Patience
Commentary
Object:
Patience is a tough virtue, slipping from our grasp in the moment of demand. It always races with Road Runner while we are stymied in the dust with Wile E. Coyote, never catching up no matter what Acme technology we employ. Stephen Winward says that at his mother's knee he learned a poem that has proved perennially true:
Patience is a virtue: possess it if you can!
Seldom in a woman, and never in a man.
My own parents used to tell us, "All good things come to those who wait." While that may have been true in the past it hardly seems to apply any more. We seem systematically to have beaten the need for waiting. We buy instant foods, and "nuke" them to serving temperature in microwave ovens. Our satellite dishes and internet search engines bring immediate access to news and information from around the world. We pop pain killers to evaporate our aches, so we don't even have to deal with the whys of our hurts. If we see something we like, instant credit grants us immediate possession.
Still, there are things that we can't control, and these keep the fires of desire burning the paper house of patience in our souls. It is the ache of loneliness and the pain of frustration that too often hold us aloof from patience. A woman whose life has been turned up-side down by a marriage gone sour and the complicated pains it causes each day grows impatient with God's failures to act on her behalf and the wilting care of others. "I'm so lonely," she shouts in print, punctuating her cry with exclamation points. I've spent time in her impatient circle. You have too.
Jeremiah, in today's Old Testament reading, indicates that patience is a religious matter and ties it to our understanding of God's plans and purposes. Paul urges the same on young Timothy, exercising pastoral fortitude among people who want quick fixes and religious fads. Certainly Jesus' parable in today's gospel lesson is pointedly about patience.
Jeremiah 31:27-34
It is important to get the historical flavor of these collected prophecies, for without context they blend into a bitter jeremiad, as our English language has often reduced such supposed rantings of the great prophet. In situ, however, one captures the desperate times and the screaming voice of the seer, who, as Abraham Joshua Heschel says, hears everything an octave higher than the rest of us and yells out the hurts of heaven in hopes of some change in the human heart before all hell breaks loose.
Suddenly, here, amid Jeremiah's voicings of divine diatribes, a calm note of hope, care, and concern breaks through. Instead of flaming bolts of judgment, the warmth of a marvelous January thaw pushes through the clouds and heaven smiles in our direction. The God of the Exodus and Sinai declares the dawning of a newer age, a world that no one can mess up. Although in many places throughout Jeremiah's prophecies, God comes as the retributive army of divine justice, here God is the powerful bodyguard, restoring the old order to a higher splendor than it had ever known. The local greenspace becomes a national park. The tiny reservoir is transformed into a magnificent ocean. The backyard garden becomes a fertile and flowering plain. Most of all, the small, nasty, and putrid human hearts and actions are resurrected to a civilization of grace and glory.
The theme of the Sinai covenant is very prominent throughout Jeremiah's prophecies. Most striking is his recognition that it governs Israel's success and its demise, and that one day soon Yahweh will have to find a way to renew the covenant in a manner that will keep the restored nation more faithful to its identity and true to its mission. Nowhere among Jeremiah's pointed prophecies is that more clear than in the lyric poetry of today's passage. No wonder that the writer of Hebrews in the New Testament quoted it at length, announcing that the coming and work of Jesus is the undeniable primary interpretation of Jeremiah's haunting homily.
Still, we ought not to jump completely into a New Testament interpretation of this divine word without wrestling with where and when it was spoken. Only when we see Jeremiah and the struggles of little Judah, about to capitulate to foreign armies in a desultory and ignominious fall from the great heights of power and influence wielded by God's favored nation during David and Solomonic times, do we hear the agonizing hope communicated through this passage.
2 Timothy 3:14--4:5
Paul's last years were likely quite hectic. When the fires began burning Rome in the middle of 64 AD, Emperor Nero was quick to point the finger of accusation toward the Christians. As a leading figure in the movement, Paul soon became a hunted man. It is probable that the winter of 63-64 AD, spent in Nicopolis (Titus 3:12), was the last peaceful time in his life. Nero would die in 68 AD but not until he had killed thousands of Christians, including Peter and Paul.
In his attempts to stay ahead of warrants for his arrest, Paul probably flitted from location to location from late 64 through early 66 AD. His travel notes to Timothy, in the second letter sent to the young pastor, certainly have the air of haste and mobility about them. During that year or so he traveled, at minimum, to Corinth (2 Timothy 4:20), Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20), and Troas (2 Timothy 4:13). In that place, the city where he had first come to know doctor Luke sixteen years before, Paul was arrested and hauled off to Rome without even being able to take along his few personal belongings (2 Timothy 4:13).
Evidently there were several different arraignments and trials during the legal process that would lead to Paul's death (2 Timothy 4:16). After all, Paul's Roman citizenship provided him with protections that Peter and others did not enjoy. In between some of these court matters Paul sent a final letter to his younger friend Timothy. It is warm and passionate, urgent and reflective, pessimistic and optimistic, all at the same time. Paul encourages Timothy to live faithfully as a pastor, carrying on the tradition of his godly forebears, grandmother Lois and mother Eunice, and learning from the example of Paul's own life as his spiritual mentor (2 Timothy 1:1--2:13). Paul also reminds Timothy of some of the key teachings that are critical for church leaders to espouse regularly (2 Timothy 2:14--3:9). Finally, Paul lapses into tender reminders of the times they spent together and offers his strong personal testimony of faith and trust in Jesus, even as he senses his execution looming (2 Timothy 3:10--4:8). Some final greetings and urgent instructions end the letter (2 Timothy 4:9-22).
The last words of Paul are quite moving. First he sums up his life in athletic metaphors (2 Timothy 4:6-8). Then, he ends his many years of communication and correspondence with a caring and concise blessing: "The Lord be with your spirit. Grace be with you" (2 Timothy 4:22). Paul was executed by beheading, probably sometime in 67 AD.
Because of the vision of Christ that captured him on the road to Damascus and the startling news of Jesus' resurrection, Paul nurtured in his converts an apocalyptic ethic and lifestyle. Jesus came a little while ago and shook things up; now Jesus is coming again soon, so live as if that matters.
This is why Timothy is supposed to exercise patience in ministry. It is a delicate high wire to walk between the pull of the passions of the crowd with their call for magical instantaneity in religious matters, and the dry scholasticism of a theology that pushes all actions of God into the realms of theoretic speculation.
How can a pastor survive? How can hope endure? How can Christianity remain vibrant? Through patient persistence in doing the right things for the right reasons at the right times in the right way among the right people.
Luke 18:1-8
Jesus' famous parable of the persistent widow reminds us of the great story of the whole of scripture. The Bible begins with God creating a wonderful universe, which has at its heart, a garden prepared for women and men to enjoy as home with their children. Around them the natural order shimmers in loveliness and God comes daily as a marvelous friend, conversationalist, and partner. Quickly, however, the story tells about the intrusion of evil and the damage that explodes around Eden. In a few short strokes, Earth becomes a battlefield in a galactic civil war, and every child is plagued by nightmares of monsters and bogymen tearing the goodness out of life.
Like the widow in Jesus' tale, the human race becomes homeless in its home. We are aliens in our own environment and increasingly disconnected from God.
In that context the Bible moves on to talk about a Palestinian homeland for God's ancient people, the Israelites. One day, came the word of the prophets, they would neither be slaves in Egypt or exiles in Babylon, but home again with God. Later developments, shaped by the teachings of Jesus, projected these promises further. For those who are part of the new family of God in the New Testament church, the promised land is found in part among Christian communities scattered throughout the nations of our world. Mostly, though, it still awaits its fullest expression in the kingdom yet to come. Sometimes we call it heaven, sometimes paradise; John, in the great Revelation that completes the Bible, tells us that it is the new creation, where we finally come home to ourselves and our culture, and most of all, to our God.
The question, for most of us, is whether we really believe this, and act accordingly. The widow in Jesus' tale certainly does. She adamantly refuses to take the brokenness in which she finds herself as the ultimate status quo. There has to be justice. There has to be a better way of life. There has to be a paradise in which things again make sense and love takes the reigns from the cruel hands of misery. Most of all, there has to be a God who will make these things happen.
So she beats on the door of the local judge, demanding what we all know has to come. Yet, since God is busy with big matters, we often assume we have gotten lost in the flushing sewage of our meager times. Not so with this woman. She bangs at the judge until the judge remembers what the ultimate rules of protocol really are, whether they have been used in a while or not. The widow irritates the judge into submission.
And Jesus says, "There! Pray like that! Be persistent like that! Don't settle for fair-to-middlin' when God makes a promise about paradise! Go after it!"
Application
Throughout history people have tried to run ahead of patience by pretending it wasn't needed and that the world would end before they did. The Millerites and the Seventh Day Adventists announced Judgment Day watches several times over. People climbed trees and sat on rooftops in all-night vigils. But starry skies never split with angelic celebration and the dreams died with graying dawn. So too did the patience.
A neighboring farmer in my boyhood community was captured by one of these millennial preachers. He sold his farm, bought a motor home, and traveled with his family in caravan with a dozen others chasing the preacher on a whirlwind tour of North America, spreading the news of kingdom come. Six months later they circled the motor homes in Texas and waited. And waited. And waited.
When Jesus refused to do a command curtain call on their schedule, the motor homes began to drift away. The prophetic band broke up, disillusioned with a near-sighted preacher, and our neighbor sneaked back to Minnesota in shame. He died a short while later, tired of patience that gave out before promise.
This is the religious dimension of patience that Jeremiah, Paul, and Jesus urge, and we find hard to manage. Our world is imperfect, with corners that bump knees and scorpions that poison hands. We get lonely, we get pained; we struggle to survive and are old in body before our youthful ideals get a chance to catch up. We try to find a little comfort and come away addicted to work, booze, drugs, or sex -- always far short of heaven.
The patience of waiting is tied to our understanding of how time will get resolved into eternity. If there is no God outside the system, we are stuck with cycles of repetition, crushed beneath recurring tasks and tedium that never ends. But if there is a God who has promised to interrupt history with healing and hope and harmony, we wait with expectation.
Alternative Application
Jeremiah 31:27-34. The Word of the Lord through Jeremiah in today's lectionary reading is very powerful. It sounds to Christians as if it belongs in the gospels or in the letters of Paul. It resonates with New Testament grace, vibrancy, and divine initiative, even while it takes up residence in the Old Testament. How do we read it today? Should we emphasize Jeremiah's political context and imagine how strange it would have sounded to people who were about to be swamped by Babylonian armies? Or should we take it primarily in its Hebrews 8 re-setting and see in it primarily the clarity of its predictions about God's new redemptive strategy in Jesus?
It is very intimidating to attempt a biblical theology that encompasses both Testaments, seeking to remain faithful to the origins and directions of each, while pursuing the historical, cultural, and religious bonds that have brought them together as the Christian Bible. Fundamental to this challenge is the question of the relationship between the two collections. Choices made here are inherently theological, philosophical, and confessional. Five major options are most often posited:
* The Old Testament is essential Christian scripture, with the New Testament serving primarily as its explanatory footnote. Because Jesus and the first Christians were Jewish, and the preaching of the apostles was based upon the Hebrew Bible, there is a sense in which the Old Testament is sufficient when considering what revelation God might have given. The New Testament documents, in this view, do not alter or add to the theology of the Old Testament. Instead, they provide notes about the life and teachings of Jesus and collect together the interpretive nuances about him that were put forward by the church's first preachers.
* The Old Testament is prophecy, and the New Testament describes its fulfillment. This is a significantly New Testament-centered approach, viewing the Hebrew Bible and its context as an incomplete religious world in which its leaders invariably pointed to meanings and future happenings that could not be apprehended immediately by their contemporaries. God's designs, accordingly, were focused on Jesus, and for that reason Israel's history and religion were inherently still evolving, forming at best a prelude or prologue to the real event.
* The Old Testament is historical background, while the New Testament is essential scripture. In this overtly church-centered analysis, all Christian theology is derived from the New Testament. It, alone, is the complete "Word of God." The Old Testament is, of course, beneficial and convenient, for it gives historical context to the life of Jesus and helps explain some of the terms and ideas bandied about in New Testament writings that are shaped by certain ancient cultures. Clearly, however, the New Testament is the guidebook for the church and for that reason it can be published separately from the Hebrew Bible and studied independently of that other collection, which belongs to a different religion.
* The Old Testament is primarily an expression of Law, while the New Testament is truly Gospel, "good news." This approach believes that the God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition acted in fundamentally different ways when nurturing the lives of these sibling faith communities. The "Law" of Old Testament covenant theology was a somewhat misguided attempt by God to stand as nanny or teacher over a spiritually immature people until an appropriate time when they would hunger for freedom as believers come of age. The New Testament breathes with grace and spiritual maturity that was not possible during Old Testament times. Jesus is the one who explained the new religious outlook and took care of the penal code associated with the Old Testament "Law" so that New Testament believers would not have to worry about it.
* The Old Testament begins God's covenant mission to reclaim the wayward peoples of earth through a centripetal geographic strategy, and the New Testament reaffirms this core design while retooling its missional thrust centrifugally outward to the far reaches of human settlement and expansion. In this perspective there is a single unifying motif that binds the two Testaments together: the mission of God. This mission is largely channeled through Israel in Old Testament times, with a result that the nation needed to be located at a significant crossroad of international interaction, so that all peoples might eventually have an opportunity to connect with Israel's God. Furthermore, because the missional activities of God were expressed through a specific cultural context, many of the scriptural teachings were designed in and around and through Israelite culture and history. The New Testament does not alter this divine missional drive, but it renegotiates the parameters so that it becomes more portable and transferable. The critical event that initiated the Old Testament era of the mission was the exodus of Israel from Egypt and the formation of its identity through the Sinai covenant. The critical event that initiated the New Testament era of the mission was the incarnation of the divine identity into human form (Jesus) so that the transition could be made quickly and its redemptive transaction secured once and for all.
While elements of each and all of these five approaches come through in our preaching, teaching, and pastoral work at different times, it is probably this last one that most closely echoes the divine message through Jeremiah. If we can bring that out in our use of this "New Covenant" passage today, we might not only be rousing our people to new levels of trust in the God who holds all times and peoples "in his hand," but we may even teach them a thing or two about some profound essentials of solid biblical interpretation that transcends proof-texting or personal feelings about a text.
Preaching the Psalms
Schuyler Rhodes
Psalm 119:97-104
This passage opens with the phrase, "Oh how I love your law!" The law referred to is, of course, God's law as received through the Hebrew scriptures. The writer goes on to elaborate about how the law makes one wise and learned and keeps the observer from evil ways. In short, we have an all out cheer party for Torah.
Many Christians who read this psalm, though, are drawn immediately to Saint Paul, who seemingly trashed the Torah in favor of grace and forgiveness in Jesus Christ. Indeed, we can hear Paul fleshing out this these throughout Romans and other letters. Essentially, we are saved from the Law in the coming of Jesus Christ. A cursory glance at all this would lead some to a strange kind of Christian anarchy that gives license to all kinds of behavior. Indeed, this was a problem for the early church.
The truth is, however, that Paul did not abandon Mosaic Law. It might be more readily said that he stood both in the world of God's kingdom where the law was no longer needed and in the unredeemed world where the law was still our custodian.
The long and the short of it all is that we still need rules. We need them because, quite frankly, we don't behave very well without them. We need rules about manners and driving; rules about property and commerce; we need rules about a lot of things. If you think about it, rules aren't a bad thing at all. What Saint Paul was interested in letting us know was that Law, whether the Torah or the laws of a nation, can become a source of idolatry. The Law is not God. It is the law. And if we follow the law slavishly without grace, without regard to the reality that it's God who rules, then we have slipped, "into slavery again" (Galatians 5:1).
So let us pay attention to our rules and laws. We do, after all, need them. But let grace prevail as we follow these laws. Let us, with the psalmist, be in a position of saying, "I love the law."
Patience is a virtue: possess it if you can!
Seldom in a woman, and never in a man.
My own parents used to tell us, "All good things come to those who wait." While that may have been true in the past it hardly seems to apply any more. We seem systematically to have beaten the need for waiting. We buy instant foods, and "nuke" them to serving temperature in microwave ovens. Our satellite dishes and internet search engines bring immediate access to news and information from around the world. We pop pain killers to evaporate our aches, so we don't even have to deal with the whys of our hurts. If we see something we like, instant credit grants us immediate possession.
Still, there are things that we can't control, and these keep the fires of desire burning the paper house of patience in our souls. It is the ache of loneliness and the pain of frustration that too often hold us aloof from patience. A woman whose life has been turned up-side down by a marriage gone sour and the complicated pains it causes each day grows impatient with God's failures to act on her behalf and the wilting care of others. "I'm so lonely," she shouts in print, punctuating her cry with exclamation points. I've spent time in her impatient circle. You have too.
Jeremiah, in today's Old Testament reading, indicates that patience is a religious matter and ties it to our understanding of God's plans and purposes. Paul urges the same on young Timothy, exercising pastoral fortitude among people who want quick fixes and religious fads. Certainly Jesus' parable in today's gospel lesson is pointedly about patience.
Jeremiah 31:27-34
It is important to get the historical flavor of these collected prophecies, for without context they blend into a bitter jeremiad, as our English language has often reduced such supposed rantings of the great prophet. In situ, however, one captures the desperate times and the screaming voice of the seer, who, as Abraham Joshua Heschel says, hears everything an octave higher than the rest of us and yells out the hurts of heaven in hopes of some change in the human heart before all hell breaks loose.
Suddenly, here, amid Jeremiah's voicings of divine diatribes, a calm note of hope, care, and concern breaks through. Instead of flaming bolts of judgment, the warmth of a marvelous January thaw pushes through the clouds and heaven smiles in our direction. The God of the Exodus and Sinai declares the dawning of a newer age, a world that no one can mess up. Although in many places throughout Jeremiah's prophecies, God comes as the retributive army of divine justice, here God is the powerful bodyguard, restoring the old order to a higher splendor than it had ever known. The local greenspace becomes a national park. The tiny reservoir is transformed into a magnificent ocean. The backyard garden becomes a fertile and flowering plain. Most of all, the small, nasty, and putrid human hearts and actions are resurrected to a civilization of grace and glory.
The theme of the Sinai covenant is very prominent throughout Jeremiah's prophecies. Most striking is his recognition that it governs Israel's success and its demise, and that one day soon Yahweh will have to find a way to renew the covenant in a manner that will keep the restored nation more faithful to its identity and true to its mission. Nowhere among Jeremiah's pointed prophecies is that more clear than in the lyric poetry of today's passage. No wonder that the writer of Hebrews in the New Testament quoted it at length, announcing that the coming and work of Jesus is the undeniable primary interpretation of Jeremiah's haunting homily.
Still, we ought not to jump completely into a New Testament interpretation of this divine word without wrestling with where and when it was spoken. Only when we see Jeremiah and the struggles of little Judah, about to capitulate to foreign armies in a desultory and ignominious fall from the great heights of power and influence wielded by God's favored nation during David and Solomonic times, do we hear the agonizing hope communicated through this passage.
2 Timothy 3:14--4:5
Paul's last years were likely quite hectic. When the fires began burning Rome in the middle of 64 AD, Emperor Nero was quick to point the finger of accusation toward the Christians. As a leading figure in the movement, Paul soon became a hunted man. It is probable that the winter of 63-64 AD, spent in Nicopolis (Titus 3:12), was the last peaceful time in his life. Nero would die in 68 AD but not until he had killed thousands of Christians, including Peter and Paul.
In his attempts to stay ahead of warrants for his arrest, Paul probably flitted from location to location from late 64 through early 66 AD. His travel notes to Timothy, in the second letter sent to the young pastor, certainly have the air of haste and mobility about them. During that year or so he traveled, at minimum, to Corinth (2 Timothy 4:20), Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20), and Troas (2 Timothy 4:13). In that place, the city where he had first come to know doctor Luke sixteen years before, Paul was arrested and hauled off to Rome without even being able to take along his few personal belongings (2 Timothy 4:13).
Evidently there were several different arraignments and trials during the legal process that would lead to Paul's death (2 Timothy 4:16). After all, Paul's Roman citizenship provided him with protections that Peter and others did not enjoy. In between some of these court matters Paul sent a final letter to his younger friend Timothy. It is warm and passionate, urgent and reflective, pessimistic and optimistic, all at the same time. Paul encourages Timothy to live faithfully as a pastor, carrying on the tradition of his godly forebears, grandmother Lois and mother Eunice, and learning from the example of Paul's own life as his spiritual mentor (2 Timothy 1:1--2:13). Paul also reminds Timothy of some of the key teachings that are critical for church leaders to espouse regularly (2 Timothy 2:14--3:9). Finally, Paul lapses into tender reminders of the times they spent together and offers his strong personal testimony of faith and trust in Jesus, even as he senses his execution looming (2 Timothy 3:10--4:8). Some final greetings and urgent instructions end the letter (2 Timothy 4:9-22).
The last words of Paul are quite moving. First he sums up his life in athletic metaphors (2 Timothy 4:6-8). Then, he ends his many years of communication and correspondence with a caring and concise blessing: "The Lord be with your spirit. Grace be with you" (2 Timothy 4:22). Paul was executed by beheading, probably sometime in 67 AD.
Because of the vision of Christ that captured him on the road to Damascus and the startling news of Jesus' resurrection, Paul nurtured in his converts an apocalyptic ethic and lifestyle. Jesus came a little while ago and shook things up; now Jesus is coming again soon, so live as if that matters.
This is why Timothy is supposed to exercise patience in ministry. It is a delicate high wire to walk between the pull of the passions of the crowd with their call for magical instantaneity in religious matters, and the dry scholasticism of a theology that pushes all actions of God into the realms of theoretic speculation.
How can a pastor survive? How can hope endure? How can Christianity remain vibrant? Through patient persistence in doing the right things for the right reasons at the right times in the right way among the right people.
Luke 18:1-8
Jesus' famous parable of the persistent widow reminds us of the great story of the whole of scripture. The Bible begins with God creating a wonderful universe, which has at its heart, a garden prepared for women and men to enjoy as home with their children. Around them the natural order shimmers in loveliness and God comes daily as a marvelous friend, conversationalist, and partner. Quickly, however, the story tells about the intrusion of evil and the damage that explodes around Eden. In a few short strokes, Earth becomes a battlefield in a galactic civil war, and every child is plagued by nightmares of monsters and bogymen tearing the goodness out of life.
Like the widow in Jesus' tale, the human race becomes homeless in its home. We are aliens in our own environment and increasingly disconnected from God.
In that context the Bible moves on to talk about a Palestinian homeland for God's ancient people, the Israelites. One day, came the word of the prophets, they would neither be slaves in Egypt or exiles in Babylon, but home again with God. Later developments, shaped by the teachings of Jesus, projected these promises further. For those who are part of the new family of God in the New Testament church, the promised land is found in part among Christian communities scattered throughout the nations of our world. Mostly, though, it still awaits its fullest expression in the kingdom yet to come. Sometimes we call it heaven, sometimes paradise; John, in the great Revelation that completes the Bible, tells us that it is the new creation, where we finally come home to ourselves and our culture, and most of all, to our God.
The question, for most of us, is whether we really believe this, and act accordingly. The widow in Jesus' tale certainly does. She adamantly refuses to take the brokenness in which she finds herself as the ultimate status quo. There has to be justice. There has to be a better way of life. There has to be a paradise in which things again make sense and love takes the reigns from the cruel hands of misery. Most of all, there has to be a God who will make these things happen.
So she beats on the door of the local judge, demanding what we all know has to come. Yet, since God is busy with big matters, we often assume we have gotten lost in the flushing sewage of our meager times. Not so with this woman. She bangs at the judge until the judge remembers what the ultimate rules of protocol really are, whether they have been used in a while or not. The widow irritates the judge into submission.
And Jesus says, "There! Pray like that! Be persistent like that! Don't settle for fair-to-middlin' when God makes a promise about paradise! Go after it!"
Application
Throughout history people have tried to run ahead of patience by pretending it wasn't needed and that the world would end before they did. The Millerites and the Seventh Day Adventists announced Judgment Day watches several times over. People climbed trees and sat on rooftops in all-night vigils. But starry skies never split with angelic celebration and the dreams died with graying dawn. So too did the patience.
A neighboring farmer in my boyhood community was captured by one of these millennial preachers. He sold his farm, bought a motor home, and traveled with his family in caravan with a dozen others chasing the preacher on a whirlwind tour of North America, spreading the news of kingdom come. Six months later they circled the motor homes in Texas and waited. And waited. And waited.
When Jesus refused to do a command curtain call on their schedule, the motor homes began to drift away. The prophetic band broke up, disillusioned with a near-sighted preacher, and our neighbor sneaked back to Minnesota in shame. He died a short while later, tired of patience that gave out before promise.
This is the religious dimension of patience that Jeremiah, Paul, and Jesus urge, and we find hard to manage. Our world is imperfect, with corners that bump knees and scorpions that poison hands. We get lonely, we get pained; we struggle to survive and are old in body before our youthful ideals get a chance to catch up. We try to find a little comfort and come away addicted to work, booze, drugs, or sex -- always far short of heaven.
The patience of waiting is tied to our understanding of how time will get resolved into eternity. If there is no God outside the system, we are stuck with cycles of repetition, crushed beneath recurring tasks and tedium that never ends. But if there is a God who has promised to interrupt history with healing and hope and harmony, we wait with expectation.
Alternative Application
Jeremiah 31:27-34. The Word of the Lord through Jeremiah in today's lectionary reading is very powerful. It sounds to Christians as if it belongs in the gospels or in the letters of Paul. It resonates with New Testament grace, vibrancy, and divine initiative, even while it takes up residence in the Old Testament. How do we read it today? Should we emphasize Jeremiah's political context and imagine how strange it would have sounded to people who were about to be swamped by Babylonian armies? Or should we take it primarily in its Hebrews 8 re-setting and see in it primarily the clarity of its predictions about God's new redemptive strategy in Jesus?
It is very intimidating to attempt a biblical theology that encompasses both Testaments, seeking to remain faithful to the origins and directions of each, while pursuing the historical, cultural, and religious bonds that have brought them together as the Christian Bible. Fundamental to this challenge is the question of the relationship between the two collections. Choices made here are inherently theological, philosophical, and confessional. Five major options are most often posited:
* The Old Testament is essential Christian scripture, with the New Testament serving primarily as its explanatory footnote. Because Jesus and the first Christians were Jewish, and the preaching of the apostles was based upon the Hebrew Bible, there is a sense in which the Old Testament is sufficient when considering what revelation God might have given. The New Testament documents, in this view, do not alter or add to the theology of the Old Testament. Instead, they provide notes about the life and teachings of Jesus and collect together the interpretive nuances about him that were put forward by the church's first preachers.
* The Old Testament is prophecy, and the New Testament describes its fulfillment. This is a significantly New Testament-centered approach, viewing the Hebrew Bible and its context as an incomplete religious world in which its leaders invariably pointed to meanings and future happenings that could not be apprehended immediately by their contemporaries. God's designs, accordingly, were focused on Jesus, and for that reason Israel's history and religion were inherently still evolving, forming at best a prelude or prologue to the real event.
* The Old Testament is historical background, while the New Testament is essential scripture. In this overtly church-centered analysis, all Christian theology is derived from the New Testament. It, alone, is the complete "Word of God." The Old Testament is, of course, beneficial and convenient, for it gives historical context to the life of Jesus and helps explain some of the terms and ideas bandied about in New Testament writings that are shaped by certain ancient cultures. Clearly, however, the New Testament is the guidebook for the church and for that reason it can be published separately from the Hebrew Bible and studied independently of that other collection, which belongs to a different religion.
* The Old Testament is primarily an expression of Law, while the New Testament is truly Gospel, "good news." This approach believes that the God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition acted in fundamentally different ways when nurturing the lives of these sibling faith communities. The "Law" of Old Testament covenant theology was a somewhat misguided attempt by God to stand as nanny or teacher over a spiritually immature people until an appropriate time when they would hunger for freedom as believers come of age. The New Testament breathes with grace and spiritual maturity that was not possible during Old Testament times. Jesus is the one who explained the new religious outlook and took care of the penal code associated with the Old Testament "Law" so that New Testament believers would not have to worry about it.
* The Old Testament begins God's covenant mission to reclaim the wayward peoples of earth through a centripetal geographic strategy, and the New Testament reaffirms this core design while retooling its missional thrust centrifugally outward to the far reaches of human settlement and expansion. In this perspective there is a single unifying motif that binds the two Testaments together: the mission of God. This mission is largely channeled through Israel in Old Testament times, with a result that the nation needed to be located at a significant crossroad of international interaction, so that all peoples might eventually have an opportunity to connect with Israel's God. Furthermore, because the missional activities of God were expressed through a specific cultural context, many of the scriptural teachings were designed in and around and through Israelite culture and history. The New Testament does not alter this divine missional drive, but it renegotiates the parameters so that it becomes more portable and transferable. The critical event that initiated the Old Testament era of the mission was the exodus of Israel from Egypt and the formation of its identity through the Sinai covenant. The critical event that initiated the New Testament era of the mission was the incarnation of the divine identity into human form (Jesus) so that the transition could be made quickly and its redemptive transaction secured once and for all.
While elements of each and all of these five approaches come through in our preaching, teaching, and pastoral work at different times, it is probably this last one that most closely echoes the divine message through Jeremiah. If we can bring that out in our use of this "New Covenant" passage today, we might not only be rousing our people to new levels of trust in the God who holds all times and peoples "in his hand," but we may even teach them a thing or two about some profound essentials of solid biblical interpretation that transcends proof-texting or personal feelings about a text.
Preaching the Psalms
Schuyler Rhodes
Psalm 119:97-104
This passage opens with the phrase, "Oh how I love your law!" The law referred to is, of course, God's law as received through the Hebrew scriptures. The writer goes on to elaborate about how the law makes one wise and learned and keeps the observer from evil ways. In short, we have an all out cheer party for Torah.
Many Christians who read this psalm, though, are drawn immediately to Saint Paul, who seemingly trashed the Torah in favor of grace and forgiveness in Jesus Christ. Indeed, we can hear Paul fleshing out this these throughout Romans and other letters. Essentially, we are saved from the Law in the coming of Jesus Christ. A cursory glance at all this would lead some to a strange kind of Christian anarchy that gives license to all kinds of behavior. Indeed, this was a problem for the early church.
The truth is, however, that Paul did not abandon Mosaic Law. It might be more readily said that he stood both in the world of God's kingdom where the law was no longer needed and in the unredeemed world where the law was still our custodian.
The long and the short of it all is that we still need rules. We need them because, quite frankly, we don't behave very well without them. We need rules about manners and driving; rules about property and commerce; we need rules about a lot of things. If you think about it, rules aren't a bad thing at all. What Saint Paul was interested in letting us know was that Law, whether the Torah or the laws of a nation, can become a source of idolatry. The Law is not God. It is the law. And if we follow the law slavishly without grace, without regard to the reality that it's God who rules, then we have slipped, "into slavery again" (Galatians 5:1).
So let us pay attention to our rules and laws. We do, after all, need them. But let grace prevail as we follow these laws. Let us, with the psalmist, be in a position of saying, "I love the law."
