Tag Archives: Ephesians

Armor for the struggle (14th Sunday after Pentecost, 8/25/2024)

Leave a reply

Readings (Track 1)

Last week’s sermon was on the long side; this week’s on the short side, focusing on the Epistle and Gospel.

Paul writes “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” In our generation perhaps no one has unpacked this better than Martin Luther King Jr. The following is from something he wrote in 1957 for the Christian Century, talking about non-violence.

“A third characteristic of this method is that the attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who are caught in those forces. It is evil we are seeking to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil. Those of us who struggle against racial injustice must come to see that the basic tension is not between races. As I like to say to the people in Montgomery, Alabama: ‘The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is at bottom between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. And if there is a victory it will be a victory not merely for fifty thousand Negroes, but a victory for justice and the forces of light. We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may happen to be unjust.’”

Good words to remember during an election year. Good words to remember any year, a clear example of what Paul’s list (“the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”) is about. In King’s case, the cultural assumption that the blacks were less than the whites, an assumption reflected in customs and laws. But oppression takes many forms, and the spiritual forces of evil are happy to help us understand why it’s best left unchallenged.

But when Paul describes the armor for that struggle, it can begin to sound dicey. Weaponize truth, righteousness, the Word of God? We have the scars to remind us of how that often ends up. Recall Lincoln’s response to someone’s confident affirmation of God being on the Union’s side: “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on my side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side.”

And if we wonder what being on God’s side looks like, we have today’s Gospel. In response to Jesus’ teaching regarding his flesh and blood, the narrator records the reaction of many of the disciples: “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” So Jesus asks the Twelve: “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” It’s not that the Twelve find the teaching any less difficult, but they understand that they need to keep listening to Jesus.

This gives us, I think, a useful way of talking about belief and unbelief. Neither the believers nor the unbelievers understand Jesus; the believers are still trying to learn from him, still trying to follow him.

And this stance, this spirituality if you will, is what keeps the armor in our Epistle from becoming destructive. The truth, righteousness, faith, word of God: that’s what we need for our continuing learning, what—if we let it—gets us, as the text puts it, “ready to proclaim the gospel of peace.” Put another way, as Paul says, this armor isn’t for enemies of flesh and blood. If we find ourselves assuming that these enemies of flesh and blood are  the ones who really need the truth, righteousness, etc. we should be prepared to discover that the spiritual forces of evil are happy to welcome us as fellow travelers, useful idiots. And that we do want to avoid.

“Be angry, but do not sin.” And we do that how? (12th after Pentecost, 8/11/2024)

Leave a reply

Readings (Track 1)

Let’s start with today’s Gospel, the middle section of John’s long exploration of the feeding of the five thousand. There are many things we could focus on; today let’s look at Jesus’ citation of the biblical (Old Testament) text “And they shall all be taught by God.” In Jesus’ mind it’s not simply a matter of the people and Jesus. The Father has been teaching the people, and those who’ve listened, who’ve learned, come to Jesus. (The text, in other words, has nothing to do with John Calvin’s nightmare, that God saves or damns us quite apart from anything we’ve thought or done.) Jesus comes at the end of a process: “Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.”

We can take this further in two directions. First, since the way we tell our own stories is always subject to revision, Jesus’ arrival can be the occasion to revisit our own stories: “Oh, so that’s what God was trying to teach me.” If we’re paying attention, Jesus’ arrival brings both the question “What do I make of Jesus?” and “What do I make of myself?”

A second direction: what has the Father been teaching? The answer to that is, of course, not simple. The Old Testament is not a small book. But it’s a question we can use to unpack our reading from 2nd Samuel.

Our 2nd Samuel reading: the lectionary has hit the fast forward button—hard. Last Sunday he prophet Nathan had said “You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword…Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house.” And that’s been playing out ever. Amnon, David’s firstborn, desires his sister Tamar, and, in a parody of David and Bathsheba, rapes her and then discards her. David hears of it, gets angry, but “he would not punish his son Amnon, because he loved him, for he was his firstborn” (13:21). Absalom, Tamar’s brother, gets angry, bides his time for two years, and kills Amnon. David and Absalom eventually reconcile—sort of—but Absalom is soon plotting a rebellion whose ending we heard this morning.

Now, probably coincidentally, anger is one of the main themes in our Ephesians reading. “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.” The main point, I’d guess, is not to let the anger fester: “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice.” How do we do that? Paul talks about speaking truth, forgiving, imitating God.

What happens if we set Paul’s words next to the story of David and his children? Speaking truth: that’s always risky, also because the truth is rarely as flattering to us as we would like. David tended to run on the principle “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is…not yet mine,” and truth-telling would have involved explaining why Amnon shouldn’t have done likewise. Absalom doesn’t even try truth-telling. We’re told that he “spoke to Amnon neither good nor bad” (13:22).

Forgiving. The prophet Nathan to David: “Now the Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die. Nevertheless…the child that is born to you shall die” (13:14). Recalling the question prompted by the Gospel reading (what are we supposed to learn from God), David in dealing with Amnon has maybe learned forgiveness, but not the need for truth-telling or (since Amnon is his son) some sort of accountability. David may have thought he was doing Amnon a favor; as it turns out, his inaction signed Amnon’s death warrant.

Imitating God. Recall Paul’s words: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us…” I suspect that that’s one idea not two: living in love is precisely how we imitate God, and the love involved is a love that increases, not decreases, our vulnerability. Neither David nor Amnon nor Absalom had any interest in increased vulnerability; that was reserved for Tamar.

Back to the question raised by today’s Gospel, whatever else God has been trying to teach, it is that badly managed anger is toxic. If we haven’t learned that, Jesus will probably make little sense to us.

Let’s return to Nathan’s words: “You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword…Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house.” As the story unfolds, it’s clearly not a Greek tragedy, in which the implacable Furies wreak havoc on the powerless humans. Rather, David continues to make bad choices—perhaps the best he’s capable of making—and his sons follow what he does, rather than whatever he might be saying. So the sword appears so frequently that we might as well count it as another member of David’s family. (And we haven’t even gotten to Solomon’s use of the sword to make his accession to the throne feel more secure.)

We live in a world in which anger is often the right response. The question—as we’re regularly reminded, also by today’s 2nd Samuel text—is what to do with that anger. I cannot—alas—channel Madison Avenue: here’s this pill, and for the next 10 minutes it’s on sale! What Paul offers: tell the truth, forgive, love like God loves, increasing our vulnerability. That can be messy: we do these things imperfectly, and rarely escape the illusion that we’re the ones wearing the white hats. That’s OK, for our God can do messy, as we’re reminded—as we celebrate—at every Eucharist. “He stretched out his arms upon the cross…” For David, Amnon, and Absalom Jesus chooses to stand with Tamar—and invites us to stand with the two of them.

Beginners at believing (11th after Pentecost, 8/4/2024)

Leave a reply

Readings (Track 1)

What a combination of readings! We might title two of them “The Morning after the Night Before,” so let’s start there.

Last week we heard the story of Jesus feeding the large crowd. The starting point there as in the David story is divine generosity. Recall how Nathan’s oracle begins: “I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; I gave you your master’s house…” Now the crowd has followed Jesus, and Jesus tries for a debrief: what was yesterday all about?

Jesus leads with this: “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” Nothing wrong with eating one’s fill, but if the conversation—if the relationship—stays at that level, it doesn’t have much of a future. It’s where many of Jesus’ interactions with folk—then and now—start, with our needs as we define them. And Jesus, being generous, will start there. But if that’s where things stay—my needs as I define them—then there’s about as much future there as in any relationship. Within that framework Jesus is at most one of many possible means to fulfill my ends.

Jesus’ statement gives us a way of wondering about how David got so badly off track. “I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; I gave you your master’s house…” David more than got his fill, but did he wonder about what the Lord wanted out of the relationship? Perhaps not often enough. Not often enough for Uriah the Hittite. But David chose not to disappear Nathan for his unwelcome words. David chose to repent—recall our psalm. So David ends as a figure of hope, and as a model for the serious acts of repentance most of us need from time to time.

A bit later in the conversation with the crowd: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” ‘Believe’: that’s one of this Gospel’s favorite words (32 times in the first three Gospels combined, 85 times in John). Oddly, John never bothers to define it, which may be one source of the arguments regarding how faith and works relate in the rest of the New Testament. Perhaps he thought he didn’t need to. Consider the word’s first occurrence in the Old Testament. Abram’s been in the Promised Land for a good stretch, but no children and he asks what’s going on. At the end of the dialogue: “And he believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6). It’s more than a mental act; it’s deciding whether to keep trusting or head back to civilization. Later it shows up in the wilderness after the spies’ pessimistic report regarding the land. “And the LORD said to Moses, ‘How long will this people despise me? And how long will they refuse to believe in me…’” (Num. 14:11). Again, more than a mental act: the people are ready to stone Moses and Aaron and to choose someone to lead them back to Egypt! So, back to John: believing in Jesus means trusting Jesus, particularly when that trust looks like a really bad idea.

So, in our context: believing is more than a hoop I’m supposed to jump through. How easy it is for baptism or confirmation to become hoops! That works about as well as treating marriage as a hoop, rather than as setting the agenda for the rest of one’s life. “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Believing in Jesus, trusting Jesus: paying attention to what Jesus is up to, letting him turn our world upside down and inside out multiple times so that at last we become, well, human.

Become human, or, in Paul’s language, “grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” And because God is generous, because, as Paul spells out, God has showered all of us with gifts, this is doable. We’re on a trajectory toward life. Hallelujah? Hallelujah!

Now, in closing, two things to notice about Paul’s vision. First, this life “worthy of the calling” is inescapably corporate. This contrasts with the scripts that reduce the faith to me and Jesus, which in Episcopal circles can translate into “my spirituality is my affair and all I ask of others is that they not make noise.” This life is corporate. The gifts I receive are gifts my neighbor needs and vice versa. Aristotle got it right: the human being is a political animal, an animal of the polis, and God builds on that. Besides, the endgame is a banquet, a celebration, and who wants to party alone?

Second, the older we get (sorry!) the stronger the temptation to set everything on cruise control. So notice Paul’s language: “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up.” Here Paul is at his most diplomatic, so diplomatic that we can miss the point. Shorn of the diplomatic padding: “Grow up!” And when I find that discouraging or off-putting, I’m reminded of Thomas Merton’s observation in talking about prayer: “We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!” (Contemplative prayer p.37)

“This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” In the coming week we’ll have multiple opportunities to do that work; may we stay awake enough to recognize them.

Jesus makes a way where there is no way (10th after Pentecost, 7/28/24)

Leave a reply

Readings (Track 2)

Over in Paris, the world’s foodie capital, the Olympics have just started. By happy coincidence today’s readings focus on… food.

Our first reading: Elisha’s multiplication of the loaves. Recall the context: the Lord had delivered Israel from Egypt, but when Israel arrived in Canaan the advice from the locals was to turn to Baal, the god of rain and fertility, for their daily needs. When in Rome… Elijah and Elisha’s task: to convince the people that it’s either Yahweh or Baal, and that if they want rain and fertility, Yahweh’s the better bet.

Today’s psalm picks up on that theme:

16 The eyes of all wait upon you, O Lord, *
and you give them their food in due season.
17 You open wide your hand *
and satisfy the needs of every living creature.

Yahweh or Baal: that’s still the choice. There’s enough food for everyone. But under Baal food is a commodity to be bought and sold, so that the World Food Programme estimates that some 309 million people face chronic hunger in 72 countries. In this country in 2022 about 44 million experienced food insecurity. Dives and Lazarus (the two protagonists in Jesus’ parable) on a global scale!

Today’s Gospel: two weeks ago we heard about Herod’s birthday party. Herodias dances and the last course turns out to be John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Mark juxtaposes that banquet with Jesus’ banquet at which five thousand are fed. Mark thinks we all end up at one of these banquets, so wants us to pay attention to the choices that lead us to one or the other.

Our Lectionary, meanwhile, has swapped out Mark’s account for John’s, in which the conversation about the feeding morphs into a conversation about the Holy Eucharist. But I’m jumping ahead.

When John the Evangelist takes up the feeding story he notes “Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near.” That’s more than a chronological note: Passover: the deliverance from Egypt, and with it the crossing of the Red Sea and the miraculous manna in the wilderness. Is all that stuck in the past, with us—along with John the Baptist—stuck in Baal’s world? And in response to this question John the Evangelist shows us Jesus, the one who makes a way where there is no way.

Five thousand hungry people, five barley loaves, two fish. No way that math’s going to work. With Jesus, way.

That night, the disciples in a small boat in the middle of a large storm. No way we’d sell them life insurance. But here comes Jesus, and there’s a way to their destination.

A couple details in that account are worth noticing.

First, Jesus walking on the sea in the middle of the storm. The thing about that is that within the Old Testament God is the one pictured treading on the sea:

With your horses you trampled through the sea, through the surging abyss! (Habakkuk 3:15 NJB)

Your way led over the sea, your path over the countless waters, and none could trace your footsteps. (Psalm 77:19 NJB)

He and no other has stretched out the heavens and trampled on the back of the Sea. (Job 9:8 NJB)

In light of this tradition, Jesus’ walking across the sea is, like the Transfiguration, an unveiling. And in case we’ve missed the point, notice Jesus’ response to the disciples. It’s a lovely double entendre. The NRSV translates “It is I,” which is certainly a possible translation. It would be equally possible to translate it “I AM” (all caps); a repetition of God’s self-identification to Moses.

I’ve spent some time on this because in popular culture the idea circulates that Jesus was a just a great teacher whom the imperial church centuries later gussied up into some sort of god. We can believe that only if we first toss the New Testament. Our creeds are the product of simply trying to understand the stories the apostles left us.

Which banquet do we end up at? Better Jesus’ than Herod’s. Jesus is the one at whose banquets the poor are fed. Jesus is the one who by nature deserves our worship.

Our reading from John: the good news that Moses’ God isn’t AWOL. Quite the opposite. But… what about that gap between Jesus’ earthly ministry and us? That’s one of the core questions our readings from Ephesians have been addressing.

Recall what we heard last week, Paul addressing us non-Jewish believers:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. (Eph. 2:19-22)

It’s an outrageously mixed metaphor: a temple that’s growing—and Jesus is at the center: with us, among us. That’s the corporate dimension.

This week, the individual: “that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

Earlier, writing to the Galatians and indulging in a little hyperbole: “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (2:20). Through the Spirit, Jesus takes up residence in each one of us. This isn’t something any of our senses are set up to process; it is something whose effects—Paul argues—are clear. Recall Paul, again in Galatians: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (5:22-23).

For Paul, as for the rest of the New Testament, talking to Jesus now is not a long distance call. No question of roaming charges or being out of network.

That’s good news, for Baal still claims our world. But the One who fed the multitude and who trod on the sea remains among us and within each one of us, always able to make a way where there is no way. Returning to the food theme, that’s one of the things we celebrate at every Eucharist. There’s room for everyone, there’s enough for everyone, everyone is welcome. We’re remembering what Jesus did. We’re celebrating that this is the future Jesus secured. There’s room for everyone, there’s enough for everyone, everyone is welcome.