Pentecost +26

Readings: Malachi 4:1–2; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 3:6–13; Luke 21:5–19

Hail the heav’n-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings,
ris’n with healing in his wings.

It’s not Christmas yet. But, after all, the promise echoed by Charles Wesley was originally given through Malachi — “for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings” — not to a quiet, happy wonderland but to a disillusioned, doubting people, returned home from exile, but seeing little for which to hope or pray. Yet God called for resolute faith, generous obedience, and grateful worship from his people, so that all nations might know him.

Israel’s sun of righteousness shines with, well, righteousness — strength of character, commitment to justice and mercy, life in community, alignment to the truth of God and God’s purposes, reverence for God’s name, steadfast refusal of evil and idolatry. That’s where light and life, where healing, come from.

Pentecost +25

Readings: Job 19:23–27; Psalm 17; 2 Thessalonians 2:1–5, 13–17; Luke 20:27–38

Job “imagines an ‘umpire’ who can stand between him and his angry God. … [But] his hope for an umpire or witness, that is, a third-person arbitrator, never materializes. … No, Job’s redemption, the reversal of his suffering, comes from God himself, who confronts him at the height of his suffering. … Job gets not an angelic arbitrator but God the Redeemer himself” (Tremper Longman III, Job [Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms, 2012]).

Job didn’t see or expect or predict Jesus, “mediator between God and humanity” (1 Timothy 2:5), “become for us … righteousness, holiness, and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30). Yet Handel (actually his librettist Jennens) was right to include the soaring air “I know that my Redeemer liveth” in the third, climactic part of Messiah. For the answer to Job’s question and the fulfillment of his hope — his and that of his people — came from a direction and in a way not subject to human control, not in thrall to human desires. And yet it was the answer, was the fulfillment, for Job and for Israel and for all creation.

That’s God’s grace in Christ — Christ who suffered, like Job, for his faithfulness. And God’s grace frees us, not for laziness or covetousness or disobedience, but for worship and service and sacrifice.

Reformation

Readings: Isaiah 1:10–18; Psalm 32; 2 Thessalonians 1:1–12; Luke 19:1–10

As we head into the 500th year since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, theologian Peter Leithart — not a Lutheran, but one to whose writing Lutherans should pay close attention — re-offers what he calls a “wish list” for the “kind of churches we at Theopolis [the organization Leithart heads] dream of.” Leithart’s list (first published in 2014) speaks especially to leaders of congregations and denominations, but would be of interest to anyone of any tradition who loves Christ’s church.

Next Sunday’s Old Testament reading originally concerned a culture — metaphorically called “Sodom” and “Gomorrah,” but, as Isaiah 1:1 makes clear, actually that of Israel, God’s people — chasing after false gods, forgetful of the law’s higher grounding, distorted by injustice masquerading as social progress. Idolatrous and pagan commitments infected worship, where worship was instead supposed to clarify the thoughts and form the actions of those participating in the direction of God’s kingdom.

Leithart lifts up a vision of church worship and ministry oriented not to the self-propagation of hackneyed customs but to the unity of the body of Christ, the sending power of the Spirit, and the glory of God the Father.

Pentecost +23

Readings: Jeremiah 14:7–22; Psalm 84; 2 Timothy 4:6–18; Luke 18:9–14

Amidst a litany of despairing questions and complaints from Israel — “Why should you be like a stranger, like a warrior who cannot save? Why have you rejected us and struck us down?” — Israel’s God breaks in, saying of this people, his people: “Truly they have loved to wander” (Jeremiah 14:10). “[This is] probably an allusion to the many idolatrous sanctuaries … or to the frequent attempts to enter into foreign alliances” (J. A. Thompson, The Book of Jeremiah [New International Commentary on the Old Testament], 382).

In our time, the trope of the (usually) man throwing off the shackles of convention and expectation, refusing to be defined by externally imposed goals and principles, finding his own path, blazing his own trail, wandering relative to the fixed and constraining itineraries of an unimaginative society, may still resonate romantically. Employees check out of the rat race. Vacationers avoid the beaten track. Students create their own majors. But … there’s a difference between wandering because you’re a living self rather than a cog in a machine, and wandering because you’re lost.

“When we rise from our sins or repent, we are returning to the baptism from which we fell, and finding our way back to the promise then made to us, which we deserted when we sinned. For the truth of the promise once made remains steadfast, always ready to receive us back with open arms when we return” (Luther, Babylonian Captivity of the Church). “On earth the church journeys in a foreign land, but she seeks Christ seated at the right hand of God, where her true life is hidden” (Vatican II, Lumen gentium 6).

Pentecost +22

Readings: Genesis 32:22–31; Psalm 121; 2 Timothy 3:14–4:5; Luke 18:1–8

Jacob is coming home, but the main problem that took him away about 20 years ago is still there: his brother Esau wanted to kill him. So he sent gifts to Esau, many animals from his herd. He’s brought his family over the Jabbok river and while he’s back on the other side, alone, a man appears out of nowhere to wrestle with him. Jacob, fighting for his life, wins until the man puts his socket out of joint and then Jacob cries uncle, so to speak, begging for a blessing. He receives a new name, and in the morning goes limping to meet his powerful brother, and they are reconciled.

Whatever your story is, if you are a Christian, there is a similarity here. You have been vulnerable, desperate, possibly fighting for your life and you find that your struggle in prayer ends in your utter collapse before God, your admission that you are weak, helpless, needy. But perhaps you remember that his strength is made perfect in weakness, and you hope again, you wait for God to work, and you live in your new name: Christian. Not the one who struggles with God and man and overcomes but the one for whom Christ died and lives and intercedes.

—Beth Werner Lee

Pentecost +21

Readings: 2 Kings 5:1–3, 7–15c; Psalm 111; 2 Timothy 2:8–15; Luke 17:11–19

The strange, heartwarming story of Jesus’ healing of the ten lepers in Luke 17 is foreshadowed by the perhaps even stranger story of the Gentile Naaman’s healing through the washing commanded by Elisha in 2 Kings 5. “Naaman is cleansed and brought near [to the God of Israel] through washing. Because he is a Gentile, Naaman’s baptism is a particularly apt sign of Christian baptism, which marks out a new community of worshipers in which the distinction of Jew and Gentile is utterly dissolved. … Having been baptized, [Naaman] realizes that he is exclusively devoted to Yahweh and promises to worship no other gods” (Peter Leithart, 1–2 Kings, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible).

The baptism of the Christian is not simply a spiritual “high,” a personal “testimony,” or the public affirmation of a private “decision,” although baptism is indeed spiritual, personal, and public. Rather, as with Naaman’s cleansing, baptism happens to the one baptized. Baptism is then and thereafter an inescapable fact about the one baptized. And this is so, of course, because it is God who acts in baptism: God who gives, God who marks, God who pledges, God who declares, “This one belongs to me.”

That doesn’t mean that Christians can’t act in contradiction to their baptism, in forgetfulness of their baptism; our wandering from God makes us a painfully baffling paradox even — especially — to ourselves. But what could possibly put us back on track, turn us in repentance? Our feelings? That would be a disaster. Our works? Not now and not ever. God’s Spirit? Yes indeed — and the Spirit, who is not in any way a projection of our feelings or works, does what he does through means external to us: the voice of the Word; the actuality of our baptism; the body and blood of Jesus; the intrusively odd relationships of the church.

Pentecost +20

Readings: Habakkuk 1:1–4; 2:1–4; Psalm 37:1–9; 2 Timothy 1:1–14; Luke 17:5–10

“There is still a vision for the appointed time” (Habakkuk 2:3). Israel’s pilgrimage of call and commission, disobedience and devastation, rescue and remembrance — a pilgrimage joined by those adopted into Jesus’ family — is mapped not by any human “sneer of cold command,” not by those worthies who “find out what the world needs, then invent it,” but by God’s promise.

Luther paraphrases the prophet here: “The prophecies or visions of the advent of the Christ and of his kingdom are not at an end, even though we [i.e., Israel] are being destroyed for a time, but they still stand and remain firm, just as they were spoken by the prophets. This involves a definite time, which is known to no one but is committed to God. And when this vision comes to pass in its own time, it will act freely and not fail, or lie” (Lectures on Habakkuk, German text, Luther’s Works 19).

“This vision … will act freely.” Some technology enthusiasts are fond of saying that “information wants to be free,” in other words, that software, news, and other kinds of knowledge should not be shielded by patents or hidden behind paywalls. Whatever may be the right thing to do with humanly developed knowledge, the vision — the community-forming, reality-determining, Spirit-given revelation of God’s will and God’s work — comes and acts, not in thrall to our bureaucratic policies, not according to our market constraints or calendar urgencies or ideological prejudices, but in order to accomplish God’s kingdom as heralded by his Son Jesus.

(“Sneer of cold command”: Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”; “find out what the world needs”: Thomas Alva Edison, Wikiquote)

Pentecost +19

Readings: Amos 6:1a, 4–7; Psalm 146; 1 Timothy 6:6–19; Luke 16:19–31

Amos, the shepherd-prophet — perhaps an aficionado of music as was that other shepherd David? — thundered in the name of the Lord against those resting “at ease in Zion,” those who sang “idle songs to the sound of the harp” but were not “grieved over the ruin of Joseph,” chasing after riches rather than righteousness and too busy cheating the needy to bother with “the tradition upon which the nation was founded, the Book of the Covenant” (Bruce E. Willoughby, Anchor Bible Dictionary).

The people’s music can be anesthetizing as well as shocking, a complacent settlement with the assumptions of the age — “idle songs” — as much as a kaleidoscopic window onto the wisdom of the past and the uncertainties of the future. Music is never “neutral,” as technology is never “neutral,” because it is always being originated or employed or enjoyed by someone. “In Scripture, music encapsulates the vocation of human beings. … God made us to make music, and to be made by the music we make” (Peter J. Leithart, First Things).

The God of Israel, named and heard and met in Christian worship, is celebrated by the church’s music as our holy and righteous sovereign, who has poured out his life in unspeakable generosity to embrace us, and so whose character — including his standing with the poor and his lifting up of the forgotten — is to form our practice, as it was to form Israel’s, and as it came to concrete reality in the life of the Israelite Jesus. May our music signify, not our idleness, but our seizure by the gospel.

Pentecost +18

Readings: Amos 8:4–7; Psalm 113; 1 Timothy 2:1–7; Luke 16:1–13

“You cannot serve God and Mammon” (Luke 16:13). A deservedly great line, easily parroted, but not so easily parsed, in an age in which material affluence, and its lack, seem to be part of the skeleton — as essential as they are invisible — giving shape to our political discussions and contests, our estimates of success and failure, our worries and hopes for the future. Are the priorities reflected in those concerns idolatrous? Are we, at bottom, in thrall to Mammon?

We easily tangle ourselves in terrible knots asking the question in that way. It’s an important issue, but it can’t be settled simply by laying down abstract principles (“give 10% as a sign of commitment to God” — an excellent idea, but not an automatic solution to Mammon-servitude).

Nor is worship an automatic solution, in our bent world, short of the Kingdom. But in worship — precisely because worship is short of the Kingdom, in that it points toward the Kingdom — another measure is made possible, another future opens to view, another sort of goods is exchanged, another service is given as a gift. In worship, God reminds us that we are his by generously including us in his life. That cannot be magic; it can only be grace.

Pentecost +16

Readings: Deuteronomy 30:15–20; Psalm 1; Philemon 1–21; Luke 14:25–33

“Count the cost” (Luke 14:28): famous and forbidding counsel from the Lord of liberty. On the one hand, “counting the cost,” estimating the damage, facing the likely sacrifice, sounds so familiar to our pragmatic, quantifying, what’s-in-it-for-me sensibilities; on the other hand, the venture Jesus invites disciples to enter, free of illusion and with clear vision, leads to unprecedented exploits, a different world, a new life.

In worship we are invited into that world, to breathe the air and to taste the food of that strange new country, the land of the Trinity. Worship of the true God costs. How could it be otherwise? “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). And yet that can only be so, can only happen, because we are by God’s grace joined with the one who gave himself utterly, whose very existence was self-expenditure, whose death has become for us life and whose life is our future.

Pentecost +15

Readings: Proverbs 25:6–7; Psalm 112; Hebrews 13:1–8, 15–16; Luke 14:1, 7–14

A great deal of Jesus’ time seems to have been spent at dinner with all sorts of people. Healing, argument, teaching, reconciliation — the panoply and parade of human life before God took place around food and drink and fellowship in Jesus’ company.

The worship of the body of Christ recalls and celebrates with thanksgiving this very bodily practice of the Lord. Scripture is read, Old Testament and New, the story of Israel and the gift of church, “that richer fare may be provided for the faithful at the table of God’s Word” (Vatican II, Sacrosanctum concilium). Jesus meets us, as he promised his disciples at supper, and so “treasure is opened and placed at everyone’s door, yes, upon the table” (Luther, Large Catechism).

Beati qui ad cenam nuptiarum Agni vocati sunt (blessed are those invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb, Revelation 19:9)!

Pentecost +14

Readings: Isaiah 58:9–14; Psalm 103; Hebrews 12:18–29; Luke 13:10–17

“Immediately,” our Gospel reading says of the woman healed on the Sabbath, “she stood up straight and began praising God.” Crippled for eighteen years previously, she had been “quite unable to stand up straight,” but the word of Jesus — “you are set free” — flexed her, unbent her, uprighted her. For this daughter of Abraham, posture and praise were liberated together, rising up toward the Sun of righteousness.

Worshipping communities assume many positions — sitting, standing, bowing, kneeling, prostrating — and, although allowance can and should be made for physical disability and discomfort, and indeed posture can and should not be subject to any kind of liturgical legalism, these are not simply functions of “what I feel like” at the moment but are ways in which even the bodies of God’s people are oriented, formed, to God’s glory.

“Lift up your hearts,” the Eucharistic exhortation goes, not because we thus make ourselves any closer, in attitude or in altitude, to the Lord, but because God’s merciful gift — his personal presence and his powerful word at the table around which we gather — sets us free: free to stand up straight, free to sing his praise, free to serve his kingdom.

Pentecost +13

Readings: Jeremiah 23:23–29; Psalm 82; Hebrews 11:29–12:2; Luke 12:49–56

“By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land,” the letter to the Hebrews celebrates, but just a few sentences later, the honor roll of faith continues, matter-of-factly: “Others were tortured, refusing to accept release. They suffered mocking and flogging, chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword….”

Faith in the invisible, promising God is not a work, not an accomplishment, not a reason for pride or self-satisfaction — but it involves staggering stakes and begets momentous consequences. Faith is not innocuous, private, or “safe,” because the God whom we believe is infinitely bigger than our imaginations and uncontrollably beyond our expectations.

Yet this God comes to us, speaks to us, gives to us, in word and music, in bread and wine, in the face of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. God whom no one can see and live, to whom the wrath of nations is as the morning mist, brings us into his own Father-Son-and-Spirit liveliness. It’s dangerous country, that land of the Trinity; it will not leave us unchanged. But it’s where we’re supposed to go, what we’re meant to be.

Pentecost +12

Readings: Genesis 15:1–6; Psalm 33; Hebrews 11:1–3, 8–16; Luke 12:32–40

God’s promise to Abram that his descendants would outnumber the stars of heaven was meant to “blow his mind,” to take him to a place where not even his imagination, much less his self-reliant industriousness, could keep up. In the twenty-first century, we may have some notion (or at least some notation: 10^24?) about the number of stars in the universe, but the promises of God cannot so easily be domesticated — although of course that’s never stopped us from trying, from making them and other gifts into idols to distract us from the promising God.

Living by promises which we do not control and cannot manipulate to suit our own desires — but which, in God’s grace, introduce us to our own flourishing — is what the ancient (and long) sermon known as Hebrews calls faith. It’s the life into which we’re plunged in worship, where we meet the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, pioneer and perfecter of faith, and where by the pouring-out of the Spirit we’re given a foretaste of that to which God’s promises point.

There, too, we will hear, and have to deal with, Jesus’ uncompromising announcement: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” It’s often said that whatever is worth having, is worth working for. Very good. But surely the real question is: How do we discover what’s truly worth having, and so truly worth working for?

Pentecost +11

Readings: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12–14, 2:18–23; Psalm 49; Colossians 3:1–11; Luke 12:13–21

Amid Ecclesiastes-style recognitions of life’s stark, brute facts — “no ransom avails for one’s life”; “when we look at the wise, they die”; “mortals cannot abide in their pomp; they are like the animals that perish” — like some weird desert flower blooms the psalmist’s astonishing conviction: “Why should I fear in times of trouble?” (Psalm 49:5).

The word and water and meal and community that come to us in worship from God’s generosity aren’t a refuge or an escape from hard “reality.” Rather, they signify, they promise, God’s work within the messy materiality and perplexing bitterness of our world, our history. Exactly so, they point to a bigger picture, a larger story: “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The gifts of worship suggest what it means to be “rich towards God” (Luke 12:21).

Pentecost +10

Readings: Genesis 18:20–32; Psalm 138; Colossians 2:6–19; Luke 11:1–13

“We perish if we cease from prayer,” we will be reminded by the hymn of the day (Lutheran Book of Worship 438). And as young children must be taught even elementary skills, so Jesus’ disciples were trained in prayer by the one whose entire life “was one single prayer” (Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church 475).

To speak — to have access — to the living God, ruler of the universe, in prayer is no trivial privilege. To know how to pray and what to pray, then, is no empty formality. Worshippers at Prince of Peace, as in many other congregations, say the ancient “Lord’s Prayer” weekly. No harm there: it comes with the highest possible recommendation. But it was praying in that way, not merely with those words, that Jesus was after for his disciples.

Our hearing the word and remembering our baptism and sharing at the table together in worship, God’s many-sided gift to us his people, puts in our ears and exercises in our movements the story of God’s love, God’s kingdom, God’s salvation through the Lord Jesus. Thus we may learn to pray. Thus we may be formed as those who pray, as “the whole body, nourished and knit together,” which “grows with a growth that is from God.”

Pentecost +9

Readings: Genesis 18:1–10; Psalm 15; Colossians 1:15–28; Luke 10:38–42

It would be easy to see in our Gospel reading only the conflict and contrast between Mary and Martha: shame on Martha the complainer, praise for Mary the listener. But the readings taken together suggest a more profound focus. The hospitality offered to the Lord (Genesis 18); the profile of the righteous person (Psalm 15); the image of the invisible, reconciling God (Colossians 15) — these draw our attention, as indeed both Martha’s and Mary’s attention was drawn, to the visiting, righteous, God-imaging Lord Jesus.

Martha and Mary enter the Gospel story offering hospitality to Jesus, as Abraham did to (the three-personed…!) God. But this means that the details — Abraham’s and Sarah’s meal of flour cakes and tender calf, the matters of preparation occupying Martha’s mind to distraction, as deliciously important and urgent as they may seem — can only be secondary, supporting. Martha did well (as did Abraham, interceding with the Lord for Sodom later in Genesis 18) bringing her concerns — even if they had to be judged and corrected — to the Righteous One.

So we do, too, when we gather in worship. And as we hear him, hear his teaching, his correction, his promise, we may by grace share in his righteousness. The table is turned (!) and he becomes our host, giving himself to us, giving his whole person, in a meal of salvation, in the bread and wine which he makes his own by his word and with which he feeds us forgiveness.

Pentecost +8

Readings: Deuteronomy 30:9–14; Psalm 25; Colossians 1:1–14; Luke 10:25–37

The first reading reminds us of what might be called the inescapable “here-ness,” the direct connection to daily life, of God’s word to Israel: “this commandment … is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away.” Christians recognize the “here-ness” of God’s word as unsurpassed, as consummated, in Jesus, the Word made flesh and dwelling among us — dwelling first with Israel and then, through Jesus’ faithfulness to his Israelite calling, with the church of Jews and Gentiles.

Indeed, we may say — as Paul does in our second reading and often elsewhere in his letters — that Christ, the Word made flesh, is our dwelling: we are to be identified with the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ to which Paul addresses Colossians, and therefore we are to know how the gospel, taking root in the substance of Christ’s body (so to speak), is “bearing fruit and growing in the whole world” and among us too.

At his table, the Lord meets us as the Samaritan foreigner in our Gospel reading met the desperate victim on the road to Jericho: in deep compassion and with limitless generosity; not to berate, to compare, or to compete, but to rescue and to restore to wholeness. Here is how we see what it means to obey that famous double command, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Here is how we see the kingdom of God coming to us.

Baptism and New Beginnings

The start of another school year puts me in mind of the importance of new beginnings in Christian faith.

Christian talk is full of the language of new beginnings. Forgiveness, of course, is all about starting over. The apostle Paul says: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). We often talk about God opening doors to new opportunities or different paths. And so forth.

Christian practice, too, is full of the symbols of new beginnings. For example: At Prince of Peace, the baptismal font centrally placed in the worship space reminds us that our baptism says — both with and beyond words — that God has given us, completely from his own free generosity and by his incomparable creative power, a fresh start, a new life.

And it’s not only the fact of a fresh start that the font evokes as we move around it and see it in our peripheral vision, but also the place from which we start — the place of new beginnings. Baptism, Paul said to the Romans, is not just getting wet, but being put, being plunged, into the life and death and resurrection of Jesus (Romans 6:1–11).

This man Jesus and everything he did and said — now twenty centuries in the past, part of a time and culture completely foreign to most of us — is yet not only our contemporary but our very environment, our context, the campus where our new life from God is lived.

And to make “progress” in Christian believing is not to depart from Jesus, our new beginning, as if we could move on to bigger and better things, but precisely to return to Jesus — to return to our baptism into Jesus — over and over again, every day, by God’s grace, as Luther pointed out (Large Catechism).

However feelings and temptations may be whispering to us otherwise, the un-erasable fact of our baptism, this empirical piece of our biography, is there to remind us that God has taken hold of us — has put his name and his claim on us — and gives himself to us in Jesus, no matter how far we stray or how dark the path.

—Maurice Lee