Posts Tagged Lectionary

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.

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.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 23 October 2011 (19th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A)

Deuteronomy 34:1-12 and Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17  •  Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 and Psalm 1  •  1 Thessalonians 2:1-8  •  Matthew 22:34-46

Perhaps teaching Dostoevsky to my English majors and minors recently has sent me down this path, but looking at this week’s Old Testament reading  reminds me that, when one takes a step back from particular books of the Bible and tries to take the whole collection of sacred Scripture as authoritative, an immensely complex picture arises.  (As I’ve noted more than once, I find readings of the Bible that take the extremes as themselves inspired more compelling than those that try to grind down what seems an inherent plurality in favor of a less-compelling “harmonized” reading.)  Abraham is the exemplar of faithfulness, but he’s also so fearful and self-serving as to pimp his wife out not to one but to two separate men of power in two separate episodes.  And in some places, his place as paragon of faithfulness derives not from striking out for Canaan but for being willing and ready to murder his own son.  King David is a man after God’s own heart and one who will attempt to manipulate God into saving the son of Bathsheba, the one conceived in the course of his murderous plot, with ostentatious public mourning, only to cut the mourning off instantly and to pull one of his wives into bed to replace the lost child within a verse or two of his son’s dying.  His last words to Solomon (conceived perhaps minutes after his elder brother’s death) are the strange mix of a holy man’s vision for constructing  a temple worthy of YHWH and a gangster’s final hit list.

Moses is no different from the men who are in some ways his forerunner and his successor in the imagination of Israel: he’s a terrorist assassin rejected by the Hebrews because they cannot trust a murderer to save their lives, and he’s a man so plagued by his own insignificance that YHWH must appoint a mouthpiece to speak for him.  He’s the singular figure for a generation of Israel’s pre-history, and he’s barred most violently from taking any part at all in the generation where Joshua must loom large.  He’s the most humble man who ever lived and one barred from entering the land promised to the humblest of nations.  And perhaps most importantly, he’s an inescapably particular human character, one whose wrath and whose reserve are undeniable; and he’s a figure whose individuality fairly often gets subsumed into the grand story of God.  It’s just as sensible to talk about Moses as a novel character, with all of the self-awareness and self-deception that the great figures of literature exhibit, as it is to write about the life of Israel in the Land as the Post-Mosaic period, to treat the man as himself a historical period.

And since the gospel of Matthew especially takes pains to frame Jesus as himself participating in that larger-than-life Moses reality (he escapes the child-killing wrath of an evil king, emerges out of Egypt, preaches five long sermons just as there are five books of Moses, ends the book of Matthew atop a mountain, and follows a man named Joseph as the male lead in the book) but does not allow even Jesus to colonize the peculiarity of Moses (unless you consider “take this cup from me” to be on a par with “who am I to go to Pharaoh,” which I don’t), the death of Moses can and must remain the Hebrew shepherd’s peculiar story.  The fact of the matter is that, unlike Jesus, who is with his followers always (it says so at the end of Matthew), Moses can never join the people in Canaan.  His part in the story must always be a sort of prelude, not one that lacks the power to define and inspire future experience but nonetheless not paradigmatic for Israel’s life as Israel.  When the Jews (and Jesus and the Church) have moments when Moses is clearly their (our) paradigm, those must be moments when we look forward to something that Moses never could experience, namely to be welcomed in to the place of rest.

Moses, who in turn could and did turn away the wrath of YHWH against the idolatrous Hebrews and take up his own sword to cut them down in their idolatry, can never fully be us.  His loneliness on that mountain, knowing that the story of Israel would really begin only after the story of Moses came to a definitive ending, was the loneliness of the clear eye, not one that takes death as the “natural” diminution of human powers but that grieves the unspeakable horror of a God who will save a nation only after the singular figure of the nation’s pre-history is dead and gone.  His sight on that mountain will never be ours because our own vision of the future can and must be a hopeful one, never discounting the possibility that the coming of the Kingdom might reach its consummation in this moment.  Or the next.  Or the next.  Only the hope of the resurrection can keep Moses from becoming (or remaining) a tragic figure, whose fate at the dark decree of the divine is never to enter in.  Only the resurrection will let any of us escape just that tragedy.

May our prayers to the God of faith and hope and love some day find us alongside Moses in the rest of God.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 16 October 2011 (18th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A)

Exodus 33:12-23 and Psalm 99  • Isaiah 45:1-7 and Psalm 96:1-9, (10-13)  • 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10  • Matthew 22:15-22

To say that the Old Testament mainly concerns Israel is not controversial.  Nor is it false.  But to say “Israel” is not nearly as simple as might first appear.  After all, the descendants of Jacob must claim, in their first generation, four different mothers.  Those who left Egypt in the wake of the divine plagues welcomed along fellow slaves (Exodus 12:38) and do not seem to have distinguished between the biological descendants of Jacob and those claimed by YHWH by virtue of their being slaves.  The bloodline of David goes through Moab as much as it goes through Judah.  And so on.

So when Isaiah brings forth the shocking word from YHWH that the new Messiah is no descendant of David but Cyrus the Persian, the people in exile, though their cheers might have been bittersweet, would not have been strangers to the possibility that a foreign power might be the anointed.  God is always in the business of shocking the world by working through particular individuals that defy expectations (think about the Sunday school lessons you remember–how many involve someone who has no business being prominent rising to prominence?), and Cyrus, a foreigner whose ignorance of the true God the divine oracle acknowledges, will be the next great figure in salvation-history.

Such is not to say, of course, that God’s anointing always follows international power wherever it goes.  After all, the early Church called Jesus several things, Messiah and Lord and Savior among them, that were direct challenges to imperial pretense.  In fact, when Jesus speaks his famous “give unto Caesar” line, he denies that the chunks of metal with the Emperor’s image on them have anything to do, really, with the proper sphere of God’s sovereignty, which is to say the totality of human life.  (To be in the image of God, it seems in this Gospel passage, means to live as divine “currency,” that which goes back and forth in the world testifying to the authority of YHWH.)  As many a New Testament commentator has noted, Jesus in this passage is not dividing the world into sovereign spheres, one governed by God and one by Caesar.  He’s diminishing Caesar’s sphere to no sphere at all.

These moments, when the man of empire Cyrus is named the Christ by divine oracle and when the one who is the eternal Christ cuts off the pretensions of empire, both stand together in the same Bible, and both remind us, if we have minds to remind, that the grand freedom of the God whose name must not be named, whose picture must not be pictured, writes itself on history and on the faithful.

May our devotion to the God of mysterious providence always be a faith that listens.