Posts Tagged Bible

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 1 January 2012 (First Sunday after Christmas, Year B)

Isaiah 61:10-62:3  • Psalm 148  • Galatians 4:4-7  • Luke 2:22-40

When people tell their own stories, we always do so in relationship to models: we can depart from them or model our own on them, but we’re always in relationship.  When conservative Christians tell our stories of faith, our models, whether we’ve read the originals or not, tend to follow the patterns of Augustine or of C.S. Lewis.  (The latter, of course, largely patterns his own story after the former’s, but that’s just another exhibit that supports my claim.)  And the two of those, as anyone who has read them knows, tell their own stories in decidedly Pauline tones.  The story is not an unfamiliar one: for intellectual reasons or for want of purpose in life, the young person rejects the faith, coming at a vital point in life to the realization (it need not always involve a miraculous light that knocks one off of one’s steed) that the Christian faith is the true way, and after that dramatic moment of turning, life does not proceed without difficulty but always has a sense of purpose.

Paul’s, of course, is not the only story that the New Testament presents: if we look for stories to which we can relate, there’s Peter’s tale of rash promise, failed promise, and restored promise.  There’s Cornelius, the one who sought truth and found his reward when the faith he seeks transforms before him.  There are the sons of Zebedee, the masses at Jerusalem, Barnabas, and Apollos.  And in this week’s reading, there’s Simeon, the man who spends his whole life waiting for something, something that certainly, in his advanced age, he had an idea of, yet something which surprises him when the Spirit leads him to enter the temple.

Simeon sings the joy of one who has heard the voice of the Spirit for a long time but who has only in the moment discovered the form of the Spirit’s movement in the world: although he has no sense of Cross or Resurrection, Simeon knows that, by some means, this will be the one who brings to fulfillment the grand promises that God made to Abraham in the earliest days of Israel’s story, the one who will teach all the nations the way of the LORD and who will bring those who elevate themselves crashing down.  Because the Spirit leads him, he knows what he sees, even if his sight only sees what happens on the far side of Jesus’s dark demise.

Simeon also sees that this child will be a revealer, one who discloses the secrets of people’s hearts.  No longer, when the salvation that Simeon sings comes to completion, will the hypocrisy that characterizes power at all levels stand in the world.  No longer will those who lord it over others be able to call themselves benefactors without their true intentions coming to the light.  No longer will those who use the name of God as a cynical strategy for control be able to keep the light from shining.

When the prophetess Anna begins to tell everyone about the child at the end of this passage, many years and many mysteries lie between Israel and the salvation of the Resurrection, but the word has come.  Many folks I’ve talked to have lived the same story: surrounded by the culture of Midwestern or Southern Protestantism, nonetheless they can name a day when God showed up, perhaps not revealing all that lay before them, the crosses and the sorrows and the friends’ deaths that would mark their stories, but certainly knowing that salvation had become present.  For those who can remember such a day, just as much as for those who can remember a road to Damascus, the salvation of Jesus the Messiah has come, and in this season of Christmastide, such is great and good news.

May our stories be stories of deliverance, and may our prayers be prayers for the Kingdom.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 25 December 2011 (The Nativity of the Lord, Year B)

Isaiah 9:2-7  • Psalm 96  • Titus 2:11-14  • Luke 2:1-14, (15-20)

I did preach the Sunday morning sermon on Easter 2001, but I’ve never preached a Sunday morning sermon on Christmas.  I will not be preaching on Christmas morning in 2011 either, though part of me wishes I were.  Luke’s version of the Nativity has been part of my imagination since I can remember, certainly before I was baptized.   I wish I could say that I was an avid Bible-reader as a youngster, but like many my age, I come to Luke’s version of Christ’s birth first through Charlie Brown and only later through the New International Version.

When Luke sets about telling the Nativity story, he frames the whole act in a series of sent messages.  Caesar issues a decree, then God sends angels, then the shepherds go and make known.  I have little desire to revisit debates about early Imperial census-taking practices; enough ink has been spilled there.  What’s far more interesting is the movement from messenger to messenger.  The people carrying Caesar’s decree never appear in Luke’s text, though certainly most readers can imagine the official agents of power as they declare in the provinces that life as the people know it must cease so that Caesar can exert and display and bolster his own power.  The Empire’s message finds the people as they are and declares, under penalty of Rome’s harsh wrath, that those who hear must go.

When the angels come, their message relies far more on the compelling grandeur of the message itself: they do not command the shepherds to do anything.  Instead the angelic decree declares that the Christ, the Lord, is born to all people, for all people.  The angels tell the shepherds that when they come to the city of David they will see certain things, but the shepherds go there on their own, compelled by hope rather than coerced by fear.  Though they fill the field (or the sky, if you’re going with traditional iconography), the Heavenly Host themselves remain secondary to the proclamation.  The shepherds do not talk of angels but of kings when they depart; the young Messiah is himself enough warrant for them to get on the move.

The shepherds themselves are the perfect third element of Luke’s tale of tidings: with no power to coerce and without the splendor of the angels of Heaven, the shepherds, as Luke tells the story, simply make known what they had witnessed.  Foreshadowing what the resurrected Jesus says of his disciples in the opening of Acts, the shepherds go and become witnesses.  And despite the shepherds’ own social standing, people are amazed by the things to which they bear witness.  Thus in microcosm, the Nativity in Luke takes the shape of the whole of Luke-Acts: the powers of the world exert their might to move people by fear, then an act of Heaven strikes the lowly and inspires them to bear witness, and in the end, the true wonder and marvel of it all lies not with the might of Rome or even with the splendor of the angels but with the lowly witnesses, telling stories not of their own heroic might but of the wonderful salvation of God which, entirely by grace, they’ve been able to see.

As Advent gives way to Christmas and winter to the growing light of day, may our own lives as witnesses to the gospel bring wonder to all those who have ears to hear.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 18 December 2011 (Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year B)

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16  • Luke 1:46b-55 or Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26   • Romans 16:25-27   • Luke 1:26-38

Once again, I’ll be preaching this text on December 18, so I’ve already given it some thought.  The way our congregation does the Advent candles, love is the culminating candle, the fourth in the Sundays of Advent and that which comes directly before the central Christ candle.  Anyone who has been around theological disputes for the last decade (perhaps the last couple millennia) knows that love is one of the grand contested words in the Christian tradition, one that takes its cues from the stories that people tell and that resists assimilation into those stories and that becomes one of the truly knock-down arguments within Christian circles: nobody can come out of a theological dispute as the voice of wisdom if the other voices can demonstrate that the position one holds is un-loving.

A traditionalist myself, I always start out, when thinking and preaching and writing about love, assuming that the rich traditions of the Church, including but not exclusive to church song, must inform the words we use, and the Magnificat must be one of those grand, central songs.  There was a span of time, I’ll admit out front, that Luke 1:52-53 was for me the core of the Magnificat, that the rest of it was basically liturgical decoration, but as I’ve written my sermon for next Sunday, I realize that the lifting of the lowly, while indisputably the content of God’s salvation that Mary sings, cannot stand alone lest it become an agenda for electoral politics rather than a song of God’s acts in the world.

What strikes me now about the Magnificat is that God starts out the song as Savior.  Those familiar with the early generations of the Roman Empire no doubt will recognize that Savior is one of the titles that the Emperor claimed for himself.  (I always want to write Saviour, because I think of the Romans as British, I suppose.)  Mary’s song here, coming to us in Luke, thus starts out subversive not because of the social reversals later (though it gets there) but because “my Savior” in this song is not the Empire-appointed savior, one that secures “safety” by means of brutal wars and cultural assimilation.  Instead, Mary’s Savior is the invisible God, who comes to each generation not in the trappings of conquest and territory but by means of stories, the faithful songs that the faithful sing about the powerful men who thought they could stand against God and the God-fearing weaklings of the world whom God chose to bear witness against them.  Mary can sing confidently that generations will call her blessed not because she has powers of her own but because the God about whom Israel sings has placed her centrally within the grand Salvation Song.

Mary remembers, however, that God is holy, and that governs the song just as much as the word Savior steers it against Empire.  Perhaps later in life Mary will fall victim to the same ideologies that seemed to follow Jesus, those that would make him a new Judas Maccabeus or a Philistine-smashing new David.  Perhaps she beheld Jesus, suffering in Jerusalem, and despaired that her son was dying because he was a failed Messiah.  But in this moment, singing this song, Mary stands back, averting her eyes and singing the holiness of the name of God, the acknowledgment that if God’s ways are strange, they stand so not because of a defect in the divine but because the hopes and the fears that life in Empire breed in all of us have distorted our ability to see the goodness of God.  The Gospel is indeed strange, but the strangeness is a function of our inability to see straight, not anything in God which, seen through faithful eyes, would itself be amiss.

When Mary sings of the descendants of Abraham in the final lines of the Magnificat, then, she sings of those who, like Abraham, have been called away from the life of the grand Chaldean ways of Empire, those wandering the wilderness as God’s people, perhaps crying out like John, perhaps encountering the nations like Philip, but always tested like Christ Himself, always facing the hard realities of Satan and countering them with the Torah stored away in our hearts, with the gratitude that comes from seeing one’s self as a saved sinner, from the songs that God has given us to sing.  The faith that sings might indeed give shape to a world that looks misshapen, might reveal the joy that lies beyond suffering, might illuminate for us God’s love at every turn.

May our songs shape us, strike the ears of the nations, and come to God as the gifts of faithful servants.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 11 December 2011 (Third Sunday of Advent, Year B)

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11  •  Psalm 126 or Luke 1:46b-55  •  1 Thessalonians 5:16-24   •  John 1:6-8, 19-28

If the small number of history classes I took in high school and college taught me anything, they trained my eyes to see monuments.  Sometimes those monuments are stone like Egypt’s pyramids, and sometimes they’re literary, like the dialogues of Plato or the Analects of Confucius.  But to spot the really great cities, one must keep one’s eyes open for the monuments.

Isaiah, of course, imagines something quite different: when he speaks to us in his oracle at Advent, Isaiah points not to a structure or even an epic that will endure through the ages as the sign that the new Israel will be truly blessed.  Certainly the oracles calls for the old ruins to be bound up, but they stand not as ends themselves but means to a greater end as Isaiah imagines things.  What will mark the new Israel is neither a great wall nor an enduring intellectual legacy but righteousness.

Such a promise should not strike us Christians as odd; after all, our own legacy on the earth is always the next generation of the faithful, those who seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.  While we may leave and have left great feats of painting and architecture and literature and music in our wake, our main legacy always must be the next band of disciples, those who go forth and make disciples in turn, and as long as the times endure, those who come after us in this grand tradition of proclamation and love for neighbors can and should judge our time on the earth as Church in terms of what kinds of disciples follow us.

The great sadness in a nation marked off by righteousness is that, within a generation, that grand and shining light could diminish greatly, and within a few generations, it could be extinguished entirely.  Without a continued dedication to a God who is God’s self always dedicated, the pursuit of righteousness as the mark of a great nation fades and far too quickly disappears.  Such is why Isaiah’s oracle is so bold: in this Advent reading, Isaiah imagines a time coming when, because of the unshakeable favor of God, there will be no need for grand pyramids or immortal tragic drama, because God will sustain from generation to generation.  The promise of righteousness, perpetual righteousness, is perhaps the grandest assertion of confidence in God that any prophet could utter, and the faithful, both in old Israel and in the Church, would do well to behold the inspired trust that Isaiah invests in God, and we would do even better to proclaim likewise.

As Christmas approaches, let us remember for what we are saved and for what we shout our joy.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 4 December 2011 (Second Sunday of Advent, Year B)

Isaiah 40:1-11  •  Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13  •  2 Peter 3:8-15a   •  Mark 1:1-8

Over the years, since I discovered in 1996 that the four gospels are delightfully different characters (I took my first college-level New Testament class in 1996), I’ve come to like Mark, if such is allowed, best among the four gospels.  If memory serves, I’ve actually taught through John more times (but I think the count is very close), but Mark’s hurried storytelling and literary self-awareness make the briefest of the gospels my favorite if such is allowed.

Mark is especially suited for Advent readings: things happen immediately, and when something does, there’s always a sense that something big is about to happen next.  John the Baptist, in these opening verses of Mark, suddenly appears at the Jordan: there’s no bothering with back-story, with any explanation for why he would be there, with anything that would slow down the story.  He sets to baptizing straightway, and he announces that the greater one is coming.  Certainly the text provides details upon which the imagination can expand, from the choice of rivers to the quotation from Isaiah to John’s signature garb.  But every details counts precisely because there are so few from which a reader can pick: Mark’s is a narrative in which everything counts because there’s so little to count.

I won’t pretend to speak for everyone’s spiritual lives, but my own story as a disciple of Jesus could benefit from this sort of simplicity: too often my own account of my journey into salvation and through the years has far too much self-doubting irony, too many moments where I become concerned about saying what my experiences are not rather than saying with boldness what they are.  There are certainly times when I wish I could tell my own story the way that Mark tells the Baptist’s story: a citation of Scripture here, a significant geographic detail there, and the core of the message that gets spoken.  Such simplicity need not be reductionistic: certainly my own attempts to teach Mark have been exercises in framing a sophisticated and well-crafted literary text.  But instead of a whole mess of throat-clearing, John the Baptist’s story begins with “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus  Christ.”  I admit that my own story could begin so directly when I tell it, whether to myself or to someone else.

May our stories be episodes in the story of Christ’s body on earth, and may our storytelling always be faithful.

Revised Common Lectionary Readings for 27 November 2011 (First Sunday of Advent, Year B)

Isaiah 64:1-9  • Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19  • 1 Corinthians 1:3-9  • Mark 13:24-37

The new Church year is upon us, and this Sunday (I’ll be preaching this Sunday, so I’ve been thinking especially hard about this) brings us a text from Isaiah that reveals just how sophisticated literary oracles can be in their ethical thought.  The Old Testament is not stuff for the intellectually lazy (even as it’s not the stuff for those self-satisfied in their intellects), and Isaiah 64, in the form of a prayer, challenges anyone who hears to imagine and re-imagine the relationships between God, the world, the course of history, the responsibility of human beings, and the nature of prayer in profound ways.

The prophet calls out, Psalm-like, at first: God is not showing up when Israel needs God, and what Israel needs is a theophany that makes the nations quake, that perhaps might save Israel from the terror that has come in the shape of the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, then the Persians.  For centuries Israel has not enjoyed the freedom that David delivered and Solomon secured, yet the prophet, pulling on the memories of the Psalms and inspired by God to proclaim boldly that God’s fire is still burning, calls for a sign so powerful that even the mountains would tremble at it.  God is always able to make things happen in the world, and God’s people are always right to call for God to remember, to save, to hear.

But then the oracle takes a turn: where Psalms often admit to sins, Isaiah’s oracle, inspired of course by God, holds that it was God’s own refusal to show God’s self that left the people to their own devices.  God’s anger, whatever spurred that anger (and for Isaiah at least, it’s always for a good reason) has led Israel further into its own wretchedness.  Indeed there are none within Israel who call on YHWH, but YHWH’s own absence has created the conditions within which such abandonment continues.

As this week’s reading takes its final turn, the prophet (still inspired, of course) turns to YHWH and re-establishes a proper stance of humility: the potter, after all, has the authority to say how the clay should take shape, and what the people of God should be calling for is not justification of God’s ways to men but for God’s memory.  Remember, O Lord, that we are all your people.  Remember, O Lord, as you remembered the Hebrews in Egypt.  Remember, O Lord, the promise that you have made, through Israel and in behalf of all of the nations.

And thus a brief run of verses weaves an amazingly complex picture of God, the world, Israel, and prayer: the prophet, speaking for Israel, admits Israel’s apostasy even as he points to YHWH as contributing to the depth of the depravity.  The prophet calls on YHWH to strike fear into the mountains and yet kneels humbly and asks simply for memory.  The prophet confesses Israel’s iniquity even as he calls on YHWH to remember the goodness of the covenant.  All of this must be true together, and Isaiah’s oracle resists any truth about God and Israel that is any less complex.

Remember, O Lord.  And may we be a people of memory.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 20 November 2011 (23rd Sunday after Pentecost, Year A)

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 and Psalm 100  • Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 and Psalm 95:1-7a  • Ephesians 1:15-23  • Matthew 25:31-46

It’s always more than a little gratifying when I discover that I hold certain suspicions that happen to resonate with the New Testament.  I’m not quite conceited enough to think that I’ve got something like a “biblical imagination”; I figure I just get lucky sometimes.

I get wary (and sometimes weary) when Christians of various ideologies minimize the Church.  As best I can tell, Church is, whether the word ekklesia  appears or whether the metaphors of body, temple, or nation pop up (those seem to be Paul’s favorites), something at the core of the ethics of the New Testament.  As I’ve taught Paul and Mark and the apocalyptic John over the last few years to teenagers and to adults, I find myself more, not less convinced that the imagination of the New Testament is, in its plurality, still singing in some sort of harmony about a new Israel, one made up of the descendants of Ham and Japeth as well as of Shem, whose role stands to bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ, His victory over sin and death.  I reckon in some folks’ eyes that makes me a made man in some “Hauerwasian mafia” and therefore myopic in my theology, but I do think that the Platonic conception of roles-within-the-world has in fact influenced Christianity from those first and canonical writings, giving us a conception that the Church does indeed stand as a body of people with a very particular role in the world.

Such does not mean, of course (despite some straw-man criticisms of said “mafia”), that those of us who are part of that “priestly nation” called Church have nothing to say about nations and neighbors and the folks whom we serve best when we remember our own calling.  This week’s gospel reading reminds us with some clarity that in Matthew, the gospel in which Jesus uses the word ekklesia the most and the book that includes the radical Sermon on the Mount, that discourse that says “you are the light of the world,” also has Jesus making his famous pronouncement about the ethne, the nations or Gentiles.  The same Jesus who imagines his own followers as those who are both salt to the earth and a city on a hill also pronounces without qualification about God’s relationships with all of the nations, seemingly irrespective of their direct treatment of the Church as Church.  (One could make the case that those who hunger and thirst are synonymous with the itinerant slaves that largely constituted the early church, but I think that’s a stretch.)  Instead, the Church in this passage, if one takes the gospel of Matthew as a whole, seems to stand as the herald or harbinger of divine judgment: those nations that relate to the poor and the prisoner (and, as Tony Campolo told us when he lectured at Milligan College in 1999, in Roman-occupied Palestine those were the same people) will have their faithfulness to those poor reckoned to them as righteousness, and those nations that treat the poor as enemies will in turn have the Son of Man as an enemy.

What of my suspicions, then?  My hunch is often that Christians of various political persuasions, for various reasons, tend to neglect this complex set of relationships between Christ, Church, the poor, and the nations.  Some will ignore the strong expectations that YHWH places on the rulers of the gentiles, expectations that at least in part animate the Exodus and get their classic articulation in the early chapters of Amos.  Such expectations do not go away in the Messianic age, and Jesus does not seem to flatten “humanity” in this passage as some advocates of Realpolitik are wont to do, removing moral responsibility entirely from nations.  But of course neither does the Son of Man imply, much less state, that those who are sheep in this  parable are anything but ethne.  They are not coextensive with Church, and where Jesus could easily have said (as do the Dead Sea Scrolls) that the true chosen will rule the good nations, he simply does not frame their relationship to the apocalyptic Son of Man in terms of their relationships with those chosen to bear witness.  The Body of Christ is the source, in this passage, of the true divine oracle to the nations, but His body speaks to the nations, not as the nations.

Obviously this week’s Gospel reading does not directly, much less systematically, take on the doctrine of Church.  But in its emphasis and in its placement of oracle rather than political strategy in the mouth of our Lord, the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew does provide a moment for us to imagine anew the possibilities that arise when the body of the Messiah stands in relationship with the nations.

May our words to the nations be words of truth, words of hope, words of love for the world.

General Introduction
- Welcome to November, from October
- Michial’s one-man war on portmanteaux
- Buy our mugs! (I mean energy, not internet—we record early in the morning)
- Listener mail from a stranger
- Mad Dog! Mad Dog! Mad Dog!
- English accents
- What’s on the web log?

Defining the Apocalyptic
- Apocalyptic and prophetic
- The end as the beginning
- Post-apocalyptic as the really important thing
- Refuting Mad Max
- The prophetic voice and the unveiling

Biblical Apocalypse
- Prophecy or apocalypse?
- And apocryphal apocalypse
- Visionary, narrative, and eschatological
- Christ or violence

Apocalypse in the Ancient Near East
- Prophecy but not apocalypse
- Cyclical time
- The importance of monotheism
- Cyrus plays the system
- Zoroastrian apocalypse

Literary Apocalypses
- Dante gets the date wrong
- Ragnarok kills off the gods
- Giving Norse mythology a happy ending
- The Red Crosse Knight in the House of Holiness
- Dem bones rise up against Henry V
- Eliot and Yeats and how we misread them
- The modern American apocalyptic novel

Songs About the End of the World
- “The End”
- “Gimme Shelter”
- “Four Winds”

Final Thoughts
- Don’t get too hung up on interpretation
- Pay attention to literary form
- What comes after the end? . . .
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ciuba, Gary. Walker Percy: Books of Revelations. Athens, GA: 1991.

Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998.

Dante. Purgatory. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 1985.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems, 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991.

Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged. New York: Henry Holt, 1969.

Milosz, Czeslaw. New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001. New York: Ecco, 2003.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1978.

Percy, Walker. The Last Gentleman. New York: Picador, 1999.

—. Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. New York: Picador, 1999.

Ragnarok: The End of the Gods. Trans. A.S. Byatt. New York: Grove Press, 2012.

Shakespeare, William. King Henry V. London: Arden, 1995.

Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story. New York: Random House, 2011.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Longman, 2006.

Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology. Trans. Jesse L. Byock. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Yeats, W.B. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. New York: Scribner, 1996.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 6 November 2011 (21st Sunday after Pentecost, Year A)

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25 and Psalm 78:1-7  •  Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-16 or Amos 5:18-24 andWisdom of Solomon 6:17-20 or Psalm 70  •  1 Thessalonians 4:13-18  •  Matthew 25:1-13

I don’t suppose I should be surprised when Biblical texts present intellectual challenges, but Chris Gehrz’s recent post on “rally texts” for activist Christianity makes me remember my days in seminary when a text like Amos 5 was far less ambiguous.  I’ve come to think that education, whether it means to or not, always involves establishing those educated as a differentiated class (think of Plato’s guardians, U.S. Marines at boot camp, or medical school residents), and seminary is no exception to that.  When I was in seminary, the distinction between those educated and those to whom we imagined ourselves sent was a difference in awareness of social justice.

Despite caricatures and abuses, I really don’t think the urge towards social justice began as a window-dressing for activism without self-awareness or for the replacement of sexual moralism with economic and environmental moralism.  I’m not going to be the one to deny that both of those have happened and likely will continue, but to make the abuses identical with the good impulse is to ignore what the Social Gospel movement and other social-justice groups stand to remind me about the Bible, namely that the Old Testament and the New Testament hold forth a reality that is nothing less than a re-ordering of human relationships, a true Way that stands in contrast to the murderous and duplicitous ways of the world (to use John’s language).  When Amos in today’s reading calls for mishphat and tzedakah (justice and righteousness) to flow like water, these are divine expectations that encompass interior life, economic life, political life, and all other facets of human existence.  There is no absolute separation between “individual” and “community” in Biblical thought; even when the individual must stand as prophetic voice for the sake of community, the prophet does so as one part to another rather than as an “us” crowing at a “them.”

Perhaps that’s why the first several verses in today’s Old Testament reading struck me as they did: Amos begins not by congratulating those who seek “the day of the LORD” but pointing out to them that divine judgment will not allow easy escapes.  You might get away from the lion of state violence, but the bear of violence delegated to the consumer public is waiting there if you’re not watching.  And you might just get snake-bitten if you consider the “house” of partisan allegiance, no matter what flavor, is a place where one escapes the clutches of injustice and unrighteousness.  The Day of the LORD is all gloom; nobody should presume to stand apart from “those people” when the chips are down.

Certainly I don’t want to minimize the role of Christians in doing serious political philosophy and thinking hard about the inner workings of political parties and the policies of national leaders and such.  But if Amos teaches us anything, Amos teaches us that self-congratulation is always about two verses away from divine retribution.

May our eyes for justice see our own sins as well.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 30 October 2011 (20th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A)

Joshua 3:7-17 and Psalm 107:1-7, 33-37  • Micah 3:5-12 and Psalm 43  • 1 Thessalonians 2:9-13  • Matthew 23:1-12

Today’s was the sort of Lectionary reading that surprises even someone like me who thinks he knows the Bible.  And for that matter, it’s a reading that makes me reconsider some of the big-picture theological moves that I tend to make, or at least those that I make without thinking.  I came into the theological scene in the mid-nineties and went to seminary at the turn of the twenty-first century, when the cardinal sin was hypocrisy and “orthopraxy” and “incarnational” Christianity were coming into their own as “the big things.”  (Yes, those trends were around fifteen years ago.)  We challenged the champions of right doctrine to show us how those doctrines played out and gloried at the fact that the lives that resulted were seldom appealing lives, according to our particular, college-senior-and-grad-student aesthetic.  (Yes, those were also around fifteen years ago.)

But in this week’s Gospel reading, Jesus insists both on the teaching and the way of life, on praxis and on doxa.  The hypocrisy (Jesus used forms of that word, after all) of the Pharisees nobody can miss in this pericope, and anybody trying to minimize the same is not reading carefully.  But just as plain is the injunction to respect the content of Pharasaical doctrine, to acknowledge the authority of the Seat of Moses.  And the metaphor here is not merely ocular: one must not merely see as the Pharisees see but follow what the Pharisees teach.  The verb is unmistakable, and I can only with great effort resist the urge to joke about Jesus calling himself not so much a Jew as a Pharisee-follower.

Okay.  I didn’t resist.

Humility, to salvage what little bit of serious thought I had going here, means at a minimum, then, an acknowledgment that the best teaching is always the best teaching, even if the best teachers happen to be wretched human beings.  What Jesus enjoins here can’t possibly be a blind eye turned to their wickedness, but it also can’t be a rejection of teaching based on an evaluation of the teachers (much less a facile psychoanalysis of the same).  To live in that impossible place, lowering one’s self to follow the reprehensible because they bear the divine word, is precisely what makes going to church every Sunday so difficult.  (And I say that as one of my congregation’s main teachers.)  But difficult might just translate into the narrow way, the cross to carry, the foolishness to those perishing.

May our humility always shape the ways we relate to our teachers.