Grace Presbyterian Church

August 28, 2022, Pentecost 12C

Luke 14:1, 7-14

Table Games

One of the great points of intrigue in such period-based (and frequently British) TV shows such as Downton Abbey, or even reaching way back to Upstairs, Downstairs, is the intrigue that surrounds the dinner table. Everyone has their place to sit, and violation of such order is the worst possible offense. Serving takes place in a very precise and ordered way, and again, no violation of such order is to be tolerated. Silverware is placed exactly so; each course of the meal is presented with precise and inflexible timing; everyone is dressed impeccably. Even the servants’ quarters down below, while significantly more relaxed than in the main dining room, sees its meals happen in a quite regular and orderly fashion.

“Table games,” it seems, have been a part of meals for almost as long as there have been meals, particularly among the more powerful and well-off of most every society. The arrangement of guests at the table, the serving of the different courses or parts of the meal, the very fact of who is invited and who is not all become part of a larger project of keeping or imposing a fixed and immutable order upon not only those gathered at any particular table, but upon the society as a whole. You found out where you “belonged” in society by where you were seated at the table – that is, if you were seated at all, which was an even more explicit statement about your place in that society.

In today’s reading from Luke, Jesus has been invited into a great meal at the home of a member of the Pharisees. We are conditioned automatically to equate “Pharisee” with “enemy of Jesus,” but that was not always the case; some were at least intrigued by his teaching and were sincerely interested in hearing more, and at least some, only a few verses ago in 13:31, were concerned enough to warn Jesus that he should get out of town as Herod had designs on killing him. Whether this invitation was reflective of such concern or was perhaps more of a means of keeping an eye on Jesus, we can’t say for certain, though we are informed in 14:1 that they “were watching him closely.”

The verses we skipped over in chapter 14 tell of yet another healing on the Sabbath, in this case of a man with a withered hand. It plays out very much like the event from last week’s reading, except this time none of the religious leaders present even dared say anything at all. It is from this event that Jesus proceeds to talk about how the “table games” of this event were playing out. The guests at the meal may have been “watching him closely,” but it turns out Jesus was watching them closely too.

What he saw was, in short, a lot of guests trying to make a place for themselves among the seats of greatest honor at the table, namely those seats closest to the host. One could almost argue that Jesus’s observations about these seating maneuvers were almost not spiritual at all, or only barely so; on the surface, it sounds like savvy business advice for the one trying to climb the corporate or social ladder. Don’t try to weasel your way up the table; that’s just a good way to get humiliated. Let the host seek you out and elevate you. 

You could almost see that advice being handed out on some kind of reality TV show about corporate boardroom maneuvering. That counsel, though, did have clear roots in much of Hebrew scripture, particularly in the book of Proverbs 25:6-7, which instructs the young learner:

Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence 

or stand in the place of the great;

for it is better to be told, ‘Come up here’,

than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.

In other words, there were very likely many of those at this meal who would have quickly recognized exactly what Jesus was talking about and probably could cite the source of his statement. You could imagine a few of the wiser guests nodding knowingly or perhaps even chuckling at his remarks so far, maybe even Jesus himself. Even within their own religious tradition, their values had become rather skewed or even twisted all out of shape.

It’s what comes next, though, that blows up the whole event. When Jesus turns to the host of the meal, what he says there is at least as vigorous a metaphorical “flipping tables” as Jesus would do literally in the Temple marketplace during the last week he spent in Jerusalem.

Another corner of the “table games” mentality, again like in many societies across history, had more to do with who got invited to a meal, and what that inviter might in turn expect from his invitees (and in this society, the one doing the inviting was always ‘he’). The expectation was simple; I invite you to a meal at my house, and in return you invite me to a meal at your house. Honor was thus repaid. To fail to reciprocate such an invitation was a grotesque social faux pas and not easily forgiven or forgotten.

It is into this extremely rigid and inviolable social order that Jesus tosses something like a verbal hand grenade. Don’t invite the ones who will invite you back. All you get out of that is one dinner. Invite the people who will not be able to return the invitation to you; the poor, the ones who are hindered in some way. That’s when your great and ultimate reward comes in. 

The ones who were nodding along or chuckling along after Jesus’s first observations were probably now feeling their chins hit the floor in shock. One of them did try to change the topic, sort of, in verse 15 (after our day’s reading), with something of a generic blessing, only for Jesus to come up a parable that illustrates a man doing exactly what Jesus has just instructed, although in this case it was because the invited guests begged off and made excuses not to come. Given the chance to back off or at least change the subject, Jesus doubled down on his teaching. 

You get the feeling that if Jesus were to show up in Gainesville looking for a good crowd with which to have dinner, he’d most likely go to St. Francis House [NOTE: a local homeless shelter]. 

Are we in it for social reward? Are we in it for honor? Are we in it to boost our reputation, to climb the ladder of success? Or are we in it to serve the ones called “the least of these” in Matthew 25? Are we in it to serve those Jesus calls us to invite and serve? Are we about “table games,” or about Christ’s table?

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #722, Lord, Speak to Me That I May Speak; #435, There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy; #345, In an Age of Twisted Values

Grace Presbyterian Church

August 21, 2022, Pentecost 11C

Luke 13:10-21

Who Could Possibly Be Upset About This?

I make no claim to understand the workings of the Revised Common Lectionary. I have no knowledge of how that particular consortium of representatives of the various religious bodies involved made their particular choices about what scriptural content to include and what to exclude, which books of scripture to emphasize and which to de-emphasize, which narratives to include and which to let pass.

I am quite convinced, however, that the choice to go directly from last week’s gospel reading, skipping over the very tail end of chapter 12 and the first verses of chapter 13, into the reading give for today was extremely deliberate. Remember how last week’s reading gave us the hard declaration about “no, I tell you, but division!” and the whole depressing point that there was really nothing Christlike we could do that wouldn’t draw somebody’s opposition? Well, it’s as if somebody decided “you know what, we need to follow up this reading with one that demonstrates exactly what Jesus was talking about. Oh, look, here’s exactly the thing, just a few verses later…“.

Indeed, this account, only separated from last week’s reading by twelve verses, is pretty much a textbook example of Jesus being given trouble for doing exactly the kind of thing he was called to do. The biggest difference here is that the larger crowd at the scene, for once, took Jesus’s side, and vocally so.

Jesus is teaching in a synagogue on a sabbath, as he was wont to do on his travels. We aren’t given any clues by Luke where Jesus is on his journey, so we can’t make anything of location or proximity or any such context clue. All we have is that he was teaching when a woman appeared, with “a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years,” as Luke describes. Most likely the condition was an orthopedic one known as ankylosing spondylitis. We should not think only of the woman being stooped over slightly; the Greek term best translates “bent double,” and while the condition is very treatable with modern medicines and techniques, in the time of this story there was not much that could be done. 

This condition can be marked by neck and back pain, difficulty breathing, extreme fatigue, and even heart problems, not to mention the frustration and isolation that a person with this condition likely experienced in a population that hand no understanding of what was afflicting her, and (as Luke describes) attributed her state to being oppressed by a spirit or demon.

 At any rate, the teaching is over. Or, perhaps, it is just beginning.

First Jesus speaks to the woman with a declaration of healing: “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” Throughout much of this gospel to this point, such a pronouncement has itself been enough to accomplish the healing in similar situations. Even in a previous healing-on-a-sabbath situation in chapter 6, Jesus spoke, and a man’s withered hand was healed. In this case, though, Jesus decided there was need of more than a word; a touch was needed. 

To be clear, it is not to say that Jesus could not have healed her with only a word. Clearly a word had been sufficient in the past. However, here, the touch seems to be necessary for a different reason. Remember that others likely figured the woman was under the bondage of some kind of spirit or demon. As such, she was likely to be considered “unclean” by those in the community, and likely by the religious leaders as well. Jesus wasn’t one to let the specter of being “unclean” stand between him and anyone in need of healing. So, in this case, placing his hands on the woman became not only a means of healing, but of restoring – taking away the social separation that had clung to this woman as well as the physical affliction that had hindered her. 

Seriously, who could possibly be upset about this?

Of course there was somebody. The head of the synagogue raised the very standard objection: healing constituted ‘work,’ and was therefore forbidden on a sabbath. What should be noted here is that while this was a standard objection, it was far from a universal one. While some readers of the law held this position, not all did. Many held that, based on a reading of the sabbath commandment as found in Deuteronomy 5, the sabbath existed as a commemoration of the deliverance of the Hebrew people from the land of Egypt and the bondage they had suffered there; it was, in short, a celebration of liberation. Therefore, any ‘work’ that served as an act of liberation – and healing from disease certainly was read that way – was to be not only allowed, but even celebrated. By such a reading, Jesus was well within the bounds of sabbath law, and you can bet he knew that.

That will be his second response, though. First, he points to the hypocrisy of his accusers, zeroing in on an exception commonly made to the law allowing one to lead an animal out for a drink. As much an act of compassion or even basic maintenance as this was, it was technically a violation of sabbath code, yet it was a violation that no longer drew offense. Jesus didn’t even have to be explicit in slamming his critics for showing more compassion for a donkey than for (as he named her) a daughter of Abraham. 

The synagogue leader and his allies were put to shame, the people celebrated all the good and wonderful things Jesus was doing, and for some that’s the end of the story. Not for Jesus, though.

Notice how verse 18 begins: “He said therefore…”. Those pithy sayings that follow this story aren’t a separate event; they follow directly on what has just happened. And this event, even as much as the content of the two sayings themselves, is for this moment an outbreak of the kingdom of God. It doesn’t just look like the growth of a mustard seed into a sturdy and spreading bush that can host the birds of the air, or the spreading of a little yeast in a bread dough. It looks like a woman who has been bent double for eighteen years standing up tall and straight. It looks like the work of God going forward despite opposition and division. It looks like healing on the day of liberation. It looks like celebration. It looks like acts of love. And it is this that we celebrate and await, at the same time.

I have quoted the novelist, inspirational writer, and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner many, many times in my sermons since I’ve been here, far more often I am sure than any other source outside of scripture itself. Buechner died this past Monday at his home in Vermont, aged 96. How fitting it is that it works well to leave the final words of this sermon to Buechner, who seemed to have something just right to say about almost any portion of scripture, and indeed has something to say about this work of expecting the kingdom of God (this from the title essay of a collection called A Room Called Remember):

Shall is the verb of hope. Then death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning or crying. Then shall my eyes behold him and not as a stranger. Then his kingdom shall come at last and his will shall be done in us and through us and for us. Then the trees of the wood shall sing for joy as already they sing a little even now sometimes when the wind is in them and as underneath their singing our own hearts too already sing a little sometimes at this holy hope we have.

The past and the future. Memory and expectation. Remember and hope. Remember and wait. Wait for him whose face we all of us know because somewhere in the past we have faintly seen it, whose life we all of us thirst for because somewhere in the past we have seen it lived, have maybe even had moments of living it ourselves. Remember him who himself remembers us as he promised to remember the thief who died beside him. To have faith is to remember and wait, and to wait in hope is to have what we hope for already begin to come true in us through our hoping. Praise him.

For the occasional glimpse of the kingdom of God, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #792, There Is a Balm in Gilead; #797, We Cannot Measure How You Heal; #852, When the Lord Redeems the Very Least

Grace Presbyterian Church

August 14, 2022, Pentecost 10C

Hebrews 12:1-2; Luke 12:49-56

Division!!??

Just one week ago, we were hearing Jesus talk about how “it is God’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” and how our true task was to be “dressed for action and keep your lamps lit,” but to wait for our Master to come to us. 

That’s all fine and good and even kind of encouraging. But no, it’s not so easy as it sounds. Situated here in Gainesville, Florida, as this church is, we are inevitably drawn to hear the words of the patron saint of this town’s musical history, Tom Petty, who reminded us in the chorus of one of his popular hits that “the waiting is the hardest part“: 

The waiting is the hardest part

Every day you get one more yard

You take it on faith, you take it to the heart

The waiting is the hardest part

If Tom Petty doesn’t convince you, then Jesus’s words in today’s reading from Luke, just a few verses after last week’s reading, will make it terribly clear that the waiting to which we are called won’t be easy.

It isn’t necessarily all that clear just what got Jesus onto this theme; his discourse turns rather suddenly here, and even verses 41-48 don’t really give a great clue as to where this sudden outburst of frustration comes from. And that’s really the best word for what is happening here; Jesus is charged with the urgent task “to bring fire to the earth” and “a baptism with which to be baptized.”

Even for Jesus, the waiting is the hardest part. 

From there comes the verse that will scandalize countless hearers this morning: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” 

Wait, what? 

This from the one hailed as the Prince of Peace, the one who said “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and all that. Divison!!?? 

The two verses that follow amplify that point by the example of the core family, held to be the irrefutable building block of Roman society and Judean society and pretty much any society you might name, then or now. In this case, the family relationships highlighted here were considered most crucial to the harmonious working of the household. The challenge of father/son relationships gone wrong might be demonstrated by the parable of the prodigal son. Mother/daughter and mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationships pointed to the business of family and marriage, the letting go of daughters who marry into other families and welcoming of daughters-in-law who marry into the family. To cite these as locus of division wasn’t only to suggest division within the family itself; such division destabilized the very presumed basis of society.

One of the more noteworthy characteristics of Jesus as described in Luke’s gospel is that, where the end of his human ministry is concerned, Jesus knows what’s coming. From back in Luke 9, when Jesus “set his face towards Jerusalem,” he has been painstakingly clear that what is ahead is going to be ugly and divisive and confrontational and he is headed right into it anyway.

He knows that his ministry has set some folks against him, religious authorities being chief among them. He knows that Roman authorities, while they don’t care about intra-Jewish doctrinal disputes, are absolutely intent on preserving that false peace that came to be known as the “pax Romana,” and will quash anything or anyone that threatens to disrupt it. Let’s not forget that his very first preaching appearance in his hometown almost ended up with him being thrown off a cliff. He knows there is opposition, and keeps going anyway.

In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., observed that the greatest vexation to the work that he and his colleagues in the civil rights movement were doing was not the extremist. He said, quote;

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom…

Don’t overlook what Dr. King has to say about “negative peace” and “positive peace.” The former is basically nobody fighting, but justice still denied to so many people and oppression running rampant. The so-called “Pax Romana” of Jesus’s time, in which no one could challenge the Roman Empire but countless thousands lived under its heel, was a prime example of “negative peace,” which, to say the least, is not what we are called to settle for. If that’s the only kind of peace we are interested in seeking, we should probably not look to Jesus for that, and it probably should not take up space in our prayers. There’s a reason that our Affirmation of Faith, taken from the PC(USA)’s A Brief Statement of Faith, orders its words the way it does when it declares that the Holy Spirit “gives us courage … to work with others for justice, freedom, and peace.” 

“I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it was already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!”

The “baptism” here seems a direct reference to his forthcoming crucifixion; the “fire” might be a reference to the prophet Malachi’s words: “but who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire…” The fire that purifies, that burns away corruption and spoilage, that makes whole what is left; this seems a likely reference in this case, Jesus longing to purge away what corrupts and ruins and harms and oppresses.

Now here’s where that “waiting” part from last week comes in: the call to be “dressed for action” and “have your lamps lit” doesn’t involve sitting at home with the lights on wearing a cool tracksuit. It means doing the things Jesus taught us to do and showed us how to do. It means the stuff in that parable of the sheep and goats from Matthew 25 – feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, all that stuff. It means being the things named in the Beatitudes – even being a peacemaker, with the seeming contradiction implied with today’s verses. It means living the fruits of the Spirit from Galatians 5 – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness. 

The waiting we do is not a passive, unobtrusive thing. It compels us to live and act in ways that somebody out there is not going to like. I say “somebody out there,” but let’s be honest; clearly we don’t have only disagreement from outside the church to worry about. If we’re going to do the real Christlike waiting, large numbers of people who call themselves Christians are going to come after us, in word or maybe even in deed. 

And if you’re thinking this can’t possibly be true, remember this: even Mr. Rogers had protesters show up at his memorial. Back in 2003, when the children’s television host (and, never forget, ordained Presbyterian minister) was buried in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Rev. Fred Phelps led a group from his Westboro Baptist “Church” near Topeka, Kansas to protest Rogers because he never did publicly condemn homosexuality. I don’t know that Fred Rogers ever said much of anything about homosexuality publicly, but he never did hate it, so Fred Phelps and his bunch hated him.

I don’t enjoy saying this, but there isn’t anything Christlike you can do that somebody won’t give you grief for doing it. We won’t have peace just because we do good things.

Five years ago I preached from a parallel passage in chapter 10 of Matthew’s gospel, in which Jesus says he came to bring “not peace but a sword” – a different but no less disturbing image. What applied about Jesus’s message there applies to Jesus’s message here as well: if you follow me, if you truly follow me and do the will of God and live into the kingdom of Heaven, the sword (or division, in this case) will find you. It’s not about creating division; it’s about doing what Jesus calls us to do, and division happens because of that. Ultimately it’s kinda foolish not to expect that.

As for the last verses, about not being able to read the signs of the times? Clearly we see that still being the case in everything from modern political punditry to our vastly worsening weather and the lack of will to do what must be done to put the brakes on a disastrously careening climate. We don’t know how to read the signs either. 

Folks, our job is to do what God calls us to do. If people attack us for it, so be it. That doesn’t mean we stop. After all, Jesus didn’t.

For a Jesus who warns us of what is coming when we do the will of God, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise noted): #365. God Reigns! Let Earth Rejoice!; #—, Do not pray for peace; #718, Take Up Your Cross, the Savior Said

Grace Presbyterian Church

August 7, 2022, Pentecost 9C

Luke 12:32-40

Dressed for Action

Back in 1986, an unknown author by the name of Frank Peretti got a novel published that would create quite a sensation in the then fairly staid world of “Christian” literature. Titled This Present Darkness, the book took events in a stereotypical American small town as a shadowing of grand and epic battles between the angels of God and demon hordes intent on overthrowing the kingdom of God. 

The book spawned a sequel, Piercing the Darkness, and in one of the two books (I can’t remember for sure which, but I think it must have been the second) came a scene that, even at the still-youthful age I was then, made me stop, blanch with horror at what I had just read, and gather up both books and throw them away. 

In the scene, the aforementioned heavenly battle seems to be going badly for the angelic good guys. One of the angelic captains begins to sound an awful lot like he’s despairing and pleads out loud for the Christians in that small town to pray harder, lest the battle be lost and God’s forces overthrown. 

Think about that, folks. The kingdom of God would be overthrown unless one person started praying harder, whatever that means. I lack the words to emphasize how theologically and biblically wrong that is without resorting to words like “heresy.” 

I could remind you of our little jaunt through the book of Revelation in the Sundays after Easter, which pointed to the ultimate conclusion that no matter how badly things might seem to be going at any given point, God wins in the end. The Lamb is on the throne, the Holy City comes down, all that good stuff.

It would be remiss of me, however, to overlook the words of today’s reading from Luke’s gospel pointing us to the same basic thought. Indeed, the very first sentence found in verse 32 illustrates just how untenable and unviable that Present Darkness scenario is. 

“Do not be afraid.” You can easily lose count of the number of times that God, or an angel, or Jesus (as in this case) says these words in Luke’s gospel, going back to the beginning of the book in which it has to be repeated multiple times to folks like Zechariah and Mary and the shepherds in the field. This sentence is good counsel enough, to be sure, but what follows is jaw-dropping, if we stop and think about it.

“…for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.”

Listen to that again: 

“…for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.”

Just give it away, apparently. It gives God pleasure to give us everything that is God’s. Let your mind be blown. And let this sentence inform those seemingly unbearably radical instructions that follow; if God is pleased to give away everything to us, can we not do the same for the world around us?

Does that sound like a kingdom that is going to be overthrown by some human weakness?

Or take the next section of the reading, the call to … waiting?

“Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit…” is reminiscent of one of those late parables in Matthew’s gospel, the one with the young women waiting for the wedding party when their lamps run out of oil. But, while “Dressed for Action” could probably be sold as a Hollywood action title, it’s also not exactly a call to storm the battlements. Jesus then follows this with a parable about slaves waiting for their master to return from such a banquet, with the wildly unfathomable promise that the master who finds those slaves waiting and ready would turn around and play the role of the servant and serve those slaves. If you ever visit Monticello, ask the docents how many times Thomas Jefferson did that for his slaves. 

But again, this outlandish reward is not for any harebrained act of whatever, but for nothing more than waiting and being ready – dressed for action and lamps lit. Not storming the Capitol or taking over the legislature to pass all manner of religious-oppression laws; only to wait for our Lord to come to us. Maybe even to give us the Kingdom since that apparently gives God pleasure to do. But the faithful response is to wait to be led by the Lord. 

For a God whose good pleasure it is to give us the Kingdom, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #396, Brethren, We Have Met to Worship; #402, How Lovely, Lord; #350, Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning

Grace Presbyterian Church

July 31, 2022, Pentecost 8C

Luke 12:13-21

Do You Own, or Are You Owned?

Six years ago when this reading showed up in the lectionary and I didn’t choose another reading, I started with the question of whether anyone remembered the TV show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the show with the host with the extreme British accent and lots of insanely wealthy people being paraded before viewers for little other reason than being insanely wealthy and willing to parade before viewers with all that wealth on display. Even the closing theme music – a tune called “Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams” – was designed to make you the viewer jealous of what you saw. It ran for twelve years and featured all manner of very rich people, from celebrities to the more obscure but still wealthy to even a future President of the United States among its featured rich people. 

Anyway, that show itself (to its credit, I suppose) didn’t really pretend to be about anything other than ogling all the stuff. Sadly, though, the show proved to be a foretaste of future TV trends; the number of rich people who get on TV mostly for being rich has only gotten larger on more shows, although nowadays you’re likely to see more of their private lives than is frankly desirable. One such example is the so-called “reality TV” series Chrisley Knows Best, featuring an originally Georgia-based real estate sharpie and his family and their exploits in being rich and increasingly famous. As to the “reality” part, now that the husband and wife at the lead of the show have been convicted of bank fraud and tax evasion, I suppose we’ll see how much longer the publicity is something the family wants to seek. How much can you pass yourself off as a wise and trustworthy individual or role model with that particular conviction looming over you?

Maybe the lead character of the parable Jesus tells in today’s reading from Luke isn’t quite on the level of a featured rich person on that show, but he is rich, and we are told this by Jesus before we even know that he got such a super-abundant harvest. And in Luke, to be honest, “rich” isn’t always a good thing.

For example: even at the very beginning of this gospel, in the Song of Mary upon her meeting with Elizabeth, we hear that God “has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (1:53). In chapter 6, Jesus proclaims a “woe” on the rich, “for they have received their consolation” (6:24). The parable of the rich man and Lazarus, in chapter 16, is particularly harsh. And then there’s the rich ruler of chapter 18 who, when challenged by Jesus to give it all away and follow, “became sad, for he was very rich” (18:23), an event that prompts Jesus to exclaim “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” (18:24), comparing the feat to getting a camel through the eye of a needle, but finally offering the hope that “what is impossible for mortals is possible for God” (18:27). Frankly the only rich person that really comes off well in this gospel is Zacchaeus, the tax collector in chapter 19, who pledges to give away for the poor and pay back any who have been defrauded.

So it’s not a surprise that this rich man here in Luke 12 is not going to turn out to be a good guy, but he does seem particularly tone-deaf, with his resolve to tear down perfectly good barns and build bigger and better, showier barns. Seriously, simply adding another barn would be a lot easier and quicker, and that’s before the moral calculus about a person’s responsibility with wealth. 

Note that Jesus tells this parable in response to a man from the crowd calling out to Jesus to settle a dispute with his brother over the family inheritance. After an initial “who do you think I am?” rebuff warning the young man not to expect Jesus to be a tool against his own family, Jesus turns quickly to warning the crowd against greed, saying “life does not consist in the abundance of possessions” (12:15). Immediately after the parable Jesus launches into teaching that is very specific in its extension of this warning, inviting his hearers and us to look at the ravens who don’t plant or harvest, the lilies that “neither toil nor spin” (12:27) and yet are more glorious than Solomon at his most glorious. At last Jesus gets to the point: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (12:34). All of these taken together seem to point toward one harsh but fair conclusion: those who own great possessions tend to be owned by those possessions.

Now by this point, you may have already begun to draw a conclusion about where this sermon is going to end up. Ugh, another sermon bashing rich people. And there is definitely a moral peril expressed in this parable. The more wealth and possessions one has, it seems, the greater the danger of becoming attached to that wealth and those possessions in a way that clouds one’s spiritual judgment so that one forgets (as our last hymn today will remind us) that it’s all God’s anyway, a lesson we also see in Ecclesiastes 5:18-19. It may be a cliché to say that “money can’t buy happiness,” but clichés tend to become clichés because they are true enough often enough to get repeated over and over again, which seems the case here.`

Perhaps more significant than simply the insufficiency of money to procure happiness is the utter inadequacy of money as a substitute for a relationship with God, which seems to be where the man who decides to build bigger barns goes off the rails. As Presbyterian minister Meda Stamper puts it, “The parable of the rich fool … illustrates simply and memorably the futility of choices made in isolation from the love of God and neighbor.” Stamper continues to describe what is a central theme, not just in this parable but in the whole gospel of Luke: “the problem of wealth in the context of the holy kingdom where closeness to God is life and attachment to things reflects soul-stifling anxiety and fear.” 

The particularly damning part of the choice the “barn man” makes in this parable is that only one person seems to factor into it: himself. He doesn’t seem to get that there might be others in his town in need, no clue that his workers (which he would have had to have if the harvest was that plentiful; he wasn’t bringing in all that by himself) might benefit from some portion of that harvest. He sounds like a man who most definitely has come to be owned by his possessions, who never learned the basic lesson we expect our kids to learn by kindergarten: the lesson of how to share. You might recall the brief snippet from Colossians read earlier here and its blunt equation of greed with idolatry. 

But of course, this being a parable of Jesus, the simple answer is not quite the whole answer. The dirty little secret about us moderns, even us modern Christians, is that we don’t have to be “rich” by the standards of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or Chrisley Knows Best or other such popular measures to become attached to our stuff in a way that hinders closeness to God. Heck, you can even be homeless and be powerfully attached to your stuff. We can all find some element of that unhealthy attachment in ourselves.

For myself, my downfall would be books or music, of which I just added several more at that conference I attended a week ago. For you it might be some other possession – not necessarily a pricey thing, but some thing or things to which the attachment might be so strong that it has the power to cloud one’s spiritual discernment. Whatever might be the case, attachment to the things of the earth is a moral peril to the degree that it precludes or hinders attachment to the things of God, to the “treasures in heaven” we are encouraged to store up, to the neighbors around us whom God calls us to serve. 

Sometime soon, or at least some time this fall, you’ll be hearing from the Finance and Stewardship Committee, beginnng the process of discerning how we will steward our resources for the forthcoming year. The word “stewardship” can feel loaded and burdensome to us, but at its most basic it describes how we participate in the kingdom of God, as a church and as individuals, and how we make use of the resources we have been given – the harvest we have gathered, so to speak – to participate in that kingdom and its work. In that process the challenge before us is to do so without becoming attached to those possessions or resources themselves – not to be owned by those possessions – but to see them as gifts from God to be given in service to God and neighbor, the thing that “barn man” never seems to have grasped.

We don’t need to have crazy luxury around us, or Robin Leach ogling our stuff on behalf of millions of TV viewers, to fall into the trap of attachment to things that cannot give life. No one is beyond that trap. Only when we see what we have through the eyes of the kingdom, fully recognizing God and neighbor in our decision-making, do we begin to get free of that trap. Only then do we see that building bigger barns is not the answer.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #41, O Worship the King, All Glorious Above; #—, What things we own cannot give life; #708, We Give Thee But Thine Own

Grace Presbyterian Church

June 26, 2022, Pentecost 4C

2 Kings 2:1-14; Luke 9:51-62

 Don’t Look Away

When last we left Elijah, the prophet had just been rebuked (mildly, to say the least) by the Lord for his pronounced myopia and “I alone am left” whine, not least by being ordered by God to go anoint his successor, a man named Elisha who at the time was apparently living with his parents tending their fields and livestock. Whether enthusiastically or not (after all, we don’t know if Elijah even knew Elisha at this point), Elijah at least obeyed that command by throwing his cloak at him, upon which Elisha left the farm and family (slaughtering twenty-four oxen on his way out and giving the meat as a feast for the locals) to follow Elijah. Elijah did have a couple more prophetic encounters left in him, including his dramatic condemnation of King Ahab over his theft of the vineyard of a neighbor and one more destructive conflict with Ahab’s successor, Ahaziah. By the time we get to today’s reading, though, Elijah’s time is up, and Elisha seems to know it.

Our narrator certainly knows it, and is almost blasé about it at the beginning of our reading. How often do you see a sentence that begins “Now when the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind” and continues in blasé fashion about Elijah and Elisha’s journey? I suppose after all the over-the-top things that have happened in Elijah’s term on earth, one more crazy thing doesn’t seem like much, but we are talking about a man who is going to be gathered up by a chariot of fire and whisked away. That seems worth a little bit of excitement. At any rate, it seems like everybody, including Elisha, knows that something extraordinary is about to happen.

And if he didn’t know it, there were plenty of others along the way to clue him in on the subject. As they travel, they encounter companies of prophets, (more refutation of Elijah’s “I alone am left” ranting) and in each case members of those prophet groups take Elisha aside and say “you know he’s going away, don’t you?” and each time Elisha responds “yeah, yeah, I know, just hush” and determinedly plugs along with Elijah, even though Elijah keeps trying to put him off as well.

Remember, Elisha hasn’t really been the prophet yet. He has so far been functioning like an understudy, or perhaps like an Assistant Prophet of Yahwistic Theology still awaiting tenure. Even though God specifically commanded Elijah to go anoint Elisha as his successor, it’s not even clear that Elisha was a prophet at all before Elijah showed up and ordained him, so to speak. At the end of 1 Kings 19, when Elijah comes to anoint him, Elisha was plowing in the fields (his parents’ fields, evidently) with twelve yoke of oxen. And before following Elijah, Elisha wants to return home to say goodbye to mom and dad and to slaughter those oxen for a great feast. Doesn’t sound much like a prophet in the making, and his name doesn’t appear again in the Kings narrative until today’s reading, and yet here Elisha is, doggedly following his apparent prophetic mentor to the last. 

And this most likely wasn’t an easy life for which he was signing up. You might remember the gospel reading for today, in which Jesus warns those who say they want to follow him. “Nowhere to lay his head.” For that matter, no turning back – sounds like Jesus would have been less inclined to indulge Elisha’s wish to say goodbye to his parents and throw that going-away party. This is not a glamorous life. We have elevated these characters from the Bible to the status of heroes, but that wasn’t necessarily how they experienced life. It wasn’t easy, particularly when you had an angry king and queen hounding you as did Elijah. But, still, Elisha was there, following Elijah to the end.

So, let’s follow what he sees.

With some of those other prophets following at a distance, Elijah and Elisha come to the Jordan River. Ii isn’t one of the Great Rivers of the World, but it’s not small. One doesn’t just wade across it, or swim across for that matter. Elisha watches as Elijah takes his mantle (the same one he had wrapped around his face on Horeb the mount of God, at the “sound of sheer silence”) and rolls it up to strike the water, and the water parts. No doubt Elisha and the others recall the Hebrew people crossing the Jordan under Joshua’s leadership as they finally approached their promised land after years in the wilderness. Elijah and Elisha cross, as the other prophets watch.

Finally Elijah gives up and asks Elisha what he wants. What do you say in such a situation? Many years before, the newly elevated king Solomon was asked this question by no less than God and had chosen to ask for wisdom. Here Elisha, asked by his prophetic mentor, chooses to ask for what he sees in Elijah, only more. Given what we’ve seen of Elijah this might seem a truly frightening prospect, but Elisha nonetheless sees in Elijah what he needs to step into his call. Except he doesn’t just ask for it, he asks for a “double portion,” language that recalls the share of an inheritance typically bequeathed to an eldest son. He asks for more, for beyond. What makes a “double portion”? Is it more power, more ability to do great feats, more discernment about God’s call to a prophet? We don’t get an explanation. Nonetheless Elijah allows that Elisha’s request will be granted, but only if Elisha sees Elijah is he is taken away. 

In other words, don’t look away at all. Don’t even blink. And certainly don’t look down at your cell phone. No pressure there, right?

And yet Elisha, determined as ever to fulfill this call he never expected, manages to keep his eyes on Elijah, until the fiery chariot and whirlwind sweep him away, finally fading from sight.

In a story like this one, with some utterly fantastic elements and a setting clearly unlike anything we will ever know, it can be difficult to relate. Chariots of Fire is a movie about Olympic runners, not something we actually expect to see in real life. But Elisha does show us something we need to see, something we can in fact learn from even in our own very different modern times. 

Elisha is wise enough to seek what his mentor had. It’s not that we need to think Elisha saw Elijah as perfect. We’ve seen the ways in which Elijah’s zeal sometimes outstripped his willingness to rely on God’s leading. And yet for all his excess, Elijah was still in touch with God, still a servant of Yahweh, and Elisha knew he needed that if he were to step into Elijah’s prophetic office. 

But even at the same time he asked for Elijah’s blessing, he knew that wasn’t enough. He needed more. Elijah’s world was already shifting away. Ahab was no longer on the scene, and even his successor Ahaziah’s reign was short-lived. Israel would be challenged by different enemies. Elijah’s way wasn’t going to be sufficient. Elisha’s prophetic ministry was going to be a different one than Elijah’s, and in his request he was wise enough to grasp that. 

We can learn from this. We, the modern church here in Gainesville and around the world, cannot cavalierly dispense with the foundation that our ancestors in the faith have built. It is not perfect. It is not foolproof. We as Christ’s church in God’s world have failed too many times in too many places in too many cases to think we’ve ever been perfect. We’ve endorsed too many evils in the name of our convenience or our status in society. We managed to read the Bible in such a way that we decided keeping slaves was o.k., for perhaps the most egregious example. That’s in our history. 

But still, flawed as those saints may have been, they are the ones who have built the foundation on which we stand, and we cannot dispense with that. Neither, however, can we be bound to it or limited to it. 

The church of the nineteenth century was not sufficient to witness to the world of the twentieth century, and neither would the twentieth-century church ever be the church that successfully witnesses to the world of the twenty-first century. Just try telling someone they ought to be in church. They’ll ask you “why?” point blank, as if you had suggested they should sprout horns. And if you don’t have a real, honest, authentic answer, you’ve lost them, probably for good. We don’t get to throw open the doors and just expect them to come. Doesn’t work.

We need more. We need things we’ve never understood before. Our challenges are different than those our fathers and mothers, or grandmothers and grandfathers, or any of the generations before us ever faced, and we need to be equipped and prepared to witness to unchanging truth in an ever-changing world. 

Elisha did indeed step into Elijah’s prophetic call. Yet his prophetic ministry would be quite different from Elijah’s. No rash challenges to a horde of Baal prophets, no running from Israel to Sinai. And mind you, his own prophetic career wasn’t free of fits of wrath; only a few verses after this story, Elisha curses a bunch of unruly boys basically for calling him “Baldy,” and a bear comes out of the woods and mauls them. And yet his work would see healings, health restored to barren and poisoned lands and wells, and even a powerful foreign general converted to the worship of Yahweh. Not bad. 

Can we as a church, both local and universal, rise to that challenge? Can we be a church that witnesses to the eternal in an age like none we’ve known before? Can we speak truth, bear witness, tell good news to a world or a country or a city that is dramatically different that the one in which we grew up? 

We would do well indeed to ask for a double portion of the Spirit. Just be careful what you ask for. 

For the audacity and the persistence of Elisha, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless indicated): #432, How Clear Is Our Vocation, Lord; #—, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot; #726, Will You Come and Follow Me (The Summons)

Grace Presbyterian Church

June 19, 2022, Pentecost 2C

Psalm 42; 1 Kings 19:1-16; Romans 11:1-6

The Prophet With John Wayne Syndrome

There is a type in American film, particularly but not exclusively found in the genre of the Western. The image is of the lone hero, trusted and revered six-shooter at his hip, who confronts the evil horde all on his own, winning the day in the name of truth or justice or whatever was seemingly under threat. Let’s be honest, many of those lone heroes were played by the likes of John Wayne, or maybe even more Clint Eastwood in later years: tough, taciturn, and unafraid of whatever level of violence was necessary to triumph. 

That type has of course spread out from the Western genre, and is found in cop shows or movies, superhero movies, and many other different kinds of action-adventure movies. Such characters also show up in various types of novels, comic books or graphic novels, and frankly a lot of different types of media consumed by an awful lot of readers or listeners or viewers. Just this weekend the animated feature film Lightyear, the one based on the character from the Toy Story movies, shows that lead character in exactly this light, determined that he is the only one who can “finish the mission” and make things right, and in the process tearing himself away from the community around him.

Though he lived innumerable centuries before anything Hollywood ever produced, the prophet Elijah seems sometimes to fall prey to the mindset of “going it alone.” He first shows up only back in Chapter 17, out of nowhere to announce to King Ahab that a drought would be upon the land for three years. In fact, even there it is not recorded that God spoke to Elijah until verse 2, after the prophet had made his announcement to the king. The drought does indeed come, and Elijah spends time in a remote place with a widow and her son, where a couple of miracles are involved. 

The events of today’s reading have their roots in the events of Chapter 18. Elijah took a simple command from God to announce the end of a drought and drew it out into an elaborate contest with the prophets of the false god Baal, culminating in the spectacular display of fire from heaven coming down and consuming all the waterlogged altars and soaked sacrifices. At the end of that episode Elijah had the 450 prophets of Baal gathered up and slaughtered. Keep in mind here that the only command God has given Elijah in this account at all was to announce the end of the drought to Ahab; even the great contest was not commanded by God as much as this scripture reads, much less killing all those Baal prophets.

Afterwards, as the prophesied rain approached, Elijah (apparently now possessed by the super-speed of the modern superhero The Flash) ran ahead of King Ahab’s fully equipped chariot to the town of Jezreel, serving then as the seat of power in Israel.

And that’s where today’s reading kicks off, with Ahab whining to his wife Jezebel about what Elijah had done, and Jezebel issuing (via messenger) a not too veiled threat to Elijah: what you did to my Baal prophets, I’m gonna do to you.

And Elijah, the man who had been sustained in the wilderness by ravens, who had seen God miraculously extend meal and oil for weeks for the widow and her son, who had challenged the Baal prophets and won, who had slaughtered all those prophets in triumph, humiliated the king … now, Elijah was scared and ran.

You can see the account of Elijah’s flight, falling asleep in despair only to be awakened, fed, and sent on his way (not once, but twice); arriving at Horeb the mount of God (in Exodus, that mountain was called Sinai), and repeating what almost sounds like a rehearsed, pre-packaged answer to God:

I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.

Elijah says this two times. He says it first when he comes to the cave on Horeb the mount of God, and again after the progression described in verses 11-12; a great wind, a strong earthquake, and a mighty fire. All of these would have been recognizable signs of the presence of God throughout Hebrew scriptue, dating back as far as the Exodus and Moses’s time with God on this same mountain on which Elijah now stands. These happenings would seem to be a clear set-up, a deliberate echo of the past presence of God in this place. But no, in this case God was in none of those; only in the “sound of sheer silence” did Elijah discern the presence of the Lord.

So somehow, the bombast and tumult of the mountaintop display, not completely unlike the bombast and tumult Elijah himself had initiated back at Mount Carmel, somehow doesn’t seem to get through to Elijah, for afterwards when he is asked a second time “what are you doing here, Elijah?” he responds the exact same way as before:

I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.

He doesn’t get it. Elijah doesn’t get it, so God has to hit him over the head with it if Elijah is ever going to get over his severe case of John Wayne Syndrome.

First of all, we the reader know that Elijah has been fundamentally incorrect all along – and this is where that Lightyear movie tracks with Elijah pretty well. Back in the first verses of chapter 18 we read of Obadiah, a servant in Ahab’s court who despite the threats of the royal family had secreted away a hundred prophets loyal to the Lord, hiding them in caves to thwart Jezebel’s plans to kill them. That’s at least a hundred and one examples of how Elijah was wrong when he claimed that “he alone was left,” and Elijah knows this because Obadiah told him to his face in 18:13. God then, in 19:18 just outside our reading, points to seven thousand loyal Israelites who have not bowed the knee to Baal, seven thousand faithful that God would preserve. Elijah had so obsessed on being the only one who could fix things that he had torn himself apart from any community at all.

But maybe the unkindest cut of all comes in verse 16. Not only was Elijah not the lone hero, but he wasn’t even irreplaceable. Another prophet would take his place, and it was Elijah’s job to go anoint him. If that’s not a direct slap in the face against Elijah’s pity party I don’t know what else it could be.

Now God still had work for Elijah to do, but God needed Elijah focused on God’s call to him, and not hung up on his self-obsessed and self-possessed despair or his need to be some kind of superhero or John Wayne or whatever. It’s not hard to extrapolate the lesson for us from such a story: this applies to us too.

It’s not uncommon for us to fall into that pit. Australian biblical scholar and pastor Howard Wallace points out that Elijah needs to be released from the zealousness and self-control that had ruled his previous service and learn that it was the word of the Lord, which sometimes did not speak in the wind or earthquake or fire, to which he needed to submit his prophetic witness. Sometimes it’s the silence that contains the word we await from the Spirit. 

Without that listening, we get crosswise with what God is calling us to do. We’re convinced it’s all up to “me”. No one else is going to step up, it’s all on our shoulders. Yes, it’s easy to slip into that particular quality of despair, but it can often be the worst place for a follower of Christ to end up, It can go either of two different ways, both disastrous and potentially destructive.

Six years ago I preached on this passage in the wake of the horrific murders of forty-nine patrons in a nightclub in Orlando patronized primarily by gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, or queer persons (and primary a Latino/Latina audience on that particular night). That event happened only a few days from the first anniversary of another infamous shooting, of nine members of an African-American congregation in Charleston. It is seemingly impossible to keep up with how many mass shootings have taken place since then, with the shootings in Buffalo supermarket and the murders of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas only the latest and loudest. In the face of such horrific evil, it’s not hard to slip into that despair that no one is faithful anymore, no one will stand up and do what needs to be done. 

Of course, on the flip side of that “I alone am left” mentality is the misguided, vengeful would-be hero who takes up weapons to commit the murders, because he believes blacks are inferior or gets offended by the sight of two men kissing. “I alone am left” is not just a despairing place; it can be a pathway to acts of unspeakable evil. Elijah has already shown himself capable of grotesque violence in the throes of this mindset, commanding the slaughter of all those Baal prophets back in verse 18. Only the silence of God’s speaking seems to finally get through, even if not completely. 

We can’t go there. We (and the plural is important, we)  must not fall into that noisy mindset (which has nothing of God in it) that the problems of the world are ours to fix by any means necessary. We also can’t be the one who is paralyzed by grief and despair, unable to take up the work of God’s kingdom. We need to engage sometimes in the holy act of shutting up and listening and waiting. 

Listen, not just to the earthquake or the whirlwind or the fire. Listen to the silence. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #4, Holy God, We Praise Your Name; #410, God is Calling Through the Whisper; #169, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.

Grace Presbyterian Church

June 12, 2022, Trinity C

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Wisdom and Trinity

It’s an almost stereotypical image, one found in comic strips or editorial cartoons or any number of other visual media. In it you see a lone sojourner, or maybe a pair, hiking or even climbing their way up a mountainside or cliff. When they get to the top, they find a lone figure, typically an elderly man, probably seated with legs crossed, appearing as a guru or sage of some sort prepared to dispense wisdom. [Here’s a recent comic that offers a different spin on that typical image.]

The scene is often used for comic effect, but it trades on something of a traditional image of a seeker of wisdom as being one who is cut off from society, engaged in solitary contemplation in that withdrawn setting. The writer of today’s reading from Proverbs would not necessarily agree with this image of withdrawal in search of wisdom.

Today’s reading is part of a more extended rhapsody (my word) on wisdom, briefly touched on in chapter 7 and then taking up most of chapters 8 and 9. It follows a discourse on a different character, one who would lead astray (in many different ways) the young student to which Proverbs is directed. In this rhapsody Wisdom is personified; most of chapters 8 and 9 are depicted as wisdom speaking to that young student. 

Let’s go ahead and make this clear: yes, Wisdom really is personified in this rhapsody as a woman. Take that, guys. In context, the character in the previous discourse who would lead the young student astray is also a woman, so the passage works as a clever literary device to present the two different paths set before the young student. Still, Wisdom (divine wisdom, clearly, as the rest of the discourse makes clear) is personified as female. Right out of the Bible, folks.

The opening four verses of the chapter set the character (sometimes called Woman Wisdom in the scholarly literature) forth, and our author’s depiction of Wisdom at work doesn’t quite square up with the mountaintop guru of comic-strip notoriety. Far from having to be sought out in some isolated place, Wisdom is out in the world, calling to anyone who would listen:

On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; besides the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out…

This isn’t wisdom in hiding or in secret. She’s out there, calling out for all to hear. 

“All fine and good,” you may say, while either being excited or offended to see something of the divine being portrayed as a woman. “All fine and good,” you may say, “but what does any of this have to do with Trinity Sunday? Why is this in the readings for today?” That’s where verses 22-31 come in.

That section opens with Wisdom’s declaration that “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts long ago.” It may surprise you to hear that this description was the subject of heated debate at no less than the Council of Nicaea, the first meeting of which took place way back in the year 325, and which was the initiator of that statement of faith we know as the Nicene Creed (we tend to say it in worship on Sundays when the Lord’s Supper happens). In their extensive and often testy debates over the nature of the Trinity, this passage, with its confusing Hebrew about being “created” or is it being “begotten” or “made” or “born” became a shorthand for discussing whether the second Person of the Trinity – the one we call God the Son, or Jesus – was “created” or “begotten” or “made” or “born” in John 1. Indeed, for some years, this character of Wisdom was sometimes discussed as a foreshadowing of the Son of God (notwithstanding Wisdom being personified as a woman here!) and of that Son’s being “in the beginning with God,” as John 1 says, or being one through whom “all things were made” as the Nicene Creed ends up saying.

If that’s how the second Person of the Trinity is involved here, the largest part of the reading names the first Person of the Trinity as the great Creator of all. Most of the text describes Wisdom’s bearing witness as God engages in the various acts of creation and even being God’s “delight, rejoicing before Him always” and also “delighting in the human race.” 

While the third Person of the Trinity is less directly invoked here, it has not escaped notice that the way Wisdom is described in this rhapsody looks and sounds a lot like the way the Holy Spirit gets described in various other corners of scripture. All that business about not being hidden off on some mountaintop but being out in the streets and at the gates of the city is awfully similar to the doings of the Spirit, after Pentecost in particular.

None of this should be taken as a “proof” of anything. Obviously this was written many, many years before the Nativity or Pentecost. What this quite exuberant passage does show us is that God’s people have been, literally for centuries, seeking ways to understand and comprehend how God moves in God’s world. We aren’t the first to struggle with it. The Council of Nicaea wasn’t the first to struggle with it. And no doubt even the writer of Proverbs wasn’t the first either. Outside of the more dramatic interventions revealed in scripture – say, the Exodus, or Pentecost, or the very life of Jesus – God’s people have been challenged by the work of putting together all that we have been shown and instructed in order, if not to have God completely figured out, at least not get God egregiously and harmfully wrong. 

In the end, perhaps such words as “wonder,” or even the “delight” that Wisdom herself invokes in today’s reading, might be at the last the last best place to end up in such pursuits. To borrow the Apostle Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians, we are still in that place where we see “in a mirror, dimly“; the time when we “will see face to face” is not yet here. May this age of contemplation be, rather than a source of dispute and anger over the nature of God, be a source of delight, perhaps with the help of good old Woman Wisdom.

For wisdom and her delight, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise noted): #1, Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty; #—, We sing of God; #2, Come, Thou Almighty King

Grace Presbyterian Church

June 5, 2022, Pentecost C

Acts 2:1-21

The Spirit Poured Out

Here we are again, at one of those passages of scripture that we may not hear very often, but we do hear it at least once every year. It’s the kind of scripture reading that we recognize almost immediately upon hearing, but that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t really know all that well.

We know the basic beats of the story:

• All of Jesus’s followers, gathered in a room, waiting for…who knows?
• The sound of a great wind, “divided tongues as of fire“, suddenly speaking languages they’d never learned or known before;
• The great crowd, in Jerusalem but from everywhere (a detailed list follows, representing the entire known world) in a way reminiscent of that great multitude from every tribe and nation and language we heard in Revelation a few weeks ago; that crowd hearing all the commotion and wondering what was going on up there;
• Some terminally clever oaf in the crowd cracking wise about their being drunk;
• Peter responding that it’s only nine o’clock in the morning, and that nobody’s drunk, but here’s what’s happening; and then quoting some spooky stuff from the prophet Joel, launching into a sermon from there (that we only get part of in today’s reading).

Sometimes those familiar phrases, though, can get a little bit dull from repetition, so familiar that we don’t really hear them. We might just slip into the thought, “oh, yeah, the Pentecost story” and go on autopilot, not really hearing.

For example: what does it suggest when Peter, following Joel 2:28-32 pretty directly, quotes God as saying “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh“? Does that strike up any particular image in your mind? Or has it become so familiar that it doesn’t really strike up anything? 

Sometimes when I find myself in this rut I turn to the Cotton Patch Gospel, the work of biblical scholar Clarence Jordan, who not only translated much of the New Testament but created a version set in the Georgia of his day, namely the late 1950s. Jerusalem became Atlanta, the baby Jesus was born in Gainesville (Georgia, not here!), and so forth. Being born and raised in Georgia, this naturally got my attention. Jordan’s colorful and evocative language can be at times illuminating. It’s not a substitute for a more straightforward translation, but it can be an interesting supplement at times.

And for this passage, Clarence Jordan offers “I will share my spirit with all mankind.” OK, there’s the dated language “mankind,” as if women weren’t included, but the main verb is “share.” It’s an effective enough verb, to be sure, and it’s definitely accurate enough in this context, but for those who respond to imagery and vividness of language, it perhaps doesn’t offer as much help. 

Another, much more recent reading of the scriptures in a different cultural context is First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament, published only last year. This work, produced by a council of Native religious leaders and teachers and scholars, sought to perform a task not unlike Jordan’s Cotton Patch Gospel, but not exactly the same; the setting is not changed, but the names of places and persons are given in a Native idiom and the style of the account is rendered as much as possible in the style of a storyteller in the oral tradition of the many nations and tribes of North America. 

In this reading, after the “sound of a great windstorm” and “flames of fire” have come and the crowd is hearing in their many languages, Peter’s reading of Joel is rendered as “‘In the last days,’ says Creator, ‘I will rain down my Spirit upon all human beings…’.”

Now there’s something. 

The thing about something being poured out is that if you’re not directly under whatever is being poured from, you might well miss it. Rain, on the other hand, is not so easy to escape. If you’re outside when it starts to rain, you get wet. There’s no sidestepping the rain or jump out of the way of it. You get wet. 

Maybe this helps drive home the fact of the Spirit being poured out on everyone. No one is left out. Everyone gets wet. 

This doesn’t go down well for a lot of people. It’s been true in every age and it’s most definitely true now; too much of the church wants this pouring out of the Spirit to be for just us, or maybe more specifically not them. We’re the “special” ones, they insist; we’re God’s chosen, God’s favorites. Not those people who don’t look like us, who don’t sound like us, who don’t flatter us or cozy up to us or make us feel important. Not them. The Spirit doesn’t pour down on them. That’s how an awful lot of people want it to be.

But when we think of the Spirit raining down? As the old verse from Matthew says, the rain falls on the just and the unjust. It doesn’t miss anybody. There’s no getting left out, there’s no Great Replacement anything, there’s no “for me but not for thee,” none of that. The Spirit rains down on everyone, whether we like it or not. Everybody gets wet.

Does everybody respond to the Spirit the same way? No, they don’t. Think again about the rain; your first impulse is to seek shelter, yes? Or perhaps pull out an umbrella? For some people, the Spirit is a disruption, maybe even a threat. You never know what’s going to happen when the Holy Spirit gets loose. Life might get uncomfortable. We might be led places we’re not comfortable going. Best get out of the rain before you get wet. 

But no, this is one rainstorm from which we don’t need to take shelter. The Holy Spirit, raining down on all humanity? In the dried-up wilderness that is increasingly the world in which we live, that raining down is nothing less than life itself. The church, big or small, local or global, dare not try to shelter against this rain, not if we want to live up to the label “Christian,” or (even better) terms like “Christlike,” or “follower of Christ.” 

One more thing: the Holy Spirit didn’t go away after Pentecost. It keeps raining all through the book of Acts. Even more, that same Spirit is still raining down on all human beings. The Holy Spirit – third person of the Trinity, remember; in other words, God – continues to rain down upon humanity, seeking to wash us and renew us and fill us with what we need to do Christlike things in a decidedly non-Christlike world.

This is one rain from which you don’t want to seek shelter or pop up an umbrella.

It’s time to let it rain. 

It’s time to get wet.

For the raining down of the Holy Spirit, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #289, On Pentecost They Gathered; #—, We trust in God, the loving Holy Spirit; #292, As the Wind Song

References:

Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch Gospel, the Complete Collection. Macon: Smith & Helwys Publishing, 2012.

First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2021.