are called into a particular community that is to remember the poor, to raise up the powerless, to share what they have achieved, and to never forget the God who loves and offers freedom so that all may be united in one living body. It is not so much that the Gospel reflects or copies the speech of Joshua in this chapter, or the speech of Moses before him. No. It is that the speeches of Moses and Joshua are given by the power of the Holy Spirit and they are a living word to be incarnated in the people who have a relationship with God.
God, the Holy and undivided Trinity, is at work throughout the sacred history of the old and the New Testaments. This is something that I have learned. The hermeneutical principle of mission combined with the belief that the same God is working through the people of Israel and their story as is working in the life of the disciples and fellowship of Jesus - is the only footing for the Christian preacher.
The Gospel evangelists themselves believe this and in so doing tie the very words of Joshua 24:1-25 into our understanding of the vocation of God and the call of Jesus.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks speaks of this passage as the great transition between Moses and Joshua. Moses has set his eye on the furthest horizon and concludes the Torah with both prophecy and the last commandments. Sacks writes:
It would not be easy. With his prophetic eye turned to the furthermost horizon of the future, Moses had been warning the people throughout Devarim that the real dangers would be the ones they least suspected. They would not be war or famine or poverty or natural disaster. They would be ease and affluence and freedom and prosperity.Joshua in this moment, in chapter 24, is doing exactly what Moses did and is calling the people to remember both their purpose, their mission, and their commitment. He is reminding them that the God to whom they are yoked in love is a God who freed them. A God who freed them to be a blessing to the whole of creation. They are to be a different kind of people. A people who serve God by being and enacting a different kind of society.
That is when a nation is in danger of forgetting its past and its mission. It becomes complacent; it may become corrupt. The rich neglect the poor. Those in power afflict the powerless. The people begin to think that what they have achieved, they achieved for and by themselves. They forget their dependence on G-d. At the very height of its powers, Israelite society would develop fault-lines that would eventually lead to disaster. (Deut. 31: 10-13) (Sacks, Jonathan. “Nitzavim-Vayelich (5770) - Covenantal Politics.” Rabbi Sacks, Office of Rabbi Sacks, 4 Apr. 2016, rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation-5770-nitzavim-vayelich-covenantal-politics/)
In effect, Joshua is offering them freedom to walk away from God and their covenant with God.
It is the same with the evangelists of the New Testament. They, like Joshua, narrate God's mighty acts in the person of Jesus. They enumerate God's grace. And, like all the history of Israel, the Evangelists remind us who chose to follow this Christ that we are called to remember that we too are to be a blessing of peace - a blessing of shalom to the world. We are called into a particular community that is to remember the poor, to raise up the powerless, to share what they have achieved, and to never forget the God who loves and offers freedom so that all may be united in one living body. It is not so much that the Gospel reflects or copies the speech of Joshua in this chapter, or the speech of Moses before him. No. It is that the speeches of Moses and Joshua are given by the power of the Holy Spirit and they are a living word to be incarnated in the people who have a relationship with God.
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