Featured post

Does our theology survive contact with the enemy? (2nd Sunday after Pentecost, 6/2/2024)

Leave a reply

Readings (Track 1); Psalm 139 (complete; versification differing slightly from the BCP version cited)

The Lectionary included part of Psalm 139 (Verses 1-5, 12-17) in today’s readings; what are we supposed to do with that psalm? The Lectionary offers one answer: read the parts you like; don’t read the parts you don’t like. Well, whatever text we’re reading, that doesn’t sound like a promising strategy for learning something new. So what are we supposed to do with it?

There certainly is an abrupt change in tone between vv. 17 and 18. The best way of making sense of that is to recall that some judicial processes in Israel involved a divine decision, the accused subject to divine examination (guilty or innocent?) with the decision announced, presumably, by a priest. “Presumably” because all our evidence is indirect: multiple psalms whose combination of themes is best explained by such processes. This psalm reflects such a process: the accused speaks to God regarding God’s thorough knowledge of the accused, and then calls for God’s judgment on the “wicked,” those who’d brought charges against the accused.

I say “This psalm reflects” because it’s hardly a transcript of the speech of a particular accused person. In fact, this theme of divine knowledge has expanded far beyond what the judicial process would involve, nevertheless preserving the flow from the accused affirming that just God’s knowledge of them, to crying out for that just God to punish the deserving. And in the process the psalm becomes—in its entirety—a sort of mirror for us. Let’s walk through it.

Verses 1-5 focus on God’s complete—astounding—knowledge of the speaker. It’s not that the psalmist is assuming divine omniscience. It’s more personal than that, putting experiences together. You know me, know all my tells. A game of poker against you would be folly. This knowledge: wonderful, incomprehensible. Peterson paraphrases “This is too much, too wonderful—I can’t take it all in.” But, such knowledge, welcome or unwelcome? Today, with all these databases collecting everything possible about us, increased use of facial recognition: good news? Is God having all this knowledge good news? The verses don’t say. The text invites us to wonder how we experience this knowledge.

Verses 6-11 provide a sort of answer: the speaker inventories all the possible places to escape this knowledge. But there’s no place to hide. Again, it’s not as though the psalmist is assuming omnipresence. It’s more like a wide receiver talking to a cornerback: “Just when I think I’m open, you’re there. You seem to know when I’m going to cut before I do.” Good news or bad news? The verbs in v.9 sound like good news, but then we can be lead where we want to go or where we don’t want to go.

Surprisingly, the light/darkness contrast in vv.10-11 provides a way forward, reminding the speaker of what God accomplished for the speaker in complete darkness: the speaker’s own bodily existence (vv.12-17). Verse 13: “I will thank you because I am marvelously made; / your works are wonderful, and I know it well.” Scripture’s well aware that our bodies can malfunction in horrific ways, but the uniform response is to call on God to make them work again, rather than to abandon the project. So Paul repeatedly speaks of a new body, and John’s Gospel notes that Jesus’ resurrected body is no barrier to enjoying a good serving of fish and chips. (Ketchup not mentioned because tomatoes hadn’t yet made it over from the Americas.)

God’s involvement with the psalmist started from the moment of conception. Amazing—but also in need of a sidebar. We’d misuse the psalmist’s testimony by dragging it into the current arguments about abortion. The psalmist is celebrating the care and continuity. The psalmist is not asking when this “unformed substance” (so the NRSV in v.15; “limbs” in the BCP) became a legal person. In Scripture that question is only implicitly addressed in the Exodus law dealing with fight between men that injures a woman that results in a miscarriage (Exod. 21:22ff). There the Greek translation introduces a distinction between a child not fully formed and a child fully formed, with personhood implied only in the latter case. So Thomas Aquinas’ position that the fetus received a soul 40 or 80 days after conception is representative. In the Roman Catholic Church ascription of personhood from the moment of conception may first appear in the 19th Century. Among the Evangelicals, as late as 1968 their flagship magazine, Christianity Today, sponsored a consultation on abortion. Participants disagreed on many points but reported “about the necessity of it and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.”[1] But back to the text.

As in the previous sections, the psalmist is overwhelmed by the qualitative difference between God’s knowledge and theirs, and this becomes the focus of the section’s concluding verses (16-17):

How deep I find your thoughts, O God!
how great is the sum of them!
If I were to count them, they would be more in number than the sand;
to count them all, my life span would need to be like yours.

But all that doesn’t derail the train of thought from God the judge examining the accused to calling on God to give the accusers what they deserve (vv.18-21).

What’s striking is that the intensity of the psalm seems to increase at v.18. God’s innumerable thoughts (vv.16-17) are important; God doing something about the enemies is really important. Somehow, once the enemies come on stage, all that celebration of God’s knowledge and creativity goes into the background and God’s role is reduced to destruction, to doing what the speaker can understand very well, thank you very much.

That’s the mirror that I think’s important here. We’re happy to celebrate God’s knowledge and the life-giving ways that God’s knowledge surpasses our own. But when the enemies come on stage, too often all that recedes, and what we want from God is that God do things we understand very well.

We remember Jesus’ “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44). But sometimes we’re not there yet, and in those cases better to pray all of Psalm 139, than stop at v.17, hoping to convince ourselves that we’re farther along than we are.

To come at it from a different angle, the enemies provide an unwelcome helpful reality check: my talk of God’s amazing knowledge and competence: quarantined in the distant past, or the ground for trust and confidence in the present? That’s the recurrent challenge for God’s people in both Testaments: can the celebration of God’s past actions translate into trust now? Our enemies—alas—help us sort that out.

The last two verses attempt a sort of summary of the psalm. And they can serve as a sort of summary for our interaction with the psalm.

“Search me out, O God, and know my heart;
try me and know my restless thoughts.”

“Search” and “know”: verbs from the beginning of the psalm. So God should keep doing what God’s been doing, despite our recurrent ambivalence about whether that knowledge is good for us (“restless thoughts”).

“Look well whether there be any wickedness in me”

Perhaps that petition was originally formulaic, spoken assuming that of course God’s going to find me innocent. But after all the attention to God’s qualitatively superior knowledge, perhaps at least for us it can destabilize the assumption of a firm distinction between us and the wicked.[2]

“And lead me in the way that is everlasting.”

And in particular, “when the enemies come onstage, don’t let our vision shrink to what we’re capable of imagining you doing.” The military has a proverb: no plan survives encounter with the enemy. We might ask: does our theology survive encounter with the enemy? That’s the challenge Psalm 139 poses to us.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/10/abortion-history-right-white-evangelical-1970s-00031480, accessed 5/30/2024.

[2] The Pharisees as portrayed in Mark’s Gospel would have had no problem praying Ps 139 straight through and understanding their conspiring against Jesus as assisting God in the fulfillment of vv.18-21.

Featured post

Postscript to the Trinity Sunday Sermon

Leave a reply

The Lectionary readings opened more doors than could be entered in the sermon. I could for example have spent much more time exploring the Trinity at work for our salvation in John’s Gospel. Hence this postscript.

One of the sermon’s primary themes was the Trinity as eternal community/fiesta/banquet/dance of love—hat tip to Leonardo Boff (Holy Trinity, Perfect Community) and C. S. Lewis (the Great Dance in Perelandra, chapter 17). But what of the buzzkill at the end of the Romans reading, Paul’s reference to sharing Jesus’ suffering?

The mediation between these themes was “The Prodigal Son” parable. (Is that parable a retelling of the Cain and Abel story?) The father wants both the younger “prodigal” son and the older self-righteous son at the banquet. But that’ll only happen if both recognize that the father’s love, forgiving, repaying evil with good (Rom 12:21), is an expression of strength, not weakness. That’ll only happen if both practice that love in forgiving, in repaying evil with good. Likewise the Father wants us at the banquet—us and our enemies. And that’ll only happen etc. That practice in this world means suffering (just ask Jesus how Holy Week went).

Pulling back the camera, while there are many moving parts in Jesus’ death, the combination of today’s Isaiah reading and the Prodigal Son parable encourage me to think that that death is less about paying some extrinsic penalty incurred by our guilt (a coal from the altar took care of Isaiah’s) and more about breaking the cycles of getting even that mar human beings and human history (see, conveniently, Gerhard Lohfink’s chapter 16 “Dying for Israel” in Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was).

Forgiving and repaying evil with good instead of seeking payback: signs of a strong or weak human being? (Signs of a strong or weak male?) The winds of that argument buffet us daily, and it’s worth noticing the answers we’re giving. And, since this is an election year, our presidential election is also about that.

Featured post

The Holy Trinity: And I should pay attention because? (Trinity Sunday, 5/26/2024)

Leave a reply

Readings

Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday, one of the principal feasts of the Church. One God; Three Persons. But—with all due reverence—so what? There are many ways we might answer that question; here are a couple.

Confessing the Holy Trinity we say that before creation there is a community of love: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. That’s probably the most profound sense of the statement “God is love:” Father, Son, Holy Spirit in an eternal relationship of love. ‘Relationship’: that’s probably too weak a word. We might call it a banquet or a dance. And out of that love God creates our universe. Not out of lack or necessity (nothing is lacking) but out of desire to share that primordial love.

To share that primordial love: that’s the human destiny. It appears throughout Scripture; here are three examples. The first comes at the culmination of the Exodus at Sinai:

Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel. Under his feet there was something like a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. God did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel; also they beheld God, and they ate and drank. (Exodus 24:9-11)

The second, from the prophet Isaiah:

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.  (Isaiah 25:6-8a)

The third, from the end of the Revelation given to St John:

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let everyone who hears say, “Come.” And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. (Revelation 22:17)

The party’s been going on from all eternity; we’re invited to join in.

Now, a parenthesis which for some will be quite unnecessary, for others—like the preacher—quite necessary. One God; billions of people scattered over the centuries. How could that not end up being organized bureaucratically? Here’s where my imagination needs stretching. Jesus, it turns out, is aware of the problem:

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. (Matthew 10:29-31)

Even the hairs of my head: counted. Perhaps not surprisingly this personal dimension to the divine invitation is captured most vividly in the Old Testament’s portraits of Lady Wisdom: “She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.… because she goes about seeking those worthy of her, and she graciously appears to them in their paths, and meets them in every thought. (Wisdom 6:13, 16)

Which brings us to today’s second theme. The first: the Holy Trinity’s breath-taking invitation. The second: we’re not left to respond to that invitation on our own, as we’ve heard in the readings from Romans and John. In Romans Paul speaks of the Spirit empowering our prayers. A bit later he talks of those frequent situations in which we don’t have the slightest idea how to pray:

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8:26-27)

In John’s Gospel Jesus uses the image of birth: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” And so we baptize (with water) in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Birth: that suggests a one-off event. In practice it tends to be a recurring event as we—picking up Paul’s language—repeatedly by the Spirit put to death those destructive habits that still form part of our character.

The Trinity’s breath-taking invitation, the Trinity’s daily assistance in responding to that invitation: that’s probably plenty for the sermon. But there’s that last bit in the Romans reading: “it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ– if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” Suffer with him? After all the talk of feast and banquet in the sermon, how’d that get in? A long answer would require another sermon; here’s the short answer. In Jesus’ parable that we usually call “The Prodigal Son” the Father wants both the younger prodigal son and the older self-righteous son at the banquet. But that’ll only happen if both recognize that the father’s love, forgiving, repaying evil with good, is an expression of strength, not weakness. That’ll only happen if both practice love in forgiving, in repaying evil with good.

The Holy Trinity wants us at the banquet. More precisely, us and our enemies at the banquet. But that’ll only happen if we recognize that the Trinity’s love, forgiving, repaying evil with good, is an expression of strength, not weakness. That’ll only happen if we’ve at least begun to practice that love in forgiving, in repaying evil with good. And that practice in this world means suffering—as every Eucharist reminds us.

The Holy Trinity, a community of love since before time, inviting us into that same community, empowering us through the Spirit to accept that invitation, empowering us through that same Spirit to walk in the way of forgiveness and repaying evil with good. If that’s not a reason to celebrate, I don’t know what is.

Featured post

La Santísima Trinidad–¿y qué? (La Trinidad, 26/5/2024)

Leave a reply

Lecturas

Hoy celebramos la fiesta de la Santísima Trinidad, una de las fiestas principales de la Iglesia. Un Dios; tres Personas. Pero—con toda la debida reverencia–¿y qué? Hay muchas maneras de responder a esta pregunta; voy a enfocar dos.

Confesando la Santísima Trinidad, confesamos que antes de la creación hay una comunidad de amor: Padre, Hijo, Espíritu Santo. “Dios es amor” decimos, y aquí tenemos el sentido más profundo de esta afirmación. Antes de nada, una comunidad de amor. “Comunidad”: quizá la palabra es demasiado débil. Mejor: una fiesta, un baile de amor. Y desde este amor Dios crea nuestro universo. Ni por carencia ni por necesidad, sino para compartir este amor primordial.

Compartir este amor primordial. Y aquí tenemos el destino humano: participar/vivir en esta comunidad de amor. Vislumbramos este destino en muchos textos de la Biblia. Por ejemplo, después del Éxodo y la entrega de la Ley:

Subieron Moisés, Aarón, Nadab, Abihú y los setenta dirigentes de Israel, y vieron al Dios de Israel: bajo los pies tenía una especie de pavimento de zafiro, límpido como el mismo cielo. Dios no extendió la mano contra los notables de Israel, que pudieron contemplar a Dios, y después comieron y bebieron. (Ex. 24:9-11 BNP)

O del profeta Isaías:

6 Y el SEÑOR de los ejércitos preparará en este monte para todos los pueblos un banquete de manjares suculentos, un banquete de vino añejo, pedazos escogidos con tuétano, y vino añejo refinado. 7 Y destruirá en este monte la cobertura que cubre todos los pueblos, el velo que está extendido sobre todas las naciones. 8 Él destruirá la muerte para siempre… (Is. 25:6-8 LBA)

O del fin de la Revelación de Juan:

El Espíritu y la esposa dicen: Ven. Y el que oye, diga: Ven. Y el que tiene sed, venga; y el que desea, que tome gratuitamente del agua de la vida. (Ap. 22:17 LBA)

Una fiesta de gozo desde antes de la creación—y nosotros, invitados a participar.

Ahora, un paréntesis, innecesario para algunos, necesario para otros—como su servidor. Un Dios; billones de personas: ¿no implica esto una burocracia sofocante? Bueno—necesito un poco más de imaginación. Y parece que Jesús mismo se dio cuenta del problema:

29 ¿No se venden dos gorriones por unas monedas? Sin embargo ni uno de ellos cae a tierra sin permiso del Padre de ustedes. 30 En cuanto a ustedes, hasta los pelos de su cabeza están contados. 31 Por tanto, no les tengan miedo, que ustedes valen más que muchos gorriones. (Mt. 10:29-31 BNP)

Hasta los pelos de mi cabeza. Y vemos esta dimensión personal de la invitación particularmente en los retratos de la Dama Sabiduría en el Antiguo Testamento:

Ella misma se da a conocer a los que la desean. Ella misma va de un lado a otro buscando a los que la merecen, los aborda benigna por los caminos, y les sale al paso en todo proyecto. (Sab. 6:13, 16 BNP)

En otras palabras, esta invitación de la Santísima Trinidad: no viene dirigida a ¨Ocupante¨ o ¨Residente¨.

Y esto nos lleva al segundo tema de esta plática. El primero: la asombrosa invitación de la Trinidad. El segundo: Dios no nos abandona a nuestros propios recursos para responder a esta invitación, como hemos escuchado en las lecturas de Romanos y Juan. En Romanos Pablo habla del Espíritu empoderando nuestras oraciones. Un poco después, de la intercesión del Espíritu cuando no tenemos la menor idea cómo orar:

26 De ese modo el Espíritu nos viene a socorrer en nuestra debilidad. Aunque no sabemos pedir como es debido, el Espíritu mismo intercede por nosotros con gemidos que no se pueden expresar. 27 Y el que sondea los corazones sabe lo que pretende el Espíritu cuando suplica por los consagrados de acuerdo con la voluntad de Dios. (Rom. 8:26-27 BNP)

En el Evangelio de Juan Jesús usa la imagen de nacimiento: ¨Te aseguro que, si uno no nace del agua y del Espíritu, no puede entrar en el reino de Dios.¨ (Jn. 3:5 BNP) Por eso bautizamos con agua en el Nombre del Padre, del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo. Nacimiento: la imagen sugiere un evento único. En la práctica, algo que recurre cuando—usando las palabras de Pablo—con la ayuda del Espíritu hacemos morir los hábitos destructivos que siguen siendo parte de nuestro carácter.

En otras palabras, ¿qué nos dice la doctrina de la Trinidad? Respondemos al Padre con el Hijo a nuestro lado y el Espíritu dentro y entre nosotros.

Bueno. La asombrosa invitación de la Trinidad, la asistencia diaria de la Trinidad a responder a esta invitación: basta para una plática. Pero, hay la última parte de la lectura de Romanos:

Y este mismo Espíritu se une a nuestro espíritu para dar testimonio de que ya somos hijos de Dios. Y puesto que somos sus hijos, también tendremos parte en la herencia que Dios nos ha prometido, la cual compartiremos con Cristo, puesto que sufrimos con él para estar también con él en su gloria. (Rom 8:16-17 DHH)

¿Sufrir con él? Después de tantas referencias a gozo, fiesta, banquete, ¿de dónde viene eso de sufrir? Una respuesta completa implicaría otra plática. Entonces, una respuesta mínima. En la parábola de Jesús que solemos llamar ¨El hijo pródigo¨ el padre quiere que tanto el hijo prodigo como el hijo creído estén en el banquete. Pero eso pasará solamente si los dos reconocen que el amor del padre, un amor que perdona y que vence al mal haciendo el bien (véase Rom 12:21) es una muestra de fortaleza, no de debilidad. Eso pasará solamente si los dos hijos practican este amor, perdonando, venciendo al mal haciendo el bien.

La Santísima Trinidad quiere que nosotros estemos en el banquete. Mejor: quiere que nosotros y nuestros enemigos estemos en el banquete. Pero eso pasará solamente si reconocemos que el amor del padre, un amor que perdona y que vence al mal haciendo el bien es una muestra de fortaleza, no de debilidad. Eso pasará solamente si hemos empezado a practicar este amor, perdonando, venciendo al mal haciendo el bien. Y esta práctica en este mundo trae sufrimiento—como nos recuerda cada Eucaristía (¨que por nosotros y por nuestra salvación bajó del cielo¨).

La Santísima Trinidad, una comunidad de amor desde antes de tiempo mismo, invitándonos a esta comunidad, empoderándonos por el Espíritu para responder a esta invitación, empoderándonos por el mismo Espíritu a caminar en el camino de perdón y de vencer al mal haciendo el bien: buenos motivos para celebrar esta fiesta, ¿no creen? Amén.

Matthew: “Jesus is the Light!” Jesus: “You are the light!” (5th Sunday after the Epiphany, 2/8/2026)

Leave a reply

Readings

Last week we heard the prophet Micah: “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?” This week’s reading from Isaiah is working the same question. We might hear it as fleshing out Micah’s answer:

If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday. The LORD will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.

Doing justice, loving kindness, walking humbly with God: both about responding to specific needs and reknitting the torn fabric of our culture, recovering our common humanity.

And, like last week’s psalm (Psalm 15), Psalm 112 offers a portrait of those who do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with God. But it does something more, and, heading towards today’s Gospel, it’s worth noticing. So please turn to pp.754-755 of the BCP. Both psalms are acrostic, each line ordered—after the initial “Hallelujah”—by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, running from A to Z, as it were.

Back in Genesis we hear “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (1:26); we might hear these two psalms as a meditation on how that plays out.

The divine-human relation is certainly not symmetrical. Both psalms begin with “Hallelujah!” (Not first “Praise Yah” and then “Praise Us.”) The first psalm ends with “the fear of the Lord;” the second begins by declaring “happy” (there’s that word again that we met in last week’s Beatitudes) “they who fear the Lord.”

What is striking is the celebration of image/likeness, in the identical vocabulary (in Hebrew) in vv.3-4:

111:3b and his righteousness endures forever.
112:3b and their righteousness will last forever.

111:4b the Lord is gracious and full of compassion.
112:4b the righteous are merciful and full of compassion.

The celebration continues, taking the differences of scale into account. The Lord is generous (vv.5a, 6b, 9a), as are the righteous (vv.5a, 9a).

Besides the Creator/creature difference, perhaps the most obvious difference is that the Lord is unopposed; the idols of the nations are not worth mentioning. The righteous, on the other hand, live in the midst of the wicked. And here’s where the psalm notices a corollary to the fear of the Lord. The righteous fear the Lord. So they do not fear evil rumors (v.7), they do not “shrink” (v.8, same Hebrew word). A proper fear/reverence of God puts others who demand our fear into perspective.

Today’s Gospel: the middle section of Matthew 5. Last week we heard the first section, the Beatitudes, another fleshing out of Micah’s “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” The third section, that series of “you have heard…but I say to you,” gets preempted this year by Lent.

So what’s in this middle section?

First, the hearers as salt and light. Salt is an open-ended metaphor, inviting us to meditate on it, and see where that meditation leads. Light, on the other hand, is an image Matthew works with repeatedly. Probably the most important connection would be in Matthew 4, citing Isaiah: “the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned” (4:16). That would be Jesus. Then in today’s reading: “You are the light of the world.”

It’s the same move made in that Isaiah text that begins “The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me” (61:1) that Jesus reads in the synagogue in Nazareth. By v.3 the text is talking about those whom the speaker has touched:

They will be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the LORD, to display his glory.
They shall build up the ancient ruins,
they shall raise up the former devastations;
they shall repair the ruined cities,
the devastations of many generations. (Isa 61:3b-4)

That, as you probably recognize, is the same project our first reading from Isaiah 58 was describing. Parenthetically, it’s easy to focus on Jesus as the light of the world, the generous God of Ps 111, and postpone “you are the light of the world” and Ps 112. In the first we’re the beneficiaries; in the second we’re also the agents. But it’s a package deal.

The Beatitudes: an implicit description of both Jesus as light and Jesus’ followers as light.

The second part of today’s Gospel is the lead-in to the “you have heard…but I say to you” section. Whatever Jesus is doing there, it’s fulfilling, not abolishing the law and the prophets. Since Lent is preempting hearing vv.21-48 this year, a couple general comments:

First, throughout the section we might more usefully translate “you have heard…and I say to you.” Jesus is fulfilling, not abolishing.

Second, Jesus’ words are addressed to us more as a parish than as individuals who happen to be in a parish. So the question they’re repeatedly asking: How do we live together in ways that support hearing and responding to these words?

Third, Jesus ends the section with “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That’s not about our being sinless. Recall the Beatitude “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” Jesus recognizes that we’ll always need mercy. And later in the Gospel: “Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times’” (18:21-22). What’s the point, then? It’s a replay of Ps 111-112’s insight: imitate this generous God. And we might recall Vince Lombardi: “Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.”

Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.

We need, Jesus tells us, to up our game; this third section (vv. 21-48) provides examples.

Two more things and I’ll close. Paul’s contrast between God’s wisdom and the wisdom of this age maps in interesting ways on Jesus’ words. The wisdom of this age regards the Beatitudes as folly. Ditto Ps 112. This world’s wisdom: happiness consists in imitating the carnivores, the more powerful and brutal the better. That can generate a lot of fear, so Ps 112’s implicit call to nurture our fear/reverence of God as a sort of vaccination remains relevant.

Second, there’s important tension between this week’s “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” and last week’s “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” (5:11). It’s not that the disciples’ different actions are eliciting different responses; it’s that they have little control over the response they’ll receive—as Jesus had little control. His actions were celebrated by the crowds pretty much until Holy Week. John Howard Yoder nails it: “The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship between cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.”[1]

How to pull this together? I think Matthew would be happy for us to return to Ps 112:

Hallelujah!
Happy are they who fear the Lord
and have great delight in his commandments!

[1] Cited in Hauerwas, Matthew, p.72.

“Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God” (4th Sunday after the Epiphany, 2/1/2026)

Leave a reply

Readings

Each of these readings deserves its own sermon. This time around let’s wonder about three things. First, the Beatitudes as a rereading of that last verse in Micah. Second, Paul on wisdom and folly. Third, that phrase in Paul’s letter, “the message of the cross.”

“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?” Micah’s audience (Isaiah’s audience—they were contemporaries) was justly very proud of the temple. Solomon had built it, had spared no expense in building it, and it was breathtaking. And as long as the multiple sacrifices and festivals stayed on schedule, it was easy to assume that the Lord found it breathtaking. So prophets like Micah had the thankless task of reminding the people that while worship (including prayer) was essential, it was not the only essential thing. In characteristic prophetic hyperbole: “what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” And over the centuries we’ve periodically needed this reminder: worship is essential; it’s not the only essential thing.

(Parenthetically, we might hear today’s psalm, Psalm 15, as a reminder, in the temple, to remember the prophets’ teaching.)

Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God: we can hear Jesus’ Beatitudes as sketching out what, with Jesus’ coming, that looks like.

The Beatitudes, the beginning of what we refer to as the Sermon on the Mount, are set just after the calling of Peter, Andrew, James, and John that we heard last week. Matthew sets the stage: “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan” (4:23-25)—and then our text.

Why’s that important? Coming at the Beatitudes cold (“Happy are the poor in spirit, those who mourn…”) one might be tempted to call the local asylum: one of your patients is loose. But after that long list of folk Jesus has touched, it’s possible that he knows what he’s talking about. That’s important for us as hearers. We’re not meant to come to the Beatitudes cold. If Jesus hasn’t touched me in some important way, they’re not the place to start.

Micah set up his summary with “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you.” Jesus sets it up with “Blessed/Happy are…” Translation of the Greek makarios is a challenge, the English versions opting for ‘blessed’ or ‘happy’, both of which have drawbacks. ‘Blessed’ can suggest something disconnected from real life; ‘happy’ can suggest something fleeting. It helps to notice that it’s the opening word in the Book of Psalms: “Happy are they who have not walked…” We might say it’s about describing a truly human life.

Most of the beatitudes focus on character as seen in conduct, the merciful, the peacemakers, etc. The beginning and ending beatitudes focus also on the vulnerability tied to that character. While in a perfect world good character would produce good fortune, we’re not in a perfect world, so good character carries risks. As Ben Sira put it “My child, when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for testing” (2:1). So “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” not because that’s how the world works, but because, as Jesus has been proclaiming, “the kingdom of heaven has come near.” As Jesus has been proclaiming, underlined in the last beatitude which shifts from “Blessed are the…” to “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” So the Beatitudes are news, tied to Jesus’ arrival, rather than timeless truths.

And the thing about news (worthy of the name) is that it guides the conduct of the wise. Snow’s in the forecast—so leave the sand and shovel in the trunk. “Blessed are the poor in spirit”—so that’s the character we want to encourage. Parenthetically, here, as in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, the focus is first on the community (the parish), then on the individual. What sort of community are we? What sort of community are we becoming?

And the community/congregation is integral to when/how these futures happen (“they will be comforted…will inherit the earth…will be filled”). Only in heaven? That would make “inherit the earth” meaningless. “They will receive mercy” only from God? Jesus’ teaching seeks to mold us into congregations in which the Beatitudes are experienced to be true in our dealings with each other. (“Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times’” (Matt. 18:21-22). The Beatitudes are news; let’s respond wisely.

Paul, as we heard, pays attention to what the message about the cross does to words like ‘wise’, ‘foolish’, ‘strong’, and ‘weak’. The way of the Beatitudes, executed supremely by Jesus, looks foolish and weak to the world, then and now. The meek will inherit the earth? Or, as Stalin put it, “The pope! How many divisions has he got?” So the Corinthians need to realize that being baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection overhauls the meaning of ‘wise’, ‘foolish’, ‘strong’, and ‘weak’. These “I belong to Paul/Apollos/Cephas/Christ” games need a second look.

That’s something we have trouble hearing. We categorize: there’s culture, economics, politics, religion, etc. “Christian” goes in the religion box, so leaves the other boxes undisturbed, leaves the meaning of ‘wise’, ‘strong’ etc. in these other boxes undisturbed. Or, worse, ‘Christian’ becomes another argument for whatever cultural, economic, or political positions I already hold. It’s easiest to see this in others. Putin invades Ukraine; the Russian Orthodox Patriarch declares that it’s God’s will. No. To be baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection means a mental asterisk on words like ‘wise’, ‘foolish’, ‘strong’, and ‘weak’ as I learn from Jesus how to use them.

So much—too briefly—for Paul. But what of “the message of the cross”? In today’s reading Paul focuses on what it does to words like ‘wise’, ‘foolish’, ‘strong’, and ‘weak’. But that’s not all, or even primarily, what the cross is about. So let’s pull back the camera. Micah: “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?” Well, why is that good, why does the LORD require that? Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God: that’s what reflects God’s character, that’s what fits with God’s creation. And that, combined with the suffering it often attracts (think the Beatitudes, Jesus’ performance of the Beatitudes, “the message of the cross”) is how the LORD heals this world.

But that’s not the end of the story. Toward the end Paul writes “He [God] is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” That’s more than Jesus messing with our use of ‘wise’, ‘foolish’, ‘strong’, and ‘weak’. That’s our walking in the way of the Beatitudes, the way of the Cross, to participate in the healing of our world. We keep remembering Jesus’ story not because he’s back there and we’re here, but so that his story becomes our story.

So, as we come to the altar, let us remember:

When we come to receive the Body and Blood we’re asking God to work in us so that we—and others—experience the Beatitudes in our common life.

When we come to the receive the Body and Blood it’s to receive Jesus as gift and to become the Jesus-like gift for others.

Fear and Light (3rd Sunday after the Epiphany, 1/25/2026)

Leave a reply

Readings

Today’s readings: such a mixed bag! The Gospel continues Epiphany themes—more on that later. The reading from Isaiah: presumably selected because Matthew quotes from it. Psalm 27: perhaps because it’s ‘light’ (“The Lord is my light”) echoes the light in Isaiah and Matthew. 1st Corinthians: well, this is when the lectionary wants us reading 1st Corinthians. Nevertheless, because all the texts are talking about the same God and the same humans, there are some interesting connections.

Today’s psalm: besides the light image, an exploration of what to do with fear. The psalmist celebrates God’s deliverance in the past, but there are still enemies out there. Verse 10: “Hearken to my voice, O Lord, when I call; / have mercy on me and answer me.” Then there’s the psalm’s last verse, omitted by the lectionary: “O tarry and await the Lord’s pleasure; / be strong, and he shall comfort your heart; / wait patiently for the Lord.” The Lord’s timing only sometimes matches our preferred timing, so patience is necessary. What to do with fear? Acknowledge it, but don’t give it the steering wheel. God has been faithful in the past; God will prove faithful in the future; we can bring even our fear before God. Recall the saying attributed to Winston Churchill: “When you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Speaking of fear, our Gospel begins with “When Jesus heard that John had been arrested.” Matthew doesn’t mention it, but John the Evangelist tells us that there was a period in which John the Baptist and Jesus were baptizing in the same region (Jn 3:22-24). You never know how narrow or broad these sweeps are going to be, so Jesus, prudently, leaves Herod’s jurisdiction. Galilee is not safe, but safer.

Matthew then pairs Jesus’ move from Nazareth to Capernaum with a citation from Isaiah. Why? Well, probably for at least three reasons.

First, one of Matthew’s recurrent themes (one of our Epiphany themes) is that this Jewish Messiah is good news for the Gentiles. That’s important to the mixed Jewish/Gentile congregations for whom he’s writing. So the phrase “Galilee of the nations” in Isaiah is important.

Second, Matthew, like John, likes that light image. John the Evangelist has Jesus saying “I am the light of the world” (8:12); the quote from Isaiah is Matthew’s equivalent. It’s also a setup for what we’ll hear in the next chapter, toward the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount: “You are the light of the world” (Mat 5:14). Back in the first chapter the angel said to Joseph “he will save his people from their sins” (1:21); that’s about empowerment.

(Let’s stay with that for a moment. Matthew doesn’t waste time between “the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light” (4:16) and “You are the light of the world” (5:14). It’s the same move made in Isa 61:1ff which lies behind the first three beatitudes in Matt 5:3-5, from “The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me” (61:1) to “to provide for those who mourn in Zion…  They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations” (61:3-4; italics mine). Easy to focus on the benefits of salvation, but without an equal focus on being empowered and sent (John 20:21), we miss the point.)

Third, in the minds of some, Jesus’ association with Galilee counted against him being the Messiah. From John’s Gospel: “Surely the Messiah does not come from Galilee, does he?” (7:41). And here, I think, Matthew is relying not only on the text he quotes, but on the continuation of the text. The reason for the light and joy Isaiah describes: “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (9:6). Galilee is precisely where we should expect the Messiah’s presence to be felt. Matthew sees the situation Isaiah faced prefiguring the situation in Jesus’ time, and builds on it!

Moving on, I think it’s helpful to have Handel’s “For unto us a child is born” ringing in our ears as we read the calling of the disciples, because it gives a sense of the authority of the one doing the calling. One commentator (Boring) sees the story as discipleship stripped down to its essentials. Why are we disciples? Jesus called us.

Circling back to today’s psalm and the beginning of the Gospel text (“Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested”) notice what Matthew leaves implicit. With the combination of Roman occupation and compliant local elites, no occupation is safe, but fishing is usually safer than most. Jesus calls them to leave that, and today’s gradual hymn reminded us of the consequences (“Young John who trimmed the flapping sail, homeless in Patmos died. Peter, who hauled the teeming net, head-down was crucified” [The Hymnal 1982¸ 661].) “When you’re going through hell, keep going.”

After the other readings, the 1st Corinthians reading is almost comic relief. Jesus, “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace,” has called us, and here we are, driven by our fears to seek status through one-upmanship. “’I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’” Almost comic relief, because whatever Corinth needs, it isn’t more darkness, and Jesus really needs those folk to be light.

So perhaps our lessons suggest an additional piece of advice to “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” That would be: “Going through hell doesn’t cancel the need to repent.” Matthew summarized Jesus’ message in today’s reading: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” It’s easy to postpone repentance until we’ve—say—gotten rid of the Roman occupation. But that simply guarantees that if we get power, we’ll use it as destructively as the Romans did.

“The Lord is my light.” Let us, with patience, allow that light to continue to do its work within and among us, the work that we know needs doing, the work about which we’re clueless. And we can do so with confidence, for the Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace has promised to be with us always.

How the Lamb takes away the sin of the world (2nd Sunday after the Epiphany, 1/18/2026)

2 Replies

Readings

“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” John the Baptist’s proclamation continues to echo in our worship. “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us; Therefore let us keep the feast.” And often immediately afterwards we say “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world: have mercy on us.” Today’s Gospel together with the other lessons give us an opportunity to wonder about what we’re saying at every Eucharist.

“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” How does the Lamb do that? Not, obviously, like the soaps in the TV ads: one swipe and it’s gone! How does the Lamb do that? A full answer would mean a very long sermon; let’s simply notice some elements in our readings and liturgy.

In our Gospel two disciples hear John and follow Jesus. “They remained with him that day.” We might wonder: does taking away the sin of the world start with friendship? We might recall: the “greatest and first commandment” (Mt 22:38) is not “You shall obey the Lord your God” but “You shall love the Lord your God.” Hard to imagine love without friendship! In our context that’s encouragement in our times of prayer/reading/reflection to hang out with Jesus, to waste time with Jesus.

We need that friendship also because we’re vulnerable, with many reasons to fear. Recall our first reading: “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.” The speaker is described as “one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers.” And while today’s psalm (Psalm 40) celebrates God’s faithfulness in the past, it’s equally concerned that that faithfulness continue. Had we read more of the psalm:

For innumerable troubles have crowded upon me;
my sins have overtaken me, and I cannot see;
they are more in number than the hairs of my head,
and my heart fails me.
Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me;
O Lord, make haste to help me.

Earlier in the psalm: “Happy are they who trust in the Lord!” True. Equally true: without that trust, this “takes away the sin of the world” project grinds to a halt. That’s one of the reasons Paul talks repeatedly in our second reading about strengthening: “He will also strengthen you to the end…”

In other words, this “takes away the sin of the world” project turns out to be deeply participative. Recall those words at the Fraction: “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us; Therefore let us keep the feast.” They’re from later in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians where he’s dealing with an issue in congregational life. Since Passover is immediately followed by a period in which yeast is verboten, Paul plays off the image:

“Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1Co 5:6-8).

Malice and evil: in a world without the Lamb, completely rational responses, for there the Golden Rule is “Do unto others as they do unto you—and do it first!” But the Lamb has arrived, and Paul wants us to remember which world we’re living in. In the Lamb’s world we can risk sincerity and truth.

And, continuing to speak of the Eucharist, recall these words of institution: “This is my Blood of the new Covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Forgiveness of our sins, yes. But recall the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” So, equally, Jesus Blood shed to create a people who forgive. Taking away the sin of the world: breaking the endless cycles of retaliation and payback with forgiveness.

“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” It’s not magic. It’s an invitation to friendship, and in the context of that friendship to learn—as often as necessary—that our fears need not set the agenda, that Jesus’ way is “none other than the way of life and peace” (BCP 99).

“Fulfill all righteousness”? (1st Sunday after the Epiphany, 1/11/2026)

Leave a reply

Readings

Welcome to the First Sunday after the Epiphany. ‘Epiphany’: the Greek word for the appearance of something normally invisible, confirmation that there’s more here than meets the eye. Our lectionary creates, effectively, an epiphany season, starting with the magi’s visit (the Feast of Epiphany) and the heavenly appearances at Jesus’ baptism (today), and ending with the Transfiguration, with the intervening Sundays more or less continuing this epiphany theme.

The other readings key off the Gospel reading. There’s general agreement that the voice from heaven (“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”) picks up the opening declaration from our Isaiah text (“Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights”). The celebration of God’s power as experienced in the earth-rattling thunder in the psalm provides an interesting counterpoint to the Gospel’s heavenly voice. Peter’s speech in Acts is a nice twofer: it recalls Jesus’ baptism, and, since Peter is speaking to the gentile Cornelius and his invitees, continues the theme that this divine appearance is good news for all peoples.

Jesus baptized by John: a striking scene, but also, apparently, profoundly unsettling. Shouldn’t Jesus be baptizing John? So the Gospel of John omits it. Luke narrates John’s arrest before Jesus’ baptism, leaving us wondering who baptized Jesus. It’s Matthew that sets the question centerstage: “John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.’” OK, and how is “fulfill all righteousness” an explanation? How does Matthew think it’s an explanation?

It turns out that “righteous” and “righteousness” are important words in Matthew’s Gospel. Unique to Matthew from the Sermon on the Mount: “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (5:20). And of all the ways Matthew could have introduced Joseph back in chapter 1, he chooses: “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man” (1:19). And in case we’re wondering what ‘righteous’ means, he’s included Tamar in Jesus’ genealogy, for ‘righteous’ is in the punchline of Tamar’s story.

Tamar is the widow of Er, the patriarch Judah’s son. Following local custom, Tamar is given to Er’s brother Onan, both so that Er won’t be left without posterity, and that Tamar will be provided for. That custom, levirate marriage, turns out to be common in many cultures—see Wikipedia—and shows up also in the Book of Ruth. But Onan also dies. By custom Judah should give Tamar to Shelah, his next son. But he’s decided that Tamar is bad news and procrastinates. And procrastinates. Tamar, honor-bound to do right by Er, improvises. She dresses as a prostitute and puts herself in Judah’s path. As payment he agrees to send a kid from the flock, and Tamar keeps his signet, cord, and staff as collateral (his wallet, more or less). Tamar returns to her widow’s garments, and Judah is left scratching his head. Let’s hear the next bit from Genesis 38:

About three months later Judah was told, “Your daughter-in-law Tamar has played the whore; moreover she is pregnant as a result of whoredom.” And Judah said, “Bring her out, and let her be burned.” As she was being brought out, she sent word to her father-in-law, “It was the owner of these who made me pregnant.” And she said, “Take note, please, whose these are, the signet and the cord and the staff.” Then Judah acknowledged them and said, “She is more in the right than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah” (Gen 38:24-26).

“She is more righteous than I.” Righteous: not a matter of checking off the boxes, but doing what’s necessary to do right by those with whom one’s in relation. So when Israel is in distress it’s good news that the Lord is righteous; the Lord can be counted on to do what’s necessary to come to Israel’s aid.

Joseph: his righteousness already orients him to mercy. But he needs the information the angel brings, needs to believe that information, that Mary’s pregnancy is holy. There’s no checklist. Given the angel’s information, taking Mary as wife, acknowledging Jesus as his son, is doing right by Mary—and by God, for that matter.

“John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.’”

“Fulfill all righteousness.” Let’s recall two other elements from the Joseph story:

  • “you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
  • “’and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us.’” (Mat 1:21-23)

(Note that I’m not suggesting that Jesus is recalling these, but that Matthew has included these also because they help him—and us—make sense of “fulfill all righteousness.”) “Save his people from their sins”: at arm’s length, or by standing in solidarity with them? “God is with us”: does Jesus get wet or not? “Fulfill all righteousness”: do whatever it takes to save his people from their sins, to fulfill that promise “God with us.” And the Father, Matthew tells us, responds: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” We might paraphrase: “Son, you nailed it.”

Next month the lectionary will have us hearing that “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees” text. Before Jesus directed it to the disciples, to us, he directed it to himself.

Two concluding observations. As a celebration of raw power, it’s hard to beat today’s psalm, Psalm 29. The juxtaposition of Psalm 29 with the divine voice at Jesus’ baptism, Jesus dripping wet, identified with this sinful people, does invite us to wonder about the relation between power and vulnerability. “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees…” We prefer to do that from a position of power; today’s text might give us another way of thinking about that, perhaps aided by those strange words Paul heard: “”My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9).

Second, this righteousness we’ve been exploring is clearly open-ended. Open-ended on our part, which can (should?) be disconcerting. “Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times’” (Mat 18:21-22). Or Paul on love: “It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1Co 13:7). Open-ended on God’s part, which can and should be profoundly encouraging: “If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?” (Rom 8:31-32)

One Wild Ride (Epiphany, 1/6/2026)

Leave a reply

Readings

The readings for our celebration of the Epiphany take us on one wild ride. We think we’re headed to Jerusalem. Then there’s a small detour to Bethlehem. Then the itinerary explodes, with multi-colored sparks flying in all directions like a giant peony-shaped firework.

In our reading from Isaiah the “you” addressed is, grammatically, feminine singular, so, in context, Jerusalem. The promised divine light and glory contrast with the present reality: Jerusalem being simply a small impoverished bit of the Persian Empire. But “the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you,” and kings and nations will respond. Towards the end of the reading it sounds like the script for Matthew’s magi, and if we picture the magi arriving on camels, we have Isaiah to thank.

Today’s psalm is a prayer for the king that focuses on the ideal king’s priorities. And almost all of that focus is on his initiatives for the poor (“For he shall deliver the poor who cries out in distress, / and the oppressed who has no helper. / He shall have pity on the lowly and poor; / he shall preserve the lives of the needy.”). That’s its edge, for most kings had quite different priorities. Few kings had an egalitarian vision in which the blood of the poor mattered. The psalm was always an expression of hope. When the kingdom falls, it becomes an expression of messianic hope. It’s included in today’s readings probably because of the mention of the kings bringing gifts (vv.10-11). If we think of the magi as kings, we can thank this psalm.

Both Isaiah and the psalm direct our attention to Jerusalem. So it’s no surprise that the magi show up there. “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?” The capital does seem like the logical place to look. A consultation with the chief priests and scribes reroutes them to Bethlehem, and there they deliver their gifts.

Would Isaiah have been disappointed that those gifts didn’t end up in the temple? Perhaps Matthew thinks they did: a temple is defined by its occupant, and Matthew has already identified Jesus as Emmanuel (“God is with us”).

But how do we understand the magi’s gifts: tribute to someone else’s king, or to a king as much theirs as the Jews’? Perhaps they don’t know. But it’s one of the questions at the heart of whether Jesus is the Messiah/Christ, and what being the Messiah/Christ means: what to do about Israel’s enemies? What to do about or with the Gentiles? Even the apostles after the resurrection: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Act 1:6) Or, to broaden the question, our first two readings: texts supporting a nationalistic (chauvinistic) agenda, or fleshing out that promise to Abraham “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:3)?

It took Pentecost and the mini-Pentecost at the gentile Cornelius’ home to discern the answer, to discern what the magi’s gifts were about, and Paul lays it out in our reading from Ephesians: God’s mystery/secret now revealed: “the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise.”

And this is playing out not only in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, but across the known world. That glory of the LORD Isaiah awaits? Recall Jesus’ promise: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Mat 18:20), also in Rome, also in Ripon. A giant peony-shaped firework.

And as Jesus’ brother James reminds us, it’s not a matter of special effects, but of living out today’s psalm’s egalitarian vision, Jesus’ vision. James: “My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in…” (2:1-2). Our readings have us focusing on Jew and Gentile; James reminds us that this isn’t the only division belief in our glorious Lord calls us to transcend.

The Gentiles: “fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise.” Very good news for us Gentiles. Good news for the Jews? That’s more ambiguous. On the one hand, it points to the fulfillment of that promise to Abraham: “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” On the other hand, it was easy to read the Bible (our Old Testament) in nationalistic/chauvinistic ways, and learning new ways of reading, thinking, behaving—that’s never easy. We like to think “your kingdom come” and “our kingdom come” point in the same direction; it’s unsettling when we discover they don’t. Both the Jews and Gentiles in these mixed house churches have hard work to do, which is why the New Testament writers give so much attention to their common life. Jews and Gentiles together: that’s by no means a done deal.

There’s an apocryphal story about Henry Kissinger visiting a zoo in Jerusalem where the centerpiece is a cage containing lions and lambs. Kissinger, astounded, corners the zookeeper: How do you do it? The zookeeper: you just have to keep adding lambs.

And in the “no pressure” department, we hear “so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” Where Paul talks of rulers and authorities—and he does so repeatedly in this letter—we talk of institutions, identities, “the powers that be,” what seems plausible or possible. Think of how we talk about the economy: the economy is healthy; the economy is nervous; the economy demands sacrifices.

These rulers and authorities are not necessarily evil, but they do tend to be overly jealous of their own turf, to keep us divided, suspicious, fearful.

One commentator puts it this way:

“[T]he Church provides hostile cosmic powers with a tangible reminder that their authority has been decisively broken and that all things are subject to Christ. The overcoming of the barriers between Jews and Gentiles, as they are united through Christ in the Church, is a pledge of the overcoming of all divisions when the universe will be restored to harmony in Christ.” From the beginning of the book Paul’s been talking about that divine plan “to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (1:10).

In Paul’s vision, God’s intention is that if you want to see where world history is headed, look at the Church. And that, of course, is the challenge, for too often our churches simply replicate existing divisions.

The magi. In God’s providence they were guided to the One in whom God is gathering all things, “things in heaven and things on earth.” To celebrate Epiphany is to recommit ourselves to their not having made that long trip for nothing.

Christ was born for this! (First Sunday after Christmas, 12/28/2025)

Leave a reply

Readings

[Call and response:] Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!

This year that line from the carol we just sang got my attention: “Christ was born for this!” What happens if we put that together with today’s readings?

In our first reading, it sounds like there are two voices There’s the “I” we meet midway through the reading: “For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent.” That sounds like a prophet, who begins to speak to Jerusalem. The “I” in the first lines? That sounds like Jerusalem personified, celebrating her coming vindication or salvation, so certain that it’s put in the past tense: “he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, / he has covered me with the robe of righteousness.”

Why should we gentiles care about that? Recall Isaiah’s vision that we heard a few weeks ago on the first Sunday of Advent:

In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.
Many peoples shall come and say,
‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.’

That’s the Old Testament’s primary vision of how those words to Abraham “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:3) are fulfilled. Not by military conquest, but by attraction. Israel’s trust in the Lord nurtures a national life that is so attractive that all the nations want in on it.

Things, obviously, didn’t play out that way, so today’s text from Isaiah looks to the Lord getting that project back on track. We hear the same hope at the beginning of today’s psalm: “The Lord rebuilds Jerusalem; / he gathers the exiles of Israel.” And we heard it in Mary’s song on the third Sunday of Advent:

He has come to the help of his servant Israel,
for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
The promise he made to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children for ever. (Lk 1:54-55)

“Christ was born for this!” And so, some years later, Jesus enters Jerusalem with the crowds shouting “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Mat 21:9) It’s almost within reach: all the Jewish leaders and Pilate have to say is “OK, Jesus, we’ll do it your way” and it’s Isaiah’s vision on steroids.

As we recall every Holy Week, it doesn’t play out that way, and God says, in effect, “OK, this is going to take longer.” So what we encounter in today’s Epistle and Gospel is a focus on adoption. Galatians: “so that we might receive adoption as children.” John: “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”

Daughters and sons of God! In the context of today’s readings, that suggests attention to Jesus’ words in the Gospel of John: “Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise” (5:19). Those words to Abraham, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed:” that’s the family project. As daughters and sons, our project.

The same theme shows up in Matthew’s Gospel: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (5:44-45).

It’s not that God has given up on the Jews. As Paul reminds us “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29). But these congregations of Jewish and Gentile believers in all the world—even in Wisconsin—each can be a temple, a place where trust in the Lord nurtures a communal life that is so attractive that all the neighbors want in on it. As Paul puts it, “so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph 3:10).

Isaiah’s vision: it’s been tweaked in unexpected ways. The “mountain of the Lord’s house” is distributed across the globe, also at 6205 University Avenue. But it’s still the endgame:

‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.’

And for that, as Paul celebrates, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” Repairing the world (tikkun olam, as the Jews put it): it’s the family business. “Christ was born for this! Christ was born for this!”

[Call and response:] Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!

Light in the Darkness (Christmas Day, 12/25/2025)

Leave a reply

Readings

[Call & response:] Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!

The truly odd thing about the way our culture celebrates Christmas, a.k.a. the Holiday Season, is the contrast between its obligatory gaiety and the despair-encouraging darkness assumed in the Christmas readings. “The people who walked in darkness” in our first reading: in Isaiah’s time, the northern tribes just swallowed up by the Assyrian Empire. Or the Roman Empire assumed in our Gospel reading. As Ben Franklin observed, “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Only under the most generous reading are the Romans guests, and they’ve been throwing their weight around for decades. That registration decree from the Emperor Agustus? The Empire needs—wait for it—more money.

Then there’s Crete. Earlier in the letter Paul writes about its inhabitants “It was one of them, their very own prophet, who said, ‘Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.’ That testimony is true” (1:12-13). It would be understandable if he’d given the place a wide berth, but, no, he’s left Titus there to sort things out. So, in the verses before today’s reading, Paul’s focused on what various groups need to hear: older men, older women, younger men, slaves… Not the finer points of etiquette, but painfully basic stuff: the older women shouldn’t be slaves to drink; the younger men should show some self-control; the slaves shouldn’t pilfer…

Why? In all that darkness booze etc. sound like rational responses! Paul in today’s reading: “For the grace/gift of God has appeared…” Later in the letter he writes: “He saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit” (3:5). It’s a matter of remembering their identity, our identity. Every day we receive countless messages (print, TV, radio, social media, etc.) each encouraging us to experience ourselves in terms of a particular identity: consumer, tax-payer, citizen, privileged white male, oppressed white male… But we are baptized. Paul would have us use that as a filter, a spam blocker, if you like. How is this message relevant to us as baptized, in which Jew, Greek, slave, free, male, female, “all…one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:27-28)?

Because, as Paul writes, there’s a point to God’s gift/grace: “that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.” “A people of his own:” that’s a somewhat unwieldy translation for the phrase that occurs repeatedly in the Torah about Israel: “you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples” (Exo 19:5). God hasn’t given up on that, a people whose life is human, humane. As you may recall, Matthew uses “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” to celebrate Jesus’ arrival in Galilee (4:15-16). Jesus is the light. But then in the next chapter we hear Jesus saying “You are the light of the world” (5:14).

God’s gift, the gift that keeps giving in the lives of those who receive it. Our reading from Isaiah ended with “The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.” And if we wonder how that works, the ending from our reading from Titus supplies part of the answer: “and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.”

“The people who walked in darkness…” A couple millennia on from Isaiah we have no lack of darkness, whether imported or home-grown. But, as Isaiah promised, we have God’s gracious gift, Emmanuel, God with us. The darkness will not get the last word. That Spirit that brooded over the dark chaos at the beginning of creation was given to us at baptism—or, better, we were given over to that Spirit at baptism—and the invitation of Christmas is to celebrate what that Spirit is stirring up in our midst.

[Call & response:] Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!

Emmanuel (“God is with us”) = “Boldly go where no one has gone before” (4th Sunday of Advent, 12/21/2025)

Leave a reply

Readings

As you probably guessed, our first reading was chosen because today’s Gospel quotes from it. Ahaz is the king of Judah—what’s left of Solomon’s kingdom after the northern tribes left to form Israel.  Everyone in the region is afraid: the hungry Assyrian Empire (modern Iraq) is expanding. It’s something like having Russia as your next-door neighbor. Israel and Aram (modern Syria) want to fight, and, since Ahaz doesn’t, they plan to invade Judah.

In our text Isaiah is imploring Ahaz to trust the Lord. And, despite Ahaz’ refusal of a sign, the Lord offers one anyway: a young woman is now pregnant and will bear a son who will be named Emmanuel (“God with us”). The child will serve as a sort of calendar: before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, Israel and Aram will be non-issues. But Ahaz doesn’t trust. As the Book of Kings tells it Ahaz sent messengers to the Assyrian king: “I am your servant and your son. Come up, and rescue me from the hand of the king of Aram and from the hand of the king of Israel, who are attacking me” (2 Ki. 16:7). Servant and son, no longer of the Lord, but of the Assyrian king. What a fall!

But the question still hangs in the air: Emmanuel (“God with us”): what will that turn out to mean?

Some 700 years later the question is not how to respond to the Assyrian Empire, but how to respond to the Roman Empire. (The factions we meet in the New Testament, the Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, Zealots, etc. separate by how they answer that question.) And in the middle of all that Mary is pregnant. For Matthew it’s an Ahaz moment, with Joseph and his generation facing the same choice Ahaz and his generation faced: trust or not. Emmanuel (“God with us”): what will that turn out to mean?

Joseph is the first to have to choose. Matthew describes Joseph as a righteous man. That’s important, because the argument about what righteousness means runs through Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (5:20). For Joseph, “righteous” means not exposing Mary to disgrace, but quietly dismissing her. Ahaz had Isaiah; Joseph has “an angel of the Lord,” who redefines “righteous” behavior. And Joseph—thank God—trusts, and takes Mary as his wife.

“Emmanuel” (God with us): whatever that means, it doesn’t mean “business as usual.” Business as usual for Ahaz was a matter of arithmetic: how many divisions do we have? How many do Israel and Aram have? How many does Assyria have? Emmanuel? Hard to quantify that. Business as usual for Joseph meant a compassionate dismissal of Mary. But “Emmanuel” significantly shifted “righteous.”

Now, a sidebar. What does Matthew’s “fulfill” mean? There are plenty of examples of prophets speaking about the future and those words proving true. Isaiah’s words in today’s reading about the fate of Israel and Aram is an example. But that’s not the only way “fulfill” works. In the case of Isaiah’s young woman, the child simply serves as a calendar. So Matthew’s just taking advantage of the Greek text’s translation of “young woman” as “virgin” to support his Jesus-fulfills-prophecy agenda? No. What Matthew has recognized is that the situations Ahaz and Joseph face are similar, and that this time around God’s action is even more breathtaking. This time around “Emmanuel” points to a far more profound “God with us,” and Matthew writes his Gospel also to help us discover some of what that means. Isaiah’s words have been filled fuller than he could have imagined.

Notice, by the way, the choices Matthew has made as a narrator. “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way” sets us up to expect an account of the birth. But Matthew focuses on the choice Joseph faces. Why? Perhaps because Matthew’s audience is in a similar situation. For the Jewish Christians in Matthew’s audience “righteousness” had meant having as little to do with the gentiles as possible. But Emmanuel, and now they’re part of a renewed Israel in which Jew and Gentile call each other “brother” and “sister.” They might be excused for thinking Joseph had it easy.

Where am I going with this? Since 1966 I’ve been a Star Trek fan: “boldly go where no one has gone before.” That’s not a bad weak analogy for the journey to which the Christmas story invites us. The Messiah, the Christ, has come. There were plenty of scripts for how that was supposed to play out. But since this is a matter of Emmanuel (“God with us”) it’s not about following a script, and one of the first ones who has to deal with this is Joseph. Sometimes, as in our Gospel, there’s a direct command to be obeyed. Sometimes it’s a matter of Spirit-led discernment. Paul in Ephesians: “Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord” (5:10). We continually turn to Holy Scripture for nourishment, not because it’s the script, but because—under the guidance of the Holy Spirit—it enables us to faithfully improvise as we follow our risen Lord.

Joseph’s feast day is March 19; let’s use the collect for that feast to take us out:

“O God, who from the family of your servant David raised up Joseph to be the guardian of your incarnate Son and the spouse of his virgin mother: Give us grace to imitate his uprightness of life and his obedience to your commands; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

Be Patient? Third Sunday of Advent, 12/14/2025

Leave a reply

Readings

A child of my age, I resonate with Ambrose Bierce’s definition of patience, “A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.” So, James’ “Be patient” is not what I want to hear.

Actually, James’ “Be patient” and Jesus’ “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me” are acknowledgements of problems, and set the agenda for the sermon.

“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” It’s not an unreasonable question, and not simply because John’s been in prison for some time. Recall what we heard last Sunday from John’s description of the coming one: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Jesus doesn’t seem to be doing that.

Jesus responds by describing what he has been doing, the description drawing heavily from multiple texts from Isaiah, including our first reading: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” The citations from Isaiah aren’t a rhetorical flourish; they’re the argument: Jesus is doing what God promised. Implicit in the response: there is a difference between gathering the wheat and burning the chaff on the one hand and what Jesus has been doing on the other.

Notice that Jesus in his response is doing what he did in the synagogue in Nazareth as recorded by Luke. Reading from Isaiah, he reads up to “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” but omits the following “and the day of vengeance of our God” (Isa 61:1-2; Lk 4:18-19).

Jesus knows that this is both what John does and doesn’t want to hear. Hence “blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” Of course, it’s not a problem only with John. Luke recalls James and John’s response when a Samaritan village refuses to receive them: “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luk 9:54). And it’s been a problem ever since: Jesus and his followers: enacting  God’s vengeance or God’s compassion and mercy (recalling the ending of James’ argument, cut short by the lectionary)?

So that’s one problem, what “the one who is to come” is doing, is commissioning us to do. It affects even our reading of the Magnificat. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, / and has lifted up the lowly./ He has filled the hungry with good things, / and the rich he has sent away empty.” That should give the mighty and rich pause.[1] But following Jesus’ lead we focus our efforts on the lowly and the hungry, a focus that often demands not a little patience.

“Be patient—James writes—until the coming of the Lord.” James is also dealing with a second problem, the delay in that coming. His contribution to our reflection lies in his choice of wording. As Luke Timothy Johnson observes of the verb makrothymein, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament that verb and its corresponding noun are mostly “used of the attitudes of a superiority to an inferior.” “[B]efore the time of judgment, God shows makrothymia; so should the community also share that outlook” (The Letter of James, 313). Contra Ambrose Bierce, we exercise patience from a position of strength, not weakness.

Now, if the delay in Jesus’ coming was a problem for James in the first century, it’s a problem for us in the twenty-first! In the Great Thanksgiving: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” How do I make sense of that delay? Well, in three different ways.

First, were I to push the question, I’d open myself to the same divine response Job got (Job 38-41):

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements– surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? (Job 38:4-7)

And those would be legitimate questions.

The second way is a spin-off from God’s response to Job. We tend to assume that we’re God’s only concern. God spends the last two chapters of the reply to Job celebrating Behemoth (“which I made just as I made you”) and Leviathan (“When it raises itself up the gods are afraid; / at the crashing they are beside themselves.”). We humans are often making a mess of it; the rest of creation, from the hummingbirds to the great whales, are giving exquisite full-throated glory to God.

The third way is more tentative, and takes off from James’ example of the farmer. Some things take time. Crops take months; some things take much longer stretches. Take Yosemite Valley: the time to form those massive blocks of granite, the time for the glaciers to do their thing. So we get the majesty of Half Dome. Or take the Grand Canyon: God introduces what will become the Colorado River: let’s see what that looks like in five or six million years. God is happy to work with long stretches of time.

What if the Creator wishes to explore the potential of this creature made “a little lower than God” (Ps 8:5)? David and his harp: it took time for that technology to develop, and it will take centuries more before a Mozart, a Beethoven, or a Copeland can appear. Or to take a different sort of technology, the centuries to develop the scientific traditions that make possible the achievements displayed in the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Literally breath-taking what we can do together in our best moments.

There is, as Scripture and the daily headlines remind us, more than enough cruelty and suffering to have us crying “Come, Lord Jesus.” Job and these other reflections don’t lessen that impulse, but do make me grateful that I’m not the one making the decision on timing.

To sum up this perhaps strange reflection on our readings, Scripture is clear that the mind is important. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Mat 22:37). And sometimes its importance lies in its capacity to recognize its limits. So I am profoundly grateful that Jesus’ blessing in today’s Gospel is not “Blessed is anyone who understands what I’m doing” but “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

[1] Recall the British ban during their rule in India as well as the more recent bans by dictatorships in Argentina and Guatemala. (Source)