Endurance Produces Hope – 18 June 2017 – Second Sunday after Pentecost

We enter Ordinary Time with Jesus’ call to proclaim the reign of God. The preacher’s challenge today is to wed that proclamation to the healing Jesus’ gives his messengers authority to bring about. Where is the healing happening in your community?

Matthew 9:35––­10:8[9-23]

By joining together these verses, the lectionary shows Matthew's intention that the disciples should do what Jesus did. Jesus proclaimed the “good news of the kingdom of heaven” (9:35); the disciples are to proclaim the good news that “the kingdom of heaven has come near” (10:7). Jesus cures every disease and sickness (9:35) and gives the disciples authority “to cure every disease and every sickness” (10:1). Jesus views the crowds “like sheep without a shepherd” (9:36) and sends the disciples to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (10:6).

The mission of the Twelve is not just to preach about the kingdom but also to actualize it through deeds of spiritual power: driving out demons and curing diseases (manifestations in human life and evil and brokenness). . .

The descriptions attached to the names [of the apostles] show what a motley crew this was: Simon was called “Rock” (Peter); Matthew was a tax collector; the other Simon was a Canaanite, a zealot for the law (from the Aramaic kanana, enthusiast, not a resident of the land of Canaan), and Judas Iscariot was a traitor. Those who are gathered by Jesus and commissioned for leadership roles in the church are a diverse and imperfect group, and this was apparently the Master's intention. – Frank C. Senn

Exodus 19:2-8a

This pericope affirms God's call to his people to be “holy,” that is, to belong to God. Holiness or sanctification means that the people have been set apart like priests in order to offer a sacrifice that is pleasing to the Lord. Holiness in the biblical tradition implied that the people should be like God, who is distinct from the creation. Therefore, the people of God are to be distinct from all the peoples and cultures around them, both morally and ritually. –– Frank C. Senn

Romans 5:1-8

Peace is here understood as reconciliation (making peace), which is referred to explicitly in verses 10–11. The condition of reconciliation through Christ gives us access to the grace of God. This access gives us the right to boast not only of glory but also of suffering. We highly regard suffering because it leads to endurance, which produces character, which produces a hope that does not disappoint because it resides in hearts into which God's love has been poured through the gift of the Holy Spirit. A homily might unpack each of these concepts, showing how one builds on the other.

God has overcome his own wrath against sin. . . by the sacrifice of his Son. This is an expression of God's love for his weak and fallen human creatures. Paul never speaks of God being reconciled with us but of us being reconciled with God, since we were the estranged party. Christ's blood is the condition of our restoration to divine favor. This has consequences for both the present and the future. Christ's sacrificial death reconciles us now in our present life before God and also saves us in the final judgment. – Frank C. Senn

Frank C. Senn, an ELCA pastor who served Immanuel Lutheran Church in Evanston, Illinois, from 1990-2013, has also taught liturgy courses at a number of seminaries and divinity schools and published thirteen books mostly on the history of the liturgy.

Homily Service 41, no. 3 (2008): 54-62.

The Future is. . . What?! – 7 August 2016 – 11th Sunday after Pentecost/ Lectionary 19/ Proper 14

How often we look around us and long for a path toward faith and hope in the midst of much anxiety! Our world is replete with seemingly intractable violence in many lands and uncertainties about who shall lead us. Today is no exception.

In the face of impossible hopes, as with Abram, God takes us by the hand and shows us the stars – a heaven filled with mysterious and distant lights that cannot be counted. They reveal the limitlessness of God’s promises which hold out hope for peace in the way Julian of Norwich insisted, writing: “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

How are we to grasp this?

Luke 12:32-40

The Gospel story shows us a stance to take, an approach to the things of this world, a measurement for what we value, and a caution about the dangers.

Today's gospel reading. . . collects a number of Jesus' teachings regarding how his followers are to ready themselves for God's impending future, that is, what living faithfully is to look like in terms of our behavior. First he underlines the gift-character of salvation with the encouragement: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (v 32, emphasis added).

Secondly, he recommends a series of actions consistent with last week's readings' emphasis on not investing oneself in the pursuit of transient earthly wealth, culminating in the assurance that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (See the commentary on last week's texts.)

And thirdly, with a greatly abbreviated reference to the much more elaborate end-time parable of the ten virgins we find in Matthew 25, he recommends an active and alert stance toward the impending future, a stance of ready waiting “for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” One might call this attitude of urgent anticipation “faith-filled hope.” – John Rollefson

Genesis 15:1-6

While the Gospel gives us the prospect of readiness to hope, the Genesis story gives us companionship with God in the night, even at the moment of despair.

In the poignant image of God pointing Abram to the stars (I picture a clear, cold, windless midnight hour with the lights of the heavens twinkling, thick and sharp) we see with Abram the abundance of God’s promised future. We are incredulous, because when we look around us at the world’s disappointments in our individual lives and that of the nations, a future of such brightness and vastness seems impossible. The moment for Abraham appears to be like ours: Where is the least inkling that hope is not futile? Where is Abram’s first heir?

[T]here is as . . . yet no sign of the offspring needed to get the promise started toward fulfillment, and the clock is ticking. It's not until the next chapter that Sarai will try to jump-start the promise by offering her slave-girl Hagar as a surrogate. As soon will become evident, this only complicates matters, and such human improvisation in trying to help the promise along isn't what Yahweh has in mind.

But most significant for today's theme is the story's conclusion: “And he (Abram) believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

From St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans, chapter 4, through the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification officially ratified by the 1999 Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation, this passage has been key in the church's efforts to understand the mystery of how it is that God justifies (reckons righteous), by grace through faith, us fallen descendants of Adam and Eve. – John Rollefson

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

Finally, we receive a summation of the truth about faith: It is not logical. What we hope for is not visible.

The author's succinct definition of faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (v 1) is borne out in the conclusion drawn from the history of the faithful, all of whom “died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them” (v 13a). This throws faith into its appropriate attitude of leaning into the future to which a promise always leads where its fulfillment is awaited in what both Paul (Romans 8:24–25, e.g.) and the Psalmist (33:22) call “hope.”

. . . The author's description of the faithful as “strangers and foreigners (sojourners) on the earth…seeking a homeland” is an apt description of the pilgrim character of the church, bringing us full circle back to father Abraham whose first recorded act of faith was to respond to God's call to “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you” in trusting obedience, “not knowing where he was going” (v 8b). . .

We cannot prove that we are justified to have faith and hope. Rather, faith and hope feed each other and we come by them most possibly with our eyes (see the stars!) and ears (hear the word of God!) open to what is impossible… and yet true.

John Rollefson is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He has served congregations in Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, Milwaukee, and San Francisco.

Homily Service 40, no. 9 (2007): 13-22.

The Spirit is Future Present – 22 May 2016 – Holy Trinity

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity gives us not only the workings of the Holy Three but a powerful inner-reliance within them that forms an image of community. All of this can sound either too practical (they each have a job) or too complicated (three is one?).

God the Creator can be too distant (the Watchmaker god who gets the ball rolling and then departs) or too comfortable (there’s not much that is controversial in acknowledging the universe must have a Source).

God the Spirit can be too easily manipulated (we can say God “told me” through the working of the Spirit what I wanted to hear) or so ever-present and pervasive that it loses the particularity of emanating from God the Son (i.e., the Spirit is in every faith).

God the Face––in Christ Jesus––of Creator/Spirit can be either too neatly drawn (Jesus’ sense of what is right and just is in line with mine) or too scary (he’s asking me to grow and change so that I embrace a larger world than I want).  

Preachers might summon the language of mystery today so that what seems to be too difficult to talk about (lest it become boringly understandable or ungraspably academic) becomes absolutely necessary to faith.

The Church and the lectionary give us this day every year to sum up, as it were, ways to think about our confession of faith: I believe in the God the Father… Son… and Holy Spirit. This is a great opportunity to get down to it!

John 16:12-15

Most significantly, we hear from Jesus’ farewell speech to the disciples, promising that a “Spirit of truth” will come to guide the disciples into the future.

Why did Jesus think his followers needed this kind of divine presence? Why not simply tell them: “You have my words, my sacramental body and blood, you have me with you always.” . . .  Even the two-voice God language is too complex for most of us, since God as a (single) “higher power” is what really matters. Why were Jesus' words and sacramental presence not enough of God for the church to hang onto?

Here's a revealing analogy. A contemporary religious community founded about forty years ago by a revered teacher faced this problem. He was their leader, teacher, saint. So they recorded ten thousand hours of his teachings, and after his death kept his living quarters unchanged as a shrine. When new members joined, they were escorted to the room, and could listen to the tapes. Why bother with the Spirit, if the original founder can still be available in this way? . . . .

One answer might be: geographical, physical mobility in one case, but not the other. The [contemporary religious] community stayed in Philadelphia, the house and room providing immediate access to the past when the leader lived there. By contrast, the earliest Christians were forced to flee; they scattered and moved around and most of them lost that immediate link with the literal places where Jesus had been. Of course, a homeless founder helped this dynamic: there was no “Jesus’ own bedroom” to show new converts! But a more significant aspect is that the Spirit, already has a direct connection to the future. . . prevent[ing] the community from only remembering, preserving, returning to a glorified sacred past. The Spirit promises a future with its own worth, its own challenges and novelties. Yet the promise is also that this future will not be Jesus-less, nor disconnected intrinsically from the mighty events recorded in the gospel. The Spirit takes what belongs to Jesus and the Father, and shares this with those to come. . . .

Did Christians begin and remain a kind of “Jesus cult” in just this sense, fixated on one individual founder? In a way, yes. But the Spirit's role is to keep them and us from getting stuck in this past. We have no forced choice between past and future. Someone in the Community of the Beloved Disciple must have grumbled, “Jesus wouldn't have wanted us to move to Ephesus,” but someone else could always invoke the Spirit's guidance. The test isn't “Would Jesus have wanted this?” but “Is the Spirit guiding us here? Does God have a future for us in Ephesus, revealed through the Spirit?” No search of the sayings could answer that. – Lucy Bregman

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Let the poetry of this passage, rich in concrete touchstones (water, mountains, earth, heavens, skies, sea…), expand the image of what undergirds all of creation by naming it Wisdom. Before all that ever was, Wisdom was born––another name for the One God.

Romans 5:1-5

The litany of Paul’s list of character traits that build upon one another becomes a kind of ladder to greater and greater capacities that strengthen us in this life of struggle. Paul’s words encourage us to look at the gifts that accrue to those who suffer: endurance, character, hope, and finally the experience that “does not disappoint us” which is joy.

Joy comes from participating in the life of the Trinity, the life of the world. Early theologians spoke of the Trinity being like a fountain with love spilling over from Father to Son to Spirit. Here’s another possibility for that fountain:

Imagine a “Trinity fountain” in which the. . . water moves from the Father to the Son and from the Son to the Spirit—but mysteriously reciprocally returns to the Father from the Son, and to the Son from the Spirit, and from the Spirit to the Father. . . a perfect, tri-personal relationship of love communication and covenant faithfulness. . . – Michael A. Van Horn

This is a description of perichoresis, a dance of the Three, to which we are all invited.

Lucy Bregman, professor of religion at Temple University, Philadelphia, has published several books on death and dying and, most recently, The Ecology of Spirituality: Practice and Virtues in a Post-Religious Age (Baylor Univ. Pr.).

Michael A. Van Horn was, at the time of this contribution to Homily Service, assistant professor of theology at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, and a pastor within the Evangelical Covenant tradition.

  

Homily Service 40, no. 7 (2007): 3-14.