Pilgrim Preaching

On Rendering

24 Pentecost A | Matthew 22:15-22
October 16, 2005

Probably nine years ago, I heard this line in a sermon by Paul Palumbo: "Having been rendered to Caesar, Jesus renders us into the very heart of God." I wrote it down on the back of a bulletin. This week I finally had an opportunity to use it. That sermon, preached in the Luther Seminary chapel, follows.

Chapel sermons are strange for several reasons (the congregation members are all connected to a theological seminary; one is preaching before one's students, teachers and colleagues; the sermon is supposed to be about 8 minutes long!). I thought I had to throw out a few good things this time so here are some notes that wouldn't work in the sermon I preached but might work somewhere else.

1. Is it lawful? This question is posed to Jesus here but other occurrences of the question/issue are really interesting. Among the places it shows up in Matthew are (a) when Jesus' disciples are plucking grain on the Sabbath, and (b) when Jesus is about to heal someone on the Sabbath, and (c) when Judas throws the money back at the temple authorities after he repents of betraying Jesus. That last discussion of whether something is "lawful" struck me as a great tie between this text and the cross, but I couldn't get it to fit in my sermon.
2. Where do we fit in the story? In the sermon, I put the congregation in the position of Jesus, asking them to answer the question, "Is it lawful to pay taxes…?" from the perspective of a teacher, student or staff member at the seminary. It would be a different sermon if the congregation were asked to identify with, say, the questioners. Is there a way that we fuss about theological questions precisely so we do not have to face the real question about who Jesus is and how he challenges Caesar's authority?

One more comment about my experience of this text. I am just about the farthest thing imaginable from a prophetic preacher. I am a great fan of direct deposit and tenure. I like the prayer in Compline that says, "The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night, and peace at the last." Mostly I like paying my taxes and being left alone. I don't naturally take to agitating or being agitated. Yet it seems to me that the powers and principalities really do make a play for all of us, and I wanted to announce to my hearers, "You do not belong to them." After I did that, I got a lot of feedback about how the sermon was courageous. Is it an "edgy" thing to call American an empire? I didn't think so, but I heard enough of those sorts of comments that I'm curious how a parallel between America and Rome might play in the preaching contexts of my readers.

Here's the sermon.

The Tension of Discipleship

14 and 15 Pentecost | Matthew 16:13ff.

I wrote a short sermon for the ELCA Convocation of Teaching Theologians on the Luther Seminary campus this week. I couldn't keep from talking about the fact that just after Peter's confession, Jesus starts talking about his death--so this might be fodder for 14 Pentecost or 15 Pentecost texts.

More than in any other gospel, in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is a teacher and a trainer of teachers. We get long exegetical lectures from Jesus in Matthew—“you have heard it said… but I say to you….” There are handfuls of parables piled one on top of the other, and even a few private tutoring sessions between the Teacher and his disciples. The disciples are somewhat better students here than they seem to be according to Mark. Their scholarship—or something—is good enough in Matthew that by the end of the book, they receive a call to teach. “Go and make disciples of all nations,” Jesus instructs them, “baptizing them … and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.”

Even so, it sounds like Jesus starts out today's lesson with rather low expectations of his class.

Letter to a Canaanite Woman

13 Pentecost A | Matthew 15:21-28

(Last fall, I preached this sermon at a Luther Seminary chapel service. I adapted it from an earlier post I made here.)

Dear Canaanite Sister,

You go girl! I've never seen anyone talk to Jesus like that. And this from someone who so clearly does not belong. No one has called anyone a Canaanite for centuries. You are a foreigner—or you would be a foreigner if it were not your home turf that Jesus had wandered into. What's more, you are a Canaanite woman in the middle of a group of Jewish men. You are so out of place and so out of time and so exactly where your daughter needs you to be.

I heard you first, before I saw you. You were screaming, crying, crying out, wailing in that Emergency Room that doubles as a road through Tyre and Sidon . So completely foreign it all was. What were you doing there? What was Jesus doing there? You would tell him what he was doing. "Have mercy on me, Son of David," you said. "My daughter… my daughter is tormented by a demon."

You were screaming when you said this, hysterical we would say. It was hard to hear, harder to watch. You followed those men, still crying after them. The disciples wondered if the demon didn't have hold of you, too. You kept shouting. They asked Jesus to dismiss you. He ignored them. But he ignored you too, and some of us who know him found his silence even more disturbing than your cries.

Then he spoke, and things got worse. "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel ," he said. At that point, had I been you, I would have gotten angry. "Sent only to Israel, huh? Then what the hell are you doing in Tyre? Need a map, Mister Omniscient Son of God?"

Did you teach the Teacher? "Lord, help me," you said, instead of fussing about just who was lost and who was out of place. To which you heard, "It is not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs."

You were kneeling when he said this, existing low where it is possible to smell exactly what the Rottweiler had for lunch. Had you fallen at his feet just to stop him in his tracks? Maybe, but your kneeling looked like the posture of worship. It looked like you were praying when he said you were a dog. And heaven knows, “Lord help me!” is a prayer.

"It is not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." We still cannot quite believe our Jesus said this. We are so embarrassed that Jesus would call anyone a dog, and we are so nonchalant about God keeping promises to God's children—unless, of course, we are the children of God to whom the promises were made. But when Jesus spoke of the children and their bread, he was not talking about most of us any more than he was talking about you. You knelt before him, and he as much as said, “You are right where you belong, dog.”

I wonder if it was not your place below the action that told you what to say next. "Yes Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." I'm down here, Lord, with the dogs, looking for just a little. A little… “My daughter…. Have mercy…. Crumbs."

Did you teach the Teacher? I think you did. Because of you and your fierce need, God's own Son himself came to see his life's work as bigger than before. What he had not thought to look for in anyone like you, he saw: faith. He saw your tenacious conviction that he could help, and amazed, he did.

I have thought that fear makes it impossible to imagine things. "Perfect fear casts out all imagination," I have thought. But you were afraid—you must have been afraid of the demon and of your daughter's suffering and afraid of all those foreign men and all their insults. You must have been afraid, yet you could see a new thing—healing—at the same time. “Woman,” Jesus said (choosing, finally, a better name than dog), “Great is your faith.” You imagined healing before it happened and you showed it to the Healer.

Walking by faith, crying out by faith, kneeling and talking back to God by faith like that, what might we see?

•  Can faith declare God's work for us in places where we don't belong?

•  Will faith point us, with you, to that stranger on the road—out of place himself—who certainly can help?

•  Will it break for us the loaf that is enough for children and for dogs.

•  Might your story help us grasp these things even when we're terrified?

You taught the Teacher. What will you teach us?

Duh-scipling

10 Pentecost A | Matthew 13:1-9; 18-23

Have you ever tried over and over to log into a web site, only to read the directions one more time and see that you have been entering your data (again and again) in the wrong spot? Or have you found yourself unable to make any sense of a set of driving directions—and then you discover you have the wrong starting point in mind? A few years ago, the word "duh" made it into American English vernacular for just such moments.

My single exegetical insight into this week's gospel text has to do with understanding. In Matthew, when Jesus is explaining the parable of the sower, he talks about understanding the word:

"When anyone hears the word about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches what was sown in his heart; this is the seed sown along the path" (Matt 13:19, NET).

"But as for the seed sown on good soil, this is the person who hears the word and understands. He bears fruit, yielding a hundred, sixty, or thirty times what was sown" (Matt 13:23, NET).

Neither Mark nor Luke records an explanation from Jesus that says anything about understanding the word. "Getting it" is a preoccupation only for Matthew. Matthew would have liked Philip's question to the Ethiopian eunuch as Philip caught up to his chariot: "Do you understand what you are reading?" (Acts 8:30).

By this point in Jesus' ministry, people watching and listening to him have all sorts of data about him. They have heard the Sermon on the Mount, his Dream Speech of life in the Rule of God. They have seen healings, even one reported at a distance—and that of a Roman centurion's slave. The disciples have witnessed the stilling of the storm. Pharisees have witnessed him eating with sinners. Crowds of people have heard him pronounce the forgiveness of sins and seen him heal on the Sabbath.

"Do you understand what you are reading?" Do the witnesses understand what they are seeing? Here are a few reactions to Jesus reported just before and after the parable of the sower:

• The Pharisees conclude that it is by the ruler of demons that Jesus casts out demons (Matt 12:24).
• Some of the scribes and Pharisees ask for a sign (Have they been seeing nothing for the last 8 chapters?) (Matt 12:38).
• Jesus' family is a little anxious, trying to get word to him (Matt 13:46ff).
• The hometown crowd takes offense at him (Matt 13:57).

It's as if we are halfway through the semester and just about everyone has failed the midterm. Do you understand? Does anyone understand what they are seeing? In another context, the apostle Paul calls Jesus the wisdom of God and then says, "None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Cor 2:8).

Jesus responds to this lack of understanding by  s p e a k i n g  v e r y  s l o w l y to the duh-sciples. "Hear, then, the parable of the sower," he says before he explains the parable to them. "Let me draw you a picture. Is a parable too artistic of a medium for you? How about an allegory then? Let's try one-for-one correspondence. I'm not really talking about seeds here; I'm talking about the word of the kingdom of God."

In Mark's version, Jesus quotes Isaiah as a way of saying that he is speaking in parables in order to hide the secrets of the kingdom, as if the parables were a kind of inside-baseball for the disciples only. Yet in all the synoptics—Mark included—Jesus keeps at his audience. "Do you understand? Well, then, let me explain it again." He is sometimes an impatient teacher (cf. Matt 16:9 and Mark 8:17), but he is ever the teacher.

What is Jesus trying to teach? For starters, he is teaching that in the midst of rulers of this age from Herod the Great to Pontius Pilate roiling at the news, still, "the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matt 4:17; cf. 13:20). He is teaching that persecutions are not to be feared and that persecution or no, "you are of more value than many sparrows" (Matt 10:26-31; cf. 13:21). He is teaching that "life is more than food, and the body more than clothing" (Matt 6:25; cf. 13:22).

And he keeps teaching. This Teacher bears a striking family resemblance to the loquacious One who called worlds into being with the Word and just keeps on talking through the prophets, the scriptures and even your voice and mine. Throughout the gospel, the Word made flesh keeps teaching with his speech and actions. He himself is seed cast abroad on the earth, sent by the Sower whose word does not return void but accomplishes what was intended for it. Thorns, the rulers of this age, dry and hardened minds and hearts: all sorts of things threaten this good seed and its seedlings. Still, it bears fruit.

Seeing Healing

19th Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 17:11-19

My colleague, Old Testament professor Fred Gaiser, is just finishing a book on healing and the Bible to be published by Baker. I found a sermon of his on the web that shows some of the themes he sees in various healing texts. The sermon is on Luke 17:11-19.

Fred makes several points about what the tenth leper gets and how that multi-faceted healing is available to God's people today. His first point is that the healed one who returns does so because he sees God at work in the world. Here's an excerpt:

“ ”

So, unlike the others, he had to return. The others could go and do whatever. This man could not. Having seen, he had to return and praise God. He had to throw himself at Jesus’ feet in thanksgiving. The "had to" is real. The experience is so overwhelming, so life changing, so joyful, it must be shared. "Which of you," asked Jesus, "if you found the lost coin, the lost treasure, the lost son, the lost sheep, would not tell the neighbors?" Wow, did I ever see a great movie! Look, there’s a rainbow! My cancer is in remission! Some things, if they are seen, simply have to be told. So it is with our friend in the story. Copyright © Frederick J. Gaiser, 2001. Used by permission.

You can find the whole sermon on the St. Anthony Park Lutheran Church web site.

Fred's article, "'Your Faith Has Made You Well": Healing and Salvation in Luke 17:11-19," Word & World 16 (1996): 291-301, is also available on the web (this one is a .pdf file).

Gates and Tables

17th Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 16:19-31

Probably what we like least about this text is the implication that someone could end up in a place of torment while someone else gets a significantly better deal. The unfairness of the imaginary afterlife scene is more troubling to most of us than the evidence we see of the unfairness of real everyday life. We are inured to the unfairness of the feasting rich man and hungry beggar separated by a gate. We know it is not right, but we also know how "complex" the issues of wealth, poverty, class, employment, etc. are. Observing scenes like those on both sides of the rich man's gate, few of us can see any way into an alternative scene.

I listened to three M. Div. seniors preach this text yesterday. They were all at pains to tell their hearers that God had made a decision on their behalf that precluded their spending time in Hades and torment. "Jesus has paid the price," came the word. "Your sins are forgiven, and therefore, you will not spend any time hoping for a little water to cool your tongue." (No one said it with quite this force, but I think they would agree that that was where each sermon was headed.)

My students are not the only ones who want to get out from under this text and help others to do the same. The Old Testament gets heat for, among other things, texts of mass murder ordained by God (cf. Do We Have to Tell that Story?), but the New Testament has a few texts of terror too. This is one of them. A man who lived well in life spends eternity in flames. He ignored Moses and the prophets—or at least he failed to learn the right lessons from them—and at death he is flat out of luck. What's more, when this fellow shows compassion for his brothers, begging for something to be done to spare them from his fate, father Abraham refuses.

It is an intense text. Jesus is really mad about something. It would be good if we could figure out what. After the parable of the dishonest manager and before the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Luke offers this comment: "The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed him [Jesus]. So he said to them, 'You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God'" (Luke 16:14). Ouch! How could we get things so backwards? Most readers of this commentary will likely know from the inside what Jesus was accusing the Pharisees of: we love—perhaps we also fear and trust—money. We may even fear, love and trust it above all things. Look what it can do: it provides not just food, clothing and shelter, but also vacations, health care, education, small and large toys, respect, access to beautiful and important people, fine linen and sumptuous feasts—just about all we need from day to day. We love what it offers.

The price we all pay for such love is an ever-widening and firmly fixed chasm that divides sisters and brothers—children of God—from each other. What we have or have not comes to define us to ourselves and to others. God sees as abomination these very distinctions that we prize precisely because God's gift is the reconciliation of brothers and sisters to each other and to himself while money's gift is a class-ificiation of us all that tears us apart.

None of this is new information with Jesus. By the time Jesus told the story, Moses and the prophets were well known for the same message. So when the rich man asks for a messenger to warn his brothers, Abraham refuses. "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even in someone rises from the dead" (Luke 16:31).

The reading for Sunday ends there. The story does not. Lucky for us, God had more hope about these things than father Abraham did. God raises Jesus from the dead, and the first thing the risen Jesus does is to join a couple of his friends on the road. Beginning with Moses and the prophets, he interprets to his friends things about himself and about a God who wants an end to idolatry and a reunion with humankind enough to give up—and raise up—his Son to make it happen. Jesus opens the scriptures to the couple walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, and then he blesses and breaks bread with them (Luke 24:13-35). It is something between a sumptuous feast and a plate of leftovers for the beggar. Gates and chasms are noticeably absent from the scene. Jesus is with them; seeing him alive, they can begin to see the redemption of Israel and the nations for which they had hoped and which they had thought was lost. It is an alternative scene to those Jesus paints in the parable. In this scene, there is something so much greater than money to fear, love and trust. Here is a stranger, recognized to be Jesus of Nazareth, risen from the dead and creating around himself a community that together reads, walks, blesses, eats, and proclaims the news, "We have seen the Lord."

God's Business Sense

16th Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 16:1-13

Thanks to my friend Paul Palumbo, I have an idea for a sermon on the parable assigned for Sunday. Most of what is here was gleaned from a phone conversation this afternoon.

The parables of the Prodigal Son and the Dishonest Steward have several things in common:

1. Both main characters squander wealth. The word is exactly the same in each story. (It's only other use in Luke is when Mary says that the Lord has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.)
2. Both main characters use an internal dialog to narrate their own strategy for getting out of trouble: "I know what I'll do…"
3. Both main characters seek to be welcomed home.
4. Both main characters receive unexpected regard from the alpha dude in the story (father/master).

I think the welcome home theme might have some preaching potential. Maybe Jesus is saying, "Look, even the children of this world understand forgiveness (as in the forgiveness of part of the debts owed to the master). Why aren't you disciples getting it?" A father understands welcoming his son home; business partners understand welcoming one of their own into their home. Folks outside the light get this. How much more should it be clear to us religious insiders (like disciples and Pharisees) that regardless of whether the welcome everyone receives is fair, the house is open and there's an extra place at the table.

At table with Zacchaeus, Jesus says, "For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost" (Luke 19:10). The prodigal and the manager are both squandering their resources. Jesus is doing the opposite. He is gathering up lost human resources. That gathering is his reason for coming, his reason for being. God is a shrewd enough householder not to write off the losses but rather to seek always to gather them all back under the same roof. It's just good for business (according to the parable of the Steward). It's also good for family (according to the parable of the Prodigal).

Care and Joy

15th Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 15:1-10

There is an odd pair of emotions in this reading: great care and great joy. The shepherd and the woman both show that careful attention to detail that is also known as hard work. Think of all that hiking over hills, the scrambling down creek banks and climbing through brambles: all in search of a sheep that could have nibbled itself into trouble a thousand different ways. Or think of all that housework! Sweeping, moving furniture, rearranging clutter, crawling around on the floor. Often this kind of physical labor coupled with careful attention to detail can lead to grumpiness. We can live our whole lives this way, always diligently searching for lost items and responsibly returning them to their correct location: a place for everything and everything in its place.

Are we having fun yet?

That everything-in-its-place kind of responsibility is not what these searches are about. Instead, the search of the shephard and the woman are all about joy, a joy that overflows into the cheerful disarray of a celebration. Friends and neighbors celebrate. Care and joy flow out of the same person, and it all ends in a party.

We are beginning a new school year at Luther Seminary. Committee meetings have started for faculty. Students are buying books and organizing their calendars around the due dates of assignments. Classes begin for all of us this week. There is a temptation in this work for carefulness to lead to grumpiness. "Why is that teacher/student being so irresponsible, or so high-maintenance, or so…well…lost? Why do I always have to be the responsible one?"

In the midst of this drift toward surliness, we get three pictures of joy on the other side of care: (1) the joy of the shepherd, (2) the joy of the woman, and (3) the joy of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.

Do we have to tell that story?

15th Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 32:7-14

The small snippet of Exodus here is probably pretty easy to preach on. God sees sin, is incensed by it, but willing to listen to reason and repent of plans for destruction when Moses brings up the fact that a promise was made. Reading the rest of this section of Exodus (chapters 32-34), however, is really hard. Some of the hard stuff:

1. The religious professional Aaron goes along to get along, melting down gold, declaring a festival and generally just keeping the people happy until he can hand off the congregation to the senior pastor again. When called to account, he says first, "You know how evil these people are" (32:22) and then about the idol he says, "I threw [their gold] into the fire and out came this calf" (32:24). Way to take responsibility, Aaron.
   
2. Moses is a nice guy in the lectionary piece, but then when he gets to the foot of the mountain, he exercises the very wrath that God was able (for the moment at least) to repent of. He incites a civil war, ordering those who are "on the Lord's side" to "Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor" (32:27).
   
3. God does repent of the impulse to wipe out the Israelites, and God renews the covenant in chapter 34, but on the way to that renewal, God still "shares the wrath" a bit. The Lord says, "Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book" (32:33) and to keep that promise, the Lord sends another plague (32:35), not on the Egyptians this time, but on his own people.

I know I wouldn't have done any better as a leader—or perhaps even as a follower—on that way-too-long family camping trip in the wilderness, yet these details of the story are still really hard to read. I might just avert my eye from these parts of the story, but then I remember something Diane Jacobson has said about the Old Testament: how odd it was for the Jews to keep telling stories that showed their screw-ups in living color. Grafted into Israel, we have joined a people who have practice telling the unvarnished truth about ourselves, our leaders and even our not-always-easy-going God.

God Pause Commercial

15th Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 32:7-14

Pr. Bill Waxenberg has written a very nice God Pause devotion on the subject of God repenting. To find it, look for the Pause dated 9/6/04. If you like, you can also sign up on this page to get a God pause via email daily.