Timing
Commentary
After the bombing of a building in Oklahoma City, an earthquake or a department store implosion in Japan, rescuers hurry. They do so to alleviate the pain of the survivors, to certify the hopes and fears of those who are related to victims of the disaster, and ...
And to get water to anyone who is alive. When reporters look back on rescue operations, they give most stress to those victims who have somehow "miraculously" lived off only the few drops of water that trickled toward them after a rainstorm or from a broken pipe. Food is fine, but one can go for days without food. Water is something one needs every few hours.
Deny water, and you deny life. Provide water, and you provide possibilities for life. Wait too long and it does no good. Bring it too soon and too abundantly and it will go undrunk, or it will drown the one for whom it is intended. There has to be a right time for the water, in the right amount.
Timing is not everything, but it is very much. The timings point to the character of God, the unseen but felt presence in all these cases. First comes a story of God's people in the desert. They were complaining, which is one good way to alienate. Yet God acted. They were sinning and weak, yet God acted. The woman at the well did not understand much of what was going on when a man she did not know questioned her and begged water of her.
She was ministered to before she knew very much at all about the one who was thirsty. While she was yet half-ignorant, God visited her. She got more than she bargained for when the conversation started. She got that "more" and thus served as a stand-in for those of us who, today, do not always catch on to everything, but among whom God is acting, at the right moment.
Grist For The Mill
Exodus 17:1-7
Has this been your experience? You worry about how modern congregations will handle stories about miracles like this one, in which water comes forth from a rock in the desert. After hedging all your bets and watching all the commentary footnotes -- the kind that tell us that water was under the Sinai desert -- you timidly talk about the water from the rock, only to find that almost no one "out there" has a problem with that. Get on with it, they seem to say. Let Exodus make its point.
The point of this text is not to get us to say, "Ah! Isn't God amazing when it is time to play tricks or quiet dissenters? Isn't it amazing that the creator of the universe has a bag of such tricks up the divine sleeve?"
Much more promise is there for the preacher who can get contemporary congregations to reexamine their own lives against the pattern of the wanderers in the wilderness. They looked back to good old days, even if those were days of slavery; at least they had something to drink. They were thirsty; what is worse than being parched? Dryness kills before hunger does -- and these dry ones were in the desert in a dried-up oasis. They quarreled with Moses, who led them, and with God, who stood behind Moses. They felt that they had entitlements, and protested the absence of these now.
They get Moses to join the kvetchers, which is the good Yiddish word for the complainers. They wanted water to live; he wanted answers from God to survive. Together they tested the Lord: "Is the Lord among us or not?" That question remains live among the wandering band of believers in the desert of modernity. Hit all the rocks that we will, we will not produce water. But listen carefully, and we shall? The voice of a sustaining God will be heard.
Romans 5:1-11
Those who pick lectionary texts do not simply draw straws or flip coins; they look for complementary readings that reinforce each other or help the listener reexamine her characteristic ways of thinking. While Romans does not pick up on Exodus here, the letter from Paul does pick up on the way life is lived, questions are asked, and hopes get expressed.
So it will be that someone who has just heard Israel put God to the test and who remembers Israel complaining will still have in mind that God acted positively. God gave water even though their murmuring about its absence was hardly a winning gesture. God kept the people alive to fulfill divine purposes when it would have been easier to abandon them.
Timing is everything. While they complained, God acted. In Paul's time, while they were still sinners, God took action on their behalf. That word had to be startling then and, if we can let it work on the deeper and fresher layers of the mind, it remains startling. But there it is: while we were still weak, Christ died for the ungodly. While we were yet sinners, again, Christ died -- for us. While we were still enemies, we were reconciled.
The hardest thing about preaching now, as it was about writing when Paul wrote or leading when Moses led, is to help create a circumstance in which the presence of God is known, felt, and recognized. If God is revealed as the one who wants and who creates peace, all the rest follows. If God is revealed as the spoiler, the lawgiver who wants revenge, nothing follows. What follows belief in the plan and plot of God, this kind of God, is the reconciling, the peace that was at issue all along, that is the heart's desire now. A congregation brings thirst: the word refreshes.
John 4:5-42
One can lose the plot of this Sunday in 50 creative ways. The role of women in the gospels, and their relations to Jesus, has to be alluring in our own time. The debate over where God is to be worshipped, and how worship is portable -- not depending upon a temple, a mountain -- fascinates. The punch line about how people believed because they had "heard for themselves" has a message for those who would witness.
Of all the choices that one long passage can offer, the one that best fits the theme of the day is the one that concentrates further on the supplying of water to the parched. John sets the scene at a well, which naturally evokes the metaphors that have to do with water. The woman brings her jar, wishing she did not have to work her way to the well again, and Jesus talks about more than how to fill it.
Water in this gospel's metaphoric use gets translated as the rich, full, God-sustained life. Jesus is as tired as the woman, as weary of travel as she is of drawing water. He engages in wordplay and she, though not catching on, furthers the conversation. Jesus is "living water" and she thinks he is talking about "running water." Fine.
Suddenly, the terms of the conversation change. Here as always Jesus is described turning everything into surprising form and shape so the one who hears the word can never think about old realities in old ways. They become new realities: Jesus, the
thirsty one, says he has living water. The woman, uncomprehending or half-comprehending, does just enough to further the talk. That gives Jesus the occasion to raise issues about her life and offer better ways. That is part of the living water that comes with his presence also now.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Isaiah 42:14-21 (Lutheran text)
For all of the politically correct stereotypes involving God language, it is seldom noticed that almost invariably, the Scriptures' use of female metaphors radicalizes both promise and threat. She-bears, the dance of the vindicated childless, an importunate widow pounding a judge out of bed -- the women of Scripture are not about to be denied, and neither is the God who takes them up in comparison.
Isaiah reports out another such parallel, just as ruthless. When hospitals first took over from midwives, they sedated expectant mothers and kept fathers out of the way and ignorant until after the fact. Now having invaded the delivery rooms, dads have discovered one possible reason for the doctors' earlier eagerness for anesthesia: there is nothing as awesomely intent, emotionally overdriven or powerful as a woman bearing down in the last stages of labor. For Isaiah, in the words of the prophecy for God as well, it is the only human point of similarity to such love-driven intensity.
After some roaring against local geography in verse 15 (delivering women have been known to cuss virtually anything in sight), God's love breaks out first. It is as possessive as a mother's hand clasped over a visually challenged child's arm, as powerful as an earth mover carving out roadbed. If such images aren't sufficient to further fill out the original, there is a promissory exclamation point: "These are the things I will do,
and I will not forsake them" (16b).
There is threat hidden in such love and in the remainder of the text it surfaces. The transparently idolatrous get it first; those who entrust themselves to handmade gods. But in the rationality of a woman in delivery or a God intent on reclaiming the lost, they are just the beginning: with love and rage rolling over one another, God descends on the beloved, "my servant," "my messenger," "my dedicated one."
It is the pious that he, maybe more appropriately but much worse she, is after: those special ones whose idolatry is not so evident. In their preoccupation with personal devotion, self-sacrifice and genuine commitment, they have gone blind and deaf on themselves. God won't have it. Instead, God will press home the witness, "magnifying" it to the point where dulled senses will be overwhelmed and a new road will open.
Luther's Small Catechism uses the word "fear" along with love and trust to describe faith's relation with God. It is texts like this one that show the basis of it. The love of God is no passive acceptance, a nonchalant indiscriminateness. Rather, when the one who raised Jesus from the dead breaks loose with it, the intensity spills over into ferocity: "... Now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant."
And to get water to anyone who is alive. When reporters look back on rescue operations, they give most stress to those victims who have somehow "miraculously" lived off only the few drops of water that trickled toward them after a rainstorm or from a broken pipe. Food is fine, but one can go for days without food. Water is something one needs every few hours.
Deny water, and you deny life. Provide water, and you provide possibilities for life. Wait too long and it does no good. Bring it too soon and too abundantly and it will go undrunk, or it will drown the one for whom it is intended. There has to be a right time for the water, in the right amount.
Timing is not everything, but it is very much. The timings point to the character of God, the unseen but felt presence in all these cases. First comes a story of God's people in the desert. They were complaining, which is one good way to alienate. Yet God acted. They were sinning and weak, yet God acted. The woman at the well did not understand much of what was going on when a man she did not know questioned her and begged water of her.
She was ministered to before she knew very much at all about the one who was thirsty. While she was yet half-ignorant, God visited her. She got more than she bargained for when the conversation started. She got that "more" and thus served as a stand-in for those of us who, today, do not always catch on to everything, but among whom God is acting, at the right moment.
Grist For The Mill
Exodus 17:1-7
Has this been your experience? You worry about how modern congregations will handle stories about miracles like this one, in which water comes forth from a rock in the desert. After hedging all your bets and watching all the commentary footnotes -- the kind that tell us that water was under the Sinai desert -- you timidly talk about the water from the rock, only to find that almost no one "out there" has a problem with that. Get on with it, they seem to say. Let Exodus make its point.
The point of this text is not to get us to say, "Ah! Isn't God amazing when it is time to play tricks or quiet dissenters? Isn't it amazing that the creator of the universe has a bag of such tricks up the divine sleeve?"
Much more promise is there for the preacher who can get contemporary congregations to reexamine their own lives against the pattern of the wanderers in the wilderness. They looked back to good old days, even if those were days of slavery; at least they had something to drink. They were thirsty; what is worse than being parched? Dryness kills before hunger does -- and these dry ones were in the desert in a dried-up oasis. They quarreled with Moses, who led them, and with God, who stood behind Moses. They felt that they had entitlements, and protested the absence of these now.
They get Moses to join the kvetchers, which is the good Yiddish word for the complainers. They wanted water to live; he wanted answers from God to survive. Together they tested the Lord: "Is the Lord among us or not?" That question remains live among the wandering band of believers in the desert of modernity. Hit all the rocks that we will, we will not produce water. But listen carefully, and we shall? The voice of a sustaining God will be heard.
Romans 5:1-11
Those who pick lectionary texts do not simply draw straws or flip coins; they look for complementary readings that reinforce each other or help the listener reexamine her characteristic ways of thinking. While Romans does not pick up on Exodus here, the letter from Paul does pick up on the way life is lived, questions are asked, and hopes get expressed.
So it will be that someone who has just heard Israel put God to the test and who remembers Israel complaining will still have in mind that God acted positively. God gave water even though their murmuring about its absence was hardly a winning gesture. God kept the people alive to fulfill divine purposes when it would have been easier to abandon them.
Timing is everything. While they complained, God acted. In Paul's time, while they were still sinners, God took action on their behalf. That word had to be startling then and, if we can let it work on the deeper and fresher layers of the mind, it remains startling. But there it is: while we were still weak, Christ died for the ungodly. While we were yet sinners, again, Christ died -- for us. While we were still enemies, we were reconciled.
The hardest thing about preaching now, as it was about writing when Paul wrote or leading when Moses led, is to help create a circumstance in which the presence of God is known, felt, and recognized. If God is revealed as the one who wants and who creates peace, all the rest follows. If God is revealed as the spoiler, the lawgiver who wants revenge, nothing follows. What follows belief in the plan and plot of God, this kind of God, is the reconciling, the peace that was at issue all along, that is the heart's desire now. A congregation brings thirst: the word refreshes.
John 4:5-42
One can lose the plot of this Sunday in 50 creative ways. The role of women in the gospels, and their relations to Jesus, has to be alluring in our own time. The debate over where God is to be worshipped, and how worship is portable -- not depending upon a temple, a mountain -- fascinates. The punch line about how people believed because they had "heard for themselves" has a message for those who would witness.
Of all the choices that one long passage can offer, the one that best fits the theme of the day is the one that concentrates further on the supplying of water to the parched. John sets the scene at a well, which naturally evokes the metaphors that have to do with water. The woman brings her jar, wishing she did not have to work her way to the well again, and Jesus talks about more than how to fill it.
Water in this gospel's metaphoric use gets translated as the rich, full, God-sustained life. Jesus is as tired as the woman, as weary of travel as she is of drawing water. He engages in wordplay and she, though not catching on, furthers the conversation. Jesus is "living water" and she thinks he is talking about "running water." Fine.
Suddenly, the terms of the conversation change. Here as always Jesus is described turning everything into surprising form and shape so the one who hears the word can never think about old realities in old ways. They become new realities: Jesus, the
thirsty one, says he has living water. The woman, uncomprehending or half-comprehending, does just enough to further the talk. That gives Jesus the occasion to raise issues about her life and offer better ways. That is part of the living water that comes with his presence also now.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Isaiah 42:14-21 (Lutheran text)
For all of the politically correct stereotypes involving God language, it is seldom noticed that almost invariably, the Scriptures' use of female metaphors radicalizes both promise and threat. She-bears, the dance of the vindicated childless, an importunate widow pounding a judge out of bed -- the women of Scripture are not about to be denied, and neither is the God who takes them up in comparison.
Isaiah reports out another such parallel, just as ruthless. When hospitals first took over from midwives, they sedated expectant mothers and kept fathers out of the way and ignorant until after the fact. Now having invaded the delivery rooms, dads have discovered one possible reason for the doctors' earlier eagerness for anesthesia: there is nothing as awesomely intent, emotionally overdriven or powerful as a woman bearing down in the last stages of labor. For Isaiah, in the words of the prophecy for God as well, it is the only human point of similarity to such love-driven intensity.
After some roaring against local geography in verse 15 (delivering women have been known to cuss virtually anything in sight), God's love breaks out first. It is as possessive as a mother's hand clasped over a visually challenged child's arm, as powerful as an earth mover carving out roadbed. If such images aren't sufficient to further fill out the original, there is a promissory exclamation point: "These are the things I will do,
and I will not forsake them" (16b).
There is threat hidden in such love and in the remainder of the text it surfaces. The transparently idolatrous get it first; those who entrust themselves to handmade gods. But in the rationality of a woman in delivery or a God intent on reclaiming the lost, they are just the beginning: with love and rage rolling over one another, God descends on the beloved, "my servant," "my messenger," "my dedicated one."
It is the pious that he, maybe more appropriately but much worse she, is after: those special ones whose idolatry is not so evident. In their preoccupation with personal devotion, self-sacrifice and genuine commitment, they have gone blind and deaf on themselves. God won't have it. Instead, God will press home the witness, "magnifying" it to the point where dulled senses will be overwhelmed and a new road will open.
Luther's Small Catechism uses the word "fear" along with love and trust to describe faith's relation with God. It is texts like this one that show the basis of it. The love of God is no passive acceptance, a nonchalant indiscriminateness. Rather, when the one who raised Jesus from the dead breaks loose with it, the intensity spills over into ferocity: "... Now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant."
