Preacher's Study - Year C, Proper 11 (16) 2013

Monday Morning in the Preacher’s Study

First thoughts about next Sunday’s sermon

(9^th Sunday after Pentecost, July 21, 2013)

Maylanne Maybee

If last week’s lectionary readings focused on love of neighbour, the emphasis this week is on love of God. 

As a deacon I’m always on the lookout for diakon-words in the epistle or gospel.  Today I find it in Luke’s description of Martha, wanting to welcome Jesus, yet “pulled in all directions by much serving (diakonian).” It’s so easy in ministry to be drawn into “much serving” and to forget that the first rule of hospitality is to attend to the guest.  It’s so easy in worship to be drawn into action, even liturgical action, and forget that the first rule is to attend, to listen. 

This Sunday’s lectionary readings seem to invite attention to the message and meaning of Sabbath, alluded to in the Amos passage and reinforced in the story from Luke, as the foundation of our relationship with God.

For all its layers of meaning, Sabbath is primarily about non-action, about presence and resting.  Amos bristles at the lip service paid to Sabbath laws by the merchants of Israel, who wait impatiently for the day to pass so they can get back to their business of exploitation and deceit, “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”  (Amos 8.6)

For the God of Israel, Sabbath is not just a day off in a week of hard work.  It is an act of justice brought about by restraint from busy-ness, the kind of restraint that gives rest to the land and restores to the poor a small portion of the goods of the earth.  Just as fruit that has been harvested but not distributed becomes rotten and over-ripe, so a nation that harvests its wealth for gain and not justice is headed for corruption and decline:  “The end has come upon my people Israel.” (Amos 8.2)

How does Luke’s gospel reflect this Sabbath theme?  Not so much a moral imperative as an invitation to be open to surprise at who God is and how God acts.  Having just told a parable about the sin of inaction through neglect of the neighbour in need, Jesus now unexpectedly points to Mary, the one who sits and listens, as having chosen the better part. 

I would want to associate this passage with the one that comes later in Luke (12.35f.): “Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.”  Is it possible that Martha got it wrong because she thought she was the one doing the serving?  More than anything, God longs to sit down and be present to us, to serve us the ripe fruit of summer, yet we may not notice if we’re too busy with our own agenda. 

Observing the Sabbath, sitting and listening, receiving the gifts of creation are ways to create space so that God can act – to nourish the poor, to still the storm, to come and serve.  If we practice “the better part” – as a church and as disciples, then our diakonia becomes the channel of God’s justice, and God’s mission, and God’s love.  

Maylanne Maybee, a member of APLM Council, is an Anglican deacon serving in the Diocese of Rupert’s Land.  She is Principal of the Centre for Christian Studies, a national theological school based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, that prepares women and men for ministry in the diaconal tradition of the Anglican and United Churches.  

Photo: http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/pierre-auguste-renoir/strawberries

Preacher's Study - Year C, Proper 10 (15) 2013

Monday Morning in the Preacher’s Study

First thoughts about next Sunday’s sermon

(8^thSunday after Pentecost, July 14, 2013)

Maylanne Maybee

Justice and mercy, God and neighbour, are the broad themes of the lectionary for the next three Sundays in July. 

They are also broad themes from our baptismal life, lived on a continuum from our priestly vocation of worship – assigning true worth to God – and our diaconal vocation of service to other, love of neighbour, care for the earth. 

In our first reading, we hear “the words of Amos”, a prophet who lived in the 8^th Century B.C.E., and along with Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah, revealed God as defender of the poor.  He spoke his message during the reign of Jeroboam II who had built up Israel into an elitist state of prosperity for the few at the cost of crushing poverty for the many.  Amos is shown a vision of the Lord holding a plumb line in his hand, a device used to determine whether a structure is straight or “true”.  The plumb line is held alongside the plumb line of the wall of Israel and Israel does not measure up.

The Hebrew translated as “plumb line” is obscure, and I prefer another interpretation:  the Lord holds a piece of tin in his hand alongside a heap of tin used to build the wall.  Tin, when combined with ­­­copper, makes bronze, a metal of weaponry and warfare.  The Lord is preparing for a thunderous conflict with Israel and will no longer “pass over” or spare its people and king who have strayed far from the Deuteronomic standard of care and protection for the poor, the powerless, and the stranger. 

Amaziah, priest of Bethel, warns the king about Amos:  “The land is not able to bear all of his words.”  Indeed, they are words spoken by one who has nothing to lose, one who has made his living not as a professional, but as one who herds livestock and tends fig trees, one who has seen the abundance of the land and its exploitation by Jeroboam. 

I see the possibility of preaching a strong message about the use and exploitation of our land through agribusiness or resource extraction – at the expense of the poor and vulnerable, and at the expense of the land itself.  There is opportunity here for a preacher to speak of the prophets of our age who cry out for the land, whose words we can scarcely bear: Joyce Carlson, Wendell Berry, David Suzuki. 

It’s a message that can be linked with and reinforced by the gospel reading for this Sunday with its parable of the Good Samaritan – a story we know so well that we risk missing its complexity and subtlety.   A lawyer asks “who is my neighbour?”  Jesus tells a parable of a man beaten by the roadside, ignored and neglected by a priest and a Levite, and tended with mercy by a stranger from Samaria who responds by pouring oil on his wounds and making provisions for his long term care. 

We are accustomed to think of ourselves as the Samaritan Church, whose mission it is to rescue and show mercy to those in distress regardless of race or creed.  And we have a fine record of this.  I remember well the story of an Anglican Bishop from Pakistan who told how, in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of 2005, Moslems flocked to the local Christian church for aid, knowing that they would not be turned away.  

Yet we are also a church that has been wounded - battered by decline in numbers, income, and influence, and here in Canada by the legacy we bear of colonialism and residential schools.  Mary Jo Leddy, in her book The Other Face of God: When the Stranger Calls Us Home (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY 2011) reflects on Hugo Simberg’s painting, The Wounded Angel, as a variation on the theme of the merciful Samaritan.  She suggests that the angel might be church itself.    Like the two peasant boys who carry the angel away from the city to a place of rest and healing, so the church is being carried away from places of power and influence to live among the poor and be healed.  “It is those who are poor”, writes Leddy, “who need, more than anyone, for the church to become good and merciful again.” (p. 137)

Jesus tells this parable in the context of setting his face to Jerusalem.  Knowing what awaits him, he expands his company of followers, and prepares them for conflict, teaching them how to resist non-violently.  He sends them “like sheep among wolves”, without defence and without resources, at risk of being beaten and left for dead like the unnamed man on the road to Jericho.    In a church that is re-awakening to its sense of diakonia, to its sense of mission, we might do well to remember our vulnerability as we travel through unfamiliar territory.  Our priests and prophets might do well to help equip us for unexpected bends in the road.  

 

Let us thunder with Amos for a regime that shares the wealth of its land with the poor.  Let us dare with the Samaritan to enter border territories and put ourselves at risk, both by offering mercy to ones who least expect it from us, and receiving mercy from people and in places we least expect.  For the Kingdom of God is revealed when the law of love is acted by unexpected people in unexpected ways and places.  Let us pay attention and be changed. 

Maylanne Maybee, a member of APLM Council, is an Anglican deacon serving in the Diocese of Rupert’s Land.  She is Principal of the Centre for Christian Studies, a national theological school based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, that prepares women and men for ministry in the diaconal tradition of the Anglican and United Churches. 

Photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Wounded_Angel_-_Hugo_Simberg.jpg

Preacher's Study - Year C, Proper 8 (13) 2013

Monday Morning in the Preacher’s Study

First thoughts about next Sunday’s sermon

(6^thSunday after Pentecost, June 30, 2013)

John W.B. Hill

Our North American culture is succumbing to a cult of ‘freedom.’  When freedom means nothing more than escape from constraints and regulations, we quickly become captive to delusions and enslaved to our own self-indulgence (what our second reading calls living according to ‘the flesh’); and the self-indulgence of our consumer society is generating a global race toward a climate crisis.

The alternative to all such enslavement, we are told, is living by the Spirit, yielding to the Spirit’s guidance.  This alone is freedom.

Elijah was a man of the Spirit, and the story of his career (in the semicontinuous first readings of the past few weeks) shows how the Spirit was leading him to question his own assumptions about the ways of the true God.  Originally convinced that the faithlessness of God’s people could be healed by a show of power and vengeance (the great sacrifice on Mount Carmel), Elijah came to see that as a delusion.  He retreated to Mount Horeb in defeat, hoping to recover the vision given to the prophet Moses in that holy place; instead, he discovered that God was not in the wind or fire.  In the ‘sheer silence’ that followed, the Spirit told him to anoint Elisha as his successor, to ‘pass the mantle.’  Time for a prophet with a clearer vision of God’s ways!

This must have been a hard pill to swallow.  Today’s episode (Elijah’s ‘swan song’) depicts a devoted disciple following a cranky and dejected master.  Elijah now retreats to the far side of the Jordan; he will expire where Moses expired, somewhat short of his goal.

So what is the meaning of the whirlwind, the chariot of fire, and horses of fire?  Chariots are war machines, and fire recalls the sacrificial fire on Mount Carmel.  Was Elijah finally consumed by his own craving for vengeance?

More to the point, will his successor see more clearly the ways of Israel’s Saviour?  We will have to wait for next Sunday’s reading to give us a clue.

Today’s gospel begins the teaching section in this version of the gospel, and Luke marks that beginning by announcing, “When the days drew near for [Jesus] to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.”  Why this expression of new resolve?  Luke acknowledges this turning point, as all the synoptic gospels do, one way or another — a change of direction foreshadowed by events such as the beheading of the Baptist and the transfiguration.  For Jesus recognizes that his offer of the new peace of God’s kingdom is being rejected by God’s people because it clashes with the sacred institutions of Jerusalem.  He faces a resistance to God’s will just as massive as the resistance Elijah faced. 

Indeed, the figure of Elijah and his stubborn fight against idolatry lies just below the surface of this gospel episode, for the Samaritans were the descendants of the northern kingdom whose monarchs were so determined to kill Elijah.  Yet Jesus’ response to their hostility is in complete contrast to Elijah’s: whereas Elijah called down fire on his foes (2 Kings 1), Jesus’ rejects such resort to violence.  But the crisis is just as real: God’s people are once again rejecting God’s way, and the consequences will be horrific, as Jesus himself foresaw.

That is why we hear such stern conditions for discipleship.  If, in this time of crisis, Jesus knows he must “set his face” toward Jerusalem, his followers must do so too.  No one who “looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”  Fair weather disciples are not disciples of such a master in such a crisis.

What will it mean, then, to be disciples in this moment of crisis, when a self-indulgent society is careening toward ecological destruction?

John Hill is a presbyter in the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC). A member of APLM Council, John also serves as chair for the Primate’s Task Force on Hospitality, Christian Initiation and Discipleship Formation in the ACC. He will be a workshop presenter at APLM’s “Stirring the Waters” conference this week in Chicago.

Preacher's Study - Year C, Proper 7 (12) 2013

Monday Morning in the Preacher’s Study

First thoughts about next Sunday’s sermon

(5^th Sunday after Pentecost, June 23, 2013)

John W.B. Hill

The story of the Gerasene demoniac is one of the richest and most revealing exorcism stories of the gospel; it also makes high demands upon our symbolic imagination.  But first we must attend to the details.

This story is not just about one sick individual; it’s about “a man of the city” and the sick relationship between him and his fellow-citizens, which Jesus seeks to heal.  Nor is the relationship the consequence of one climactic breakup; “many times [the demon] had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound ... but he would break the bonds and be driven into the wilds.”  We get a picture of a cyclical pattern within an ambivalent relationship: he causes alarms among the citizens, but they cannot bring themselves to be rid of him.  As the conclusion of the story makes clear, they consider his healing a threat; they need him to be sick — which may be why they keep trying to chain him (sort of), knowing that he will escape (sort of).  It’s a relation of co-dependency.

In a dysfunctional society, people develop adaptive behaviour for survival.  If they are not accepted for who they are, they may assume a false-self role.  In the case of someone with deviant behaviour, that role may be ‘the scapegoat,’ acting out the dysfunction of the society, and then being accused of causing society’s problems (what we call ‘demonizing’).  The scapegoat may ultimately come to accept the accusations (i.e., may become ‘demon-possessed’).  If so, he absolves everyone else of society’s problem. 

Jesus challenges every such manifestation of the ‘Kingdom of the Accuser,’ for he is the very presence of the ‘Kingdom of God.’  Those enmeshed in Satan’s Kingdom cannot see what is going on, but the ‘demon’ (the personification of the dysfunctionality) knows instinctively that its power is threatened by Jesus’ arrival.  It even whines about being persecuted: “I beg you, do not torment me.”

The extreme form of scapegoating culminates in killing the accused — by a lynch mob or, in ancient culture, by stoning or pushing off the edge of a cliff.  (Just challenging the social system can trigger this kind of scapegoating: see, for example, Luke 4: 16 - 30.)

The text of this story shows signs of a complex development.  The pigs charging over the edge into the sea may be a later folk embellishment; nevertheless, this clearly serves the purpose of the tale, for the ‘demons’ are the accusations he has endured (and internalised).  Their name is ‘legion,’ for he is truly ‘enemy occupied territory.’  If he fails to cooperate with their need for someone to blame, he too may be pushed off a cliff. 

Thus the emotional climax of the story is seeing his demons go over the cliff themselves.  More importantly, the evangelical climax is seeing the man “sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.”  He is a model of true conversion; he has been “clothed with Christ” (as today’s second reading puts it) and then sent on a mission of reconciliation.

The prophet Elijah is another model of conversion.  Today’s first (semicontinuous) reading continues the story we heard some weeks ago, the sacrificial contest on Mount Carmel.  We expect to hear that Elijah is basking in that victory; instead he insists it was a failure: “the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword.”  The clue is the symmetry: Elijah had slaughtered prophets too — the prophets of Baal.  Violence cannot achieve God’s purposes.  Even a triumphant sacrifice is still violence, justifying a violent social order — unless, like the cross of Christ, it awakens us to the futility of violence.  “The Lord was not in the wind [or] the earthquake [or] the fire.”  But entering the “sheer silence,” one may hear his voice and rediscover one’s calling.

John W. B. Hill is an Anglican presbyter in Toronto, Canada, author of one of the first Anglican sources for catechumenal practice, council member of APLM, and chair of Liturgy Canada.