Sermon Illustrations for Proper 21 | Ordinary Time 26 (2023)
Illustration
Exodus 17:1-7
We didn’t just invent this Bible stuff a couple years ago. The scriptures have been around for thousands of years, and believers have been commenting on them about as long. I really enjoy hearing what our predecessors had to say. In the case of this passage, I was recently introduced to two special writers; Rabbi Shelomoh Yitschaki Solomon ben Isaac, better known as Rashi, born in France in 1040, who died in the Rhineland in 1104, and Obadiah Ben Jacob Sforno, who lived in Italy 1475-1550. He not only studied the Bible, but also mathematics, philosophy, and medicine.
God instructs Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go.” (17:5) According to the medieval Rabbi Obadiah ben Jacob Sforno (1475-1550), whose learning included mathematics and medicine, the purpose of this processional was to ensure that the people would be looking on during the miracle so, “They will see how you are exerting yourself on their behalf to supply their want,” (The Soncino Chumash, 470).
In contrast to the people’s need to see the miracle that followed, Moses was assured by God, “I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb.” (17:6) While it was important for Moses to be seen performing the action that led to God’s miracle, Moses knew he was seen by God and did not need to see God to believe in what was going to take place. That puts me in mind of what Jesus said to Thomas, following the resurrection: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” (John 20:29)
The people could not see God, but they could see Moses, and God wanted Moses to be seen, because they were arguing about Moses. The scriptures say they disputed with Moses. That’s a judicial term. They were taking him to court. They were disputing with Moses and testing God. Was God going to do something?
And that means, in this dry desert of contention, of grumbling, of murmuring, of disputing what the truth is, and testing God to see if God is going to act in a world at war, and here in our country with a nation at war with itself, people are testing God to see what will happen, and here in this dry time God is going to act — through us!
Now there’s a problem with that. We’re not showoffs. We’re uncomfortable in public. We don’t trust public piety, when people pray to a God who always agrees with their politics and their viewpoints. People are creating idols in the desert that look a lot like that face they see in the mirror. And who is going to strike the rock and release the blessed water we all need to survive?
Frank R.
* * *
Exodus 17:1-7
This is a story about our total dependence on God and our unworthiness of his attention. This message goes down hard for Americans. First, it seems that we do not believe that we are totally dependent on God. According to the most recent poll on the subject, a 2006 survey conducted by Baylor University, it was found that two out of five Americans believe in a God who is not engaged in daily lives. A 2016 LifeWay study found that 65% of us think everyone sins a little, but that most of us still believe that we are good by nature.
John Calvin provides good antidotes to these outlooks. He wrote:
Ye have nothing of your own, but what God has conferred on you is at his will and pleasure... (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.IX/2, p.395)
We may hence gather a useful doctrine: With regard to the whole race of man there is nothing certain or permanent in this life... (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.IX/2, p.396)
With this kind of confidence in God, Calvin assures us that we can come to know that when we face the challenges of life we can do so with delight and nothing can shake us:
Grace anticipates unwilling man that he may will... man is not borne alone without any motion of the heart, as if by an outside force; rather he is so affected within that he obeys from the heart... when feeling of delight is imparted through the same grace the human will is formed to endure; it is strengthened with unconquerable fortitude. (Institutes of the Christian Religion [Westminster Press edition], pp.306,308)
Mark E.
* * *
Philippians 2:1-13
In my tradition, the first Sunday of October is World Communion Sunday. We celebrate God’s presence, Christ’s presence, the Holy Spirit’s presence in the whole world and the myriad ways we all celebrate our faith. Paul reminds us, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (12b-13 NRSV) He gave us instructions for working out our salvation: demonstrate love and compassion, be humble as Christ was an example of humility. These are challenging actions in our lives. Sometimes we fall, we fail. Yet, we know that God is a God of grace, and that God works in us for God’s own pleasure. We are reminded that God is omnipresent and we each, and all, are blessed by God and God’s grace. Celebrate that today as you live into your journey of faith.
Bonnie B.
* * *
Philippians 2:1-13
Most employment counselors, indeed pop-culture psychology, advise against humility, urging us to “toot our own horns” in the job search or in life, to recognize how unique and talented we are. Famed 19th-century German intellectual Friedrich Nietzsche talked about life this way in his famed book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He observed that life lived by human prudence requires good acting and people who invent themselves. But then he adds that wanting others to enjoy looking at us and our “wisdom” is a rather laughable way to live. (The Portable Nietzsche, pp.255-256)
John Calvin believed that this text is a lesson in humility and that is good for us. He wrote:
“Confidence in ourselves produces carelessness and arrogance.” (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.XXI/2, p.67) And then he added:
For both diseases [vanity and strife] he [Paul] brings forward one remedy — humility, and with good reason, for it is the mother of moderation, the effect of which is that yielding up our own right, we give preference to others, and are not thrown into agitation. (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.XXI/2, pp.52-53)
Of course, the lesson is about Jesus’ humility, not our own. Martin Luther powerfully notes this and explains what this has to do with our humility:
Here Paul again presents to us a powerful example of the celestial and eternal fire, the love of Christ, for the purpose of persuading us to exercise a loving concern for one another. (Complete Sermons, Vol.4/1, p.169)
He [Paul] shows us how from eternity it has been God’s pleasure that Christ, the glorious one who has wrought all this, should do it for us. What human heart would not melt at the joy-inspiring thought? Who would not love, praise, and thank God and in return for his goodness, not only be ready to serve the world, but gladly embrace the extremity of humility? (Complete Sermons, Vol.4/1, p.179)
When you hang around Jesus, his humility just rubs off on you and me.
Mark E.
* * *
Philippians 3:4-14
People tend to give gifts to graduates of both high school and college. I remember a gift my mother gave me for my high school graduation more than forty years ago. It was a poem. I came across this poem when searching for stories about this passage. It is an anonymous poem that says:
Nothing in the world
Can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not;
Nothing is more common
Than unsuccessful men
With talent.
Genius will not:
Unrewarded genius
Is almost a proverb.
Education will not;
The world is full of
Educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination
Alone are important.
I thought about that poem again as I read this familiar passage. Paul was educated and important. In the end, though, he was “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.” He was willing to press on “toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus” (vs. 13-14). Another anonymous work provides good perspective. “You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one.”
Bill T.
* * *
Matthew 21:23-32
This is not the only time that Jesus answers a question with a question. It is less, in my opinion, of Jesus being evasive than of Jesus refusing to play by the rules of another, and to allow them to frame the question as a simple binary — this or that — when the real answer might be to ask a totally different question altogether.
People with an agenda often want to control a biblical conversation. You either agree with them or you’re damned. There are no other choices — in their minds. Then they’re ready with their clobber verse to clear the field.
When the religious authorities asked Jesus the source of his authority they were asking the question to challenge his very presence in the temple. Where’s your diploma? Where did you get your degree? It was not a difficult question, but by answer their question with another question he was turning the tables on them, and also delighting the spectators at the expense of the authorities’ dignity, knocking them off their high horses. Jesus in return asked a simple question — let’s talk about if John’s authority to baptize came from heaven or earth. But either answer opened them up to criticism and refusing to answer exposed the weakness of their authority!
Jesus then told a parable that exposed them to further ridicule — as religious leaders who were commissioned by God to tend the vines of God’s kingdom and made a big show of their discipleship without actually doing anything. They refused to respond to John’s message while outsiders heard and repented.
Faithful believers in Jesus hear, respond, — and act.
Frank R.
* * *
Matthew 21:23-32
I came across this story and thought it was appropriate for this verse. It did not have an attribution. A missionary translator was trying to find a word for “obedience” in the native language he was working in. It seemed that “obedience” was something rarely seen in the culture of the people in whose language he was translating the New Testament. As he returned home from the village one day, he whistled for his dog, and it came running at full speed. An old man, a native elder in that village, seeing this, said in his native tongue. “Your dog is all ears.” The missionary smiled. He now knew the word he needed for “obedience.”
Jesus was dealing with the Jewish religious leaders who, as was their practice, were hassling him. In response to them, he tells a parable about two sons. Only one of the sons was “all ears.” It wasn’t the son the religious leaders could identify with. With respect to doing what Jesus wants us to do, are we “all ears?”
Bill T.
We didn’t just invent this Bible stuff a couple years ago. The scriptures have been around for thousands of years, and believers have been commenting on them about as long. I really enjoy hearing what our predecessors had to say. In the case of this passage, I was recently introduced to two special writers; Rabbi Shelomoh Yitschaki Solomon ben Isaac, better known as Rashi, born in France in 1040, who died in the Rhineland in 1104, and Obadiah Ben Jacob Sforno, who lived in Italy 1475-1550. He not only studied the Bible, but also mathematics, philosophy, and medicine.
God instructs Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go.” (17:5) According to the medieval Rabbi Obadiah ben Jacob Sforno (1475-1550), whose learning included mathematics and medicine, the purpose of this processional was to ensure that the people would be looking on during the miracle so, “They will see how you are exerting yourself on their behalf to supply their want,” (The Soncino Chumash, 470).
In contrast to the people’s need to see the miracle that followed, Moses was assured by God, “I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb.” (17:6) While it was important for Moses to be seen performing the action that led to God’s miracle, Moses knew he was seen by God and did not need to see God to believe in what was going to take place. That puts me in mind of what Jesus said to Thomas, following the resurrection: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” (John 20:29)
The people could not see God, but they could see Moses, and God wanted Moses to be seen, because they were arguing about Moses. The scriptures say they disputed with Moses. That’s a judicial term. They were taking him to court. They were disputing with Moses and testing God. Was God going to do something?
And that means, in this dry desert of contention, of grumbling, of murmuring, of disputing what the truth is, and testing God to see if God is going to act in a world at war, and here in our country with a nation at war with itself, people are testing God to see what will happen, and here in this dry time God is going to act — through us!
Now there’s a problem with that. We’re not showoffs. We’re uncomfortable in public. We don’t trust public piety, when people pray to a God who always agrees with their politics and their viewpoints. People are creating idols in the desert that look a lot like that face they see in the mirror. And who is going to strike the rock and release the blessed water we all need to survive?
Frank R.
* * *
Exodus 17:1-7
This is a story about our total dependence on God and our unworthiness of his attention. This message goes down hard for Americans. First, it seems that we do not believe that we are totally dependent on God. According to the most recent poll on the subject, a 2006 survey conducted by Baylor University, it was found that two out of five Americans believe in a God who is not engaged in daily lives. A 2016 LifeWay study found that 65% of us think everyone sins a little, but that most of us still believe that we are good by nature.
John Calvin provides good antidotes to these outlooks. He wrote:
Ye have nothing of your own, but what God has conferred on you is at his will and pleasure... (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.IX/2, p.395)
We may hence gather a useful doctrine: With regard to the whole race of man there is nothing certain or permanent in this life... (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.IX/2, p.396)
With this kind of confidence in God, Calvin assures us that we can come to know that when we face the challenges of life we can do so with delight and nothing can shake us:
Grace anticipates unwilling man that he may will... man is not borne alone without any motion of the heart, as if by an outside force; rather he is so affected within that he obeys from the heart... when feeling of delight is imparted through the same grace the human will is formed to endure; it is strengthened with unconquerable fortitude. (Institutes of the Christian Religion [Westminster Press edition], pp.306,308)
Mark E.
* * *
Philippians 2:1-13
In my tradition, the first Sunday of October is World Communion Sunday. We celebrate God’s presence, Christ’s presence, the Holy Spirit’s presence in the whole world and the myriad ways we all celebrate our faith. Paul reminds us, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (12b-13 NRSV) He gave us instructions for working out our salvation: demonstrate love and compassion, be humble as Christ was an example of humility. These are challenging actions in our lives. Sometimes we fall, we fail. Yet, we know that God is a God of grace, and that God works in us for God’s own pleasure. We are reminded that God is omnipresent and we each, and all, are blessed by God and God’s grace. Celebrate that today as you live into your journey of faith.
Bonnie B.
* * *
Philippians 2:1-13
Most employment counselors, indeed pop-culture psychology, advise against humility, urging us to “toot our own horns” in the job search or in life, to recognize how unique and talented we are. Famed 19th-century German intellectual Friedrich Nietzsche talked about life this way in his famed book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He observed that life lived by human prudence requires good acting and people who invent themselves. But then he adds that wanting others to enjoy looking at us and our “wisdom” is a rather laughable way to live. (The Portable Nietzsche, pp.255-256)
John Calvin believed that this text is a lesson in humility and that is good for us. He wrote:
“Confidence in ourselves produces carelessness and arrogance.” (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.XXI/2, p.67) And then he added:
For both diseases [vanity and strife] he [Paul] brings forward one remedy — humility, and with good reason, for it is the mother of moderation, the effect of which is that yielding up our own right, we give preference to others, and are not thrown into agitation. (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.XXI/2, pp.52-53)
Of course, the lesson is about Jesus’ humility, not our own. Martin Luther powerfully notes this and explains what this has to do with our humility:
Here Paul again presents to us a powerful example of the celestial and eternal fire, the love of Christ, for the purpose of persuading us to exercise a loving concern for one another. (Complete Sermons, Vol.4/1, p.169)
He [Paul] shows us how from eternity it has been God’s pleasure that Christ, the glorious one who has wrought all this, should do it for us. What human heart would not melt at the joy-inspiring thought? Who would not love, praise, and thank God and in return for his goodness, not only be ready to serve the world, but gladly embrace the extremity of humility? (Complete Sermons, Vol.4/1, p.179)
When you hang around Jesus, his humility just rubs off on you and me.
Mark E.
* * *
Philippians 3:4-14
People tend to give gifts to graduates of both high school and college. I remember a gift my mother gave me for my high school graduation more than forty years ago. It was a poem. I came across this poem when searching for stories about this passage. It is an anonymous poem that says:
Nothing in the world
Can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not;
Nothing is more common
Than unsuccessful men
With talent.
Genius will not:
Unrewarded genius
Is almost a proverb.
Education will not;
The world is full of
Educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination
Alone are important.
I thought about that poem again as I read this familiar passage. Paul was educated and important. In the end, though, he was “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.” He was willing to press on “toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus” (vs. 13-14). Another anonymous work provides good perspective. “You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one.”
Bill T.
* * *
Matthew 21:23-32
This is not the only time that Jesus answers a question with a question. It is less, in my opinion, of Jesus being evasive than of Jesus refusing to play by the rules of another, and to allow them to frame the question as a simple binary — this or that — when the real answer might be to ask a totally different question altogether.
People with an agenda often want to control a biblical conversation. You either agree with them or you’re damned. There are no other choices — in their minds. Then they’re ready with their clobber verse to clear the field.
When the religious authorities asked Jesus the source of his authority they were asking the question to challenge his very presence in the temple. Where’s your diploma? Where did you get your degree? It was not a difficult question, but by answer their question with another question he was turning the tables on them, and also delighting the spectators at the expense of the authorities’ dignity, knocking them off their high horses. Jesus in return asked a simple question — let’s talk about if John’s authority to baptize came from heaven or earth. But either answer opened them up to criticism and refusing to answer exposed the weakness of their authority!
Jesus then told a parable that exposed them to further ridicule — as religious leaders who were commissioned by God to tend the vines of God’s kingdom and made a big show of their discipleship without actually doing anything. They refused to respond to John’s message while outsiders heard and repented.
Faithful believers in Jesus hear, respond, — and act.
Frank R.
* * *
Matthew 21:23-32
I came across this story and thought it was appropriate for this verse. It did not have an attribution. A missionary translator was trying to find a word for “obedience” in the native language he was working in. It seemed that “obedience” was something rarely seen in the culture of the people in whose language he was translating the New Testament. As he returned home from the village one day, he whistled for his dog, and it came running at full speed. An old man, a native elder in that village, seeing this, said in his native tongue. “Your dog is all ears.” The missionary smiled. He now knew the word he needed for “obedience.”
Jesus was dealing with the Jewish religious leaders who, as was their practice, were hassling him. In response to them, he tells a parable about two sons. Only one of the sons was “all ears.” It wasn’t the son the religious leaders could identify with. With respect to doing what Jesus wants us to do, are we “all ears?”
Bill T.
