Severe words
Commentary
I would not have minded the day off today. It is one thing to say, in the abstract, that we have to take up the tough stuff in the biblical record. It is another, however, to focus on the moment and the locale or circumstance described in a biblical story. So long as we talk about the principle of realism in the scripture, it is possible to remain abstract and principled. The moment we come close to the reality of persons in the Bible, it is impossible to be anything but concrete and personal.
So any humane modern reader -- who is not necessarily more humane than biblical characters or anyone else from the past -- will have to empathize with Hagar. She had no say in her destiny, being a slave woman.She did what she was commanded to do: she produced a male heir. So far as we know, she brought him up faithfully. But she gets turned out into the desert, abandoned -- and those who abandon her are not verbally chastised in the telling. In dealing with this with a congregation I would neither try to gloss over it and try to explain it away -- smart people will spot the story and want to confront its meanings -- nor use it to show condescendingly how humane we are not by contrast. Our century is more violent than Abraham's and Sarah's was, and we are not innocents.
Similarly, I wish I could show Jesus blessing the nuclear family in all its cozy potential. Instead we have to stand there and hear Matthew's version of what Jesus has to say about loyalty. It's easy to say that family loyalty and kingdom loyalty do not clash. But they do. Bottom line: Romans 6 has all the gospel we get or need today. Beyond that, we hear severe words, which have their place in the overall economy of scripture and lectionary.
Grist For The Mill
Genesis 21:8-21
This is one of the least likable stories in the scriptures. For many it ranks just this side of the story in which Jephthah sacrifices his daughter because he vowed to sacrifice the first person he met after a victory, or the incident where Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son. Given the hundreds of pages untouched by lectionary committees, why, one asks, did they not skip this one? Certainly, it receives enough attention these years. One hears many sermons on Hagar by those who see patriarchalism all over Judaism and Christianity and its texts as well as by those who have pity for the innocent slave woman, as the biblical heroine Sarah did not.
There it is, however, and it will be read, and must be coped with. It's not a story one should lightly explain away: that Sarah and Abraham had clay feet, or that Sarah had green eyes and Abraham no sense of guts or fairness has to go into the mix we call "biblical realism." In short: those big people back then were little. The heroic were cowardly. The noble were envious. Yet God would make something out of their lives and stories.
Of course, the story is here not just to diminish Sarah and Abraham in our eyes. We live in an age in which we grow by cutting all ancestors down to size. Get close to anyone and you will find reasons, big reasons, to do the cutting. The story is here, however, also to show what God does in the face of personal pettiness, disasters, and, in the case of Hagar and Ishmael, of endurance. Muslims, who do not see themselves as heirs of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are Abraham's children through their tracing to him via Ishmael. "God was with the boy," and he grew and became a father and the family of Abraham, the flawed family of faith, grew.
Romans 6:1b-11
This Sunday, which did not get off to a good start (for non-Muslim readers) through the Genesis passage, gets redeemed through this one from Romans. On the one hand it implies jealous Sarah and skullduggerously semi-humane Abraham and all the other weak people, in other words, all the other people, who have ever lived. So much was made of the fact that God forgives that, Paul worries, some may think sinning is a good idea and they need more of it. Not at all. Not because their logic is wrong, but because their personal history is skewed.
They keep thinking that they are on their own; that it is up to them to choose to be weak or strong; weaker or stronger. No: they belong to someone else. They have lost their sense of who they are because they remember who they were. Who they are? They are new people, who no longer are slaves to sin. They were under the dominion of death, but they are no longer.
Paul writes in reference to the act of being buried with Christ Jesus in baptism. Different traditions will handle this differently, depending upon their mode of baptism, the age of the baptizee, the meanings they associate with it. But no matter how they interpret or perform baptisms, they cannot escape -- and who would want to? -- the scripturally emphatic idea that something happens in it to remake the individual, so that in some sense death is already behind them.
This is a liberating notion that merits development in any sermon. "The life he lives, he lives to God," says Paul of such a woman or man. Thinking of oneself as no longer "dead to sin" but "alive to God in Christ Jesus" is liberating, enabling. Not bad for self-esteem, either.
Matthew 10:24-39
With that wonderful Romans passage serving as the second lesson, we move now to a portion of the Gospels that is as hard to take as the Old Testament or first reading about Hagar being put out in the desert.
What business did a lectionary committee have going for this set of sayings for Jesus? We can take such a set in the context of the whole Gospel story. We have what has been called a "memory-impression" of Jesus that allows for apparently contradictory elements to be included. But what if we hear only this, today, or if someone is new to the Jesus story?
After all, these are supposed to be "family values" years, in which we are to model modern families in the light of biblical ones. So we get out concordances and start looking for pro-family comment by Jesus. It's hard to find. He had the kingdom, not the family, in mind. So we nonviolent sorts here meet a Jesus who sternly announces that he has "not come to bring peace, but a sword." He sets a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
Sometimes these relations are sufficiently Oepidal or vicious that they need no "setting" of one against another. But Jesus wants nothing to be taken for granted and nothing mistaken. Celebrators of the family often have trouble ranking "their Lord" higher than "the family" on their loyalty scales. Jesus is so taken up with the kingdom of God and his cross that he has little or no room for the earthly attachments most of us need or seek. There is always a danger that one might love relatives more than one loves the cross, or Jesus, or the love of God. It's hard to wring much gospel from as severe a text as this. Let it be "sternness" time, rescued by a little word about sparrows.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Exodus 19:2-8a (Lutheran text)
Election is no privilege; it is a calling. Maybe if Israel had known what it involved, the people wouldn't have stood there so devoutly saying, "All this we will do." Rather, like the church nowadays, they would have tried to keep God at a safe distance by denying election altogether.
To this point in the exodus, God's relationship has been promising. Speaking to Moses from the mountaintop, God can refer to a dramatic deliverance: the Egyptians have been left behind, swamped with blood and seawater; the children of Jacob have been carried out of bondage as though they were on wings, soaring above everything.
But the thrice-repeated "wilderness" in the early verses of the lesson should have an ominous ring. For the people are now going to learn that there is another dimension to God's choice. "... The whole earth is mine ...," God says, "but you shall be for me a priestly people and a holy nation" (vv. 5-6).
Reiterating the Creator's claim to the whole creation, God strips out any basis for turning election into national endorsement. Egypt's blood may be on the floor; the Canaanites' property rights may be in jeopardy. But God's claim on these foreigners by creation still holds, even as Israel benefits from the dispossession. God's choice may imply but certainly doesn't require the rejection of the other nations.
More, election brings with it a vocation. Israel is chosen precisely for the others, to serve as God's witnesses, bearing the word to the nations. This is their holiness -- not in personal or national moral character, but in their conformity to the purpose for which God has set them apart.
Hearing such a word in the wilderness, Israel will learn even more of what's involved in God's election before they come out the other side. For the God who has chosen them, who has refused to let promise be reduced to endorsement, who will lead them through the desert for the sake of other nations of the earth, will turn out to be pretty tough to deal with.
That's the problem, of course: God keeps insisting on acting like God, confounding every expectation. So a nation of runaway slaves, just tasting their liberties, is selected for the redemption of the earth; by the time they get done repeating the word "wilderness," they will have had forty years of it, leaving a generation's worth of graves behind them; and when they arrive, Moses, who got to look God in the face, will get hardly more than a glimpse of the holy land before he himself is put under.
It's enough to make any people rebellious. But there's one thing that should always be kept in mind: the God who elects won't be denied. So there's no alternative, even in disaster, to saying, "All this we will do."
So any humane modern reader -- who is not necessarily more humane than biblical characters or anyone else from the past -- will have to empathize with Hagar. She had no say in her destiny, being a slave woman.She did what she was commanded to do: she produced a male heir. So far as we know, she brought him up faithfully. But she gets turned out into the desert, abandoned -- and those who abandon her are not verbally chastised in the telling. In dealing with this with a congregation I would neither try to gloss over it and try to explain it away -- smart people will spot the story and want to confront its meanings -- nor use it to show condescendingly how humane we are not by contrast. Our century is more violent than Abraham's and Sarah's was, and we are not innocents.
Similarly, I wish I could show Jesus blessing the nuclear family in all its cozy potential. Instead we have to stand there and hear Matthew's version of what Jesus has to say about loyalty. It's easy to say that family loyalty and kingdom loyalty do not clash. But they do. Bottom line: Romans 6 has all the gospel we get or need today. Beyond that, we hear severe words, which have their place in the overall economy of scripture and lectionary.
Grist For The Mill
Genesis 21:8-21
This is one of the least likable stories in the scriptures. For many it ranks just this side of the story in which Jephthah sacrifices his daughter because he vowed to sacrifice the first person he met after a victory, or the incident where Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son. Given the hundreds of pages untouched by lectionary committees, why, one asks, did they not skip this one? Certainly, it receives enough attention these years. One hears many sermons on Hagar by those who see patriarchalism all over Judaism and Christianity and its texts as well as by those who have pity for the innocent slave woman, as the biblical heroine Sarah did not.
There it is, however, and it will be read, and must be coped with. It's not a story one should lightly explain away: that Sarah and Abraham had clay feet, or that Sarah had green eyes and Abraham no sense of guts or fairness has to go into the mix we call "biblical realism." In short: those big people back then were little. The heroic were cowardly. The noble were envious. Yet God would make something out of their lives and stories.
Of course, the story is here not just to diminish Sarah and Abraham in our eyes. We live in an age in which we grow by cutting all ancestors down to size. Get close to anyone and you will find reasons, big reasons, to do the cutting. The story is here, however, also to show what God does in the face of personal pettiness, disasters, and, in the case of Hagar and Ishmael, of endurance. Muslims, who do not see themselves as heirs of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are Abraham's children through their tracing to him via Ishmael. "God was with the boy," and he grew and became a father and the family of Abraham, the flawed family of faith, grew.
Romans 6:1b-11
This Sunday, which did not get off to a good start (for non-Muslim readers) through the Genesis passage, gets redeemed through this one from Romans. On the one hand it implies jealous Sarah and skullduggerously semi-humane Abraham and all the other weak people, in other words, all the other people, who have ever lived. So much was made of the fact that God forgives that, Paul worries, some may think sinning is a good idea and they need more of it. Not at all. Not because their logic is wrong, but because their personal history is skewed.
They keep thinking that they are on their own; that it is up to them to choose to be weak or strong; weaker or stronger. No: they belong to someone else. They have lost their sense of who they are because they remember who they were. Who they are? They are new people, who no longer are slaves to sin. They were under the dominion of death, but they are no longer.
Paul writes in reference to the act of being buried with Christ Jesus in baptism. Different traditions will handle this differently, depending upon their mode of baptism, the age of the baptizee, the meanings they associate with it. But no matter how they interpret or perform baptisms, they cannot escape -- and who would want to? -- the scripturally emphatic idea that something happens in it to remake the individual, so that in some sense death is already behind them.
This is a liberating notion that merits development in any sermon. "The life he lives, he lives to God," says Paul of such a woman or man. Thinking of oneself as no longer "dead to sin" but "alive to God in Christ Jesus" is liberating, enabling. Not bad for self-esteem, either.
Matthew 10:24-39
With that wonderful Romans passage serving as the second lesson, we move now to a portion of the Gospels that is as hard to take as the Old Testament or first reading about Hagar being put out in the desert.
What business did a lectionary committee have going for this set of sayings for Jesus? We can take such a set in the context of the whole Gospel story. We have what has been called a "memory-impression" of Jesus that allows for apparently contradictory elements to be included. But what if we hear only this, today, or if someone is new to the Jesus story?
After all, these are supposed to be "family values" years, in which we are to model modern families in the light of biblical ones. So we get out concordances and start looking for pro-family comment by Jesus. It's hard to find. He had the kingdom, not the family, in mind. So we nonviolent sorts here meet a Jesus who sternly announces that he has "not come to bring peace, but a sword." He sets a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
Sometimes these relations are sufficiently Oepidal or vicious that they need no "setting" of one against another. But Jesus wants nothing to be taken for granted and nothing mistaken. Celebrators of the family often have trouble ranking "their Lord" higher than "the family" on their loyalty scales. Jesus is so taken up with the kingdom of God and his cross that he has little or no room for the earthly attachments most of us need or seek. There is always a danger that one might love relatives more than one loves the cross, or Jesus, or the love of God. It's hard to wring much gospel from as severe a text as this. Let it be "sternness" time, rescued by a little word about sparrows.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Exodus 19:2-8a (Lutheran text)
Election is no privilege; it is a calling. Maybe if Israel had known what it involved, the people wouldn't have stood there so devoutly saying, "All this we will do." Rather, like the church nowadays, they would have tried to keep God at a safe distance by denying election altogether.
To this point in the exodus, God's relationship has been promising. Speaking to Moses from the mountaintop, God can refer to a dramatic deliverance: the Egyptians have been left behind, swamped with blood and seawater; the children of Jacob have been carried out of bondage as though they were on wings, soaring above everything.
But the thrice-repeated "wilderness" in the early verses of the lesson should have an ominous ring. For the people are now going to learn that there is another dimension to God's choice. "... The whole earth is mine ...," God says, "but you shall be for me a priestly people and a holy nation" (vv. 5-6).
Reiterating the Creator's claim to the whole creation, God strips out any basis for turning election into national endorsement. Egypt's blood may be on the floor; the Canaanites' property rights may be in jeopardy. But God's claim on these foreigners by creation still holds, even as Israel benefits from the dispossession. God's choice may imply but certainly doesn't require the rejection of the other nations.
More, election brings with it a vocation. Israel is chosen precisely for the others, to serve as God's witnesses, bearing the word to the nations. This is their holiness -- not in personal or national moral character, but in their conformity to the purpose for which God has set them apart.
Hearing such a word in the wilderness, Israel will learn even more of what's involved in God's election before they come out the other side. For the God who has chosen them, who has refused to let promise be reduced to endorsement, who will lead them through the desert for the sake of other nations of the earth, will turn out to be pretty tough to deal with.
That's the problem, of course: God keeps insisting on acting like God, confounding every expectation. So a nation of runaway slaves, just tasting their liberties, is selected for the redemption of the earth; by the time they get done repeating the word "wilderness," they will have had forty years of it, leaving a generation's worth of graves behind them; and when they arrive, Moses, who got to look God in the face, will get hardly more than a glimpse of the holy land before he himself is put under.
It's enough to make any people rebellious. But there's one thing that should always be kept in mind: the God who elects won't be denied. So there's no alternative, even in disaster, to saying, "All this we will do."
