Under the circumstances
Commentary
As I was driving home from the office the other day, I was waiting at a traffic light downtown, when I saw one of my parishioners cross the street in front of me. It's still my first year in my present appointment, and it occurred to me that I had never seen him outside of church. He is in church quite faithfully, but I had never seen him outside of that context. The sight of him in more casual clothes ... chewing gum ... and coming out of a store reminded me of a ridiculously simple fact: He has a life outside of that pew where I am accustomed to seeing him each Sunday morning.
That our people have lives outside of church, of course, is no great revelation. It may be an important reminder to some of us, however, since the church context is such a huge percentage of our lives.
I wondered for a moment what last Sunday's sermon could mean to that man as he walked down the street, shopping and chewing gum. And what would this coming Sunday's sermon mean to him?
I do not know all the circumstances of all the people in my congregation. I can't. But I am well served to remember that they have all sorts of circumstances -- some quite ordinary, even mundane; and some extraordinary, either by reason of great difficulties or great blessings. And they come on Sunday mornings needing, in part, a faith that applies to all the circumstances of their lives.
The Exodus episode and the words from Paul to the Philippians combine to provide wisdom and insight for people who need faith under the circumstances.
Exodus 32:1-14
What's taking so long? This is the tortured question that we ask time and again, perhaps almost every day. When we're stuck in traffic, when we're waiting for a response from someone by phone or by e-mail, when we're eager for some order to be delivered, when we're standing impatiently in a line that's not moving, we ask, "What's taking so long?"
The Israelites, camped at the base of Mount Sinai, looked up at the mountain each day for weeks. Their eyes strained to see some sign of Moses coming down, returning from his rendezvous with God. Day after day passed with no sign of Moses, and the people became worried and impatient. What's taking him so long?
The experience of waiting presents us with a test of character. What will we do while we wait? Waiting suggests that circumstances are, for the present, out of our control. We don't like that. What will we do about it?
I remember numbers of occasions when my dad would pick me up from school. He would almost always arrive at the school before I got out of the building, and so he would have to wait for me. If he had nursed impatience within himself, then he might have nervously drummed his fingers, repeatedly checked his watch, and allowed a mounting urgency to grow inside. Under those circumstances, I would almost certainly have been greeted by that impatient protest that masquerades as a question: "What took you so long?"
Instead, however, my dad would always have in the car with him something to read and a pad to write on. And so he would redeem the time with work, with reading, and with correspondence, making it almost a matter of indifference to him whether he waited for me two minutes or twenty.
So the question of character is: What do we do while we wait? Do we grumble and complain? Does our impatience give birth to rudeness? Do we doubt and despair?
Jesus, anticipating the wait his followers would experience until his second coming, told parables about servants whose master was away for an indefinite time. How those servants were judged in the end was a function of what they did while they waited.
What the Israelites did while they waited for Moses reflects badly on them.
Perhaps you've been stuck in the kind of traffic jam that prompts you to go ahead and shift your car into park. I have. And I've concluded that there's no point in my sitting here with my foot on the break and my engine running, and so I've shifted and turned off the car.
That represents a moment of resignation that the Israelites were loath to reach. They did not want to be parked indefinitely out there in the wilderness. They had children and flocks to worry about. The resources seemed limited. Their destination was known, but not familiar, and the trip forward was daunting, particularly without Moses' leadership. And so, unable to move forward, and unwilling to stay parked, the people decide to shift into reverse -- into idolatry and debauchery.
The human dependence on a human agent and representative in our relationship to God is manifested here at Sinai. It is ostensibly Moses' disappearance that concerns the people, yet their response is to make new gods for themselves (see 32:4). Is Moses' absence the same as God's? Have they no faith in or relationship with God apart from Moses as the mediator?
God says of the people, "they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them." I am enough of a sports fan that "quick" sounds mostly like a virtue to me. But it depends, doesn't it, on what we are quick to do?
It is a charming thing to be quick-witted. It is not so pleasant, however, to be quick-tempered. We are grateful for people who are quick to respond, but we're burdened by folks who are quick to judge. In the case of the Israelites in the wilderness, they were quick to turn aside. What is my quickness? What are you and I quick to do?
The conclusion of this passage features a dramatic instance of human intercession and God changing his mind. In my experience, people are often troubled by this story, for they are uneasy with the thought of God changing his mind -- or, worse yet, the thought of a human being changing God's mind.
In fact, of course, we are quite impossible to please on this subject. If there is no changing God's mind, then we chaff against the impression that everything is pre-determined, and we wonder about the point and purpose of prayer. On the other hand, when presented with this powerful illustration of the point and purpose of prayer, we resist the prospect.
Yet, here is this thematic truth, like it or not. The God who creates a world and then leaves us in charge of it; the God who entrusts the saving message of his love to human messengers; that same God invites our intercession and our persistence. And so, from Abraham on behalf of the unnumbered righteous in Sodom (Genesis 18:16-33) to the ever-hopeful gardener (Luke 13:6-9), from the Canaanite woman who would not take, "No," for an answer (Matthew 15:21-28) to Moses in our passage, our God invites, welcomes, and responds to our persevering faith and to our dogged prayers.
Philippians 4:1-9
One of the standard tricks of the trade for mothers whose children like to make ugly faces is to offer this warning: "Be careful! Your face might freeze like that!" In the short term, of course, the superstition is unfounded. Over the long haul, however, I expect the warning has its wisdom. We have all known people whose eyes and lines reflect years of either smiling or frowning, or bitterness or beatitude.
Whenever I read this passage from Paul's letter to the Philippians, I am reminded of that old maternal warning. We don't know what was going on between Euodia and Syntyche there in the church at Philippi. We don't even know anything about who they were. But we surmise from Paul's brief reference that there was some quarrel between them.
You could probably identify two people in your church just now who are separated by some disagreement. It is unfortunate, to be sure, but it is not uncommon. And yet, the names of these two otherwise unknown women of first-century Philippi are still known and read around the globe 2,000 years later. And like the lovers frozen in mid-flirtation in Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn, so Euodia and Syntyche are frozen in mid-quarrel. It's as though history caught them making an ugly face, and their faces did, indeed, freeze like that.
That Paul exhorts those two women personally in the midst of his letter to the congregation as a whole suggests something about Paul's emphasis on unity. We certainly see evidence of that priority in other letters (as in 1 Corinthians 1:10-13; Ephesians 4:1-16; Titus 3:10), and it is particularly striking here. We might be inclined to shrug off a two-person dispute. What can it hurt? Besides, aren't such things inevitable when dealing with human beings? Paul maintains a higher view of the body of Christ, however, and higher hopes for the church. As William Barclay observes, "He thought no effort too great to maintain the peace of the church. A quarreling church is no church at all, for it is one from which Christ has been shut out. No man can be at peace with God and at variance with his fellow-man."
Later in the passage we find one of the most familiar phrases from the entire Pauline corpus, as well as one of the emblem statements of this particular letter: "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice."
If this were scribbled on a postcard from the Bahamas where Paul was lounging on a beach, his words might seem shallow and unconvincing. But Paul wrote to the Philippians from prison, and that context makes his exhortation to rejoice -- and his own manifest joy -- quite remarkable. We cannot easily dismiss Paul's words because of our own difficulties when we see the circumstances from which he wrote and in which he rejoiced.
"Rejoice," which appears twice in the verse, is rendered as a plural imperative in the original Greek. The word is a healthy reminder that rejoicing is a verb, not merely an emotion. It is something we do; not necessarily something we feel. And Paul commands the people of Philippi to do it.
That's a strong word for us in our day and in our circumstances. It is neither a pale "cheer up" nor a heartless "get over it." Rejoicing is something you and I can do. I can choose to do it just now as surely as I can choose to blink or snap or walk. And Paul urges me to do it, and to do it always, at all times.
Matthew 22:1-14
Jesus introduces this parable about a wedding banquet with a familiar introduction. As "once upon a time" is to children's fables, so "the kingdom of heaven is like" is to Jesus' parables. They are not all explicitly parables of the kingdom, but the kingdom is clearly a prevailing theme.
This particular parable offers a strange mix of moods.
On the one hand, there is the festive context: a wedding banquet. And it is not any ordinary celebration, for this is no less than the banquet being given by the king for his own son on the occasion of the son's wedding. This is big stuff: regal and opulent, joyful and personal.
On the other hand, the festive quality of the parable seems somewhat diminished by the recurring judgment theme. This king does not just send out invitations; he also sends out his troops. He seems to welcome all comers, but then he violently evicts one in the end.
It's a strange mix of moods, but one that is consistent with our understanding of the eschaton. Just as "the day of the Lord" had two sides to it in Amos' day (see Amos 5:18-20), so the New Testament's picture of the end of time features a mixture of both judgment and joy.
Unlike the people of Jesus' day, we in the United States do not live in a context of kings and princes. We have witnessed some royal weddings in our time, however, and so we have some sense for the fanfare of the occasion. Even the weddings of ordinary people were big events in their communities in that day. And so it would no doubt have been a great honor and privilege to be invited to attend the wedding of the king's son. Accordingly, the way that the invited guests decline the big, special event -- probably in favor of much lesser fare (see v. 5, and, in Luke's version of the parable, 14:18-20) -- seems ridiculous to us. And yet, truth be told, every time we decline any invitation from God, it is a ridiculous preference for lesser fare. We have, as Charles Wesley sings it, "sold for naught (our) heritage above."
It is noteworthy -- and sobering -- that among those who missed the great banquet were folks who did not choose bad places, just ordinary ones. Jesus said that one went to his farm and another to his business. Those are reasonable destinations, plausible priorities. Yet when they interfere with the king's invitation, suddenly they change from neutral to negative. The old adage says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And we can easily see why if that is the road we sometimes take just to get to our farms and our businesses.
At the end of the parable, Jesus describes the unceremonious dismissal of one of the attendees. Earlier, the invited guests had "made light of it and went away." And now, at the end, one man who did come "was not wearing a wedding robe." Thus we discover that there is more than one way to take lightly the invitation of God. Just as declining his invitation is an unworthy response, it is also possible to accept his invitation unworthily.
Application
The circumstances were unfavorable for the people of our passage from Exodus. They were out in the middle of nowhere -- some distance from the place they had involuntarily called home for the past four centuries, and a still greater distance from the foreign land that was their final destination. They were in the wilderness, with supplies that seemed to be no match for demands. And their leader -- the one whom God had used to bring them out of Egypt, and whom God was presumably going to use to lead them to the promised land -- was missing in action.
What do you do under such circumstances?
Paul, too, wrote from unfavorable circumstances. He was in prison, no doubt unjustly, and probably after having been treated cruelly. Also, his future must have seemed uncertain. He was often misunderstood by some of his own Christian brethren, he met with mounting Jewish opposition almost everywhere he went, and even the civil authorities in certain places were intolerant of him, his work, and his influence.
What do you do under such circumstances?
The responses of Paul in prison and the Israelites in the wilderness could not be more different.
The children of Israel despaired in the midst of their circumstances, and they looked for help and for hope in improper places. The Apostle Paul wrote the "joyful epistle." The Israelites were "quick to turn aside." Paul said, "Stand firm in the Lord." The Israelites worried about Moses, about food, about water. Paul wrote, "Do not worry about anything." The Israelites complained. Paul rejoiced.
Side by side, the Israelites and the apostle present us with examples of how we might respond under the circumstances of our lives. We might despair and complain, be filled with worry, and be tempted to turn aside from the truth and the righteousness that we have known. Or we may stand firm, trust and rejoice in the Lord, and be assured that "the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."
An Alternative Application
Philippians 4:1-9. Among the many compelling scenes in the 1975 movie, Jaws, there is a late-night episode in which two characters, Hooper and Brody, slice open the carcass of a shark to discover what he has eaten recently. The question at hand is whether he is the shark that recently killed two victims there at Amity, but the graphic depiction gives us a broader glimpse into the consumption of a shark, including a Louisiana license plate. With both its suspense and its grim realism, the scene invites the audience to ponder the feeding habits of a shark.
What if it were possible for us to perform such an exploration of the human mind? What if there was something we could open, and all that our mind has consumed in the past week would spill out on the floor for all to see? What kind of mental diet would we see?
After this introduction, the sermon would have two major sections. First, some consideration of the unwholesome stuff that may fill our minds: worries and anger, bitterness and grudges, ambition and lust, unkind judgments and worthless trivialities. And then, having explored and examined some of what may presently fill our minds, we can turn to Paul's "think about these things" list.
The list deserves exposition at three levels. First, consideration of what these several words -- true, honorable, commendable, just, pure, pleasing, excellent, worthy of praise -- mean. Second, some cheerful imagining of what difference it would make in a life if our mental diet changed from worries, grudges, and trivialities to things honorable, pure, and worthy of praise. And, third, a congregation might benefit from a concrete proposal -- for example, to focus on a different word (emphasis) in Paul's list each day of the coming week as a way of training our minds.
Finally, it should be noted that Paul's list stands in stark contrast to the fare that is offered on television and in so many, many magazines. His list may also be quite far removed from the thoughts that come naturally to us, or that we cultivate as a matter of habit. If we want our minds to be filled with these things, therefore, we may have to feed in different waters.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23
As is sometimes the case with psalms that have been edited for the lectionary, in this one the most important verse is one that is omitted from this week's selection. Verse 44 reads, "Nevertheless he regarded their distress when he heard their cry." The psalmist has just finished a lengthy recounting of all the ways Israel broke covenant with the Lord in the wilderness and in the people's early days in the promised land. But -- nevertheless. Nevertheless, the Lord remained faithful, and continues to be faithful today.
Today's selection ends with Moses standing in the breach, physically protecting the people from the wrath of God (v. 23). Without the good news of verse 44, the reading ends on a discouraging note, and the last thing we hear of the Lord has to do with deadly wrath. Having read verse 44, however, we know that the Lord has another quality besides wrath: mercy.
The offense of the people, however, is real. It is idolatry. Idolatry is exceedingly difficult to translate into the modern idiom. Our culture is decidedly soft on idolatry. Our democratic tradition of freedom of religion leads us to be generally tolerant of our neighbors' objects of worship: be they the devotional practices of other world religions, or the expensive toy sitting in the driveway. Yet from the standpoint of the Old Testament, idolatry is serious business.
It doesn't help that the mental image of idolatry many of us carry around is something like the role Edward G. Robinson played in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille movie, The Ten Commandments. In that Hollywood classic, the colorful Robinson trades his gangster's fedora for a burnoose. He's playing Dathan -- a minor character in the Old Testament. Good ol' Cecil B. whisks Dathan up into a composite bad guy, the symbol of everything that's wrong with the wandering Hebrews: short memory, chronic complaining, and yearning for the fleshpots of Egypt. In the film, Dathan single-handedly incites the crowd to demand of Aaron a golden calf. Then he leads the unruly mob in a frenzied, bangle-jangling dance. It's 1950s Hollywood's idea of biblical decadence -- pretty tame by today's standards, but back then it must have seemed like some wild party.
There's only one problem with DeMille's cinematic version of the golden calf story: any idiot watching the film can tell the good guys from the bad guys. Edward G. Robinson is so deliciously smarmy, and the worship of the golden calf so much like the mother of all drunken frat parties that anybody watching that scene can say with absolute confidence "I would never be so stupid!"
Yet idolatry is rarely so obvious. John Calvin calls the human race "a perpetual factory of idols," and he's not referring to golden statues of livestock. Someone once said, "idolatry is worshiping anything that ought to be used, and using anything that ought to be worshiped." Plenty of things fit that definition: things that are real, bona fide temptations for us twenty-first-century Christians.
We need the "nevertheless" of Psalm 106 as much as anyone.
That our people have lives outside of church, of course, is no great revelation. It may be an important reminder to some of us, however, since the church context is such a huge percentage of our lives.
I wondered for a moment what last Sunday's sermon could mean to that man as he walked down the street, shopping and chewing gum. And what would this coming Sunday's sermon mean to him?
I do not know all the circumstances of all the people in my congregation. I can't. But I am well served to remember that they have all sorts of circumstances -- some quite ordinary, even mundane; and some extraordinary, either by reason of great difficulties or great blessings. And they come on Sunday mornings needing, in part, a faith that applies to all the circumstances of their lives.
The Exodus episode and the words from Paul to the Philippians combine to provide wisdom and insight for people who need faith under the circumstances.
Exodus 32:1-14
What's taking so long? This is the tortured question that we ask time and again, perhaps almost every day. When we're stuck in traffic, when we're waiting for a response from someone by phone or by e-mail, when we're eager for some order to be delivered, when we're standing impatiently in a line that's not moving, we ask, "What's taking so long?"
The Israelites, camped at the base of Mount Sinai, looked up at the mountain each day for weeks. Their eyes strained to see some sign of Moses coming down, returning from his rendezvous with God. Day after day passed with no sign of Moses, and the people became worried and impatient. What's taking him so long?
The experience of waiting presents us with a test of character. What will we do while we wait? Waiting suggests that circumstances are, for the present, out of our control. We don't like that. What will we do about it?
I remember numbers of occasions when my dad would pick me up from school. He would almost always arrive at the school before I got out of the building, and so he would have to wait for me. If he had nursed impatience within himself, then he might have nervously drummed his fingers, repeatedly checked his watch, and allowed a mounting urgency to grow inside. Under those circumstances, I would almost certainly have been greeted by that impatient protest that masquerades as a question: "What took you so long?"
Instead, however, my dad would always have in the car with him something to read and a pad to write on. And so he would redeem the time with work, with reading, and with correspondence, making it almost a matter of indifference to him whether he waited for me two minutes or twenty.
So the question of character is: What do we do while we wait? Do we grumble and complain? Does our impatience give birth to rudeness? Do we doubt and despair?
Jesus, anticipating the wait his followers would experience until his second coming, told parables about servants whose master was away for an indefinite time. How those servants were judged in the end was a function of what they did while they waited.
What the Israelites did while they waited for Moses reflects badly on them.
Perhaps you've been stuck in the kind of traffic jam that prompts you to go ahead and shift your car into park. I have. And I've concluded that there's no point in my sitting here with my foot on the break and my engine running, and so I've shifted and turned off the car.
That represents a moment of resignation that the Israelites were loath to reach. They did not want to be parked indefinitely out there in the wilderness. They had children and flocks to worry about. The resources seemed limited. Their destination was known, but not familiar, and the trip forward was daunting, particularly without Moses' leadership. And so, unable to move forward, and unwilling to stay parked, the people decide to shift into reverse -- into idolatry and debauchery.
The human dependence on a human agent and representative in our relationship to God is manifested here at Sinai. It is ostensibly Moses' disappearance that concerns the people, yet their response is to make new gods for themselves (see 32:4). Is Moses' absence the same as God's? Have they no faith in or relationship with God apart from Moses as the mediator?
God says of the people, "they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them." I am enough of a sports fan that "quick" sounds mostly like a virtue to me. But it depends, doesn't it, on what we are quick to do?
It is a charming thing to be quick-witted. It is not so pleasant, however, to be quick-tempered. We are grateful for people who are quick to respond, but we're burdened by folks who are quick to judge. In the case of the Israelites in the wilderness, they were quick to turn aside. What is my quickness? What are you and I quick to do?
The conclusion of this passage features a dramatic instance of human intercession and God changing his mind. In my experience, people are often troubled by this story, for they are uneasy with the thought of God changing his mind -- or, worse yet, the thought of a human being changing God's mind.
In fact, of course, we are quite impossible to please on this subject. If there is no changing God's mind, then we chaff against the impression that everything is pre-determined, and we wonder about the point and purpose of prayer. On the other hand, when presented with this powerful illustration of the point and purpose of prayer, we resist the prospect.
Yet, here is this thematic truth, like it or not. The God who creates a world and then leaves us in charge of it; the God who entrusts the saving message of his love to human messengers; that same God invites our intercession and our persistence. And so, from Abraham on behalf of the unnumbered righteous in Sodom (Genesis 18:16-33) to the ever-hopeful gardener (Luke 13:6-9), from the Canaanite woman who would not take, "No," for an answer (Matthew 15:21-28) to Moses in our passage, our God invites, welcomes, and responds to our persevering faith and to our dogged prayers.
Philippians 4:1-9
One of the standard tricks of the trade for mothers whose children like to make ugly faces is to offer this warning: "Be careful! Your face might freeze like that!" In the short term, of course, the superstition is unfounded. Over the long haul, however, I expect the warning has its wisdom. We have all known people whose eyes and lines reflect years of either smiling or frowning, or bitterness or beatitude.
Whenever I read this passage from Paul's letter to the Philippians, I am reminded of that old maternal warning. We don't know what was going on between Euodia and Syntyche there in the church at Philippi. We don't even know anything about who they were. But we surmise from Paul's brief reference that there was some quarrel between them.
You could probably identify two people in your church just now who are separated by some disagreement. It is unfortunate, to be sure, but it is not uncommon. And yet, the names of these two otherwise unknown women of first-century Philippi are still known and read around the globe 2,000 years later. And like the lovers frozen in mid-flirtation in Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn, so Euodia and Syntyche are frozen in mid-quarrel. It's as though history caught them making an ugly face, and their faces did, indeed, freeze like that.
That Paul exhorts those two women personally in the midst of his letter to the congregation as a whole suggests something about Paul's emphasis on unity. We certainly see evidence of that priority in other letters (as in 1 Corinthians 1:10-13; Ephesians 4:1-16; Titus 3:10), and it is particularly striking here. We might be inclined to shrug off a two-person dispute. What can it hurt? Besides, aren't such things inevitable when dealing with human beings? Paul maintains a higher view of the body of Christ, however, and higher hopes for the church. As William Barclay observes, "He thought no effort too great to maintain the peace of the church. A quarreling church is no church at all, for it is one from which Christ has been shut out. No man can be at peace with God and at variance with his fellow-man."
Later in the passage we find one of the most familiar phrases from the entire Pauline corpus, as well as one of the emblem statements of this particular letter: "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice."
If this were scribbled on a postcard from the Bahamas where Paul was lounging on a beach, his words might seem shallow and unconvincing. But Paul wrote to the Philippians from prison, and that context makes his exhortation to rejoice -- and his own manifest joy -- quite remarkable. We cannot easily dismiss Paul's words because of our own difficulties when we see the circumstances from which he wrote and in which he rejoiced.
"Rejoice," which appears twice in the verse, is rendered as a plural imperative in the original Greek. The word is a healthy reminder that rejoicing is a verb, not merely an emotion. It is something we do; not necessarily something we feel. And Paul commands the people of Philippi to do it.
That's a strong word for us in our day and in our circumstances. It is neither a pale "cheer up" nor a heartless "get over it." Rejoicing is something you and I can do. I can choose to do it just now as surely as I can choose to blink or snap or walk. And Paul urges me to do it, and to do it always, at all times.
Matthew 22:1-14
Jesus introduces this parable about a wedding banquet with a familiar introduction. As "once upon a time" is to children's fables, so "the kingdom of heaven is like" is to Jesus' parables. They are not all explicitly parables of the kingdom, but the kingdom is clearly a prevailing theme.
This particular parable offers a strange mix of moods.
On the one hand, there is the festive context: a wedding banquet. And it is not any ordinary celebration, for this is no less than the banquet being given by the king for his own son on the occasion of the son's wedding. This is big stuff: regal and opulent, joyful and personal.
On the other hand, the festive quality of the parable seems somewhat diminished by the recurring judgment theme. This king does not just send out invitations; he also sends out his troops. He seems to welcome all comers, but then he violently evicts one in the end.
It's a strange mix of moods, but one that is consistent with our understanding of the eschaton. Just as "the day of the Lord" had two sides to it in Amos' day (see Amos 5:18-20), so the New Testament's picture of the end of time features a mixture of both judgment and joy.
Unlike the people of Jesus' day, we in the United States do not live in a context of kings and princes. We have witnessed some royal weddings in our time, however, and so we have some sense for the fanfare of the occasion. Even the weddings of ordinary people were big events in their communities in that day. And so it would no doubt have been a great honor and privilege to be invited to attend the wedding of the king's son. Accordingly, the way that the invited guests decline the big, special event -- probably in favor of much lesser fare (see v. 5, and, in Luke's version of the parable, 14:18-20) -- seems ridiculous to us. And yet, truth be told, every time we decline any invitation from God, it is a ridiculous preference for lesser fare. We have, as Charles Wesley sings it, "sold for naught (our) heritage above."
It is noteworthy -- and sobering -- that among those who missed the great banquet were folks who did not choose bad places, just ordinary ones. Jesus said that one went to his farm and another to his business. Those are reasonable destinations, plausible priorities. Yet when they interfere with the king's invitation, suddenly they change from neutral to negative. The old adage says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And we can easily see why if that is the road we sometimes take just to get to our farms and our businesses.
At the end of the parable, Jesus describes the unceremonious dismissal of one of the attendees. Earlier, the invited guests had "made light of it and went away." And now, at the end, one man who did come "was not wearing a wedding robe." Thus we discover that there is more than one way to take lightly the invitation of God. Just as declining his invitation is an unworthy response, it is also possible to accept his invitation unworthily.
Application
The circumstances were unfavorable for the people of our passage from Exodus. They were out in the middle of nowhere -- some distance from the place they had involuntarily called home for the past four centuries, and a still greater distance from the foreign land that was their final destination. They were in the wilderness, with supplies that seemed to be no match for demands. And their leader -- the one whom God had used to bring them out of Egypt, and whom God was presumably going to use to lead them to the promised land -- was missing in action.
What do you do under such circumstances?
Paul, too, wrote from unfavorable circumstances. He was in prison, no doubt unjustly, and probably after having been treated cruelly. Also, his future must have seemed uncertain. He was often misunderstood by some of his own Christian brethren, he met with mounting Jewish opposition almost everywhere he went, and even the civil authorities in certain places were intolerant of him, his work, and his influence.
What do you do under such circumstances?
The responses of Paul in prison and the Israelites in the wilderness could not be more different.
The children of Israel despaired in the midst of their circumstances, and they looked for help and for hope in improper places. The Apostle Paul wrote the "joyful epistle." The Israelites were "quick to turn aside." Paul said, "Stand firm in the Lord." The Israelites worried about Moses, about food, about water. Paul wrote, "Do not worry about anything." The Israelites complained. Paul rejoiced.
Side by side, the Israelites and the apostle present us with examples of how we might respond under the circumstances of our lives. We might despair and complain, be filled with worry, and be tempted to turn aside from the truth and the righteousness that we have known. Or we may stand firm, trust and rejoice in the Lord, and be assured that "the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."
An Alternative Application
Philippians 4:1-9. Among the many compelling scenes in the 1975 movie, Jaws, there is a late-night episode in which two characters, Hooper and Brody, slice open the carcass of a shark to discover what he has eaten recently. The question at hand is whether he is the shark that recently killed two victims there at Amity, but the graphic depiction gives us a broader glimpse into the consumption of a shark, including a Louisiana license plate. With both its suspense and its grim realism, the scene invites the audience to ponder the feeding habits of a shark.
What if it were possible for us to perform such an exploration of the human mind? What if there was something we could open, and all that our mind has consumed in the past week would spill out on the floor for all to see? What kind of mental diet would we see?
After this introduction, the sermon would have two major sections. First, some consideration of the unwholesome stuff that may fill our minds: worries and anger, bitterness and grudges, ambition and lust, unkind judgments and worthless trivialities. And then, having explored and examined some of what may presently fill our minds, we can turn to Paul's "think about these things" list.
The list deserves exposition at three levels. First, consideration of what these several words -- true, honorable, commendable, just, pure, pleasing, excellent, worthy of praise -- mean. Second, some cheerful imagining of what difference it would make in a life if our mental diet changed from worries, grudges, and trivialities to things honorable, pure, and worthy of praise. And, third, a congregation might benefit from a concrete proposal -- for example, to focus on a different word (emphasis) in Paul's list each day of the coming week as a way of training our minds.
Finally, it should be noted that Paul's list stands in stark contrast to the fare that is offered on television and in so many, many magazines. His list may also be quite far removed from the thoughts that come naturally to us, or that we cultivate as a matter of habit. If we want our minds to be filled with these things, therefore, we may have to feed in different waters.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23
As is sometimes the case with psalms that have been edited for the lectionary, in this one the most important verse is one that is omitted from this week's selection. Verse 44 reads, "Nevertheless he regarded their distress when he heard their cry." The psalmist has just finished a lengthy recounting of all the ways Israel broke covenant with the Lord in the wilderness and in the people's early days in the promised land. But -- nevertheless. Nevertheless, the Lord remained faithful, and continues to be faithful today.
Today's selection ends with Moses standing in the breach, physically protecting the people from the wrath of God (v. 23). Without the good news of verse 44, the reading ends on a discouraging note, and the last thing we hear of the Lord has to do with deadly wrath. Having read verse 44, however, we know that the Lord has another quality besides wrath: mercy.
The offense of the people, however, is real. It is idolatry. Idolatry is exceedingly difficult to translate into the modern idiom. Our culture is decidedly soft on idolatry. Our democratic tradition of freedom of religion leads us to be generally tolerant of our neighbors' objects of worship: be they the devotional practices of other world religions, or the expensive toy sitting in the driveway. Yet from the standpoint of the Old Testament, idolatry is serious business.
It doesn't help that the mental image of idolatry many of us carry around is something like the role Edward G. Robinson played in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille movie, The Ten Commandments. In that Hollywood classic, the colorful Robinson trades his gangster's fedora for a burnoose. He's playing Dathan -- a minor character in the Old Testament. Good ol' Cecil B. whisks Dathan up into a composite bad guy, the symbol of everything that's wrong with the wandering Hebrews: short memory, chronic complaining, and yearning for the fleshpots of Egypt. In the film, Dathan single-handedly incites the crowd to demand of Aaron a golden calf. Then he leads the unruly mob in a frenzied, bangle-jangling dance. It's 1950s Hollywood's idea of biblical decadence -- pretty tame by today's standards, but back then it must have seemed like some wild party.
There's only one problem with DeMille's cinematic version of the golden calf story: any idiot watching the film can tell the good guys from the bad guys. Edward G. Robinson is so deliciously smarmy, and the worship of the golden calf so much like the mother of all drunken frat parties that anybody watching that scene can say with absolute confidence "I would never be so stupid!"
Yet idolatry is rarely so obvious. John Calvin calls the human race "a perpetual factory of idols," and he's not referring to golden statues of livestock. Someone once said, "idolatry is worshiping anything that ought to be used, and using anything that ought to be worshiped." Plenty of things fit that definition: things that are real, bona fide temptations for us twenty-first-century Christians.
We need the "nevertheless" of Psalm 106 as much as anyone.
