Posts Tagged Lectionary

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 5 February 2012 (Fifth Sunday of Epiphany, Year B)

Isaiah 40:21-31  • Psalm 147:1-11, 20c  • 1 Corinthians 9:16-23  • Mark 1:29-39

This week’s gospel reading is one that rewards attention to the story’s details.  (It’s from Mark, a book that rewards attention to detail.)  Mark shows Jesus going from public space (the Synagogue) into family space (Peter and Andrew’s house) and encountering a fever, the fire-within that threatens human well-being just as much as the unclean spirits do.  And when the setting changes, so does the reaction of the people: in the absence of Synagogue authorities to heed, the people do not make comments in their wonder; they flock to the house.

And then another literary detail becomes important: they flock at sundown.  The gospel of Mark does not often set the scene with such specific time markers, so this one is worth noting.  The picture that the text paints for the reader (or the hearer) is unmistakable: as the world grows dark, the people gather around Jesus.  This is where the famous Messianic Secret comes in: although Jesus expels the unclean spirits from those who come, Jesus does not allow those spirits to name him, because the privilege of calling him Son of God will only be granted once he has shown the world what it means to be Son of God, to be nailed to the cross.  Although the people await the new Son of God (a title that had mainly royal, not biological, connotations in the Second-Temple era), Jesus makes every attempt to keep Israel from saying with certainty that the King has arrived.

Thus Simon’s statement, “Everyone is looking for you,” rings doubly ironic this side of the Resurrection: no doubt word had spread in that particular moment that a healer was in Capernaum, and no doubt people from the surrounding area were seeking him for the particular and crushing sicknesses and possessions that troubled their families; but beyond that, as Mark tells us in the opening verse of the gospel, the Son of God, the one that everyone is indeed looking for, is among them, incognito, as the moment of his glorification (I borrow that word from John, not Mark, of course) approaches.

In the meantime, Jesus is clear on what he must do: after withdrawing to pray, he sets out for the next town, then the next, playing the itinerant prophet and announcing the Reign of God to all who would hear.  Only when he comes to the city that kills prophets will he allow the voice of an occupying pagan officer to announce him as Son of God without objecting.  But for now, the signs that point to the Reign of God will continue, whether by exorcism or by healing, whether in synagogue or home, and the office of proclamation will not fall to the one who in God’s name reigns but the ones who in the King’s name proclaim His gospel.

May the God who sends the Son and gives the gift of the Spirit enliven us, that we might also be signs that point to the Reign of God.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 22 January 2012 (Third Sunday of Epiphany, Year B)

Jonah 3:1-5, 10  • Psalm 62:5-12  • 1 Corinthians 7:29-31  • Mark 1:14-20

The way I read the Bible has changed over time and with exposure to great teachers.  I can remember well the moment when, as a young college student, I first entertained the possibility that divine inspiration might actually make more sense if some books of the Bible (not all of them) might have had more than one inspired human author.  I remember in seminary the period of time when I faced and eventually embraced the possibility that the Bible is a plurality of voices not because of some defect but precisely by divine intention.  And I remember, in the years after seminary, as I caught up with the New Testament scholarship that I’d neglected while pursuing my seminary degree in Old Testament, learning the discipline of reading the New Testament against the background of imperial occupation and seeing the claims of the lordship of Jesus as genuinely political claims.  In all of these moments I changed as a reader, and the Bible made different sorts of sense to me.  I don’t know where the next big change is coming from, but I don’t doubt that it’s coming.

Another change that happened early in my career as a Bible reader was the realization that, for the New Testament, the Old Testament constitutes a world in its own right, that the text itself is sacred.  Certainly before I had a conception that the events “behind” the Old Testament’s stories were important, but shifting the focus to the text itself helped me to see that, for the gospel-writers, to fulfill the Scriptures really did mean to fulfill what is written, paying attention to the structure of the written Hebrew (and translated Greek) phrase in ways that astronomers pay attention to mathematical equations: the idea is not to impose the text (or the equation) on the world by force of will but to discover that the text (or the equation) was there all along, waiting on someone to discover the connection.  I have to think that such an ethos of discovery was part of what Nietzsche hated so much about the Christian (and the Jewish) ways of existing in the world.

In this week’s reading, the Old Testament echo is a subtle one, so much so that I considered “I will make you fish for men” a New-Testament innovation, something that Jesus made up on the spot.  Certainly such phrases exist in the canonical gospels, but this happens not to be one of them.  The image of hooking human beings has prophetic roots: in both Amos and Ezekiel, the oracles of God promise that the world powers that oppress Israel will be led out of their places of power on fish hooks, a grisly image that some speculate has roots in the brutality of the Assyrian empire.  In the oracles of judgment against Egypt and other empires, those who hear Jesus no doubt would have remembered the strong connection between men-as-fish and national liberation, and when they set out to follow Jesus, they well might have thought of themselves as a sort of avant-garde in the grand Messianic struggle for national liberation.

But for those who remember Jonah along with Amos and Ezekiel, perhaps later, in the shadow of the cross, the true nature of fishing for men might have become clear.  Jonah, like Amos and Ezekiel, went out to prophesy judgment, but much to his own disappointment, Jonah is never one who drags Israel’s enemies through the streets on hooks.  Instead, God shows Jonah what will be the ultimate results of man-fishing.  Nineveh repents.

In the years to come, after Jesus ascends to the right hand of the Father, these disciples, like Jonah, will learn what it means for God to make fishers of men.  Jerusalem, the city that crucifies Jesus, is also the first site where the Holy Spirit proclaims the forgiveness extended to all, even those who called for the crucifixion of the Son of God.  One of the most significant early converts will himself be a centurion, an officer in the army that should have been on the hooks.  And the book of Acts itself ends with Paul in Rome, the Nineveh of his own day, not cleaning his sword after a rousing military rout but in prison yet proclaiming the gospel unhindered.  Such is the way of fishing for men.

May we remember the scandal of God’s grace and rejoice not in ignorance but in humble awareness.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 15 January 2012 (Second Sunday of Epiphany, Year B)

1 Samuel 3:1-10, (11-20)  •  Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18  • 1 Corinthians 6:12-20  • John 1:43-51

As far as I’m concerned (that’s not very far, I realize), John remains the easiest of the four gospels to translate and the hardest to teach.  Even with a decade of rust on my Koine Greek, I can still look at a passage from John, pick out the key words, and usually do something close to sight-reading, something that lies well beyond my grasp when I read Paul’s epistles, much less Luke’s gospel.  Yet, when I try to teach John (usually to an adult Sunday school class), the way that the text uses words makes interpretation incredibly difficult in places, not least when the text brings the same key word into use for several different purposes in the same run of verses.

This week’s Gospel reading does just that, using the basic verbs “to find” and “to see” over and over in a short span, each time tweaking the connotation of the verb just a little bit and making the reader ponder what it means, when Jesus comes, to find and to be found, to see and to be seen.  All four of the gospels use the contrast between sight and blindness to make points about the nature of the Kingdom (remember that Jesus performed all sorts of healings, and the written gospels could just as well have focused on the healings of internal organs rather than telling so many stories of the blind and lame), but John especially uses sight as a primary image for what Jesus is doing.  Moreover, although John is not the only of the gospels to write about being lost and being found, certainly that pair of words is another duality that forms the imagination of the one reading John, although only “found” appears in this week’s reading.

The first movement in the passage features a series of “to find” verbs: without any concern for background, Jesus simply finds Philip.  Why or even whether Jesus was looking for him remains unwritten; Philip is simply found.  When Philip becomes the finder, the object of his finding is Nathanael, someone without much of a story beyond a possible common connection to Bethsaida.  (Later writers, most notably Eusebius, would give these characters back stories, but the New Testament does not.)  When Philip finds Nathanael, though, a little bit about their character comes through: although he does not speak of any signs or wonders or other arguments for his claim, Philip does tell Nathanael that “we have found,” and his identification of Jesus as the one about whom Moses writes says that, at the least, Philip and Nathanael are familiar enough with the Torah (whether through reading themselves or, more likely, through hearing the Torah read in Synagogue) that “the one Moses wrote about” means something to them.  When Nathanael disparages Nazareth, he does not necessarily disclose a bigotry against small towns but perhaps an intensity of dedication to Moses: after all, there is no book more dedicated to Jerusalem, Palestine’s big city, than Deuteronomy.

I set up all of those “to find” verbs not to bore anyone with an academic exercise (though I might have done that) but to note that, in John, a wealth of theology can come across in the simple repetition of a verb.  Assuming that John would have pointed out irony (as he does in other places), the triple finding here points to the complexity of Christ’s relationship with the faithful: while John asserts that Jesus found Philip (but does not dare to explain how or why), the agency for finding Nathanael is not directly Jesus’s but Philip’s, and even as Philip stands as one found, he can (without the narrator’s correction) assert that “we” have “found” the figure whom the greatest of prophets promised.  John therefore opens up in its first chapter a complex of true statements about these relationships: Jesus finds the lost, the formerly-lost find friends to bring along, and those whom Jesus finds also find Jesus.  None of the three negates another, and just as the prepositions in the prayer of Jesus in John 17 make teaching that chapter nearly impossible, sorting these findings out turns out to be quite difficult in the course of teaching.

When John’s narrative turns to seeing, the slight shifts continue to complicate.  Philip’s injunction to “Come and see” starts the series with a fairly straightforward connotation: he invites Philip to perceive Jesus visually (for reasons the text does not yet disclose) as a response to Philip’s rhetorical question about Nazareth.  Then Jesus complicates the notion of sight.  Where Philip invites Nathanael to see in order to assuage doubt, Jesus both has foresight of Nathanael (under the fig tree) and waits until he sees Nathanael to speak to him.  Again, perhaps I allegorize here, but the conjunction of mortal sight (the normal faculty to perceive by means of the eyes) and supernatural sight (the capacity to see what a mortal’s eyes cannot by nature see) immediately points to a reality there in Galilee which is both divine and human, and Nathanael rightly ascribes two Royal titles (one of which in John is also a proto-Trinitarian title) to the one who stands and looks and yet sees beyond his looking.

Yet when Jesus hears these things, rather than leaving the episode to end, he promises that sight, whether of the natural human sort or the supernatural sort, will not cease with this sort of moment: reaching back to Genesis, Jesus promises not that the Son of God will demonstrate more powers of sight but that those who are faithful to the rightful king will themselves see the sorts of things that Jacob, esteemed forefather of all Israel, saw.  And even better, the sight that Jesus promises will exceed Jacob’s, for while Jacob saw angels, Jesus promises Nathanael that he will see not only angels but also the Son of Man promised in Daniel (another book that Nathanael no doubt heard read in the Synagogue).

In this early encounter with Jesus, therefore, the promises that John relays come in simple language, used in sophisticated ways, weaving theology not with the neologisms of systematic theology (important as those are) but through Biblical allusion, careful placement of subjects and verbs and objects, and repetition.  And that’s why coming back to John, even for someone like me who’s taught the book over and over, always yields rewards to the careful reader.

May the God who found and called us, whom we find in Christ, lend us the sight of the prophets, even as God redeems us by seeing us as redeemed.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 8 January 2012 (First Sunday of Epiphany, Year B)

Genesis 1:1-5  • Psalm 29  • Acts 19:1-7  • Mark 1:4-11

“He found disciples” is the most fascinating sentence in this week’s Acts reading.  I’ve argued before that Luke-Acts tells the stories of John the Baptist, of Jesus, and of the Apostles with a strong literary continuity, and the identification of these John-followers as “disciples” is a passage that I’d forgotten for some time that confirms that argument.  For Luke-Acts, the movement of the Spirit is unpredictable, never nullifying expectations for people to relate to the new community of the Way but also appearing out ahead of the Apostles, surprising the Apostles, and otherwise stealing the show at every turn.  So when Paul encounters this group of people, a crew who does not even seem to have a concept of Holy Spirit, the narrative voice calls them disciples without any finger-crossing and fully expecting that, once they hear what they once did not know, they immediately respond by submitting to baptism into the name of Jesus, and after the laying-on of hands, about twelve of them (they’re just about like apostles now!) are prepared to proclaim the gospel, by word and by sign, in Asia Minor.

Before anyone goes pitying my hermeneutical naivete, I recognize that Luke-Acts is a narrative that aims to be normative.  And that’s precisely the point: because the story that this text tells is nothing like the world of sectarian and denominational bickering over baptism that I’ve known in my career as a Stone-Campbell Christian in an conservative-evangelical world, it stands as a paradigm, an alternative to the soft ecumenism and the borderline isolationism that have defined the boundaries of the discussion in my own experience.  In the Acts version, those Paul finds are already disciples, and he invites them into a new baptism.  Nobody ever thinks either of refusing fellowship or refusing baptism, and there’s never any sense that “they” have to become like “us” in order to be faithful to Christ: the way that Acts tells it, everyone is figuring this out, as faithfully and obediently as they can manage, in every moment of the story.

Again, just in case some of you still pity the poor blogger, I don’t think that every writer, constructing a story of the first-generation Church, would have told this story.  If anything, Paul’s letters to the Ephesians and the Corinthians and even the Romans indicate that Paul himself sees the faithful in those places as needing more instruction, still floundering and lapsing either into exclusion or libertinism (or, in Corinth, both, but that’s Corinth).  But to fault Acts for presenting the Church at its best is to miss the point of Acts: this is the book that ends with the gospel proclaimed, unhindered.  This is the book where disputes whose outcome will define the future of Christianity come to a very civil settlement at Jerusalem, where Jacobus (James, for those with no Latin or Greek) says “I say that we will,” and that’s the end of it.  This is not the world of the “realist” who refuses to believe in even the horizon of harmony but a series of exemplary stories, told with an emphasis on the work of the Spirit so that future generations might see what Spirit looks like.

So I call on Christians to look to Acts not because it’s the only way to tell the early Church’s story but because it’s one way to tell that story, a way that has in its sights the souls of those who read and the good of the Church for whom Acts will become Scripture.  1 Corinthians will always be there if we get tempted to triumphalism, but when we need direction for our desires, an image to which we can aspire, give me Acts any old day of the week.

May the Scriptures enliven our imaginations so that we can proclaim boldly the gospel of our Lord Jesus, the Messiah.

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.