Proper 5, Year B, June 9, 2021

Prayer

Creator God, we are fashioned, male and female, in the likeness of your glory.  Gather us around Christ, our teacher.  Grant that by doing your will we may truly become disciples, brothers and sisters of the Son.  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 3:20-35

"In Mark's Gospel, Satan is always behind the opposition to Jesus regardless of who or what the vehicle may be. In this case, it is his own family and a delegation of scribes from Jerusalem."

"Getting on the Right Side of God," Alyce M. McKenzie, "Edgy Exegesis," Patheos, 2012.

"When we rush to explain away Jesus' miracles, we risk overlooking the deeper message of his liberating power."

"Jesus Christ: Exorcist," Susan R. Garrett, Beliefnet.

"Here is the Good News: Jesus is not out of his mind; Jesus is not filled with demonic spirits. Rather, Jesus has the mind of God; Jesus is filled with the Holy Spirit - and invites all of us to be of the same mind and same Spirit in a new family as his sisters and brothers."
Holy Textures, Understanding the Bible in its own time and in ours, Mark 3:20-35, David Ewart, 2012.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

In the gospel story of Mark we locate ourselves just after Jesus has called the disciples (including the mention of the one who would betray him) and we also are in the midst of a response by the religious leaders of the day to his first teaching.  In our passage for today his relatives also react to his teaching.

The parable of the "binding of the strong man" is a teaching about the Gospel's message for freedom from that which binds us.  In Mark this teaching is powerfully dualistic; nevertheless, the image cast in the story and the teaching of Jesus is clear: we are to be granted freedom from the one who comes to bind the forces that rebel against God. 

This is wonderful news!  What seems important though is to remember that humans are bound as well. That this strong man runs our house. That this strong man, who himself is in need of binding, is a destructive force that humans cannot be free from.  In fact, we are perpetually in the grasp of this strong man. It is always easy to blame someone for our own problems and I don't mean to do this here. I am simply saying that God in Christ Jesus comes because we are not able to do this ourselves and for ourselves.  We are dependant upon God's working this out. 

The image of disciples who will turn against Jesus, the religious home that turns against their own son, and a family that turns against Jesus reminds us of how unable to be free, truly free, we are.  He reminds them (similar to the passage from last week's Gospel of John) that the Holy Spirit is at work in the world and that it cannot be stopped.  Strong words are used by Jesus, but it is as if to say, "woe to anyone who dares stop the spirit."  I am reminded of Emil Brunner's thoughts in his classic text The Church Misunderstanding, where he explains the difficult spot between the church and the ecclesia - God's church.  Religion is always attempting to point towards God but it is always something that is still bound by the strong man and our nature in this world and so a mere reflection of the ecclesia.

Then Jesus teaches about a radical new reorientation of creation.  He says: "Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”  It is those upon whom the gaze of Jesus falls that become a new family, a reordered family.  The faith and religion that Jesus grew up in demanded birth into the family.  Literally a lineage of fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters that was tied to the mortal body.  Here Jesus is offering a vision of the family of God that is based upon the gaze of Jesus, the working of the spirit, and the discipleship of the person which makes their will open to the movement of the will of God. 

So, we are remade in Jesus brothers and sisters one to another.  We are to view ourselves through the eyes of Jesus and see in one another the Holy Spirit moving and drawing us ever closer together in a new family, an ever expanding family.  And, we are to be known as those who do God's will.  We are known as people who do not rebel against God's spirit but embrace it and are formed by it. 

I believe for Jesus, for our author Mark, and for his community this notion of communal life as a new family, which is at work doing God's will is essentially the binding force of life lived following Jesus. 

Now here is the thing...and it is an important thing of which we should be aware.  And that is, because the strong man is in us, we Aristotle-ize the passage.  That is right, we Aristotle-ize the passage.  Aristotle in his Ethics writes:

Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it: people become builders by building and instrumentalists by playing instruments. similarly we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones. This view is supported by what happens in city states.  Legislators make their citizens good by habituation; this is the intention of every legislator, and those who do not carry it out fail of their object.

We immediately move from understanding the grace of the Holy Spirit at work in our lives, and Jesus' gaze upon his friends as the marks of the new family and take the last little bit of this passage out of context and we say, "If you do not do the will of God then you are not true believers."  Wow! It happened so quickly, we Aristotle-ize Jesus' teaching.

The problem is that the strong man within us understands this is the way of the world.  You do it, you become it.  It is a way of being and becoming.  That however, is contrary to the Gospel of Jesus and contrary to Paul's arguments. Righteousness is NEVER acquired by action, even the action of believing.  (Rom.1)  The reality is that the strong man is in us, we are him, and so our action and our believing flow out of our ego's desire, our self concern, for salvation.  No one may be a member of the family by doing good works or obeying the law.  One is not justified into community by being good or by doing...but by God and by God's work on the cross.  Actions flow from the love affair with God.  They flow out of being made family by God and by God's Holy Spirit. God makes us a vessel of Grace.  (Romans 3, 1 Cor. 1) 

To be named brother and sister in God's family is not something that takes place because the church says so, it takes place because of God's gaze and the Holy Spirit's blowing this way and that.  The Church recognizes this reality in sacrament but does not make it so.  God's grace and love, God's invitation to be family, is free, as free as the gaze of Jesus upon those friends gathered around him.  It free to those who do good works and those who do not.  It is free even to those who reject him out of their religious convictions.  It is free to those family members who wish he would stop causing so much trouble. It is free to those disciples who will deny and betray him and run away.  It is free.  To be made a member of the family of God is pure grace and pure love.

So we might preach and pray, come Holy Spirit, gaze upon me Jesus Christ, bind the strong man within my soul, and open my heart to your love, that your will may be done in me.

[Thanks this week to Collins book on Mark, for Marcus' book on Mark, and for Gerhard O Forde's reflections on grace and the cross from On Being A Theologian of the Cross.]

2 Corinthians 4.13-5.1

"Amidst real hardships and suffering, Paul expresses hope in God's work to redeem and to transform."

Commentary, 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

"Paul's confidence rests not in the details - they don't bother him - but in the fact of God."

"First Thoughts on Passages on Year B Epistle Passages in the Lectionary,"Pentecost 2, William Loader, Murdoch University, Uniting Church in Australia.

"The self can die only if and when it loses all wonder, either this side of the grave or beyond."

"The Gift of Aging," Caroll E. Simcox. The Christian Century, 1987. Republished atReligion Online.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

In this passage Paul is using Psalm 116 vs 10. This is a psalm about suffering and a near death experience. Like many people who have used the psalms for comfort Paul too draws on their wisdom to offer a sense of his struggle. He too fears he is close to death. Yet he believes that is work is still before him. He is to continue to proclaim the Gospel. He has kept his faith despite the afflictions and sufferings of his time. 

Paul is relying on the foundation that he is working towards God's future. He has hope because he believe God will be victorious. This refrain of doing the work for the sake of Christ and the sake of the Gospel is constant in Paul's writing. I only imagine this is because of his profound feeling of grace placed upon him by God. 

This is what enables him to not lose heart in the midst of his ministry. 

What is important here I think is that Paul is failing physically AND he is heading into very strong opposition. In fact as we read the whole text what we know is that the Gospel he is proclaiming is being pounced upon and defeated at many a turn - in Philippi for sure and doubts have crept in elsewhere. 

Paul though has faith, he believes in his message, he believes the Gospel will win. 

As I think about this I wonder about my own feelings when I receive criticism. Do I believe that the Gospel will win (in spite of my weakness)? Do I have faith that if I do my part and offer the vision I have inherited - believing it from the Holy Spirit - that God will correct it, mold it, shape it, reform it as needed for God's cause? 

Here might I rely upon God! Here might I find a bit of strength to be human and allow God to be God. Here I might find and discover that I will make mistakes and speak out of tune but that the Gospel will work and win. The work of Christ on the Cross shall be victorious. 

Humbly we pray as church leaders then:

Gracious Father, we pray for thy holy Catholic Church. Fill it with all truth, in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Savior. Amen.

1 Samuel 8:4-20

"Voice, leadership, and power are anchoring themes of this story for the Second Sunday after Pentecost."

Preaching 1 Samuel 8:4-11(12-15), 16-20 (11:14-15), Jill Crainshaw, Lectionary Homiletics sample.

"It's easy to side with Samuel and God in this passage, from our vantage point in a democracy, but we may not be giving the people the credit they deserve."

Commentary, 1 Samuel 8:4-11 [12-15] 16-20 [11:14-15], Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

"When he reached retirement age, he might have turned things over to his sons, but they were a bunch of crooks who sold justice to the highest bidder, and the Israelites said maybe he'd better get them a king instead."

"Samuel," Frederick Buechner, Buechner Blog.

"The abject impossibility of God's desertion of Jesus on the cross speaks volumes to us in this moment. Jesus, who is God among us, experiences the loss of the relationship caused in every moment we enthrone other kings in our lives “ be they Saul or be they ourselves."

"Enthroning Kings," Peter Lockhart, A Different Heresy, 2012.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

In our passage from I Samuel we have the great moment in Israel's history where by the people cry out for a king to rule them. There are two reasons to this, the first is  out of fear of Samuel's potential absence. The second is that they see that they are surrounded with monarchies.

Samuel is not happy about this of course. Samuel believed that what was most important was the relationship between the people and God.

God says, “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. Just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so also they are doing to you. Now then, listen to their voice; only—you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.”

The point God is making is that the people are eager to have rulers over them. They believe that the powers of the world will bring upon them great riches and prosperity. God tells Samuel to warn them. But...quite frankly God is a little tired of their complaints. He reminds Samuel they have been like this since Egypt and they had the same complaints with Moses. People long for earthly power and kingdoms because they hope to have a part in them...forgetting that most serve the powers and few get to be powers. This is not a rejection of Samuel just as it was not a rejection of Moses. This is a rejection of God.

So Samuel warns them. He prophesies, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

Of course the people don't listen to him. So, what does this have to do with anything? Is there more there for us and how does this fit with Christianity?

As Christians what we know is that when Jesus comes the people are living exactly within a world that Samuel prophesies. God points out in this passage that the people from the time of Moses have wanted greatness for themselves. The kingdom will be a deliverance and a short lived time of prosperity under David and Solomon - though the price the people will pay is substantial. There will then be a fall into exile and a long time of existence as a lesser vassal within wider kingdoms - the Roman Empire being the last before Jesus.

This moment is essential because it reminds us that we want a human king. This is the king they cry out for but not the kingdom Jesus delivers. The rejection of Jesus is the very rejection of God in this passage.

Deeply rooted here is the notion that we Christians, like our Jewish brothers and sisters, reject the notion that humans are created to rule over each other. We reject the notion of economic enslavement.

This passage as part of the overall Jewish and Christian theology that community is about the mediation of freedom between the structures of this world. We belong to a faith tradition that is rooted in God's giving freedom to his creatures. God gives us freedom. This begins when God explains to Cain that sin is part of choice and that there is nothing in the created order that forces us to do anything. (Jonathan Sacks, On The Limits of Power.) Renowned psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl believed that when all every other conceivable freedom is removed from a human being, there is left one. The basic freedom from which all other choices flow is the freedom to chose how one reacts to their context. It is this freedom that roots us to our first ancestors. It is this freedom that takes us to God himself. It is this freedom that is a reflection of God's image and likeness. (Ibid.)

While even this basic freedom cannot be removed even with the calling of a monarch, the rejection of God, and God's servant Samuel, it is quite something else to ask for a monarchy. In other words a free society is something quite different. Moreover, it does not begin by the rejection of Samuel and God but by the taking on of other lesser gods, powers, and monarchies. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes:

Individual freedom, though, is one thing; a free society, another. In virtually every society known to history, the strong have attempted to use their power against the weak. The biblical paradigm for this was ancient Egypt, which turned the Israelites into slaves. It is no coincidence that the formative experience of Israel was that of G-d, the supreme power, rescuing the powerless and leading them across the desert to freedom. The task he set them was to create a society built on the rule of law, together with social welfare and practical compassion, in which no one’s freedom would be purchased at the cost of others being reduced to servitude or humiliating poverty and dependence. 

The ideal society, as the Torah conceives it, is one in which no one rules or exercises power over anyone else, other than G-d himself. To be sure, that could not be achieved overnight. The struggle has taken over three thousand years and is not over yet. Its closest approximation is Shabbat – a world experienced one day in seven in which no one can force anyone else (not a servant or an employee or even a domestic animal) to work for them. The idea of one human being ruling over another is anathema to the Jewish mind. Only one being is entitled to sovereign powers, and that is G-d. That is what Gideon means when he says, “I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you. The Lord will rule over you.”

...The building of a body politic is, the Torah warns, fraught with conflict, but out of this conflict great things come. The command to appoint a king tells us that power is much but not all. You need it to create a state. You need something else altogether to build a society that honours the image of G-d that is mankind. (Ibid.)

I believe the same is true for Christians. Jesus does not offer us a revelation of something that was out of sync with the ancient invitation to create community by God in the very first place. God invitesus in Jesus Christ to something more than a projected notion of a worldly monarchy upon God. This is where the church has gotten it so wrong. It is where the church has in fact done nothing more than offer a vision of God that is different from the complaining people desired from Samuel, and the Harodians of Jesus' time hoped to achieve with the  Romans. No, Jesus once again comes and offers us an ideal society where (as Jesus says in Matthew's Gospel 20:25-28) we live differently. We do not lord power over others. We are not students or slaves and servants...we are friends. This is a relationship spoken of by the early theologians of the church who suggested that this friendship with God and one another was an idea of society where power is not exercised over one another.

When we live with the powers we are enslaved as Samuel promises: the powers will take your sons and daughters and make them wage war and support the war machine; the powers will make you migrate to places and harvest this or that, and they will eat a plenty while you will not make a just wage and will starve; the powers will make you work in machine shops, in bakeries and you will become the maker of things while others enjoy them; you will be taxed to pay for the machine of government itself; you will be the subjects but you will be enslaved to the system you choose.

Human beings ruling over others was "anathema" to God, to Moses, to Samuel. It was anathema to Jesus, his apostles, and those who followed very early on in the history of Christianity. If Christianity is to join the Jesus movement it will have to take off the Constantinian yoke it places upon its people so that it may no longer rule and lord over God's friends like a monarchy.

Genesis 2:15 - 3:21

"That the two become one flesh has echoes in the Christian Testament, that men who held power in that patriarchal context should no more mistreat their wives than themselves."
Commentary, Genesis 2:18-24, Wil Gafney, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2015.

"Reading the Genesis 3 text in light of Jesus' confrontations with people who thought he was 'out of his mind,' focuses our attention on expectations about the relationships between God and humans, and humans and creation."

Commentary, Genesis 3:8-15, Melinda Quivik, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2015.

"The pericope concludes with the formula about "leaving and cleaving," which again is quite well known. But it is helpful to note that it is the man who is identified with his parents, and the woman stands alone, a contrast with certain wedding practices!"

Commentary, Genesis 2:18-24, Sara Koenig, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

We last read this passage as part of our readings for Lent 1.A.

Our Old Testament reading today is the story of the fall. It is an origins story. The sweeping creation of all things includes the making of human beings. Many scholars of the text will tell you that there is a second creation tale woven in. This tale seeks to tell us of why we are the way we are.

I am reminded of the ancient Norse myth of where poetry comes from. The story though is entitled something akin to: where bad poetry comes from. This genesis, this beginning, story is about where our bad poetry comes from - if you will. It is about wisdom that pulls us from our intended relationship with God and death.

The text itself speaks of God's desire to walk in the garden with his creatures. God has created these trees. one is of good and evil and the other is life. Formed from dust we are created as images of God. But the humans are tempted to understand and to know. They are tempted to have life. There is a creature who is crafty, walks on legs, and helps the humans along their path.

You well know the rest of the story and how they eat from the tree and discover they are naked before one another and God. So it is they receive a bit of punishment from God...the creature will be like snakes we know today...the woman is going to have pain in child birth...the man will have to work. And, finally, we are told that the snake and the humans will be enemies.

Episcopalians do not espouse biblical literalism and so we dismiss this and the other story as a factual account of creation. Episcopalians do espouse that the scripture contains all things necessary for salvation. So it is that as we consider the passage we wonder what this has to do with salvation.

Now, what is curious about this text is that it never is used by the writers of the Gospels or the letters in the new testament. It is referred to as in passing in some of Paul's writings. He frequently compares being led astray by the serpent to being led astray by those who wish to offer a contrarian view to the Gospel. Cross references will lead you to other passages regarding sin, lust, and death...but that is a way of looking back into the passage and seeing there what we want to see.

This passage would be referred to endlessly by the early church fathers as a text on modesty, lust, and the veiling of virgins. By the reformation Calvin writes this, "The design, therefore, of Moses was to show, in a few words, how greatly our present condition differs from our first original, in order that we may learn, with humble confession of our fault, to bewail our evils. We ought not then to be surprised, that, while intent on the history he purposed to relate, he does not discuss every topic which may be desired by any person whatever." (Commentary on Genesis: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom01.ix.i.html)

What I want to point out here is that while we have inherited the notion that the God's rectifying act is rooted deeply in a midcourse correction of Adam and Eve, there is barely a mention of it until we get to a more modern time.

It is clear that the Gospel authors saw Jesus in the frame of Adam. The Gospel was to be a new beginning...a re-genesis if you will. Moreover, that the gospel this week of Jesus' own tempting is in some way to give a nod to previous temptings of others. Most especially the temptations of the Israelites while wondering in the desert and maybe a small nod to the creation story.

But the creation story is our topic so lets stick with it a bit more. The first thing is that I want you to put out of your mind all that business of somehow there was perfection in the story prior to the eating of the tree. I am not sure where we all get that...but it is not the case. Now, I am leaning on my Robert Farrar Capon here (Genesis the Movie, 287) I am taking this, like Capon and Paul (for that matter - Galatians 4:24) as allegory. They did not have anything on...meaning that they were literally and figuratively naked before God. The idea here is that their goodness and badness was all out in view. Creation was a folly of revelation where in humans were known by each other and by God. Their "foibles" were out there in the open. (Ibid) There was innocence and most importantly...no "criminality". (Ibid) You see the story doesn't say they were perfect to each other, or that they didn't make mistakes, or even that somehow they were innocent. It just isn't in there. What is clear is that there was no knowledge of their follies and foibles...there was no knowledge or shame of their sin.

We human beings want to sanitize the text and make the garden of eden a world of perfection and in so doing live out the story itself. That world was perfect, this world is not = sin. So... God does not like sin and wants us to live in a perfect world and be perfect and so we must create a lot of morality dances and laws so as to recreate the perfect sinless world. But that really isn't the story nor the case at all.

I am going to leave you with this to ponder. God's saving act, by one who knows no sin (that pre-fall nod I talked about), is an act that removes the shame from us so we might return to the arms of our beloved - God. Capon says, "God makes shamelessness his supreme virtue." (293) God in Christ Jesus came to save the shameful, shaming, shamed, and all the rest. He hung out with them and he hung out with the religious doing the shaming as well. Jesus' death on the cross does not return us to perfection but instead makes our imperfection our way back in.

Previous Sermons On These Passages

Let There Be No Church Misunderstanding

Jun 9, 2015, Sermon preached at All Saints in Austin and St James La Grange.


Supermarianation: Consider the light that is in us, Jun 29, 2012, This is a sermon reflecting upon Gerry Anderson's Supermarianation and Ireneaus and the light that is in us, St Timothy's Lake Jackson

Proper 4, Year B, June 2, 2024

Prayer

Creator of the planets and their courses, you created the Sabbath as one day in seven for all. Having invited us to rest, to breath, to pause; now, encourage us to rest our demands on others, listen in the place of speaking, and pause our impact upon the cosmos. You make the sabbath to universally benefit  humanity and all creation. We give thanks for this benevolent provision that enables us to to experience a life with you that is well lived in the shadow of your wing. In the name of
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

Some Thoughts on Mark 2:23-3:6

"In this pair of scenes, Jesus does not assail Judaism. He does not reject the law. He does not render the sabbath obsolete. He does not even call the Pharisees blind guides or a pack of dotards. A sermon on the passage should not do those things, either."

Matt Skinner, Working Preacher

"As best I can tell, most Christians follow eight commandments, not ten. The second commandment was dispatched at the Council of Nicea in 787, when the church decided graven images were OK. If it had pleased God to become incarnate in a person, the church reasoned, then it should not displease God for us to have images of that person. Iconoclasts have continued to rise up over the years, but few Christians regard icons, stained glass windows or Jesus T-shirts as sinful.

The fourth commandment has undergone a more gradual demise. When Jesus declared that the sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the sabbath, many of his followers deduced that they were free from sabbath observance. Since the rabbis themselves had said as much ("Sabbath has been given to you; you have not been given to the sabbath"), it seems more likely that Jesus was sharpening his disciples' sense of sabbath as divine gift instead of divine burden.

Barbara Brown Taylor, Remember the Sabbath

Oremus Online NRSV Text

This gospel is very important. It teaches us about how Jesus approaches the Law. In so doing it offers us a means by which we might interpret his teaching and approach scripture as Christians. Furthermore, it offers us some thoughts about our own words and actions around keeping the Sabbath.

This passage comes as part of the first wrestling match with the religious leaders. You will note as we read through the Gospel of Mark there is a chiastic flow. That means that the author moves through a series of repetitive movements arriving at a point and then back out mimicking the first. In poetry you talk about it this way: "Chiastic structure, or chiastic pattern, is a literary technique in narrative motifs and other textual passages. An example of chiastic structure would be two ideas, A and B, together with variants A' and B', being presented as A,B,B',A'." (Thanks wiki!) for my more visual friends it looks something like this:

Marks Gospel is filled with them. They exist through the actual writing. But they are also thematic. So, this story of the conflict with the religious leaders can be broken out in parts. Here is a new code for community, then will come a new social order, then will come the epilogue for the first teaching series which ends about 11 Sundays from now. If we think of this graphically we are at about C in the thematic chiasm. For more about this read Ched Myers work on the text. He does a good job of breaking out the themes. Knowing them allows you to make reference later to how this particular text connects with the others. For our purposes what is important is that Mark reveals two assaults on the Roman System of governing and two assaults on the religious leaders of the day.

The Story
Our lesson today comes as part of the first assault and Jesus is here teaching clearly that there is a different kind of spiritual and relational economy at work in the kingdom of God being manifest. It is the first of the two controversies over the Sabbath and, it is also part of the feeding narrative in Mark.

All we need to know as we turn to the passage is that people were not supposed to walk very far on the sabbath and they were not to do any work.

So, Jesus is walking and as they pass through a grain field his disciples pick grain and eat it breaking both the religious rules for the sabbath including, but not limited to: transit, sowing, and reaping. Now...Deuteronomy is clear that travelers can actually pluck grain if needed. (Deut 23:25)

The religious leaders say to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?” And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.” Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”

Normally in Mark there is a teaching and an act of power. So what follows then is a healing. Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The religious leaders, we are told, went out and immediately conspired with other religious political leaders against Jesus. They wanted to destroy him before Jesus and his teachings destroyed their carefully crafted system.

They make way. Way is one of Jesus' words for his movement. They make way through the field. But they do more.

• Jesus, using 1 Sam 21:1-6, asserts his kingly right to violate the Sabbath with his followers who are in need 
• David of course was on a campaign, he was commandeering bread 
• Jesus is on a campaign (remember he will commandeer an “ass” on his way to Jerusalem too) 
• Each confrontation Jesus has with the religious leaders is over food and table 
• Jesus may very well be challenging the code by his teaching: disciples along the way must be fed, along with the poor and those who go without 
• The Sabbath was made for all, this bread was made for all 
• Those who follow Jesus will be fed 
• After all, Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath 
• Jesus is Lord of the House and he has come to claim it as his own 
• Jesus is restoring creation to its rightful order and inviting those who follow the way to join in the restoration (Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, 160.)

Jesus is creating a new community that is intimately tied to the old, but is flying in the face of the present day religious leaders.

A Way To Read Scripture
There is something more though. Here we see Jesus choosing a manner of reading the scriptures. This is very important. Modernism has created all kinds of ways of reading the scripture. Very few of them look at how Jesus reads the scripture and uses it. Lets take a brief look.

Jesus reminds the religious leaders of a story. The story contradicts their story. There is a rule and someone, David who knew the rule, also broke it. Jesus is using an ancient form of reading the scripture that is called "halakhic".(Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, 49.) We have talked about it before but it is important if you want to understand how Jesus reads the Old Testament over and against the religious practices of the day. (We had a passage like this on Lent 4.A)

The halakhic controversy is a debate about the collection of religious laws in Jesus’ day which at times were in conflict with one another. The Gospels are full of attempts by the people and religious leaders to trip Jesus up with questions about these conflicting laws. Richard Hays, scholar and theologian, points out that in Mark’s Gospel he first leans on the idea that like David in our passage from today, Jesus is anointed but his full authority is not yet recognized by the leaders all around him. But, Gospels go a step further.

We see this in the Gospel of John too, our author uses our I Samuel passage to show that God sees differently that human beings. In so seeing God solves the conflicting religious laws by setting out priorities. John’s Gospel will pick this up in chapter 7. Here too we see the conflicts in play. Jesus is making a case that because God sees the world and humanity different, God’s love may “override” other commandments.

Let me end with Hays’ brilliant words for us on the use of I Samuel by Jesus. Hays writes, “This implies that the law’s fundamental aim of promoting human wholeness and flourishing can in some instances over-ride its ritual prohibitions. This is certainly not a negation of the law; rather, it is an argument profoundly respectful of the law’s own inner logic, an argument that operates within well-established Jewish hermeneutical precedent… That this is so is underscored by the subtle scriptural allusions in the final thrust of Jesus’ rejoinder to his critics, ‘Do not judge according o appearance, but judge with just judgement.’” (Hays, Scripture, 298)

A Vision of Christology
What this means is that God's goal of feeding and healing, on the sabbath and not on the sabbath, is a priority to other things. Poor health and hunger are immediate needs that Jesus says take a priority to the religious rules.

What we see is that Jesus is making a case for feeding and healing those in need. And, we see Jesus doing this using a particular form of reading the scripture that is known in his day and rarely practiced by Christians since! Now, there is Christology at work here too. We see it in the narrative. What we seek is that God in Christ Jesus is first of all revealing who he is and what his mission is to be.

Jesus is claiming his messianic role by healing, and pronouncing the new boundaries for community. Episcopal priest and New Testament theologian Robert Farrar Capon writes that by the time he reaches the end of this section of Mark's gospel we see Jesus as a "wonder working, demon-exorcising claimant to the messianic title", as a "sabbath-breaking upstart with a dangerously arrogant sense of his own authority - as somebody, in other words, who is neither interested in, nor palatable to, the religious sensibilities of expert Messiah watchers." (Kingdom, Grace, Judgment, 51.) Jesus is not beginning a new religion, he is inaugurating the messianic kingdom.

Furthermore, this Lord of the Sabbath teaching is important because the sabbath is being redirected beyond the non-work regulations of one day a week. Instead, Jesus is broadening the work to say that the creation itself, its practices, its economy, its common life local and global, is in fact oriented around the sabbath. A sabbath where people have enough to eat and a sabbath where people's sins are forgiven. Using the moniker of Daniel 7:13: “one like unto a son of man” descends “with the clouds of heaven” representing himself to God's people, “the saints of the Most High.” In the book of Enoch we see the Son of Man as the Lord of Lords, who has come to create the next chapter of life for the people of God. In the Book of Enoch he is of great dignity and power (I Enoch 46:1, 3; 48:2f.; 51:3; 62:2, 6f.; 69:27-29). From Isaiah we receive the prophecy that this power is to be directed at freedom and comfort - he is a prophet. (Isaiah 53) Theologians like our own Hooker understand Jesus' use “conjured up all kinds of associations: prophetic calling, the mission of God’s obedient people, the possibility of suffering for those who were faithful to his will, and the promise of vindication.” (Hooker, St. Mark, 93. Ezekiel, the prophet, and Daniel are addressed as ‘Son of Man’ (see Dan. 8:127).

It is not about the Grain. 

So let us come back to the place where we began...remember that the scripture says it is ok of a traveler finds themselves hungry on the day of the sabbath and picks and eats. So, this cannot be the real issue. I think, as does Hooker, Myers, and others that the issue is not that they are picking grain. It is that they are "making a way." What is against the religious and scriptural sabbath rules is making a road. 

As they are traveling through the fields the action is one of making a road. They are trampling wheat. The words used literally mean they  “make their way” (hodon poiein), means literally “to make or build a road”. 

Mark understands the action of the disciples as making a way by tramping down the standing corn. (J. D. M. Derrett, Studies in the New Testament, Vol. I, 85ff. Remember that Mark uses hodos in 1.2 and elsewhere to talk about making way for Jesus. They are making their way to Jerusalem with jesus. The way is about a way of life, a communal way, a new and renewed way of being community. Like others, I believe that Mark makes a particular and unique choice of words. This is a story about the Messiah who is making a way, building a road in the wilderness. A road where all might follow and find. A road where there is plenty of food, healing and redemption.

Some Thoughts on 2 Corinthians 4:5-12

"There is a strong link here between Paul?s longing, his almost reckless candor about himself, and his sense of freedom. He understood himself as having been made a ?slave? to Christ, and of having been set free from the bondage of sin and death. This was not abstract theologizing."

"Dying to Rise," Chapter 13 of Reframing Paul, by Mark Strom, Intervarsity Press, 2000.

"A mother once confided that until her own son developed leukemia, she had never known a seriously ill child. Her eyes were opened in the hospital to the vast and varied problems that can afflict our very young. She could only conclude either that they had all been previously hidden in some closet or her own view of the world was too narrow and protected."

"Hearts Untroubled," Diane M. Komp, Theology Today, 1988.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

Stanley Hauerwas makes it clear in his foreword for Malady of the Christian Body by Brock and Wannenwetsch that the first generation of Christians in Corinth were exactly that...the first to live in a new evolving age of faith. Paul is writing, he says, as a thinker who is faced with the trouble of living out a life that seeks to continue the work of Jesus.

Our passage for this week goes well with the Christology of Mark. 

We are not about making our own way but instead preparing and making the way for Jesus. We are the workers who Jesus prayed for and called to help harvest. We are the ones who are casting Jesus' light across the wilderness that a path may be found from our heart to God's. 

We are truly human, fallible and flawed. We are the clay jars barely able to be mirrors of God's glory and power. The work we do as a community, our plucking and tending, our road making, is not of our own doing but clearly the power of God working in and through us. We are not blessed, as so many people are want to say today, because we do this work or because of our faith. We are fortunate to recognize God is at work in us, on us, and through us. As Paul says often, it is not we ourselves but God through us.

Paul writes, "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; 9persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies."

Death is at work in us, but life too. Despite our short fall of the reign of God we are still the ones called to do the work. 

Some Thoughts on 1 Samuel 3:1-10

"The Lord was with Samuel, but somehow, this divine appointment does not at all diminish the totality of the human experience."

Commentary, 1 Samuel 3:1-10, Roger Nam, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2015.


"From the very beginning, God has been fully present to everyone and everything in this world. And God is still with us because the Spirit of God still "hovers" and "resonates" over and around and in us all."

"Sacred Space," Alan Brehm, The Waking Dreamer.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

In our Episcopal tradition the call of Eli and Samuel is one of those passages that is most frequently read at the celebrations of new ministry. And, what happens is that we hijack the scripture by making it about us and how much we are like Samuel. In this way we miss the message for the old existing religious tradition.

Let us think through the passage from a missional perspective and try to envision a word for God's church.

In a time when we flounder as a religion it is hart to hear the word of the Lord. It becomes stale. It is a tradition of the dead instead of the living tradition. (3.1) Remember Jaroslav Pelikan wrote “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.” (The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities) At such times it is hard for the people stuck to see, our eyesight, our vision, dims. (3.2) Yet God is present and people are listening. Typically they are different, younger, eager. (3.3)

Note that we know quite clearly that part of what is happening is that Eli's sons are keeping the best of the offerings for themselves and not passing that along to God and to the poor. (Verse 3:13 is coming.) "For I have told him that I am about to punish his house forever, for the iniquity that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them. 14Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering forever.”

People who hear God calling in times like this can easily get everything confused believing that it is the ancient tradition and religion that is calling. So, we go and we say...here we are. But the tradition says clearly: we did not call you. We are resting in our traditionalism. (3.4-3.8) The traditionalists sometimes have to be awakened several times by the visions and hearings of the young in order to truly realize - God is not dead. In fact, God has come calling. And, when the tradition like Eli awakes it is awaken and listens carefully. 

Eli tells Samuel to listen - and he does so respectfully. He will then speak the words to Eli and offer the vision that God has spoken. Eli receives the news faithfully. "So Samuel told him everything and hid nothing from him. Then he said, “It is the Lord; let him do what seems good to him.” (3:18) We are told, now that Samuel has figured out how to listen anew, that the word is with him and "none of it falls to the ground."

It will be Samuel's work to give voice to the people's cry for help and to God's deisre to comfort. He will preach against systems that abuse the weak. And, when God gives in to the monarchy, he will remind the monarchy that it is their work, indeed their calling, to seek the good of the people in his care and to help God care for the weak, powerless, and the hungry.

Callie Plunket-Brewton, who is a Campus Minister at the University of North Alabama wrote:

Just as the call of Samuel sets the tone for his prophetic career and foreshadows the oracles he will deliver against the human leaders of the people, the song of Hannah represents the central focus of YHWH's leadership of the people: concern for the poor and powerless, and judgment of those who prey on the vulnerable and abuse their power.

Samuel received a vision about religion that revealed to him that it, nor the powers of this world, may take advantage of the poor. Aging religion, aging monarchies, aging governments loose their sight that they are merely tools and vessels with the opportunity to do good. They have the power and authority to serve the weakest. So often they chose systems of death and corruption over the other. So often they loose sight of the reign of God. Sometimes, religions and principalities, need new prophets to help them here.

Some Thoughts on Deuteronomy 5:12-15

"God requires balance, rest and work. Those of us who are able to engage in both, must also never forget those who are restricted from enjoying much of either."

Commentary, Deuteronomy 5:12-15 and Proverbs 14:23, Robert Charles Scott, The African American Lectionary, 2008.

"Congregations are 'soul communities,' in which young and old are soul-mates, bound together as an extended family of God, who love, support, and sustain one another. They should assure that senior adults are cared for and honored as resourceful contributors to community life, wisdom-givers, exemplars of the faith, and worthy recipients of care. How do we make this biblical vision concrete in our lives?"

"Caring as Honoring," Anne E. Streaty Wimberly, The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University, 2003.

"Honorable work and restful renewal are both aspects of responsibility."

Radical Shabbat: Free Time, Free People. Rabbi Arthur Waskow. "Living the Word," in Sojourners Online, May/June 2000.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

One of the things that most Christians get wrong is exactly what day the sabbath falls upon. The sabbath is not Sunday. Instead it is Saturday. Saturday is to be our day of rest. Christians go to church not on the sabbath but instead on the first day of the work week. We begin our work by doing the work of the people - liturgy. We begin our work week by reminding ourselves that God is the creator of all and that the creation, our days, and the work before us are all gifts.

The passage begins by remind us who this God is. This God is the one who first raised Israel out of the land of Egypt and raised Christ from the dead. 

We are given then the who of the law - the ten commandments. 

Interesting factoid: in the 1950's there was a group called The Fraternal Order of Eagles. The F.O.E. is an international fraternal organization that was founded on February 6, 1898 in Seattle, Washington by a group of six theater owners including John Cort, brothers John W. and Tim J. Considine, Harry. "People helping people" is there motto. Wiki tells me  that "Touring theater troupes are credited with much of the Eagles' rapid growth. Most early members were actors, stagehands and playwrights, who carried the Eagles story as they toured across the United States and Canada. The organization's success is also attributed to its funeral benefits." And, they claim responsibility for "mother's day". Though that is really not true - though they helped popularize it. Anyway...they got with Cecil B. DeMille and funded a promotion in 1956! Together they donated monuments to the Ten Commandments (which was DeMille's new movie) across the country. It was the same decade when "in God we Trust" was on our money and the Pledge of Allegiance was amended to include "under God." (See American Grace by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell.) Yes...that is right, those things don't date back to the revolution. You heard it hear. The ten commandments were a movie promotion!

Now, back to our story...I encourage you to turn to the back of your prayer book and see in the catechism of the Episcopal Church how we interpret the ten commandments and how they are a good mirror to a holy and full life lived as God intends. Here is how our Book of Common Prayer Catechism speaks about the Ten Commandments:

Q. What do we learn from these commandments?
A. We learn two things: our duty to God, and our duty to our neighbors.
Q. What is our duty to God?
A. Our duty is to believe and trust in God;

I. To love and obey God and to bring others to know him;
II. To put nothing in the place of God;
III. To show God respect in thought, word, and deed;
IV. And to set aside regular times for worship,prayer, and the study of God’s ways.

Q. What is our duty to our neighbors?
A. Our duty to our neighbors is to love them as ourselves, and to do to other people as we wish them to do to us;

V. To love, honor, and help our parents and family; to honor those in authority, and to meet their just demands;
VI. To show respect for the life God has given us; to work and pray for peace; to bear no malice, prejudice, or hatred in our hearts; and to be kind to all the creatures of God;
VII. To use all our bodily desires as God intended;
VIII. To be honest and fair in our dealings; to seek justice, freedom, and the necessities of life for all people; and to use our talents and possessions as ones who must answer for them to God;
IX. To speak the truth, and not to mislead others by our silence;
X. To resist temptations to envy, greed, and jealousy; to rejoice in other people’s gifts and graces; and to do our duty for the love of God, who has called us into fellowship with him.

Q. What is the purpose of the Ten Commandments?
A. The Ten Commandments were given to define our relationship with God and our neighbors.

Q. Since we do not fully obey them, are they useful at all?
A. Since we do not fully obey them, we see more clearly our sin and our need for redemption.

We are not simply people after peace and justice but we are people who are deeply rooted in a tradition that seeks to tell our story through virtuous action. We know God’s will for us and for creation. We know what we are to do... We are to be virtuous citizens not only on Sundays, not only within the walls of our homes; we are to be virtuous citizens at work in the political and social environs of our community. And, when we don’t follow these commandments we are to repent and return to the Lord, and begin the work again.

Jonathan Sacks, the once chief rabbi points out that this passage takes a major turn from all that has been read before it.  He writes, "The book of Deuteronomy is saturated with the language of love. The root a-h-v appears in Shemot twice, in Vayikra twice (both in Lev. 19), in Badmibar not at all, but in Sefer Devarim 23 times. Devarim is a book about societal beatitude and the transformative power of love." Then he asks, "Why is it that love, which plays so great a part in the book of Deuteronomy, is so much less in evidence in the earlier books...?"

Sacks then jumps to ask...why is forgiveness not mentioned until this book too? He points out: "God does not forgive Adam and Eve or Cain (though he mitigates their punishment). Forgiveness does not figure in the stories of the Flood, the Tower of Babel or the destruction of Sodom and the cities of the plain (Abraham’s plea is that the cities be spared if they contain fifty or ten righteous people; this is not a plea for forgiveness). Divine forgiveness makes its first appearance in the book of Exodus after Moses’ successful plea in the wake of golden calf, and is then institutionalized in the form of Yom Kippur (Lev. 16), but not before. Why so?"

His answer is that God does not insert forgiveness and so love until we have learned to forgive and to love one another. 

Not unlike forgiveness before it, love is present in the book but love is not a political, social, or moral principle until Deuteronomy.

For instance he writes: "Abraham loves Isaac. Isaac loves Esau. Rebecca loves Jacob. Jacob loves Rachel. He also loves Joseph. There is interpersonal love in plentiful supply. But almost all the loves of Genesis turn out to be divisive. They lead to tension between Jacob and Esau, between Rachel and Leah, and between Joseph and his brothers. Implicit in Genesis is a profound observation missed by most moralists and theologians. Love in and of itself – real love, personal and passionate, the kind of love that suffuses much of the prophetic literature as well as Shir Ha-Shirim, the greatest love song in Tanakh, as opposed to the detached, generalised love called agape which we associate with ancient Greece – is not sufficient as a basis for society. It can divide as well as unite."

You see, Sacks helps us because what he sees that we do not is that that love, forgiveness, come along in Deuteronomy with the word justice.

Simon May, a philosopher writes:

[W]hat we must note here, for it is fundamental to the history of Western love, is the remarkable and radical justice that underlies the love commandment of Leviticus. Not a cold justice in which due deserts are mechanically handed out, but the justice that brings the other, as an individual with needs and interests, into a relationship of respect. All our neighbours are to be recognised as equal to ourselves before the law of love. Justice and love therefore become inseparable. (Simon May, Love: A History, 19-20.)

Sacks concludes by stating that "Love without justice leads to rivalry, and eventually to hate. Justice without love is devoid of the humanizing forces of compassion and mercy. We need both. This unique ethical vision – the love of God for humans and of humans for God, translated into an ethic of love toward both neighbour and stranger – is the foundation of Western civilization and its abiding glory. It is born here in the book of Deuteronomy, the book of law-as-love and love-as-law." You can read his whole article here: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Morality of Love

The reality is that the God of love invites us into a particular covenant relationship of love, justice, and forgiveness with God first. Then God invites us into a similar relationship with one another. As God has chosen to be with us so are we invited by the commandments to be in relationships with others. 

God's forgiveness in Christ is not a new thing, but the very next thing in the neverending relationship between God and humanity. God's forgiveness is that prime move by the creator God's self to do what God has done since the beginning - be in relationship with us.

Previous Sermons On These Passages

Walk this Way Jun 3, 2018, St. David's, Austin, Pentecost 4B

Trinity Sunday Year B, May 26, 2024

Prayer

Nicodemus by Henry Tanner, 1899

O God Most High, in the waters of baptism you made us your sons and daughters in Christ, your only-begotten Son.  Hear deep within us the cry of that Spirit, who calls out to you "Abba, Father,"  and grant that, obedient to your savior's commission, we may become heralds of the salvation you offer to all and go forth to make disciples of all nations. 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 John 3:1-17

"All are included, even God's enemies. God did not come to condemn, but to save. As Martin Niemoller once put it, 'It took me a long time to realize that not only did God not hate my enemies, he didn't even hate his enemies.'"

Lectionary Blogging, Trinity B, John Petty, 2012.

"What is crucial in our proclamation is the reality of God's activity in Jesus, God's only Son, sent and given for the sake of the salvation of the world. Only through the awakening of belief through the Spirit can this be known."

Commentary, John 3:1-17, Ginger Barfield, WorkingPreacher.org, 2015

"When we become too sure of what we know about Jesus (or indeed the Trinity on this particular Sunday), when we believe that we have grasped him at last, that is when we can perhaps expect to be undone like Nicodemus."

Commentary, John 3:1-17, Meda Stamper, WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

Let me begin by saying how much I love this story and enjoy Nicodemus.  A pharisee, a righteous liver, he comes to Jesus and sits and has a conversation with him.  The early church thought this was about entrapment.  Maybe it was.  Regardless, there is deep wisdom in this passage and important thoughts for the follower of Jesus today.

First, let us begin in the beginning.  Nicodemus says that he believes that Jesus is from God.  He literally says, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God."  But this meaning in English is better understood as "you are a teacher approved by God."  Jesus then corrects him saying, "no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." Often times we immediately go to the importance of this phrase in light of our one understanding of baptism.  (We will get there.)  But this is really a message to Nicodemus that Jesus is not himself just another prophet approved by God, but is directly from God, of God.

 Nicodemus does not understand and thinks Jesus is speaking about people. So he asks about being born of God.  Jesus answers in the language of the first century which held a mix of understanding that God was in you and/or that God adopted you as an individual. This language is very clear in the Pauline letters; and, I should say very important language in the Christian Faith.  Though theological in nature these notions are not applied to Jesus directly as he is one with the Father.  (Raymond Brown, John, vol 1, 138ff)

Raymond Brown argues that there is also enough language of adoption in the OT that Nicodemus as a righteous pharisee would have been able to understand that Jesus was offering a vision that the gathering at the end of times was at work in the world through Jesus' own ministry. (140)   There is a notion here that the Holy Spirit of God is begetting, if you will, new members of God's family.  In a time when birth had significant meaning to your culture, context, and religion, this is a radical all embracing notion.  Just as today for the righteous it is difficult to wrestle with God's all embracing drawing in of sinners.  This is a beautiful and mysterious thing.  We are not as human beings able to understand and fathom the depths of God fully and so this Holy Spirit begetting is strange.  Jesus says, ‘You must be born from above.’8The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (vs 8, see also Eccles 11.5 "As you do not know how the spirit (wind) comes to the bones in the womb, so you do not know the work of God who does all things.")

This passage also has profound meaning for the Christian community within the context of baptism.  For the first Christians this is about God and the family of God.  It is about being born of water and spirit. It is about the ritual of Christian initiation.  It is important to note that this is completely foreign to the pharisee sitting before Jesus. Nicodemus might have understood baptism as a cleansing or ritual bathing.  Or, he could have understood this baptism or rebirth like the "proselyte" baptism of his own day where a person becoming a Jew went through a ceremony of new birth - literally a rebirthing.  Neither of these are Holy Spirit baptism. (142)  This is a hotly debated topic and can send us off into all kinds of scenarios.  Let me simply say that for the purpose of our reflection, the church has understood this as the necessary form of the sacrament of baptism in order to be reborn and that the stronger pieces of scripture to support this sacrament are found elsewhere and not here.

What is important, what is amazing, is again this notion of grace given by the Holy Spirit.  The idea so very difficult for Nicodemus is that being physically born into the family of Abraham, and following the law as a good pharisee, is not what matters in the end. Rather, the radical notion that the family of Abraham is being increased by the begetting work of the Holy Spirit!  Moreover, that the begetting Holy Spirit is falling on people who do not follow the law like good Nicodemus.  That is trouble for Nicodemus indeed!  For at the end of the day I think Nicodemus like us (when we are honest) is a score keeper. He has a good score.  He is born special and separate, and he has spent a life separating himself even more through his piety.

In the dark night of our souls when we come to Jesus what are we inviting him to bless?  Our score? Our piety? Our actions?  Our work of justice? Our right living?  What are we inviting Jesus to curse?  In the dark night when we sit at Jesus' feet what does he offer us? He offers us freedom from keeping score, keeping score on others; but most importantly keeping score on ourselves. 

Next comes the important part of the passage:  "If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man."  The message here is one of the resurrected Lord.  Jesus will be raised, the Son of Man, will be raised and this will undo the power of the law over us.  Jesus' resurrection and ascension will unify man with God in a new way and in so doing will unplug our score board. He will wipe clean the slate.  In the ascension, in his return to the holy community of God (the Trinity) he does so without any human effort. He does so without having asked our permission. He does so even though he is crucified. He does so purely as a measure of grace for the righteous and the sinner alike.

I believe he offers us grace.  I believe he offers us grace to imagine the family of God as God sees it and to imagine the reality of our personal invitation to participate.  Will we follow this Jesus? This Jesus of grace? This loving Jesus?  Who is raised from the dead and ascends into heaven and unites us into the heavenly community?  Will we follow him when he says:

“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him."

Romans 8:12-25

"...the preacher will do well to bring up the fact that there is feminine, indeed maternal, imagery for God in the Bible also (Deuteronomy 32:18; Isaiah 42:14; 49:15; 66:13). That imagery is also used to speak of God in an intimate way, not to define God by gender."

Commentary, Romans 8:12-17, Arland J. Hultgren, WorkingPreacher.org, 2015.

"It is interesting that Paul, writing to what was probably a predominantly male audience, would have invoked the imagery of a pain that has never been felt by males."

"Labor Pains," Alyce M McKenzie, Edgy Exegesis, 2014.

"Even self assurance is not based on fetching the certificate of membership or recalling an even of the the past, but a sense of oneness or otherwise with the being of God the Spirit moving within our lives (8:16)."

"First Thoughts on Year A Epistle Passages in the Lectionary," Pentecost 6, William Loader, Murdoch University, Uniting Church in Australia.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

We continue our reading in Paul's Romans and we continue as he reminds us that our desires are not the desires of God and so we grate against God's pull upon us. We are ego centered creatures. At our worst we have very little room for anyone else.

But the life of the follower of Jesus is not hallmarked by feeding these personal desires and wishes but instead by overcoming our brokenness to work on God's work. We are to press forward dealing with our own sins and thus building up the character of God within us. In other words those things that are in us, which we do but do not wish to do, which are bad for ourselves or others are the very things that build us up into the character of Christ as we work on them. So it is that we groan we suffer we carry our cross - but we are not condemned.

We have hope. We know that while we still labor the final battle is won. We know that while we chose to labor because of God's grace that we do so out of a great sense of wanting to life a life within God's Spirit. Yet we hope. We hope on our good days and we hope on our bad days. 

This hope of God's winning victory is what pulls us forward. Knowing that death and sin have met their match and God has been victorious sealing for us eternal life allows us to continue to live as "children of God." Knowing that we are heirs, that we are given as intimate relationship with God as Jesus had himself - we are able to apply ourselves tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. 

We are freed from hopelessness. We are freed from bondage to sin and death which kept us from hope.

It is here in this reception of grace, forgiveness, and love from God that we discover hope for ourselves, hope for our lives, hope for our relationships, and hope for our church. 

So let us awake! Let us see that God has won the day. Let us see that in the end sin and death are conquered and let us chose to work on ourselves that we might ever more grow into the character of Christ. For we are one with God, we are his children, and his heirs.

Isaiah 6:1-8

"Such spilling of divine secrets amounts to a paradoxical intervention, when straightforward communication has failed, an intervention designed to goad listeners into hearing."

Commentary, Isaiah 6:1-8, Patricia Tull, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2015.

"The Isaiah reading anchors our vision of the Trinity with Isaiah's, set on the Lord of hosts and the throne of vast and awesome might."

Commentary, Isaiah 6:1-8, Melinda Quivik, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2012.

"We are sent to join God in mission because we have encountered God, because we have been brought face to face with God's holiness and our brokenness, and because we have been made whole by God's grace."

"Worship that Sends," Patrick Johnson, Missional Preaching: Equipping for Witness, 2015.

Oremus Online NRSV Text

John's gospel understands that Isaiah is a witness to the divinity of Christ. Isaiah is the voice crying out in the wilderness (John 1.23). Then again in 53.1 and 6.10, John uses Isaiah again to reveal that Jesus is fulfilling prophesy. (Richard Hays, Echoes of the Scripture in the Gospels, 293.)

This is all very important because what Christian biblical theologians argue is that Isaiah, when he has this vision (the one from today's lesson) he is not simply seeing God on the throne, but he is seeing the incarnation, the Christ, on the throne. Hays argues that this is John's view too and this is why it is so important for him to enlist Isaiah as a witness to God in Christ Jesus. (Hays, 289.) This a witness to the triadic nature of God and the eternal presence of the incarnation. (Hays would say Jesus...but I think that is theologically incorrect.)

This is an important reading of scripture because it is both triune and it begins to reveal how the first evangelists and followers of Jesus understood who Jesus was without a New Testament.

One of the real issues on Trinity Sunday is not so much the Trinity, but our lack of good theological and scriptural underpinning.

What I am saying here is quite important, at least to my theology and understanding of the creation. People often suggest that the Trinity is a mere mystery planted into theology because of early Christian infighting over the idea of who Jesus was and the deep desire to not appear anything other than monotheist. Secondly, we err on the side of believing that the incarnation begins with Jesus' birth - which it decidedly does not...if you are a true Trinitarian that is. And, lastly we make the mistake of believing that the only reason that Jesus comes into the world is because of sin. That is hogwash too. You see most people get a good understanding of Augustine trinitarian doctrine and don't go any further. Without doing so what we get is the heresy of modalism...another words...as Augustine says himself: the trinity is really about describing three somethings. (Augustine, De Trinitate 7.9 (CCSL, 50A:259).

The Trinity's work is part of the very creation of the cosmos. It is present before the birth of Jesus and after. The 1 in 3 and 3 in 1 God is fully active prior to our imagining and will be long after our ingathering. There is one will causing all actions and one substance.

I think that Robert Farrar Capon puts a fun and quite theologically brilliant spin on all of this as he reminds us of the contribution of the early Scotists and Franciscan theologians - good trinitarians all. I offer you this quote from his book The Third Peacock...well worth the read. Enjoy:

In the Christian scheme of things, the ultimate act by which God runs and rescues creation is the Incarnation. Sent by the Father and conceived by the Spirit, the eternal Word is born of the Virgin Mary and, in the mystery of the indwelling, lives, dies, rises, and reigns. Unfortunately, however, we tend to look on the mystery mechanically. We view it as a fairly straight piece of repairwork which became necessary because of sin. Synopsis: The world gets out of whack; perverse and foolish oft it strays until there is none good, no, not one. Enter therefore God with incarnational tool kit. He fixes up a new Adam in Jesus and then proposes, through the mystery of baptism, to pick up all the fallen members of the old Adam and graft them into Christ. Real twister of an ending: As a result of sin, man ends up higher by redemption than he would have by creation alone.

However venerable that interpretation is, though, it is not the only one. As long ago as the Middle Ages, the Scotist school of Franciscan theologians suggested another. They raised the question of whether the Incarnation would have occurred apart from sen; and they answered it, Yes. In other words, they saw the action of God in Christ, not as an incidental patching of the fabric of creation, but as part of its very texture. For our purposes—in this context of a world run by desire for God—that opens up the possibility that the Word in Jesus was not so much doing bits of busy work to jimmy things into line as he was being his own fetching self right there in the midst of creation.
And there you have the bridge from a mechanical to a personal analogy to the divine help. When we say that a friend “helped” us, two meanings are possible. In the case where our need was for a Band-Aid, a gallon of gas or a push on a cold morning, we have in mind mechanical help; help for times when help was at least possible. But when nothing can be helped, when the dead are irretrievably dead and the beloved lost for good, what do we mean by telling Harry how much help he was to us in our need? He did nothing; he rescued no one from the pit, he brought no one back from the ends of the earth. Still, we are glad of him; we protest that without him we would never have made it. Yet we know perfectly well we could have gotten through it just by breathing in and out. That means, therefore, that what we thank him for is precisely personal help. It was his presence, not the things that he did, that made the difference.

So with God, perhaps. Might not Incarnation be his response, not to the incidental irregularity of sin, but to the unhelpable presence of badness in creation? Perhaps in a world where, for admittedly inscrutable reasons, victimization is the reverse of the coin of being, his help consists of his presence in all victims. At any rate, when he finally does show up in Jesus, that is how it seems to work. His much-heralded coming to put all things to rights ends badly. When the invisible hand that holds the stars finally does its triumphant restoring thing, it does nothing at all but hang there and bleed. That may well be help; but it is not the Band-Aid creation expected on the basis of mechanical analogies. The only way it makes any sense is when it is seen as personal: When we are helpless, there he is. He doesn’t start your stalled car for you; he comes and sits with you in the snowbank. You can object that he should have made a world in which cars don’t stall; but you can’t complain he doesn’t stick by his customers.

So, back to Isaiah. Now, did Isaiah catch a glimpse of God in Christ, the Incarnation, sitting upon the thrown? A man with arms and legs? A pre-Jesus. I doubt it but I do not know. But I believe that Isaiah understood clearly that the God who gave him the sight of such a vision was the God who had created the cosmos and would in the end gather us in. It is God, the Lord, who is present at our coming in and our going out. It is this God who, in the wreck of Israel and the end of King Uzziah's rule, is present. Everything can be in the dumps but the Lord sits upon his throne and sits by our side. 

And, it is this certainty of presence that Isaiah bears witness to, that the first disciples experienced both before and after the resurrection, and it is this certainty of presence that John the evangelist records in his Gospel.

Sermons Preached on this Passage

Everyone Needs a Place, May 27, 2018- Trinity Sunday, Trinity, Galveston

The first Sunday after Pentecost, Year BHappy Days #77: The Book of Records

Jun 5, 2012, Sermon preached at St. Stephens and Hope Houston, Trinity Sunday, Year B, 2012; with a shout out to my Mom and her new phone!


Living the Divine Trinity is Living Ministry

Jun 9, 2015, Sermon preached at St. Thomas Houston, Trinity Sunday, 2015