Second Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12
The first two readings have to do with the ideal king. We in the U.S. have a hard time imagining what it would be like to have a king, especially one whose main concern is the poor. It is difficult to find a single king in all of history who made the poor his chief concern—unless you are talking about Jesus, of course, and recognize Him as a “king.”
Besides the incredible biblical assumption that someone in power would care about the poor, the other issue that defies belief is the peaceable kingdom that the painter Edward Hicks illustrated from these words of Isaiah. If the wolf and the lion lie down with the lambs and the calves, they will starve to death. We speak of them being “hard wired” to kill and eat. They are predators. Some say we humans are hard wired, too, to protect our families and property, to expand our reach through war.
In her book Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver makes a strong case that predators such as the coyote must be allowed to survive or the world will be overrun by rodents. We have all learned that the accidental or purposeful introduction of species where they are not found naturally has often led to disastrous consequences for the environment.
Amid this talk of kings and predators, Matthew’s gospel portrays John the Baptist talking about Jesus as a powerful figure, someone who will thrash about with his pitchfork and send people into “unquenchable fire.” Ever after, preachers can use that quote to try to scare people into righteousness. Unfortunately, righteousness often meant a public confession followed by hefty contributions to the preacher’s organization.
However, when Jesus begins his ministry, He gives very little evidence of a winnowing fork, and instead He associates and appears to LOVE the people that the righteous condemned. And so He shows Himself the kind of king that Isaiah and the Psalm were talking about. The people He befriended, lifted up, cured and healed, were most often people who were poor. They were lacking in the eyes of the elite.
And so we come to the big questions: Is Jesus someone who would relate to you? Would He understand you? Would He LIKE you? Would you like Him or even love Him? If yes, is that because you are blameless and have perfectly observed all the commandments from your youth?
No worries. Jesus gave a clue right from the beginning that he was separating himself from the establishment. He went to the river Jordan to be baptized by John, this upstart who eventually was executed by the current King. Then He begins showing a shocking favoritism to those whom Isaiah calls “the meek of the earth” (Is. 11: 4).
And so this is the way Jesus demonstrated for us what He meant by a “spirit of Wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord” (Is. 11:2). And we are still hoping, in the waning weeks of 2010, to walk in His way and so bring to our world those gifts of His Spirit.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Commentary on Lectionary for November 28, 2010
Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44
Advent begins, a period of making room for the Presence of God in our lives. There is a stillness, a joyful anticipation about this liturgical season. In the Christian tradition, Advent has been likened to a journey, a trip to Bethlehem, as if we were wise men and, having had some star, some illumination that convinced us that something stupendous has happened on this earth, we set out to follow that light wherever it leads.
No wonder Psalm 122, one of the “ascent psalms,” speaks about the joy of going up to Jerusalem along with all the tribes of the Lord, and hearing proclaimed from that holy city the word “Shalom”—“Peace be within you!” Isaiah (2:1-5) and Micah (4:1-3) proclaim the same thing: the wonderful invitation to climb the Lord’s mountain to get instruction in God’s ways. And what do they hear? --That there will be an end to war and amid all the violence of clashing armies and rival kings, the one God will stand secure, bring peace, and be worthy of our praise.
At this time of year, our Islamic brethren have just made the haaj to Mecca. More than two million people, dressed simply, obliterating external signs of wealth or class, are fulfilling one of Islam’s pillars, the visit to this holy place, a purifying journey, a chance to commune with God.
Advent also begins the frantic rush toward Christmas. Instead of a peaceful pilgrimage to the holy places, many of us in this country fight each other for merchandise at Black Friday prices. People get trampled; violence erupts; politeness is discarded; incivility reigns. For those in-store guards watching for theft on monitors, it must be a terrible scene that unfolds before them and a sorry commentary on what we humans can become. And the saddest part is that our economy needs to be fed with a huge amount of purchasing each year, and so merchants try to extend black Friday backwards from the day after Thanksgiving, even trying to rename that traditional day of giving thanks, ‘gray Thursday.’
Can you imagine Paul of Tarsus standing at the doors of a mall or a Wal-Mart saying, as he does in Romans 13:13-14: “Let us live honorably…not in quarreling and jealousy…make no provision for the desires of the flesh!” --Certainly ignored; probably trampled.
So what’s the point? Is it wrong to want to give gifts, to seek bargains, to make Christmas lists? I don’t know. We are caught up in a culture and an economic system that says: of course not. We are caught up in a crowd heading in one direction and are pushed along whether we dig in our heels or not. Maybe the best we can do is to heed Jesus’ words that we don’t know when God will come, will try to reach us, will take us to Himself. “Stay awake, therefore! You cannot know the day your Lord is coming” (Mt. 24:42). The experience of His Presence is the most precious gift we will ever receive.
Maybe in the midst of the frenetic activity before Christmas, we can carve out a little bit of time each day to read Psalm 122 and hear its message of peace. Shalom!
Advent begins, a period of making room for the Presence of God in our lives. There is a stillness, a joyful anticipation about this liturgical season. In the Christian tradition, Advent has been likened to a journey, a trip to Bethlehem, as if we were wise men and, having had some star, some illumination that convinced us that something stupendous has happened on this earth, we set out to follow that light wherever it leads.
No wonder Psalm 122, one of the “ascent psalms,” speaks about the joy of going up to Jerusalem along with all the tribes of the Lord, and hearing proclaimed from that holy city the word “Shalom”—“Peace be within you!” Isaiah (2:1-5) and Micah (4:1-3) proclaim the same thing: the wonderful invitation to climb the Lord’s mountain to get instruction in God’s ways. And what do they hear? --That there will be an end to war and amid all the violence of clashing armies and rival kings, the one God will stand secure, bring peace, and be worthy of our praise.
At this time of year, our Islamic brethren have just made the haaj to Mecca. More than two million people, dressed simply, obliterating external signs of wealth or class, are fulfilling one of Islam’s pillars, the visit to this holy place, a purifying journey, a chance to commune with God.
Advent also begins the frantic rush toward Christmas. Instead of a peaceful pilgrimage to the holy places, many of us in this country fight each other for merchandise at Black Friday prices. People get trampled; violence erupts; politeness is discarded; incivility reigns. For those in-store guards watching for theft on monitors, it must be a terrible scene that unfolds before them and a sorry commentary on what we humans can become. And the saddest part is that our economy needs to be fed with a huge amount of purchasing each year, and so merchants try to extend black Friday backwards from the day after Thanksgiving, even trying to rename that traditional day of giving thanks, ‘gray Thursday.’
Can you imagine Paul of Tarsus standing at the doors of a mall or a Wal-Mart saying, as he does in Romans 13:13-14: “Let us live honorably…not in quarreling and jealousy…make no provision for the desires of the flesh!” --Certainly ignored; probably trampled.
So what’s the point? Is it wrong to want to give gifts, to seek bargains, to make Christmas lists? I don’t know. We are caught up in a culture and an economic system that says: of course not. We are caught up in a crowd heading in one direction and are pushed along whether we dig in our heels or not. Maybe the best we can do is to heed Jesus’ words that we don’t know when God will come, will try to reach us, will take us to Himself. “Stay awake, therefore! You cannot know the day your Lord is coming” (Mt. 24:42). The experience of His Presence is the most precious gift we will ever receive.
Maybe in the midst of the frenetic activity before Christmas, we can carve out a little bit of time each day to read Psalm 122 and hear its message of peace. Shalom!
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Commentary on Lectionary for November 21, 2010
Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 46; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43
If you have lived through any type of natural disaster—for example, a volcanic eruption with fiery lava raining down on you as you flee, or a serious earthquake, or a tsunami with a 30 foot wave coming toward you or a war—apocalyptic writing must have a special meaning for you. When your body gives out or the earth shakes, it must seem as if nothing is stable. –And ultimately, nothing is stable.
Scriptural readings such as those last week can fill a person with great fear. So today’s readings are a welcome turn, as if we have awakened the morning after a storm and the sun is shining, making everything look fresh and beautiful. In last week’s readings, God is seen as a terrible avenger of all the evil mankind continues to do.
Today the prophet Jeremiah speaks harshly to the kings of Israel, whom he blames for scattering God’s people. But then He has God promising to bring them back, to gather them together, acting as a good shepherd after his flock has been frightened into flight by a pack of wolves.
Psalm 46 continues this portrait. God is a refuge, not a cause of fear. God is the place where we go when our knees are shaking and our faces pale, “even though mountains slip into the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam.” No earthquake can shatter this confidence because “God is in the midst of her…The Lord of hosts is with us.” What a wonderful juxtaposition of verse 8 with verse 9! God is pictured as one who “has wrought desolations in the earth,” but then the very next line makes it seem as if his “desolations” are breaking apart weapons and causing war to cease.
We can almost see the Psalm writer putting his finger to his lips and saying to us who are cowering and frantic: “Sh-h-h! Be still and know that I am God.” Or as one translation has it: “Cease striving and know that I am God.” It is a wonderful contemplative moment when you can get your mind to stop and your body to relax, and you follow your breath in and out as you grow still and let all your tasks, all your fears, and all that is happening get sucked into the stillness and peace of God.
It is almost jarring, this close to Advent, to read the Gospel passage from Luke that has Jesus on the cross talking to the man crucified next to him. Here is a thief, someone who has broken the law of God, probably not just once, and here is Jesus offering him forgiveness. It reminds me of the story of a psychiatrist who worked with a criminal on his deathbed and the man said just before dying: “Thank you for giving me life.”
Paul explicitly makes Jesus the person who fulfills God’s promise way back in Jeremiah’s time and the Psalmist’s time: He is God with us. He “rescued us from the domain of darkness” (Col. 1:13). Not only that, but he reconciled all things in himself. He didn’t meet violence with violence. He met it with forgiveness. What followed was peace and new life. And those are the gifts held out to us again and again as we read the scriptures. Cease striving, relax in his presence, carry this connection into your dealing with the world and with others, and then the earthquakes will come, but they won’t matter.
If you have lived through any type of natural disaster—for example, a volcanic eruption with fiery lava raining down on you as you flee, or a serious earthquake, or a tsunami with a 30 foot wave coming toward you or a war—apocalyptic writing must have a special meaning for you. When your body gives out or the earth shakes, it must seem as if nothing is stable. –And ultimately, nothing is stable.
Scriptural readings such as those last week can fill a person with great fear. So today’s readings are a welcome turn, as if we have awakened the morning after a storm and the sun is shining, making everything look fresh and beautiful. In last week’s readings, God is seen as a terrible avenger of all the evil mankind continues to do.
Today the prophet Jeremiah speaks harshly to the kings of Israel, whom he blames for scattering God’s people. But then He has God promising to bring them back, to gather them together, acting as a good shepherd after his flock has been frightened into flight by a pack of wolves.
Psalm 46 continues this portrait. God is a refuge, not a cause of fear. God is the place where we go when our knees are shaking and our faces pale, “even though mountains slip into the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam.” No earthquake can shatter this confidence because “God is in the midst of her…The Lord of hosts is with us.” What a wonderful juxtaposition of verse 8 with verse 9! God is pictured as one who “has wrought desolations in the earth,” but then the very next line makes it seem as if his “desolations” are breaking apart weapons and causing war to cease.
We can almost see the Psalm writer putting his finger to his lips and saying to us who are cowering and frantic: “Sh-h-h! Be still and know that I am God.” Or as one translation has it: “Cease striving and know that I am God.” It is a wonderful contemplative moment when you can get your mind to stop and your body to relax, and you follow your breath in and out as you grow still and let all your tasks, all your fears, and all that is happening get sucked into the stillness and peace of God.
It is almost jarring, this close to Advent, to read the Gospel passage from Luke that has Jesus on the cross talking to the man crucified next to him. Here is a thief, someone who has broken the law of God, probably not just once, and here is Jesus offering him forgiveness. It reminds me of the story of a psychiatrist who worked with a criminal on his deathbed and the man said just before dying: “Thank you for giving me life.”
Paul explicitly makes Jesus the person who fulfills God’s promise way back in Jeremiah’s time and the Psalmist’s time: He is God with us. He “rescued us from the domain of darkness” (Col. 1:13). Not only that, but he reconciled all things in himself. He didn’t meet violence with violence. He met it with forgiveness. What followed was peace and new life. And those are the gifts held out to us again and again as we read the scriptures. Cease striving, relax in his presence, carry this connection into your dealing with the world and with others, and then the earthquakes will come, but they won’t matter.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Commentary on Lectionary for November 14, 2010
Mal 4:1-2a; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19
We often use Scripture to find out who God is. In these last readings of the Church year, it’s almost as if God returns the favor, and shows us who WE are. Visit any historical museum, and you will see evidence of countless years of war, weapons development, bigger and better, science, knowledge, huge sums of money used to promote killing in the name of freedom, peace, and righteousness. One war sows the seeds for the next.
And so we can understand the apocalypse and apocalyptic writing. God is telling us what we sometimes refuse to believe, even after all of the violence: nothing in this universe is permanent, and something in us wants to destroy it all. The U.S. and Russia are even now in negotiations about how many mass destructive devices they will keep to destroy each other. And some of our politicians want to derail these negotiations so that we can build MORE bombs than other superpowers. In this, they say, is our security. Any other approach, they imply, is naïve.
Into all this conflict and tribulation, a Prince of Peace has come, with a whole different view of what power is and in what direction to go if we are looking for peace. God first sent prophets like Malachi (whose name means “my messenger”). Prophesying in the 5th century BCE, Malachi might have said: Yes, you have rebuilt the Temple, but your rules for worship harm and manipulate people; your leaders are corrupt, and you continue to oppress the widows and the poor as well as reject aliens. How can you be freed from all of this without some kind of purification? It will not be pleasant, but it will be healing, like an astringent salve on a wound. It is so difficult to take up the cause of the poor and oppressed, and to fight for justice because we know we will be persecuted.
God sends his son, Jesus, the embodiment of the divine. He doesn’t come with guns blazing, flame throwers clearing the way like some Schwarzenegger action film. We’re talking a manger here, and fishermen, lepers, donkeys to ride on, a crown of thorns, and a painful and shameful death.
And now, even after Jesus’ coming, says the author of 2 Thessalonians, we need a second coming because we didn’t get His message the first time. Or we’ve gotten weary trying to do what is right. Or we’ve become distracted by the budget, and have forgotten to pull together and work to help one another and those outside our circles who are in need.
Jesus’ words in Luke remind us what our world is like and what we can expect of corruptible forms. Natural disasters have and will come. We don’t know how to live without violence. The message here, I think, before we can seriously look at where Jesus needs to come again and how we can help make this second coming happen, is that we need to treat these tribulations as a purifying process. He will be with us, urging us to hang in there with faith and to wait to feel his presence, a presence so all-consumingly wonderful that we will consider the pain of getting to it trivial.
Like the Psalmist, even while we are being purified, we will only think praise, of making a joyful noise, of using all of the instruments we know how to play and then calling upon all creation to join us: “Let the sea roar…let the rivers clap their hands…let the mountains sing” (Ps. 98:7-8).
We often use Scripture to find out who God is. In these last readings of the Church year, it’s almost as if God returns the favor, and shows us who WE are. Visit any historical museum, and you will see evidence of countless years of war, weapons development, bigger and better, science, knowledge, huge sums of money used to promote killing in the name of freedom, peace, and righteousness. One war sows the seeds for the next.
And so we can understand the apocalypse and apocalyptic writing. God is telling us what we sometimes refuse to believe, even after all of the violence: nothing in this universe is permanent, and something in us wants to destroy it all. The U.S. and Russia are even now in negotiations about how many mass destructive devices they will keep to destroy each other. And some of our politicians want to derail these negotiations so that we can build MORE bombs than other superpowers. In this, they say, is our security. Any other approach, they imply, is naïve.
Into all this conflict and tribulation, a Prince of Peace has come, with a whole different view of what power is and in what direction to go if we are looking for peace. God first sent prophets like Malachi (whose name means “my messenger”). Prophesying in the 5th century BCE, Malachi might have said: Yes, you have rebuilt the Temple, but your rules for worship harm and manipulate people; your leaders are corrupt, and you continue to oppress the widows and the poor as well as reject aliens. How can you be freed from all of this without some kind of purification? It will not be pleasant, but it will be healing, like an astringent salve on a wound. It is so difficult to take up the cause of the poor and oppressed, and to fight for justice because we know we will be persecuted.
God sends his son, Jesus, the embodiment of the divine. He doesn’t come with guns blazing, flame throwers clearing the way like some Schwarzenegger action film. We’re talking a manger here, and fishermen, lepers, donkeys to ride on, a crown of thorns, and a painful and shameful death.
And now, even after Jesus’ coming, says the author of 2 Thessalonians, we need a second coming because we didn’t get His message the first time. Or we’ve gotten weary trying to do what is right. Or we’ve become distracted by the budget, and have forgotten to pull together and work to help one another and those outside our circles who are in need.
Jesus’ words in Luke remind us what our world is like and what we can expect of corruptible forms. Natural disasters have and will come. We don’t know how to live without violence. The message here, I think, before we can seriously look at where Jesus needs to come again and how we can help make this second coming happen, is that we need to treat these tribulations as a purifying process. He will be with us, urging us to hang in there with faith and to wait to feel his presence, a presence so all-consumingly wonderful that we will consider the pain of getting to it trivial.
Like the Psalmist, even while we are being purified, we will only think praise, of making a joyful noise, of using all of the instruments we know how to play and then calling upon all creation to join us: “Let the sea roar…let the rivers clap their hands…let the mountains sing” (Ps. 98:7-8).
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