Luke 18:9-14; Psalm 65; 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18
The first time we read this parable of Jesus, we are comforted. We know who should be wearing the white hat and who should be wearing the black hat. Then we get to Jesus’ comment at the end and our certainty begins to crumble. If we read the parable three or four more times, we it becomes unsettling.
This parable, found only in Luke’s memory, doesn’t go where we think it ought to go. Jesus frequently upends the commonly accepted notions about relationships with God, like he upended the tables of the temple merchants and bankers. This parable upends virtually everything we think we know about faith, everything we organize our faith around. We are left with nothing.
Friends, that is exactly where Jesus wants us. Empty-handed.
Before we pile on the Pharisee with our disdain, we need to step back and think about Pharisees. Believe it or not, they were a reforming sect within the Judaism of Jesus’ time. They grew out of the Babylonian exile. They sought to ease up the onus of temple sacrifice which had grown up after Solomon built the first temple, which was renewed with the remodeling of the temple and renewing of worship traditions during King Josiah’s reign two decades before the Temple’s Babylonian destruction, and the post-exile rebuilding under Ezra and Nehemiah.
The Temple-less exile helped create the synagogue, a local representation of the Temple without all the sacrificial rituals. The Pharisees shifted the center of faith from the Jerusalem Temple to local congregations and to individual homes. They promoted the idea of the “priesthood of all believers.” The worship of God was not something distant on a mountain in Jerusalem or reserved to a priestly class, but something intimate which could be done in community and home.
The Pharisees developed the rabbinic tradition. By the time of Jesus, they had become the leading exponents of Judaism. The Sadducees and Essenes were smaller Jewish sects overshadowed by and often in contention with the Pharisees.
After the Romans destroyed the temple in 70 CE, the Pharisees took control of the Jewish religious tradition in the Jewish homeland and in the Diaspora – the scattering of Jews throughout the Roman Empire’s geography. The Pharisees finalized the canon of Hebrew scriptures about 60 years after Jesus’ resurrection. They began the long process of interpreting the Torah which ultimately became known as the Mishnah and the Talmud. This was going on during the time that Luke was putting his gospel into writing, some 10-15 years after the destruction of Jerusalem.
In spite of all the controversy between the Pharisees and Jesus, the Pharisees aren’t the totally evil religionists they are portrayed to be.
According to Luke, Jesus tells this parable to confront people “who had convinced themselves that they were righteous and who looked on everyone else with disgust.” Karl Barth, in his massive Church Dogmatics, identified pride as the chief sin of the religious person, because it was fundamentally idolatrous: it confuses Creator and creation, Giver and gift.
Luke supports this viewpoint. As he describes the praying Pharisee, it is obvious that those who are contemptuous of others have come to consider justice a characteristic of themselves, rather than a characteristic that rightly belongs only to God. In fact, two stories later in Luke’s gospel Jesus flatly states, “No one is good except the one God” (Luke 18:19). Even though the Pharisee in the parable thanks God for his righteousness rather than claiming credit for himself, he goes on to remind God how fortunate God is to have such a wonderful worshiper. That undercuts any humility his prayer otherwise demonstrates.
Tax collectors were not paragons of society. They were political operatives in charge of certain regions, call them census tracts, wards, legislative districts, whatever. The Romans set a required tax revenue amount for each district and the tax collecting franchisee was responsible for raising it, by whatever means it took. Anything over the required amount was the tax collector’s profit, which many worked hard to maximize. Often tax regions were subdivided with local tax collectors collecting, taking a cut, and paying a surcharge to the chief tax collector. Pyramid schemes have been around for a long time.
We always notice the body language of the two pray-ers. But we also need to notice their positions. The Pharisee stands by himself, so as to avoid being contaminated by any riffraff that also might be in the temple at the same time. The Pharisee is isolated in attitude and in location. He’s got a special spot where he can scan the crowd and see who else is praying.
The tax collector stood at a distance. As someone universally recognized as a lowlife and ritually unclean, he might have been hesitant to enter any farther than the entryway. Another possibility is that he wasn’t even Jewish. Sometimes they were foreign mercenaries, illegal aliens of the day, hired to the do the empire’s dirty work. If that was the case, he couldn’t go any further than the doorway to the Holy Place. He could only look in, like an African-American looking in the window of a “whites only” restaurant in our grandparents’ time.
As Jesus so often reminded his hearers – and he reminds us here – things are not always as they appear. It is the repentant tax collector, not the pious Pharisee, who returned home “justified.” Pharisee had fallen into the sin of arrogance and pride. He exalted himself above others, even God. He gave thanks to God that he was better than the robbers, adulterers, or the tax collector he saw out of the corner of his eye. Because of all his religious acts, he confidently justified himself.
The tax collector, on the other hand, was humiliated before God and others. He honestly recognized his misdeeds, and his brokenness was evident in his behavior.
Although Barth understood the shame of both to be the result of their comparison to the holiness of God, John Calvin understood that their fallenness was the result of the original sin committed by Adam and Eve in Eden. The doctrine of original sin is the theological view that the sin of Adam was imputed to all humanity, a mutation which was embedded in their spiritual DNA. Calvin put it this way: “[Adam] consigned his race to ruin by his rebellion when he perverted the whole order of nature.”
Paul described human depravity in this manner: “Many people were made sinners through the disobedience of one person” (Romans 5:19). Reformed theologians like Calvin and Barth understand Scripture to teach that the entire person is subject to sin, leaving no one immune to Adam’s original sin. This doctrine is most often referred to as total depravity. What this means is that a human being cannot not sin. In other words, we are doomed to sin.(1)
That’s where Jesus stepped in with the tax collector. The man was “justified.” The parable invites us to acknowledge that we are all subject to original sin and completely sinful in our innermost being. If we do that, we concede two things: (1) we are unable to save ourselves because we are steeped in sin; and (2) we are totally and utterly dependent on God for salvation.
That’s the piece which was missing for the Pharisee. He justified himself before God by trying to exalt himself. He came to the throne of God with his hands filled with “who he was,” “what he had done,” and “what he had not done.” He had a multi-page resume, a lengthy Who’s Who entry in his hands. Holding all that out to God, the Pharisee expected to put himself in good standing. After all, in his mind he deserved to be there.
On the other hand, the tax collector humbled himself, genuinely acknowledging that his life was rife with sin and that he did not deserve God’s forgiveness. But he asked in faith knowing that God is merciful.
Luke Timothy Johnson says that prayer is a theme in Luke-Acts.
“For Luke, prayer is faith in action. Prayer is not an optional exercise in piety, carried out to demonstrate one’s relationship with God. It is that relationship with God. The way one prays therefore reveals that relationship. If the disciples do not ‘cry out day and night’ to the Lord, then they in fact do not have faith, for that is what faith does. Similarly, if prayer is self-assertion before God, then it cannot be answered by God’s gift of righteousness; possession and gift cancel each other.”(2)
Alan Redpath writes, “Faith is two empty hands held open to receive all of the Lord.”
Augustus Toplady’s lyrics ring out:
"Nothing in my hand I bring,
simply to the cross I cling;
naked, come to thee for dress,
helpless look to thee for grace;
foul, I to the fountain fly;
wash me, Savior, or I die.” (That’s the third stanza of “Rock of Ages.”)
The Pharisee’s hands are full of himself. He is unable to receive God’s forgiveness and mercy. The tax collector has nothing in his hands. He is poised to receive the blessings of God.
“Nothing in my hand I bring;
simply to the cross I cling.”
(1) Robert Leach, “Luke 18:9-14 – Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, vol 4, 214.
(2) Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (Sacred Pagina) (Wilmington, Delaware: Michael Glazer, 2006), 473.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Luke 17:11-19; Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; 2 Timothy 2:8-15
Karl Barth, a leading Reformed theologian of the mid-twentieth century, was fond of saying that the basic human response to God is gratitude — not fear and trembling, not guilt and dread, but thanksgiving. “What else can we say to what God gives us but stammer praise?”
C. S. Lewis, as he explored his newfound faith, observed that the Bible, particularly the Book of Psalms, insisted that we praise and thank God. He also observed the connection between gratitude and personal well-being. “I noticed how the humblest and at the same time most balanced minds praised most: while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least. Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible.”(1)
Luke tells a wonderful story. It always takes my breath away. Luke alone remembers it and shares it. Perhaps that is because it features an outsider, a despised minority, a Samaritan, and Jesus touching someone. Those are important thematic components for Luke.
We find Jesus out of bounds, so to speak. He and his followers are walking through Samaritan territory. That’s never an issue for him. Strictly observant Jews in his day avoided any contact with the residents of Samaria, living far into the future a centuries-old hatred.
We can imagine that the relationship between Jews and Samaritans must be something like the animosity of the orange Protestants and the green Catholics of Northern Ireland which festered on and off for a century. Presbyterian Church (USA) mission co-worker Doug Baker has spent most of his ministry working to bring peace to that country. May the current lack of enmity be true and not just the quiet before another storm.
Of course another current religious conflict of larger proportions is the conflict between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam in the Middle East. That confrontation has been going on for generations and promises to continue for many more. The extremists of Al Qaeda and ISIS in the Middle East and Boko Haram in Western Africa add fuel to those fires. As Kareem Abdul Jabbar posted on Facebook recently, “ISIS is to Islam as the Westboro Baptism Church is to Christianity.” That’s not a compliment.
We American Christians haven’t been immune to internecine fighting, but most of the artillery has been words, not bombs. Think about the issues we have fought over in the last centuries: abolition of slavery, prohibition of alcohol, child labor laws, women’s suffrage, ordination of women, voting rights, women’s reproductive rights, human sexuality in general.
Jesus and his entourage were walking through Samaritan territory. As they neared a town they were met by a group of ten lepers. In those days a leper couldn’t hang out with anyone other than another leper. As was the custom, the lepers didn’t approach very near. They called out from an appropriate distance, “Jesus, Master, show us mercy!” They could have been begging for something to eat or for shelter for the night. But if you gave them a coin, no one would receive the coin from them for a loaf of bread, a fish, or some fruit. Or if you gave them a room, the room or whole house would become unclean.
The men were desperate for healing. Being a leper was like being a Syrian refugee today or an undocumented alien. No one wants you. And there was no recourse, unless what you had was not leprosy (Hansen’s Disease in today’s medical parlance). You could have had a bad case of psoriasis, poison ivy, small pox, chicken pox, measles, the teenage bane of acne, or – heaven forbid – shingles. Some of these might clear up in time, and then you could go through the proper rites for ritual cleansing and be allowed back in the community and to life. But if they didn’t....
Jesus desired to have mercy, so he said to them, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” A leper was supposed to be clean before going to the priest. Only a priest could determine whether a person was clean or not. I wonder how even handed that was. I can imagine discussions such as baseball managers often have with umpires about a variety of calls. “I’m clean.” “No, you’re not.” “Yes, I am.” “No, you’re not.”
The instruction was unusual, but they did what Jesus asked. As they left, they were cleansed. All ten of them. Luke affirms that, Apparently nine of the ten were Jews and in the misery of their leprous ostracism even a Samaritan fellow traveler was okay. As they were going off, the Jewish lepers went to find their nearest priest. The Samaritan had to go find a priest of his own. Perhaps it was when they were splitting up that the Samaritan, now on his own, had enough time to realize that he had been healed. And healed by a Jew at that. That’s when he reversed his steps and sought out Jesus, whom he knew to be a Jew.
Something is going on here, something wonderful and mysterious and tingling with the healing power of God. Leper No. 10, the Samaritan, raced back to Jesus, praising God with a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him profusely. Jesus knew his power. He knew that all ten lepers had been cleansed, made ritually pure, made whole again.
The Jewish lepers were intent on doing exactly what Jesus had told them to do, follow the steps of the law. They were excited about being united with family gain. The Samaritan saw a larger picture. Jesus has had mercy on him – as a leper, as a Samaritan, as a human being.
One in ten. A ten percent thanksgiving ratio. That’s not saying much. Didn’t the Jewish mothers teach their children better than that? The nine did what they were told. The tenth knew that there had to be an intermediate step. That step is gratitude. Gratitude and thanksgiving move us beyond the standard, the acceptable, the ordinary. A gracious attitude and lifestyle make a person extraordinary, unusual, blessed, a cut above the rest. The Samaritan, normally on the bottom of the social heap, had risen to the top like precious cream.
The Bible uses the concepts of wellness, wholeness, and salvation nearly interchangeably. “Your faith has healed you/made you well/made you whole/saved you.” Being grateful and saying thank you are absolutely at the heart of God’s hope for the human race and God’s intent for each of us.
Medical studies have shown that gratitude does tend towards a better level of health and disposition. It may be that grateful people take better care of themselves, but there is evidence that gratitude itself is a stress reducer, that grateful people are more hopeful, and that there are links between gratitude and the immune system. So your mother was right when she made you call your grandmother and thank her for the Christmas sweater or birthday card.
Jesus knew what he was talking about. “Your faith has healed you,” says Jesus. He gave him a fist bump and a high five not so much for the faith that asked for healing, but for the faith that returned to give thanks. After all, it’s a grateful faith — not a gimme faith — that saves us.
The basic Christian response to God is gratitude: gratitude for the gift of life, gratitude for the world, gratitude for the dear people God has given us who enrich and grace our lives. The basic Christian experience is gratitude to God for God’s love in Jesus Christ and the gift of hopeful confidence, wholeness and wellness that comes with it, regardless of the worldly circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Writer Anne Lamott says her two favorite prayers are, in the morning, “Help me, help me, help me,” and at bedtime, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
If you are having trouble with faith, perhaps you have a underlying problem with gratitude. The question then has to be asked, what is the leprosy/malady/wrong thinking that you need to be healed from so that you can be grateful? Where are you ostracized (in your perception of the world or in reality)? If prayers of thanks are part of the soul’s healing and deliverance and flourish, the physical circumstances of the pray-er become less important. It is the thanking that saves the grateful leper, and such thankfulness is available to all of us in every circumstance.
Kimberly Bracken Long writes,
“To practice gratitude intentionally changes an individual life, to be sure. It also changes the character of a congregation. When Christians practice gratitude, they come to worship not just to ‘get something out of it,’ but to give thanks and praise to God. Stewardship is transformed from fund-raising to the glad gratitude of joyful givers. The mission of the church changes from ethical duty to the work of grateful hands and hearts.”(2)
Friends, if you want to grow your faith, begin by growing your gratitude. The formerly leprous Samaritan did. It made all the difference in his life. Gratitude will change your life, too.
General Resource: “Leper No. 10,” Homiletics, November 27, 2003.
(1) Cited by John M. Buchanan, “Luke 17:11-19 - Homiletics Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4, 165
(2) Kimberly Bracken Long, “Luke 17:11-19 - Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4, 168
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Psalm 37:1-9; Lamentations 1:1-6; Luke 17:5-10
Two long-time church members were discussing the present state of the church. The woman lamented that for more than sixty years she had been going to church and she couldn’t remember one sermon from any one of a dozen ministers who had preached during that time. The church was in a sorry state she said. She wasn’t even sure why she still attended.
The other parishioner, a man of similar age, commented. “You know,” he said, “Charlotte and I have been married for nearly sixty years. I haven’t done the math, but that should amount to a huge number of meals she has fixed for me over the years. I confess that I don’t remember any one of them in particular. But here I am, still healthy. Every meal has fed me and kept me alive all that time. For that I am truly thankful. Maybe all those sermons over the years have done the same for you.”
I don’t think anyone has ever satisfactorily explained the human tendency to see the negative more quickly than the positive. Optimists see the glass half full. Pessimists see the glass half empty. Engineers and theologians say that what we need is a different glass, a smaller glass to be fuller, a bigger glass to be emptier, or a larger glass so that half is more.
The Book of Psalms is just such a glass. It is a remarkable ancient collection of songs of praise, lament, petition, wisdom, intercession, and thanksgiving. That should cover just about any kind of glass in a bartender’s collection. Yet, so often we only think of a few psalms that are familiar enough to be ingrained in our memories (23, 84, 98, 121, 150 to name a few). The rest are vague. We don’t know them by heart, like our ancestors did generations ago. The medieval monks knew them in Latin by their opening words. Our Scots ancestors knew them by the tunes associated with them. The Psalms were music, they were liturgical resources, they were prayers. They are not scripture like the Books of Moses, the writings of the major prophets, the gospels, or the epistles. Yet the Psalms are the largest book in the Bible, and they make up the most diverse collection of writings to and about God. They reflect every human emotion.
Psalm 37 wrestles with a very basic question, “Is God in charge or not?” It is not directly addressed to God. It is more of a meditation to the author’s self as he or she tries to sort out what is going on in the world around the psalmist and where is God in it all. By itself it psalm would be hard to identify it as a liturgical text. The poem consists of kindly advice to a fellow traveler on the way. For all its ancientness, the psalm has a surprising contemporary ring to it. The psalmist climbs a steep hill with the opening nine verses of imperatives imploring the righteous to remain righteous while faced with injustice and surrounded by the seductive lures of ill-gained prosperity. I would encourage you to go home and reread these nine verses and then continue for the remaining thirty-one verses to get the whole drift of the psalmist’s theological wrestling.
Throughout the psalm, the psalmist argues for what is true over what is apparent. If seeing is believing, then it is obvious that the world is a screwed up place where the guilty get away scot-free, where violence succeeds, where greed is the reigning core value, where untruth said often enough becomes truth, where good is to be stamped out like a campfire lest it ignites a whole forest.
The psalmist repeatedly insists that the eternal truth is that God is sovereign and just. What is temporarily apparent is that the wicked succeed and the unjust prosper. Just as we can only see so far until the curvature of the earth makes seeing impossible, so our vision over the curvature of God’s time limits our ability to see all that God sees.
The psalm’s readers are challenged to “enjoy the Lord” (v. 4), even when life is neither enjoyable nor fair. That’s the same message that the prophet Isaiah wrote to beleaguered exiles, “Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength; they will fly on wings like eagles, they will run and not be tired, they will walk and not be weary” (Isaiah 40:31).
In a world where things are not as clear cut as we would like, in a world where people do get weary and where they plod rather than run, the psalmist provides a picture which sharply contrasts those who do life well with those who do well in life. To do well in this life nearly always requires a compromise of values. Doing well by earthly standards is always short-lived. The grass and leafy green vegetables only grow for a season until they die off or the frost does them in.
The psalmist believes that the wicked someday will rot away atop their polluted lifestyle. “Evildoers will be eliminated” the psalmist asserts in verse 9. All their gains will evaporate. A more terrifying warning is the psalmist’s insistence that they will be cut off from God. For an Israelite, such banishment was a fate worse than death. In Jewish theology, heaven is not a location but a condition in which one enjoys the full presence of God. Hell is to be cut off from God. That will be the fate of all who seek to thrive by relying on worldly, wicked routes to power.(1)
Three times in these first nine verses the psalmist counsels us, “don’t be upset.” That is perhaps a weak rendering of the underlying Hebrew. Other translations counsel, “Don’t worry,” “Don’t bother your head,” “Don’t fret.” None of those translations reaches the depth of the anguish and violence which the Hebrew suggests.
The Hebrew charah refers to anger or jealousy that is so strong one goes up in flames because of it. This is not your garden variety of being upset, like a parent fretting about a child’s messy room. It refers to an older notion of fretting as a torment that slowly devours one’s heart and soul.
The Hebrew charah does not refer to an action that occurs subtly, but comes on in a way that is fiery, violent, and all-consuming. In other words, it is hell. It is a life cut off from God. When we fret because evil people succeed through nefarious ways, we suffer the same fate that they do. Our road to hell may be less immediately obvious, but it will happen all the same. We end up no better off than they are, in a burned-out existence estranged from God.(2)
Instead of winding up like that, the psalmist invites listeners – believers – to “trust the Lord and do good; live in the land and farm faithfulness” (v. 3). Our psalmist is not a purveyor of doom and judgment. Rather the poet seeks to grow hope. Hope is always a fragile commodity. That reality makes this psalm especially powerful in our community and society today. We are quick to see the evil all around us. We jump on every conspiracy bandwagon that comes along. (Who doesn’t love a parade?) We have drawn up sides in the political machinations of the current electoral furor and earnestly believe that the other candidate is the devil incarnate.
The psalmist would say, “Not so fast.” Yes, each candidate is a sinner. Then again, so are each of us, and as Jesus so vividly demonstrated in John 8 when he asked for the one without sin to cast the first stone, the crowd dissolved one by one until there was no one left to condemn the victim.
Evil is in each of us, a on-going battle as strenuous as trying to overcome an addiction of any kind.
Thankfully, Jesus was aware of the agony of suffering helplessly in the midst of what seemed like irreversible evil. He gathered his closest associates around a table spread with the good gifts of life done well. “Be encouraged! I have conquered the world” (John 16:33).
So we should be encouraged as well. When we abandon our fretting, envy, jealousy, anger, and wrath, we not only enjoy a better life personally, but we glorify God. Our life and the way we live it from Monday to Saturday are a fundamental part of our worship of God on Sunday. Life, done well, is worship.
As the psalmist admonished, “Farm faithfulness.” On the land, we farm in order to eat. In our homes, we eat in order to live. In our daily activities, we live in order to be faithful. In the midst of a world where political, economic, and religious systems seem to be falling apart, where personal sureties fade from sight, this psalm calls for a spirituality of confident trust in God, who seeks justice for all people. “Those who hope in the Lord — they will possess the land.” We will trust in the Lord. We will farm faithfulness.
General Resource:
Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminister John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, Volume 4, “Theological, Pastoral, Exegetical, and Homiletical Perspectives.”:
(1) Rebecca Blair Young, “Psalm 37:1-9 - Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4 (WORDsearch edition).
(2) Ibid.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15; 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31
Have you read some of the safety warnings on items you have bought recently?
• On Children’s Cough Medicine: ‘Do not drive a car or operate machinery after taking this medication’ (We could do a lot to reduce the rate of construction accidents if we could just get those 5 year olds with head colds off those bulldozers.)
• On packaging for a clothes iron: ‘Do not iron clothes on body.’ (But wouldn't this save me more time?)
• On a cardboard windshield sun-shade: ‘Warning: Do Not Drive With Sun Shield in Place.’ (But the sun is in my eyes.)
• On alphabet blocks: ‘Not for children. Letters may be used to construct words, phrases and sentences that may be deemed offensive.’ (Doh!)
The irony is that for all of us for whom these warnings are unnecessary, there is somebody who needs these warnings. Sad to say.
Several years ago, a book came out entitled Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do). The basic premise was that today’s parents tend to be over-protective of their children. Yes, there are dangerous things that should be stayed away from. On the other hand, flirting with danger is how we humans learn about the world and about ourselves.
Confession time. How many of you have used a magnifying glass to ignite paper on fire? How many of you every put a penny on a railroad track? (I know that my mother did that when the President Harding funeral train went through her home town.) How many of you ever used an eraser to remove an ink mark off your skin? (I did that once. It took a long time to heal.) Have any of you ever stuck your tongue to a cold flag pole like Flick did in the movie, “The Christmas Story”?
None of these thing are particularly constructive, but they are fun, especially if you are a kid. Yes, there are a lot of things that shouldn’t be tried at home, And as the automobile ads often note, professional drivers on a closed course. So why not lick a battery and learn about electrical currents? It’s safer than biting an extension cord.
We seem to live in a world with a lot more “don’ts” than “dos.” While some dangers are very real, others are not tainted with the same degree of fear. And it is true that some people are way more klutzy than others. Nevertheless, we are a society raising a generation of timid beings who will ultimately be afraid of their shadows and not willing to venture anything without the ministrations of tort attorney lest the least something not go as expected.
Think about all the things that might never have happened if the don’t-do-it tribe had had their way. Columbus would never have sailed the ocean blue. The Montgolfiers would never have gotten manned hot-air balloons to fly. The Wright brothers would still be pedaling bicycles. Dr. Christian Barnard would never have tried heart transplantation. And Jeremiah would still be sitting in prison wishing he had bought his cousin Hanamel’s property in Anathoth.
A local business person in Waverly once told me that he never turned down an opportunity to buy a piece property that was strategic to the future of his business. The potential might not be for years down the road, but it still couldn’t be ruled out. Opportunities like that, he said, don’t come around a second time. I’m sure that he had to stretch sometimes to seize the opportunity, yet he dared to succeed where others would have said, “I can’t do it.” And he has succeeded.
The prophet Jeremiah, however, isn’t just taking a little risk and exposing himself to a little danger: He’s taking a huge risk when he buys a field during the Chaldean army’s siege of Jerusalem. The prophet is in prison in the middle of all this upset and he takes the unexpected action of purchasing a piece of land in his hometown.
How come Jeremiah says “do” when all the conventional wisdom said “don’t”? The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah through a cousin named Hanamel, saying, “Buy my field in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, for you are next in line and have a family obligation to purchase it.” (Jeremiah 32:8). Hanamel is offering Jeremiah a piece of land that seems to be worthless because the Chaldeans are about to crush King Zedekiah and the Israelites. Then the Israelite A-Listers will be taken into exile in Babylon, leaving only the wretched poor to fend for themselves in a land of destroyed infrastructure. But Jeremiah jumps at the opportunity — the Lord speaks to him and says, “Houses, fields, and vineyards will again be bought in this land.”
Jeremiah takes a chance and makes a risky investment. Why? Because the Lord has spoken to him. He does a dangerous thing because God has promised that the land of Anathoth has a future, despite all evidence to the contrary.
And sure enough, the people of Anathoth do eventually return, after the exile (Ezra 2:23). God’s Word is revealed to be reliable, trustworthy and true. What looked risky turns out to be right.
Jeremiah is not risk averse. He revels in risk. He takes on Zedekiah, who is like so many other politicians. He’s been in office long enough that he has forgotten what it is to be on the outside of the system. He’s a seat keeper looking after his own interests rather than a seat holder who understands the community responsibility of the position he is in. Zedekiah is risk averse because he can’t change the way he is doing things, no matter how many people tell him that he is heading for disaster. “Read my lips: Stay the course.” Jerusalem is under siege; the Chaldeans are banging at the city gates. They are starving the citizenry. The future looks pretty bleak.
Jeremiah has been the chief internal thorn in Zedekiah’s side. All of Jeremiah’s words have tried to alert the king to the impending doom and to get him to change his ways so that God would save the people. Jeremiah might as well have been talking to himself. The king didn’t listen. Jeremiah bought a pot and shattered it in front of the people saying, “You are broken beyond repair.” That was the last straw for the king. He had Jeremiah arrested, thrown in prison, and condemned to death. If the end of Judah was bleak, Jeremiah’s end was bleaker.
That’s when he agrees to buy the property in Anathoth. Buying the property has nothing to do with the present. It has everything to do with the future. Buying the property has nothing to do with Jeremiah. It has everything to do with God.
The destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the people may mean the end of the nation of Israel as it was then understood. That destruction did not mean that God had abandoned God’s people nor did it mean that God had lessened God’s intimate connection with them. They will still be God’s people just as much as they were under the old covenant. What’s more is that they will thrive—they will till the soil, marry and bear children, worship God and celebrate together.
Buying the property has everything to do with the future and has everything to do with God. Jeremiah knows God is present and working in the world. This is in spite of and because of all he and the people have been through. He knows that each of them, limited and flawed as they are, participate as integral parts of something that transcends them utterly. We call this faith. This is not faith in the sense of declaring to be true something that cannot be proved through the physical senses. Rather, it is the recognition that meaninglessness, while not to be ignored, totally lacks the power to engage a situation in a creative way. It cannot obliterate the power of being, which is the gift of God.
By purchasing the land in the midst of Jerusalem's destruction by Babylon and while he was imprisoned, Jeremiah defines what it means to have faith in God’s future. He attests to his belief that God is present even in catastrophe. He declares that meaninglessness or non-being will not triumph.
That’s Jeremiah’s message to us when we suffer from hopelessness and despair of unexpected setbacks, when we look at a health choice in front of us, when we look at the people who would be our leaders, when we despair about how small, how aging, how vulnerable we are as a congregation, as a denomination, as a world faith community. Out of the depths of Jeremiah’s prison cell he declares that out of the chaos of change, God’s eternal promises will be fulfilled. Jeremiah bet his bottom dollar on it—he went ahead and purchased a field right in the middle of the turmoil!
What field is God offering you to buy today? Is it your future witness for a vital congregation in 2030? Is your field one of seeing the gospel taken to the last outposts of the earth? Is it a field that says the message of Christ has things to say alongside all the other religious messages for people to have the right to choose among?
Friends, whatever the field is, buy it!
General resources:
“Living Dangerously,” Homiletics, September 26, 2010.
Sharon Peebles Burch, “Pastoral Perspective - Jeremiah 32:1-3, 6-15,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, vol. 4, 98-102.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13; Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
About coffee break time on Thursday morning this week will be the autumnal equinox when the orbit of the earth results in the sun crossing the equator. Day and night will be equal length for one day. We will be halfway between the first day of summer (15 hours of daylight) and the first day of winter (with 9 hours and 21 minutes of daylight). You have probably noticed that the sun has been rising later each morning and setting earlier in the evening.
At 39̊ 20' N latitude Waverly is neither in the tropics or the arctic zone. Nevertheless we do get depressed feelings when the winter days are short and grey. If we lived above the Arctic Circle, we would notice both the never-ending light of mid-summer and the never-ending night of mid-winter.
Psychologists have defined seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, as a depression from the lack of sunlight and the effect that sunlight has the chemistry of the body.
In Finland, March and April are “birthday months.” It is an amusing fact, that far and away, more babies are born in those two months than during any other time of the year. The reason is that people really enjoy themselves during the long, golden days of high summer, which given Finland’s high northern latitudes, lasts for more than 20 hours every day.
The curious thing is that the lowest birth months are July, August and September. Recreation during the bleak weeks of near total darkness in November and December occurs inside but not in the bedroom. It seems that the Finns are particularly susceptible to SAD. For Americans, the highest concentration of SAD people is not in Alaska but in Seattle. So that’s why so much coffee is brewed there! Add to that the near constant drizzle and we would be SAD too.
There is a reason so many northerners go to Florida and Arizona every winter. And it’s not just arthritis.
An acronym is a word made up of the first letters of several words. Any good acronym can stand for a number of things. Before I came to Waverly, the only thing NCR stood for was National Cash Register Company. I had to forget that quickly. Because I live in several levels of the church, I sometimes have to stop and think where I am in order to flesh out an acronym.
SAD, the acronym for Seasonal Affective Disorder, can have a meaning in church language: Spiritual Affective Disorder. SAD churches display all the classic symptoms associated with individuals struggling with the seasonal disorder. SAD churches are lethargic, slow to react to events either within their faith community or in the world around them. This is layered with an underlying sense of anxiety running through everything these churches try to do.
Like individuals, SAD churches have a notoriously low reproduction rate. Every year the number gathered in their pews grows fewer, grayer, frailer. New members aren’t attracted to a SAD congregation, and current members who haven’t been completely spiritually debilitated often flee in order to keep their flickering flame of faith from being snuffed out by the spiritual vacuum around them. SAD is no longer a mainline church malady. It is effecting evangelical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism as well. Big congregations and urban ones are as prone to SAD as are small or rural congregations.
Just as the cause of Season Affective Disorder is a lack of light in a specific spectrum, so, too, churches that suffer Spiritual Affective Disorder do so because they lack a certain type of light in their lives. That light, of course, is the “Light of the World,” Jesus Christ.
Today’s reading from 1 Timothy celebrates the universality of God’s love and God’s redeeming intentions. That divine urge may be universal, but it can be possible only by one thing: the “one mediator between God and humanity, the human Jesus Christ, who gave himself as a payment to set all people free” (vv. 5-6).
What that means is that the church is called to stand out in a darkened world as a life-saving beacon of light, a blazing torch of hope. The church needs to be lit from within by a single source of power – the redemptive love and spirit of Christ.
Academic theology has fixated its thinking on God, has dissected Christ like a chef mincing vegetables, and has shied away from even thinking about where the Spirit comes in. Much of our theological talk keeps God at arms length through abstract words and concepts. Because Paul’s theology is dense, we miss out on the core of his consistent message, which is “Jesus.” Jesus is our all in all.
An African-American Gen-Xer in Chicago started coming to church because he got excited about somebody named Jesus. He told his pastor, “If it weren’t for Jesus, I wouldn’t be a Christian.” Think about that. Sometimes the obvious is in plain sight and we still miss it. The man said that he had encountered numerous followers of Jesus, but all of them were afflicted with SAD. That might explain the T-shirt which proclaims, “Jesus save us ... from some of your followers.”
Dr. Paul says that we don’t have to SAD Christians or SAD churches. We can be transformed into GLAD Christians and GLAD congregations. What does GLAD stand for? God’s Love Always Delights. God’s Love Always Delights. Say that with me, please. God’s Love Always Delights. Again. God’s Love Always Delights.
Don’t take Paul’s word for it. The psalms give ample opportunity to be delighted by God’s love. Here’s a portion of Psalm 113:
God’s glory is higher than the skies!
Who could possibly compare to the Lord our God?
God rules from on high;
he has to come down to even see heaven and earth!
God lifts up the poor from the dirt
and raises up the needy from the garbage pile
to seat them with leaders —
with the leaders of his own people! (113:4-8)
Paul doesn’t tell us to go the Florida. He gives us a prescription in the opening verse of today’s reading: “First of all, then, I ask that requests, prayers, petitions, and thanksgiving be made for all people.” If we are praying, and if we are giving thanks, there is no way we can suffer from SAD!
- Feeling overwhelmed by your problems? Pray for someone else whose burdens are equal to or greater than your own.
- Feeling resentment toward an individual? Give thanks to God for that person, asking God to let him or her be an instrument of growth in your life.
- Feeling alone and in the dark, uncertain where to go next? Pray, asking God to shed the light of divine wisdom in your soul.
- Feeling critical of others? Thank God for the objects of your criticism, and ask God to make them a blessing wherever they go.
- Feeling bitterness toward others who have succeeded where you have failed? Pray for their continued success.
- Feeling impatient with the pace of your spiritual growth? Thank God for your progress so far.
- Feeling unforgiving toward others?
There’s the rub, isn’t it? How can we be GLAD Christians, praying and thanking God, unless we have an attitude of forgiveness? Not just toward others, but towards ourselves. And towards God. Doctors have shown that being unwilling to forgive or being unwilling to be forgiven is more detrimental to health than many physical ailments.
The inability to be forgiven or to forgive someone is like a room darkening shade that prevents the light of Christ from penetrating our lives. If we can roll that shade all the way up we can bathe in the delighting which God’s love always brings. That sounds easy, but we all know how contrary window shades can be. They sometimes need to be nudged and coddled, and dealt with carefully. They can’t be forced. Forgiveness can’t be forced. It must be genuine. But the more there is, the GLADer you can be.
Remember: God’s Love Always Delights. Say it with me again. God’s Love Always Delights.
General Resource:
Homiletics, September 20, 1998.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
1 Timothy 1:12-17; Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Luke 15:1-10
Timothy enjoyed a special relationship with the apostle Paul. Of all of Paul’s correspondence, the Timothy letters are the only personal ones. I am sure that Paul wrote more letters than we have. He didn’t keep carbon copies or PDF files of his letters. And most of the people who received letters from him didn’t file them away. A couple of reads and into the trash basket. Perhaps Timothy valued Paul’s words so much that he hung onto everything he ever received from the apostle. We are fortunate to have these letters. While they were written to Timothy, the letters contain much that any disciple of Christ could benefit from.
Paul and Timothy were close, like father and son, not unlike the spiritual relationships that Paul had with Philemon and Onesimus whom we talked about last week. While Paul had collegial relationships with Barnabas, Epaphras, Silas, Priscilla, Aquila, and others, there is a sense that Paul had raised Timothy into the ministry.
The call to gospel ministry often has been extended through the wisdom and counsel of a pastor who perceived gifts for ministry and the working of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life. Perhaps some of my retired colleagues have had the experience of being an agent of God to direct a person towards ministry. Several people were directly and indirectly key in my own call to ministry.
Paul sensed the deep work of the Spirit in Timothy and prodded him to do more than attend church services. Today many young people who were raised in the church’s teaching head off after college into careers full of a sense that faith is expressed through social action and intellectual curiosity. They have learned to think for themselves and to tease out their beliefs in personal reflection.
That’s one of the reasons there are increasing numbers of “nones” – the people who are spiritual but not religious, who have a strong belief in God but aren’t interested in the institutional church. As a popular motto floating around the internet says, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” They believe deeply in acceptance and inclusion of all people in the social, economic, and political spheres of life, regardless of ages, genders, races, sexual orientations, and abilities. They are caught in a tension of being both passionate about changing their world and paralyzed with anger and fear about the world they are inheriting from their parents and grandparents.
I don’t know if Timothy’s thinking two millennia ago resonates with any of today’s hopes and angst. What I do know is that Paul took him under his spiritual wing and coached and counseled him about faith and life. Nearly thirty years ago theologians Stanley Hauerwas and William Willamon wrote their landmark work, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Hauerwas and Willamon unapologetically called for the church to be “a colony of heaven” comprised of Christians who are resident aliens in a strange land. With the disenfranchisement of Protestant Christianity in particular, the church has a rare opportunity for a new, truer Christian faithfulness.
About the same time Alban Institute director Loren Meade said that Christendom was no longer a viable model for the church. Christendom – where church and world were the same thing – had been the church model ever since Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official state religion over 1,500 years ago. The empire devolved into feudal fiefdoms and tribal societies, which in turn gave way to nation states, to superpowers, and to political and economic blocs of nations. Travel and mass communication, now nearly instantaneous, have brought the reality home to every population that religions are no longer regional but global. That means that regions are no longer all one kind of religion. The world has returned to the dynamics of the apostolic age where Christianity is one among many completing religions and faith expressions.
While Waverly may be something of a cultural backwater, the increasingly urbanized world is full of people who rub shoulders and who are searching for living relationships with a deity. They may recognize that god through the eyes and faith of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Mormonism, Wicca, or New Age, not to mention the huge variety of Christian expressions ranging from ancient Orthodoxy, to Catholicism, to Protestantism which runs from high-church Anglican to traditional mainline to evangelical to charismatic and pentecostal. The reality of our 2016 world is that it is much more similar to Timothy’s world than it is different.
Paul self-discloses intimate revelations and confessions about his faith. We wonder how Timothy received them and how he responded in his own faith and his day to day living.
There are Pauls and Timothys in today’s church world. Can the Pauls of our time be as open as the first Paul was? Can those people who are fathers and mothers in faith to younger believers share intimately with the Timothys of today, who may be female, non-Caucasian, and for whom English may not be their first language? Can today’s Pauls be vulnerable enough to share their confessions of faith, their personal relationships with God, their questions and doubts, as well as affirmations and celebrations? Leaders need to communicate the gospel to today’s future church through honest, raw sharing. Warmed-over platitudes and stale theological language will never bridge the generations. Today’s Timothys want to know if there is substance behind the ancient language of the church.
Friends, we are the Pauls of this day. Our Timothys may be fifty- and sixty-somethings rather than twenty-somethings. That doesn’t matter. Each of us is being invited to reexamine our language of Christian faith. We aren’t being asked to get rid of it. Rather we are being asked to make it alive and to frame it for twenty-first-century ears. If you think that is hard for you, imagine how hard it is for those of us trained to use traditional theological language.
For example, after a discussion of the parables of the Mustard Seed and the Yeast in Matthew, a young man asked his pastor to explain the kingdom/realm of God in “plain language” and not in “church words.” Pausing and catching her breath, the pastor began describing the organic unfolding of creation and all that is in it, including human beings, as a part of the Divine, as a revelation of the Divine, as the continuing work of the Divine. “Oh,” he replied, “The Oneness of all things. The way we are all connected energetically. I get it.” We all know that the subject is really a lot more complicated than that, but she had opened a door and gained his attention. Pushing the door open further will be the work of many more discussions and a lot of faithful imagining.
Colleague Thom Shuman writes that he heard the account of how a pastor in Indonesia (where there are no sheep) read Jesus’ parable as “Which of you, having a hundred ducks, if one is lost, does not leave the 99 in the rice fields and go searching for the one which is lost.” The pastor put the ancient parable into words that the people would relate to, just as Jesus did.(1)
Twenty-first-century Timothys won’t take the logic that was handed to us when we were their age. I’m sure you remember it: “Because I said so, that’s why.” Today’s Timothys don’t want to be treated like toddlers. They long for personal experiences of the mystery of life and the animating force that they hope lies behind the workings of the creation. They want us to set aside our stony facades of impassiveness and to share with them the joys and the agonies of our faith journeys. They want to hear our doubts as well as our affirmations.
If you and I can offer them this openness, if you and I can welcome them into our faith experiences, today’s Timothys may decide that “church” is the right institution for their world and not a relic from Christianity’s bygone glory days. These Timothys search for wholeness of body, mind, and soul and wholeness of creation which they equate with real salvation. They understand sin as disconnection from wholeness, from the Oneness of the universe, for it means disconnection from their very selves. They have been raised to understand the web of life as it is seen in family systems, ecological systems, and quantum physics. Sin is tearing the web and denying its existence. While they reverence the connectivity of the universe in all its forms, they get caught up in and are wounded by its brokenness just as easily as older generations. They seek ways to be part of the healing process.
You and I are twenty-first-century Pauls. The first Paul challenges us to mentor our Timothys rather than complain about them. Our charge is to listen carefully to them so that together we can participate in experiencing God in Christ Jesus. Our Timothys invite us onto unknown paths of faithful, worshipful living, allowing the Spirit to help us change our “churchy” language into idioms that are recognizable today.
We live in a connected world. Every Facebook post, every web-blog, every social media post, has a “Share” button. Pre-internet Paul would nevertheless have known what to do with a “Share” button. Use it. That’s what he did, long before it became fashionable. He shared Jesus Christ gladly, honestly, lovingly with everyone he met. And he especially did it with Timothy. That’s our calling as well. As today’s Pauls we are called to hit the “Share” button on our faith.
General Sources:
Jane Anne Ferguson, “1 Timothy 1:12-17 - Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, vol. 4, 62-66.
Robert P. Jones, The Death of White Christian America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016).
Loren B. Meade, The Once and Future Church (Washington DC: The Alban Institute, 1991).
Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willamon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition (Nashville: Abindgon Press, 2014)
(1) Thom Shuman, “Re: [Midrash] Opening Comments for Sunday September 11 2016 which is the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 19. Year C,” Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 12:00 PM.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011
www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Philemon 1-21; Jeremiah 18:1-11; Luke 14:25-33
What a delightful letter. With cosmopolitan sensitivity the author combines the Greek concept of “grace” with the Hebrew idea of “shalom/peace” and uses the result to underlie the entire correspondence. The letter is different from Paul’s deep and often polemical writing. These 21 verses bring a human and practical reality to ideas and images that are heady by nature and made more so by our human attempts to understand them.
We don’t know if Paul ever visited Colossae. It was near Laodicea which would have been on his route from Psidia to Ephesus during his third missionary journey. Since Jews in neighboring towns often came to hear Paul, that was likely how Paul and Philemon first met. Philemon was a wealthy man. He owned at least one slave and was the master of a house large enough to accommodate a church. He, his wife Apphia, and Archippus were the leaders of this congregation, and the entire community got to overhear the apostle’s request when the letter was read aloud.
A young man named Onesimus had run away from Colossae and had come to Paul during Paul’s house arrest, possibly in Ephesus but more likely in Rome, although Rome would have been a long way for a slave to travel. Did he know that Paul was there? We don’t know. Onesimus’ name means “useful” or “beneficial” and he apparently lived up to it assisting Paul during the imprisonment. Paul brought Onesimus to Christ and made the young believer’s faith strong. A close bond—like that of a father to a son—grew between them.
We don’t know what Onesimus did. Did he run away from Philemon’s household? Did they have a falling out that possibly ended with an assault? Did he steal something from Philemon? We simply don’t know. Paul says only that Onesimus had found his way to the imprisoned Paul and became a Christian through his close contact with the apostle.
Over the course of their relationship Onesimus had confessed to Paul about the rift which existed between himself and Philemon. Paul must have felt caught in the middle of a poor situation. On the one hand Onesimus was quite useful to him. And it was a joy for Paul to teach him about Jesus and to watch the young man eagerly grow in the faith. And on the other hand, Paul had had much the same kind of experience a number of years earlier as Philemon eagerly received Paul’s teaching about Christ and took it to heart.
There are three main actors in this vignette: a slave, Onesimus, who has very little to his name other than the clothes on his back (and now, thanks to Paul, the good news of salvation); a gentile (Greek) Philemon (who also has come to know Christ through the agency of Paul), a man with a good deal of means including a great house and the need and ability to own a slave; and Paul, a Pharisaically trained, diaspora Jew, tentmaking itinerant, converted by Christ into an apostle of Christ for the gentile world. What strange companions. They are from radically different backgrounds and cultures. The only thing in common is Jesus Christ, who makes them equal.
Paul lived and practiced a very deep ethical principle that he shared with Christ: the principle of non-dominance. By their backgrounds Jesus, a Palestinian, Aramaic-speaking, Jewish carpenter with a rudimentary synagogue education and Paul, a Hellenistic, Greek-speaking, highly trained Pharisee were very different men. What they shared through their teaching and living was a refusal to dominate other people, even when they could easily do so. Jesus had a quick mind to perceive the hypocrisy of other people’s words and actions. Paul had a caring yet sharp tongue to put people in their place.
In his letter to Philemon, Paul openly declined to tell Philemon what to do although, as he said, he could have done so. Rather, Paul stated that any economic, class, or cultural differences that had existed among the three of them have been eliminated through Christ Jesus working in each of their lives. Paul dared to contemplate a wealthy Hellenistic Christian receiving another Christian, who had been his disobedient slave, as a spiritual equal, as a brother. He trusted Philemon not to fall back into the reigning patterns of prestige, discrimination, and violence that were the customary framework for everyday life in those days.
Paul’s letter reminds us on this Labor Day weekend that regardless of our day-filling work, be it a highly trained profession, a skilled trade, customer service work, social service work, or the career of retirement, the chief work of the Christian is to live a Christ-like life for the world each of us interacts with minute by minute and day by day.
Much of the church through the ages, including today’‘s church, has not caught the drift of this radical understanding of the community of Christ. We routinely regard power structures in the church as normal. We worry about matters of authority as if they were the chief concern of God. The Church shies away from deep discussions of theology. And the conversations that are had are thinly disguised arguments over issues that have little relevance to what people think about the nature of God or how to contemplate the Exodus or the Resurrection.
Columnist E. J. Dionne says that “We go straight to hot-button issues.”(1) He calls that politicizing the Gospel. In that sense what passes for discussion is theological domination – who is right and who is wrong. Neither Paul nor our Lord take that approach. They are braver than we are because they did not seek to dominate fellow believers. After all, Jesus got down on his hands and knees and washed the feet of his disciples, saying, “I have given you an example: Just as I have done, you also must do” (John 13:15). Paul said “God forbid that I should boast about anything except for the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6:14).
In a recent blog post Marshal Segal said that we cannot serve both God and theology. He wrote,
“Be committed to having a right theology, but be as committed to having a relational theology—a growing, humble and heartfelt intimacy with God. Do not simply search the Scriptures for soteriology [how Christ saves us], but search for salvation—the eternal life—that is only found in the flesh, blood and person of Jesus Christ (John 5:39).”(2)
In his request to Philemon, Paul sought neither to dominate him or to be dominated by him. Philemon, Onesimus, and Paul were equals in the sight of Christ. Further, Paul’s trust in God was so deep that he was able to discover the love of God in every situation, no matter how difficult or strange. He wrote while he was imprisoned and it sounded more like a vacation postcard, “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.” Would we be able to discover a loving gift if we were to revisit the catalog of our past ills and misfortunes? That’s not as easy as it might sound, but saints across the ages courageously have done just that.
Paul also challenged Philemon to allow the Holy Spirit to take up residence within him and start moving the furniture. Paul trusted his friend to quit worrying about respectability and to act in favor of what is just and right, not traditional and expected. Christ’s Spirit heightens our native abilities in ways that feel at once both natural and beyond natural. The Spirit of Christ working in us will always direct us to behave generously on behalf of others. When God’s people are “in the Lord” or “in Christ” (a favorite expression of Paul’s) there is no longer any special status—neither up or down, older or younger, slave or free, male or female (Gal. 3:28). All are beloved brothers and sisters in the love of God in the Lord Christ Jesus.
That takes great courage which only the Holy Spirit can provide. Living the Christ-life is not for sissies.
We don’t know how the story ends. In Jesus’ parable of the father and two sons, we don’t know the elder son finally joined the party. Did Philemon receive Onesimus as a brother rather than as chattel?
In Huckleberry Finn, Huck was ready to post a letter to Miss Watson about her runaway slave Jim. Then he got thinking about all he has been through with Jim, how Jim has cared for him and become a friend, and treated him like the kindly father Huck never had. Huck then tears the letter up.
Imagine an illegal immigrant today. Say that it is Rosa, now the single mother of children born in this country, but who herself entered the country illegally. There are reasons for laws dealing with illegal immigrants, and Christians are meant to be law-abiding citizens. Yet, before all else, the immigrant is a sister or brother in the love of God. Gospel teaching and baptismal vows call Christians to respect the dignity of every human being. Imagine receiving a letter—one Christian community to another—commending reconciliation and care for Rosa.(3)
We don’t know how Philemon responded to Paul’s request. When the gospel brings strange companions together in our lives, we can respond as Paul believes we should. We can live out the answer that Christ looks for.
Paul’s closing words still have power: “May the grace of Christ be with your Spirit.”
General Resource: Gray Temple, “Philemon 1-21: Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4, 38-42.Christ).
(1) E. J. Dionne, “Theology gets lost when religion is politicized,” Columbus Dispatch, August 25, 2016, B-11.
(2) Marshall Segal, ChurchLeaders.com, August 25, 2016, http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/247944-cannot-serve-god-theology.html
(3) Frederick Borsch, “Philemon 1-21: Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4, 43.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
