Category: Lectionary

6 October 2013
Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 22C (RCL)
Lamentations 1:1-6
Lamentations 3:19-26 (Canticle A)
2 Timothy 1:1-14
Luke 17:5-10

Throughout the “green” season of Year C in the RCL, we have been reading of the approaching last days of the kingdom of Judah. Now, it has arrived. The book of Lamentations is a collections of songs and poems about the destruction of Jerusalem. All the glory is gone and the people dispersed. It is interesting to me that the verses we use as a canticle this morning are so hopeful: your mercies are new every morning. Contrast that to the other option, Psalm 137 – how happy the one who dashes your little ones against a stone. The two options present two widely different responses to catastrophe: one of hopelessness and one of faithfulness and hope.

The parable of the servant presented in this week’s reading from Luke is no one’s favorite. We don’t like the idea of saying, “We are worthless servants; we have only done what we ought to have done.” We want recognition for our good work. Everybody likes an “attaboy” or “attagirl” once in a while.

I think it makes sense to read these verses with the first four verses of the seventeenth chapter of Luke. Jesus Continue reading “Increase our faith”

September 22, 2013
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 20C (RCL)
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
Psalm 79:1-9
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13

In the RCL Old Testament track, we’ve been reading passages relating to the history of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel in year C. We are coming to the end of that history. The passage from Jeremiah is God’s response to the siege of Jerusalem. Even after all the warnings of all the prophets, when we would almost expect God to say, “I told you so,” God instead is weeping over the ruin of Jerusalem. The psalm echoes the same events, but as so often happens in the psalms, expressed from the point of view of the people, they begin to seek God’s vengeance on their conquerors. Monotheism requires an answer to the catastrophe of God’s people. If there are many Gods, then catastrophe is easily explained: the God of some other people proved stronger. But if only our God, then why did this happen. The prophets, especially Jeremiah, began groping their way toward a response: God was angry at us because of our sins. The psalms take this a step further and suggest that once we have learned our lesson, and repented of our sins, the God will turn the tables, and punish those whom God used to punish us. Jeremiah, instead, takes the view that God grieves along with God’s people

The Gospel passage is one that people react against. Jesus appears to be approving of dishonesty Continue reading “Prudent uses of wealth?”

15 September 2013
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 19C (RCL)
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
Psalm 14
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10

Jeremiah’s prophecy for this week is almost unremittingly pessimistic. He does include the line, “Yet, I will not make a full end,” but without any further detail, and it appears to be a later insertion. Jeremiah had good reason for his predictions — he was probably writing between Babylon’s first conquest of Jerusalem, when they made it a client state, and its final destruction. Jeremiah could see the political writing on the wall.

It would be easy, during this time, to take Jeremiah’s pessimism and run with it. We have Continue reading “Lost sheep”

8 September 2013
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 18C (RCL)
Jeremiah 18:1-11
Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17
Philemon 1-20
Luke 14:25-33

My preaching professor in seminary said if you have a text to preach on that you don’t like, you should begin with your text, depart from your text, and never return to your text — he was joking of course. This is one of those Gospel readings no one likes: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, cannot be my disciple.” Even Matthew didn’t like it — that Gospel changes this pronouncement to “Whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.” How do we set the pronouncement about hating parents alongside the commandment to honor father and mother?

Commentators try to wiggle out of the shock of this saying. The word “hate” is a bad translation from the Aramaic into the Greek (unfortunately, there is no evidence that Q ever existed in Aramaic). It is intended to be hyperbole. One can find any number of attempts to skirt the difficulty of this saying. This pericope comes just after the parable of the king’s banquet: those invited declined, and so the servant compelled people to come in off the highways and byways. Jesus told that parable in response to someone’s exclamation, “Blessed is the one who will eat bread in the kingdom of God.” The parable suggests that the people eating bread in the kingdom aren’t who we might expect.

The meal context shifts, in the first verse of this passage, to the journey motif Continue reading “Count the cost”

1 September 2013
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 17C (RCL)
Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81:1 10-16
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Luke 14:1, 7-14

Much of the teaching in Luke’s Gospel takes place at a meal. This reflects Luke’s awareness of and participation in the culture of his day. Most of Plato’s dialogs take place at meals. It was a standard cultural form: banquet and symposium. Those who could afford it went to dinner parties, and then after all the food and entertainment were out of the way, the conversation would begin, lubricated by judicious application of wine. Topics of conversation included love, manners, philosophy, poetry — any number of things. The task of the leader of the symposium was to keep the conversation flowing.

In the Gospel reading for today, we have a standard trope of table conversation: how to avoid being shamed at a dinner party. Continue reading “Places of honor”

25 August 2013
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 16C (RCL)
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71:1-6
Hebrews 12:18-29
Luke 13:10-17

This passage from Luke is not one we have read liturgically until the switch to the Revised Common Lectionary. It’s always refreshing to read something new. At first glance, this seems like a simple little story, without much to commend it a place in Luke’s narrative other than the escalating conflict with the synagogue officials. Yeah, so Jesus healed someone: what’s new about that?

In the Gospels, there are several accounts of healing on the sabbath which get Jesus in trouble with the authorities Continue reading “Bent over”

18 August 2013
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 15C (RCL)
Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Luke 12:49-56

The rhetorical force of the opening sentence in today’s Gospel comes through far clearer in the Greek than the English. I better translation would be, “Fire I have come to cast on the earth.” The syntax emphasizes the word “fire.” Not a happy reading. The people who study Q (the material common to Matthew and Luke) tell us that this comes from the second phase of Q’s composition: after a period of initial optimism that their radically inclusive table fellowship would transform society, the Q-people were discouraged, and began to call down fire on those who wouldn’t hear their message. In the third and final stage of composition Continue reading “The signs of the times”

11 August 2013
Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 14C (RCL)
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

Isaiah dives right in to his prophecy against the people. In the verses we leave out, speaking for God, the prophet laments that God’s children don’t recognize their parent. But at least, says the prophets, God has not left us quite as desolate as Sodom. Jerusalem still exists like a hut in a vineyard. And then come the verses we have in our reading. Interestingly, the sins of Sodom, to which the prophet compares the sins of Jerusalem, have more to do with injustice, with a failure to redress the wrongs done to the widow and orphan, than with the sins we usually associate with Sodom. All of our religious worship Continue reading “Incorruptible purses”

28 July 2013
Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 12 C (RCL)
Hosea 1:2-10
Psalm 85
Colossians 2:6-19
Luke 11:1-13

In the RCL, we have been working our way through a sort of history of the divided kingdoms in the Old Testament readings of Year C. We have been reading the minor prophets for the last couple of weeks. Amos was a southern prophet who went north to Bethel and spoke against the excesses of the wealthy. Hosea is, by all appearances, a northern prophet who inveighs against the polytheism of the north. It would be unfair to say that a pure YHWHism had become infected with the worship of the Canaanite gods, but more accurate to say that Hosea was out there on the leading edge of monotheism, trying to direct the religion of Israel toward a pure YHWHism. The fertility cults of the whole Canaanite region were found equally in Israelite (and probably Judahite) religion, but as the disaster of political collapse approached, the prophets of YHWH began to insist on a pure monotheism.

YHWH tells Hosea to take a promiscuous wife Continue reading “Who’s shameless?”

21 July 2013
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 11C (RCL)
Amos 8:1-12
Psalm 52
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42

Amos is generally agreed to be the first prophetic book in the Bible, and as such one of the earliest written biblical works to come to us in its original form. Amos is a thoroughly pessimistic work — there isn’t a lot of hope in its prophecies. Amos, a peasant from the southern kingdom, came north to call Israel to judgment. The crime seems to be the exploitation of the poor (and not just by the rich, but even the poor preying on the poor). The merchants in this passage can hardly wait for the sabbath to be over, so they can get back to their cheating. Apparently, the rich would extend credit to the poor, and then take their land when they couldn’t pay (selling the poor for a pair of sandals — sandals being the exchanged in the exchange of land — cf Ruth 4:7). A friend managed a rural Walmart Continue reading “Poor Martha”