Fourth Sunday After The Epiphany / Fourth Sunday In Ordinary Time
Preaching
Lectionary Preaching Workbook
Series VIII, Cycle A
Object:
Theme For The Day
Although God's expectations are impossible to fulfill, humility is always within our reach.
Old Testament Lesson
Micah 6:1-8
What Does The Lord Require?
In this passage, the prophet imagines that the Lord has hauled the people of Israel into court, accusing them of ingratitude. The jury for this lawsuit is "the mountains... the enduring foundations of the earth" (verses 1-2). Acting the part of an aggrieved plaintiff, the Lord cries out, demanding to know what could possibly justify such indifference -- throwing in a reminder of the Exodus for good measure (verses 3-5). In verse 6, the voice of the speaker shifts from the Lord to that of an anonymous worshiper, who asks what he ought to bring with him as he comes before the Lord. Not even the most absurdly extravagant sacrifices -- "thousands of rams... ten thousands of rivers of oil... my firstborn" -- could possibly be enough, he despairs (v. 7). Then, the voice of the prophet speaks some of the most famous words in the Hebrew scriptures: "He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (v. 8). In form, this is a variation on Deuteronomy 10:12-13. In this case, the three elements of faithful living are justice, kindness, and "walking humbly" -- which, likely, goes far beyond mere humility to describe a life lived in faithful obedience to the law.
New Testament Lesson
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Foolishness And Wisdom
"For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing" (v. 18). With these provocative words, the apostle Paul begins a discourse on the meaning of wisdom. It is a timely and relevant topic for the Corinthian Christians, who are living in the midst of a Greek culture that prides itself on its philosophical ideals. Quoting Isaiah 29:14, Paul recalls how the Lord has promised to "destroy the wisdom of the wise." God has "made foolish the wisdom of the world," in not allowing the best and the brightest -- the philosophers, in other words -- to attain spiritual truth through pure reason. It is only through the "foolish proclamation" of Paul, and his eager but ill-schooled fellow-evangelists that the truth of the cross is being revealed (verses 20-21). Engaging for a moment in an overgeneralization, Paul mentions the stereotypical view that "Jews demand signs" -- miracles, in other words -- and "Greeks desire wisdom" -- well-debated philosophical conclusions (v. 22). Yet, God fails to provide the answer either faction is looking for. What God offers, instead, is the cross of Jesus: a powerful image that communicates beyond words (v. 23). In a rhetorical flourish that seems, on the face of it, an absurd statement, Paul declares, "God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength" (v. 25). In verses 26-29, Paul addresses his readers directly, asking them to consider who they are. This band of believers is far from the best and brightest, in the estimation of their society. Yet, God has chosen none other then these ordinary people to receive the truth and to bear it to the world. This is so no one will be able to boast, except in the Lord (verses 30-31). Paul is concerned, throughout this letter, with the arrogance and boasting of certain factionalists in the Corinthian church. Here, he reminds everyone in the church of their lack of scholarly or societal pedigree, and that it is God who is responsible for everything they know to be true.
Gospel Lesson
Matthew 5:1-12
The Beatitudes
This passage also occurs on All Saints: see the commentary for that date.
Preaching Possibilities
One experience we've all had is that of not measuring up. It's the sort of experience that belongs most powerfully to our growing-up years: times when we tried, and failed, to please an authority figure. Maybe it was a parent, a teacher, or a youth leader. Whoever the person was, we brought our best, and we were rejected.
There we stood with our crayon drawing or wooden birdhouse or school report in hand, and we were told, "It's not good enough," or, "Why did you have to be so careless?" or, "How stupid can you get?" With those hard, unfeeling words, our prize, our creation, seemed to wilt away in our very hands.
Maybe we walked away asking ourselves, "What do you want? What do you really want?" It was not so much a question to be answered as a cry of despair.
"What do you really want?" We can just as well direct that question to God. Sometimes, when life disappoints us, we do just that. There are times when we fear we don't measure up in God's eyes and never could. At such times, you and I may come to picture God as a stern taskmaster who never does accept the offering of our hearts.
There's been a lot written in recent years about the "inner child": a complex of painful memories that live on, years into adulthood. Even within the most self-assured, successful person, there may lurk this frightened, cast-off child.
Perhaps the prophet Micah knows that feeling, as he writes,
With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Yet, to Micah, there is nothing we can sacrifice that will satisfy God. Burnt offerings don't do it. Even the most extravagant acts of worship -- thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil -- have no effect.
There is only one thing that will satisfy the Lord: "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." Famous words, these -- among the most famous in all the Hebrew scriptures. They are a neat, three-part formula for a life of holiness.
Yet, these words are much more easily said than done. Take this whole matter of "doing justice." Justice is a lofty ideal, but how many manage to achieve it? Life's ethical choices are rarely clear-cut. There are subtle pressures to conform, to compromise. Doing justice, in a world that winks at fairness and glorifies expediency is never easy.
There are always those rationalizations that echo hollowly in our minds: "the things everybody's doing," the "little white lies," the box of goods that "fell off a truck." It's "just what you have to do to stay in business today," or, "to succeed in the profession," or "to get good grades in school."
Well, if doing justice is not so easy, then perhaps we'll do better with the second item in Micah's list: "loving kindness." Everybody loves kindness! But, do we?
The Hebrew word here is hesed, one of the greatest words in all the Old Testament. Other places, hesed is translated "steadfast love" -- the love of God for Israel, an overflowing faithfulness on God's part, even when the people have turned away. The prophet Hosea likens it to the love of a man for his faithless wife. No matter how many times she runs away, still he welcomes her back.
True kindness is not a matter between equals. Rather, it belongs to an unequal relationship. It is not any great kindness to help a person who may one day help us; that's simply an even trade, a quid pro quo. No, true kindness is gentle treatment of a person who can never pay us back. That sort of caring is what the poet Wordsworth is trying to capture in these lines,
That best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
Do you know where our English word "kindness" comes from? It has the same root as the word "kin." Extending kindness to others is making them kinfolk, treating them "like family." "Make yourself at home"; "Mi casa, su casa" -- these are the words of true kindness.
Kindness is often far from our minds. We rush through our overbooked lives, "looking out for number one," ever glancing back over our shoulders to be sure failure isn't gaining on us. It's difficult to make room for kindness.
Well, with kindness not so easy to attain, now it seems that we are up at bat with two strikes against us. There is, yet, a third item in the list: "walk humbly with your God."
This, ultimately, is what saves us. When we drive ourselves to the edge of burnout trying to achieve for the impassive parent, when we "fall off the wagon" yet again into self-destructive behaviors, when we lead from the lowest card in our moral deck, all we need do is admit to God who we are. That's humility. And once we admit that, we are able to walk with God.
The Lord does not desire our sacrifices. God desires us. The eternally demanding parent turns out to be not so stern as we imagined.
All most human parents really want, in their heart of hearts -- once you peel away their own feelings of inadequacy, and expose their hurting child within -- is not so much to see their offspring become "my son the doctor," "my daughter the lawyer," but to be in relationship. Those of us who are parents know the wonder of looking into an infant's eyes and seeing a life there, a life that is a gift beyond price.
God looks on us with the same mixture of fascination and love. What God desires most of all is for us to walk alongside, knowing who we are and knowing who God is. Every one of us stands empty-handed before God, before the only one who can do something with this world, the only one who can assure us of a future. There is nothing we can offer God but ourselves.
And that's all we really need. For, once we achieve this way of life, God has a way of filling in the gaps, of smoothing out the rough places of our lives. If we "walk humbly with our God" in the life of discipleship for any length of time, we will discover that God is giving us the gifts of justice and kindness -- and so many more, besides.
Prayer For The Day
Great God,
we want to approach you with arms laden with gifts.
We wish to please you with rich offerings,
the fruits of a life well-lived.
Yet, we are sorry to say, our hands are empty.
There is nothing we can offer you --
nothing, that is, that brings glory to ourselves
as well as to you.
And so, as an afterthought,
we stretch out our empty arms
and offer you ourselves.
Praise be to you,
that you have promised, in Christ,
to accept us. Amen.
To Illustrate
Arthur Cochrane, longtime professor of theology at the University of Dubuque and Pittsburgh Theological Seminaries, was a graduate student in Germany in the 1930s. In one of his books, Cochrane tells of how he was visiting a friend of his, a Christian woman who was working in her family's resort hotel. The telephone rang, and the woman said to the caller, "I'm sorry, but there are no rooms left."
After hanging up, she explained that there were indeed rooms available, but the caller was a rabbi. "If we allowed one Jew to come, we would soon be overrun by Jews and that would be bad for business."
"I didn't sleep very well that night," Cochrane writes. "It dawned on me that while I could swim on their beaches, dance on their dance floor, eat in their dining hall, and sleep in one of their rooms, my Lord and Savior could not."
A few years later, as the Nazi repression grew more intense, Cochrane himself felt the cold breath of injustice: "I was forced on several occasions to report at police headquarters where I was queried about my Jewishness. I didn't cut a very heroic figure. I simply replied that if I looked like a Jew it was because of my Irish nose. Since then I have recalled Peter's denial: 'I do not know the man.' "
***
The way to true humility, says the preacher Phillips Brooks, "is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is."
That "higher nature" is Jesus Christ. You and I think of ourselves as great, but then we remember how Christ came into this world as one of us. We yearn to exalt ourselves and our achievements, but then we remember his walk to Calvary. When doing justice and loving kindness are impossible for us, there's always that humble walk with God.
***
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.
-- Charles Dickens
***
No good act performed in the world ever dies. Science tells us that no atom of matter can ever be destroyed, that no force once started ever ends; it merely passes through a multiplicity of ever-changing phases. Every good deed done to others is a great force that starts an unending pulsation through time and eternity. We may not know it, we may never hear a word of gratitude or recognition, but it will all come back to us in some form as naturally, as perfectly, as inevitably, as echo answers to sound.
-- William George Jordan
***
Who speaks for God? God speaks for God. And it is the voiceless and powerless for whom the voice of God has always been authentically raised. It is up to us to make sure that our vision bears some resemblance to the vision the prophets of God proclaim throughout the scriptures. Then the people on the street corners will have a better idea of who the children of God really are.
-- Jim Wallis, Who Speaks for God? (New York: Delacorte Press, 1996), pp. 39-40
***
But mercy is above this sceptered sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute of God himself
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.
-- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
***
Pride slays thanksgiving, but a humble mind is the soil out of which thanks naturally grow. A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
***
A wise, old Middle-Eastern mystic said this about himself. "I was a revolutionary when I was young, and all my prayer to God was: 'Lord, give me the energy to change the world.' As I approached middle age and realized that my life was half gone without my changing a single soul, I changed my prayer to: 'Lord, give me the grace to change all those who come into contact with me. Just my family and friends and I shall be satisfied.' Now that I am an old man and my days are numbered, I have begun to see how foolish I have been. My one prayer now is: 'Lord, give me the grace to change myself.' If I had prayed this right from the start, I would not have wasted my life."
-- Paul J. Wharton, Stories and Parables for Preachers and Teachers (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 31
Although God's expectations are impossible to fulfill, humility is always within our reach.
Old Testament Lesson
Micah 6:1-8
What Does The Lord Require?
In this passage, the prophet imagines that the Lord has hauled the people of Israel into court, accusing them of ingratitude. The jury for this lawsuit is "the mountains... the enduring foundations of the earth" (verses 1-2). Acting the part of an aggrieved plaintiff, the Lord cries out, demanding to know what could possibly justify such indifference -- throwing in a reminder of the Exodus for good measure (verses 3-5). In verse 6, the voice of the speaker shifts from the Lord to that of an anonymous worshiper, who asks what he ought to bring with him as he comes before the Lord. Not even the most absurdly extravagant sacrifices -- "thousands of rams... ten thousands of rivers of oil... my firstborn" -- could possibly be enough, he despairs (v. 7). Then, the voice of the prophet speaks some of the most famous words in the Hebrew scriptures: "He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (v. 8). In form, this is a variation on Deuteronomy 10:12-13. In this case, the three elements of faithful living are justice, kindness, and "walking humbly" -- which, likely, goes far beyond mere humility to describe a life lived in faithful obedience to the law.
New Testament Lesson
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Foolishness And Wisdom
"For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing" (v. 18). With these provocative words, the apostle Paul begins a discourse on the meaning of wisdom. It is a timely and relevant topic for the Corinthian Christians, who are living in the midst of a Greek culture that prides itself on its philosophical ideals. Quoting Isaiah 29:14, Paul recalls how the Lord has promised to "destroy the wisdom of the wise." God has "made foolish the wisdom of the world," in not allowing the best and the brightest -- the philosophers, in other words -- to attain spiritual truth through pure reason. It is only through the "foolish proclamation" of Paul, and his eager but ill-schooled fellow-evangelists that the truth of the cross is being revealed (verses 20-21). Engaging for a moment in an overgeneralization, Paul mentions the stereotypical view that "Jews demand signs" -- miracles, in other words -- and "Greeks desire wisdom" -- well-debated philosophical conclusions (v. 22). Yet, God fails to provide the answer either faction is looking for. What God offers, instead, is the cross of Jesus: a powerful image that communicates beyond words (v. 23). In a rhetorical flourish that seems, on the face of it, an absurd statement, Paul declares, "God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength" (v. 25). In verses 26-29, Paul addresses his readers directly, asking them to consider who they are. This band of believers is far from the best and brightest, in the estimation of their society. Yet, God has chosen none other then these ordinary people to receive the truth and to bear it to the world. This is so no one will be able to boast, except in the Lord (verses 30-31). Paul is concerned, throughout this letter, with the arrogance and boasting of certain factionalists in the Corinthian church. Here, he reminds everyone in the church of their lack of scholarly or societal pedigree, and that it is God who is responsible for everything they know to be true.
Gospel Lesson
Matthew 5:1-12
The Beatitudes
This passage also occurs on All Saints: see the commentary for that date.
Preaching Possibilities
One experience we've all had is that of not measuring up. It's the sort of experience that belongs most powerfully to our growing-up years: times when we tried, and failed, to please an authority figure. Maybe it was a parent, a teacher, or a youth leader. Whoever the person was, we brought our best, and we were rejected.
There we stood with our crayon drawing or wooden birdhouse or school report in hand, and we were told, "It's not good enough," or, "Why did you have to be so careless?" or, "How stupid can you get?" With those hard, unfeeling words, our prize, our creation, seemed to wilt away in our very hands.
Maybe we walked away asking ourselves, "What do you want? What do you really want?" It was not so much a question to be answered as a cry of despair.
"What do you really want?" We can just as well direct that question to God. Sometimes, when life disappoints us, we do just that. There are times when we fear we don't measure up in God's eyes and never could. At such times, you and I may come to picture God as a stern taskmaster who never does accept the offering of our hearts.
There's been a lot written in recent years about the "inner child": a complex of painful memories that live on, years into adulthood. Even within the most self-assured, successful person, there may lurk this frightened, cast-off child.
Perhaps the prophet Micah knows that feeling, as he writes,
With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Yet, to Micah, there is nothing we can sacrifice that will satisfy God. Burnt offerings don't do it. Even the most extravagant acts of worship -- thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil -- have no effect.
There is only one thing that will satisfy the Lord: "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." Famous words, these -- among the most famous in all the Hebrew scriptures. They are a neat, three-part formula for a life of holiness.
Yet, these words are much more easily said than done. Take this whole matter of "doing justice." Justice is a lofty ideal, but how many manage to achieve it? Life's ethical choices are rarely clear-cut. There are subtle pressures to conform, to compromise. Doing justice, in a world that winks at fairness and glorifies expediency is never easy.
There are always those rationalizations that echo hollowly in our minds: "the things everybody's doing," the "little white lies," the box of goods that "fell off a truck." It's "just what you have to do to stay in business today," or, "to succeed in the profession," or "to get good grades in school."
Well, if doing justice is not so easy, then perhaps we'll do better with the second item in Micah's list: "loving kindness." Everybody loves kindness! But, do we?
The Hebrew word here is hesed, one of the greatest words in all the Old Testament. Other places, hesed is translated "steadfast love" -- the love of God for Israel, an overflowing faithfulness on God's part, even when the people have turned away. The prophet Hosea likens it to the love of a man for his faithless wife. No matter how many times she runs away, still he welcomes her back.
True kindness is not a matter between equals. Rather, it belongs to an unequal relationship. It is not any great kindness to help a person who may one day help us; that's simply an even trade, a quid pro quo. No, true kindness is gentle treatment of a person who can never pay us back. That sort of caring is what the poet Wordsworth is trying to capture in these lines,
That best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
Do you know where our English word "kindness" comes from? It has the same root as the word "kin." Extending kindness to others is making them kinfolk, treating them "like family." "Make yourself at home"; "Mi casa, su casa" -- these are the words of true kindness.
Kindness is often far from our minds. We rush through our overbooked lives, "looking out for number one," ever glancing back over our shoulders to be sure failure isn't gaining on us. It's difficult to make room for kindness.
Well, with kindness not so easy to attain, now it seems that we are up at bat with two strikes against us. There is, yet, a third item in the list: "walk humbly with your God."
This, ultimately, is what saves us. When we drive ourselves to the edge of burnout trying to achieve for the impassive parent, when we "fall off the wagon" yet again into self-destructive behaviors, when we lead from the lowest card in our moral deck, all we need do is admit to God who we are. That's humility. And once we admit that, we are able to walk with God.
The Lord does not desire our sacrifices. God desires us. The eternally demanding parent turns out to be not so stern as we imagined.
All most human parents really want, in their heart of hearts -- once you peel away their own feelings of inadequacy, and expose their hurting child within -- is not so much to see their offspring become "my son the doctor," "my daughter the lawyer," but to be in relationship. Those of us who are parents know the wonder of looking into an infant's eyes and seeing a life there, a life that is a gift beyond price.
God looks on us with the same mixture of fascination and love. What God desires most of all is for us to walk alongside, knowing who we are and knowing who God is. Every one of us stands empty-handed before God, before the only one who can do something with this world, the only one who can assure us of a future. There is nothing we can offer God but ourselves.
And that's all we really need. For, once we achieve this way of life, God has a way of filling in the gaps, of smoothing out the rough places of our lives. If we "walk humbly with our God" in the life of discipleship for any length of time, we will discover that God is giving us the gifts of justice and kindness -- and so many more, besides.
Prayer For The Day
Great God,
we want to approach you with arms laden with gifts.
We wish to please you with rich offerings,
the fruits of a life well-lived.
Yet, we are sorry to say, our hands are empty.
There is nothing we can offer you --
nothing, that is, that brings glory to ourselves
as well as to you.
And so, as an afterthought,
we stretch out our empty arms
and offer you ourselves.
Praise be to you,
that you have promised, in Christ,
to accept us. Amen.
To Illustrate
Arthur Cochrane, longtime professor of theology at the University of Dubuque and Pittsburgh Theological Seminaries, was a graduate student in Germany in the 1930s. In one of his books, Cochrane tells of how he was visiting a friend of his, a Christian woman who was working in her family's resort hotel. The telephone rang, and the woman said to the caller, "I'm sorry, but there are no rooms left."
After hanging up, she explained that there were indeed rooms available, but the caller was a rabbi. "If we allowed one Jew to come, we would soon be overrun by Jews and that would be bad for business."
"I didn't sleep very well that night," Cochrane writes. "It dawned on me that while I could swim on their beaches, dance on their dance floor, eat in their dining hall, and sleep in one of their rooms, my Lord and Savior could not."
A few years later, as the Nazi repression grew more intense, Cochrane himself felt the cold breath of injustice: "I was forced on several occasions to report at police headquarters where I was queried about my Jewishness. I didn't cut a very heroic figure. I simply replied that if I looked like a Jew it was because of my Irish nose. Since then I have recalled Peter's denial: 'I do not know the man.' "
***
The way to true humility, says the preacher Phillips Brooks, "is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is."
That "higher nature" is Jesus Christ. You and I think of ourselves as great, but then we remember how Christ came into this world as one of us. We yearn to exalt ourselves and our achievements, but then we remember his walk to Calvary. When doing justice and loving kindness are impossible for us, there's always that humble walk with God.
***
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.
-- Charles Dickens
***
No good act performed in the world ever dies. Science tells us that no atom of matter can ever be destroyed, that no force once started ever ends; it merely passes through a multiplicity of ever-changing phases. Every good deed done to others is a great force that starts an unending pulsation through time and eternity. We may not know it, we may never hear a word of gratitude or recognition, but it will all come back to us in some form as naturally, as perfectly, as inevitably, as echo answers to sound.
-- William George Jordan
***
Who speaks for God? God speaks for God. And it is the voiceless and powerless for whom the voice of God has always been authentically raised. It is up to us to make sure that our vision bears some resemblance to the vision the prophets of God proclaim throughout the scriptures. Then the people on the street corners will have a better idea of who the children of God really are.
-- Jim Wallis, Who Speaks for God? (New York: Delacorte Press, 1996), pp. 39-40
***
But mercy is above this sceptered sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute of God himself
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.
-- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
***
Pride slays thanksgiving, but a humble mind is the soil out of which thanks naturally grow. A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
***
A wise, old Middle-Eastern mystic said this about himself. "I was a revolutionary when I was young, and all my prayer to God was: 'Lord, give me the energy to change the world.' As I approached middle age and realized that my life was half gone without my changing a single soul, I changed my prayer to: 'Lord, give me the grace to change all those who come into contact with me. Just my family and friends and I shall be satisfied.' Now that I am an old man and my days are numbered, I have begun to see how foolish I have been. My one prayer now is: 'Lord, give me the grace to change myself.' If I had prayed this right from the start, I would not have wasted my life."
-- Paul J. Wharton, Stories and Parables for Preachers and Teachers (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 31
