Proper 27A/Ordinary 32A/Pentecost +23 November 8, 2020

Prayer

Drive from our hearts the idols this world worships, money, and power, privilege and prestige, that we may be free to serve you alone, and, by loving our neighbor as ourselves, may make your Son's new commandment of love the law that governs every aspect of our lives. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, 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 A, Peter J. Scagnelli, LTP, 1992.

Some Thoughts: Matthew 25:1-13

"When all is said and done—when we have scared ourselves silly with the now-or-never urgency of faith and the once-and-always finality of judgment—we need to take a deep breath and let it out with a laugh. Because what we are watching for is a party. (Capon)" "Pity the Fools," D Mark Davis, Left Behind and Loving It, 2017.

"Unpredictability is an important theological category, for the God of the Bible has always chosen to be a God associated with calling people, sending people, encountering people, incarnating as human, and pouring out the Holy Spirit on communities who are on the margins, all of this happening in the fullness of God’s own time." "The Politics of Representation," Raj Bharat Patta, Political Theology Today, 2017.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

Jesus is again teaching a parable about the kingdom of heaven. He then offers ten bridesmaids, lambs, a bridegroom, not enough oil and trouble. The problem with preaching these parables is that we are preaching against the story tide. People have heard them so many times they have already made up their minds about what they say. And, typically what they know, or think they know, is based upon a surface reading at best or a childhood memory. Frederick Buechner, theologian and author, remarks that we “suck” these dry with old stories and thoughts about what we think we know. (Frederick Buechner, excerpt from "The Truth of Stories" was originally published in The Clown in the Belfry and later in Secrets in the Dark.)

The parable itself falls within the last parables of judgment in Robert Farrar Capon’s view (See Kingdom, Grace, Judgment, Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus, 512.) He offers the idea that human beings think in a way that there is always an opportunity for a second chance. The parables of judgment offer a sense of urgency in that God in Christ Jesus is a disruptor, and disruption in history. He is a disruption in our history and there is immediacy to going with the bridegroom when he comes. There is no time for dilly-dallying. There is the now and present Christ. 

God is saving right now and in our moment.

God is, in Capon’s view saving history. And, in a moment that history will have an end and even in that moment faith will come to an end. Yet, God is saving if you will but have a little faith.

Our parable starts out as his parables began when he first taught and his journey to the cross was but in its infancy. Now he nears his work and so the parables have taken on an urgency as does his final days with his followers.

In order to catch Jesus’ joke and understand the parable in its kingdom meaning lets call the maidens with a little bit of oil maidens #1. And, lets call the maidens with a ton of oil maidens #2.

Maidens #1 take just enough oil to make it through the night. The first hearers would say, “Ah, these are wise maidens.” They are prudent, they take just enough. They are following the rules of not wasting anything. They are so wise.” Jesus then makes a joke! He calls them “foolish”. The maidens bring just enough to make it to the feast and no more. Once again the parable seems to be about prudence and preparedness when it is actually about plenty and extravagance.

Then there are maidens #2. By the world’s standards the maidens #2 are foolish. They take WAY too much oil. Jesus then calls these #2 maidens “wise”. You see the party is to go on and on. The Bridegroom is making his way from party to party and we are to go with him…when he arrives. In faith we must be ready and willing to be held up as the Bridegroom makes his way.

The kingdom is not run in a respectable way!

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.

"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.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

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.

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, http://www.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:

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.

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/)

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.

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.

Walter Brueggemann writes:

What this God requires is a life-commitment that will impinge upon every dimension of public life — social, political and economic. This God, so says Joshua, is uncompromising. With YHWH it is “all or nothing,” no casual allowance for accommodation. What is at issue is a jealous God who is committed to neighborly justice and the organization of the economy for the sake of the weak and vulnerable (thus the testimony of the book of Deuteronomy that stands behind this narrative chapter). But the other gods, the totems of agricultural self-sufficiency, do not require such neighborly passion. The either/or that Joshua presents has immediate practical social consequences. A decision for YHWH entails socio-economic justice. A decision for the “other gods” leads inevitably to socio-economic exploitation, the accumulation of wealth at the expense of neighbors. Such a “religion” without commitment to social justice will eventuate in communities of economic failure, such as we now witness in Reading. (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/walter-brueggemann/joshua-2413a-1425_b_1070263.html)