A Look at This Coming Sunday's Bible Lessons (March 8, 2009) (Part 1)

[Regular readers of Better Living know that, each week, I try to take a look at the lessons on which worship for the subsequent Sunday will be built. I do this partly to clarify my own thinking, but also to help the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, the congregation I serve as pastor, to get ready for worship. Because we use a lectionary (that's a plan of Bible readings) associated with the Church Year, a version of which is used by most Christians in the world as they worship each week, I hope that others will find it helpful, too.]

Second Sunday in Lent
March 8, 2009

The Bible Lessons:
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Psalm 22:23-31
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38

Prayer of the Day
O God, by the passion of Your blessed Son You made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life. Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of Your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, Who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen

General Comments:
1. Go here for a discussion of Lent. (In spite of the title of the linked piece, it contains quite a bit of information about Lent.)

2. The color associated with Lent is purple. Purple, as most children learn, is the color associated with royalty, making the color appropriate for this season that culminates with Jesus' "enthronement" on the cross and the confirmation of His kingship with His resurrection on Easter.

But how exactly did purple come to be associated with royalty, wealth, and power? Purple dyes were the most costly to create and so, the most costly to buy in the ancient world. Only kings and others of great wealth could afford to have anything with purple in it.

In the Roman Empire, the wealthiest and most powerful members of society--the senators--were the only ones who could incorporate purple into their garments. They did so with purple stripes on their togas. (Only the elite could wear togas in public. Others wore simple tunics.)

Purple dye was created from the "glandular fluids of certain types of sea snails in the eastern Mediterranean, known collectively as murex snails." (Since Christianity emerged in Palestine during an era dominated by Greco-Roman culture, you might also be interested in reading The Ancient City by Peter Connolly and Hazel Dodge for fascinating descriptions and illustrations of everyday life in ancient Rome and Athens.)

3. Unlike many Sundays in the Church Year, there is a connection between the first lesson (from Genesis) and the second lesson (from Romans). (The Psalm isn't really counted as a lesson, per se.) The lesson from Genesis recalls a covenant that God made with Abram (later Abraham) and Sarai (later Sarah) to become the ancestors of a generations of believers. What did Abram have to do to be so blessed? Believe in the promise and the promise-maker.

In Romans, Paul underscores that this is all that's required of us today: To believe in the God made known definitively and authoritatively in Jesus.

We cannot earn, any more than Abraham could, the status of righteousness, rightness with God, and with it eternity with God and the presence of God in our daily lives now. That comes as a gift which God confers on sinners who turn from their sin (and its control over their lives) and instead, trust or believe in Jesus (and His control over their lives).

More on the individual texts later in the week.

A Look at This Sunday's Bible Lessons (June 8, 2008)

This week's look at the Bible lessons for Sunday will be brief.

The Bible Lessons:
Genesis 12:1-9
Psalm 33:1-12
Romans 4:13-25
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

The Prayer of the Day:
O God, you are the source of life and the ground of our being. By the power of your Spirit bring healing to this wounded world, and raise us to the new life of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

A Few Comments:
1. As I've mentioned in previous posts, the Bible lessons appointed for the Sundays after Pentecost attempt to answer the question, "Now what?" They direct us to how we live our lives in light of our faith in the God born, died, and risen in Jesus Christ and come to us in the Holy Spirit.

Each Sunday during this season then, we confront one or two important elements involved in following Jesus through our daily lives.

2. This Sunday, maybe the largest theme is the centrality of heeding God's improbable call. People of faith are called to follow where and when God calls. This is underscored in the lessons from Genesis and in Romans, both of which discuss God's improbable call of Abram and Sarai (later Abraham and Sarah) from their native Ur (in what is modern-day Iraq) to become, despite their advanced years, the ancestors of Israel. It's also seen in Jesus' call of the tax collector, Matthew, in our Gospel lesson; tax collectors were lowly regarded by Jesus' fellow Judeans, seen as notorious sinners.

3. A curiosity regarding our Gospel lesson is that Jesus' call of Matthew and Jesus' confrontation of the Pharisees horrfied by Jesus dining with tax collectors and other sinners is set amid a long string of healings and miracles recounted in chapters 8 and 9 of Matthew's Gospel.

But maybe this shouldn't surprise us, especially in light of Jesus' response to the Pharisees criticism of Him. “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick," Jesus tells the Pharisees. In other words, the condition of sin, separation from God, is more fatal than any physical ailment. Jesus, the great physician, was willing to make housecalls, in order to do battle with the condition that, untreated by His grace, is eternally fatal. He still makes such calls through the Word, the Sacraments, prayer, and the fellowship of believers.

We saw Jesus implicitly connecting the forgiveness of sins to healing earlier in this chapter, Matthew 9:2. There, He forgave a paralytic of His sins. Sin is a bigger problem than disease. Notice too that there, as well as in this Sunday's Gospel lesson, Jesus forgives without any indication of repentance on the part of those to who He brings forgiveness/healing. This isn't to disdain repentance. But those who trust in Jesus, believe in Him, trust Him also to take dominion over their sins, even when they're not fully aware of them. You see, all sin is rooted in our failure to allow God first place in our lives. When we trust (have faith in) the God we see in Jesus, our sin is supplanted by God's authority. Repentance inheres in authentic trust in God. Repentance, turning to Christ, is a daily and ongoing part of the lives of Christians, who nothing but recovering sinners who trust God.

4. In our lesson from Romans, Paul discusses the nature of faith, our relationship with God. God blesses us with new life and His constant presence not because we are good people. Abraham's blessings came to him not because he was a good man, Paul says, but because he believed in God. (I laugh a little at Paul's portrait of Abraham. While what he writes of the ancient patriarch of faith is true, it overlooks those moments when Abraham's faith wavered. Twice, you'll remember, unsure that God could be counted on to protect him, Abraham told foreign kings that Sarai/Sarah wasn't his wife, but his sister. The kings briefly prepared to take her as their wives, each avoiding consummation and offense to God simply because God warned them not to go forward with their plans.) The blessings of new life in Jesus Christ belong to all with faith in Him.

5. A major point of interest to me in this Sunday's lesson from Matthew is that Jesus responds to the Pharisees' criticism, although they don't express it directly to Him. It required no supernatural abilities for Jesus to be aware of their criticisms.

Gossip always gets back to the person being gossiped about. Always. And it never contributes to the resolution of conflicts.

Jesus nipped gossip in the bud by confronting the gossips, as we see in our Gospel lesson.

This is an enormous problem in congregations, fostering feelings of distrust and enmity. This is why Jesus commands us in Matthew 18:15-20 on how to deal with situations in which we feel fellow church members have wronged us. We're not to bellyache to others. We're to go directly to the person we feel has wronged us...and we're to do so with the idea that we could be wrong and they could be right.

If their offenses against us don't rise to such a level that we feel it appropriate to confront, then we shouldn't say anything at all to anyone but God.

This has been a hard lesson for me to learn. I'm still learning it.

During this coming Sunday's Small Catechism moment, we'll be considering Luther's explanation of the Eighth Commandment, "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." As always, Luther sees the manner in which God seeks to protect us in this commantment. What does the commandment mean? Luther says:

We are to fear and love God so that we do not betray, slander, or lie about our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain his actions in the kindest way.

Notice that the commandment calls us to be co-conspirators with God in protecting, enhancing, and shoring up the reputations of others. That means not just refraining from telling lies about them, it also means speaking well of them when others are talking them down.

[Each week, I present some thoughts on the Bible lessons for the succeeding Sunday. In doing so, I hope to help the people of the congregation I serve, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, to prepare for worship. And because, we will almost always use the appointed lessons for the Church Year, I also hope that these thoughts can help others prepare for worship too.]