[These passes are designed to help the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, to prepare for worship. In them, I look at the Bible lessons around which our worship will be built. Hopefully, other readers of 'Better Living' will be helped by these passes, since we use the lessons associated with the Church Year that are used in most congregations in North America and actually, the world.]
The Bible Lessons:
Isaiah 35:1-10
Psalm 146:5-10
James 5:7-10
Matthew 11:2-11
General Comments:
(1) We come to the third of the four Sundays in Advent, the season that precedes Christmas. This year, known as Year A of the three-year lectionary cycle, as in the other two years, the Gospel lessons for the middle two weeks of Advent feature John the Baptist. Last week, we read Matthew's account of John's ministry on the Jordan River. This week's Gospel lesson finds John in prison, with questions about Jesus. More on that later.
(2) More about the season of Advent here.
(3) Isaiah 35:1-10: Chapters 1 to 34 of Isaiah have contained many oracles of judgment against the nations for their rebellion against God, which includes injustice and inhumanity toward others. God's people aren't exempt from judgment for their sins. In the chapters immediately preceding our lesson, Edom is singled out. Some believe that the nation of Edom helped Assyria to conquer Israel and Judah.
Isaiah 35 brings a shift in emphasis. It isn't God's desire to punish, although the Bible testifies that God will ultimately accept our choices, whether to receive Him and His grace or not. (See here.) In spite of the sins of Israel and their exile, God wills to restore the well-being of His people. The call, as has been true in all the texts on which we've focused during Advent, is repentance, turning back to God.
You can find some general information on Isaiah here.
(4) A few thoughts on the Isaiah text...First, on v. 1, the wilderness is the place where death and the devil have made themselves at home, according to the Bible. But it's also the place where God made life spring up and where God breathed life into lifeless dirt in the case of the first man. But, even the wilderness will be a glad place when Israel is restored (and when the Messiah comes).
(5) I love v. 8. You can even be an imbecile, but if you're walking on God's way, you'll be okay. This gives me great comfort!
(6) Psalm 146:5-10: Psalm 146 is part of a set that ends the Psalms, the Old Testament worship book. Some call Psalms 146-150 the Hallelujah Psalms because "each hymn includes a call to worship, a statement of the purpose for praising God, and a renewed summons to praise. These Psalms all begin and end with the word Hallelujah (in the NRSV, translated as “Praise the LORD”)."
(7) The God extolled and praised in these verses is very different from earthly rulers. This one acts on behalf of those who can't act on their own, those who freely acknowledge that their "help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God."
For some, this humble realism is offensive. There is in our world today, a virulent, hateful, often violent atheism, represented by people like Christopher Hitchens and others. Like the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietsche, many post-modern atheists reject belief in God in part because they recoil at notions of God favoring the weak. Also influenced by the thinking of Charles Darwin, earthly existence, to them, is about striving to be Nietsche's ubermensch (overman), who uses his mastery--physical, intellectual, or otherwise--to conquer. It's an affront to their egos to acknowledge a God greater than themselves.
But what these post-modern atheists refuse to acknowledge is the incontrovertible evidence from history and from contemporary societies that, despite the misuse and misapplication of Christian belief by some, Christianity has always unleashed creativity, freedom, achievement, free enterprise, and scientific inquiry.
(8) James 5:7-10: The New Testament book of James, written by an earthly brother of Jesus, deals with ethics, how to conduct one's daily life. One of the reasons this is necessary is seen in this lesson. It's what the scholars call the delayed parousia, the seeming delay of the risen and ascended Jesus in returning to establish His Kingdom.
In a way, this is the same issue bothering John the Baptist in our Gospel lesson from Matthew. The early believers being addressed by James had expected Jesus to return sooner. This led to restiveness on the part of some and often, to a failure to keep living the Christian life.
James tells the believers to be patient.
(9) The word for patience used by James is longsuffering. He points to two examples of longsuffering. First, the farmer. In Israel, there are two major seasons of rain: October/November and April/May. The farmer must wait patiently for both these seasons, early and late, before being assured of a harvest to reap.
Second, James points to the prophets. This is a timely example for us. Unlike self-appointed prophets who have founded their own religions, the Old Testament prophets delivered their oracles without leveraging obeisance. They didn't seek to rule over others. They sensed that they were moved by God to speak certain messages, but accepted that, like those to whom they delivered their messages, they had to wait to see if God would either use those messages or confirm that they were, in fact, from God.
Based on what we see in the last of the great Biblical prophets, John the Baptist, in this Sunday's Gospel lesson, we see that the prophets even sometimes doubted themselves. John wondered if Jesus was the fulfillment of his prophecies delivered by the Jordan River? Had he gotten things right? Or was Jesus not the Messiah?
Above all, the prophets were ordinary, imperfect people who acted in faith and a willingness to be wrong. The same cannot be said of so-called prophets who founded new religions, who acted with little evidence of self-doubt, and who fiercely enforced their oracles on their followers.
James would say such false prophets not only have lacked a connection with the God Whose self-disclosure is recorded in the Bible, but that they also have lacked patience, the willingness to let God act and the willingness to be wrong.
[More tomorrow, I hope.]
As a fan of Charles Darwin the man (and scientist) I feel obligated to try and extract him from the company of Christopher Hitchens and Nietzsche (both of whom I also like, but for different reasons). Hitchens is a bomb-thrower indeed, more articulate and clever than your Ann Coulter variety, but still a bomb-thrower. Nietzsche's writings are all over the place:philosophizing to him was as much about grandiose prose as it was about his central thesis. Whenever I meet a self-described Nietzschean, I like to point out that his (Nietzsche's) work is as riddled with self contradiction in places as some say the bible is. When it comes to Charles Darwin (whom I affectionately refer to as Chuck D.) I always wince when I even get whiff of someone tying him to so-called 'social darwinism', which he was uncomfortable with. Darwin was a good father, a devoted and honest scientist, and donated frequently to his local Anglican church for the cause of supporting the poor and unhealthy. He acknowledged the harsh principles of nature, but never suggested that we not follow a deeper, more compassionate morality.
ReplyDeleteOff topic a little, I know, but we've all got our quirks.