Author: Steve

With all the sunshine we’ve had lately, it’s been easier to notice things usually not so visible this time of year in Oregon, like streaky, spotted windows or dust in a corner picked out by slanting winter sunshine. You could almost wish for a little less light so those reminders of imperfect cleaning would stay hidden.

Our text this week in John 3:14-21. In the verses following the familiar words of John 3:16, we hear how Jesus’ coming into the world is a kind of judgment by light, revealing all the thoughts and actions we wished would stay hidden.

We hear all the time about hidden evil being exposed, whether political corruption or organized crime or personal sins like embezzlement or use of pornography. Recent on-line activities like “doxxing” (spreading a person’s personal information and secrets on the Internet) exploit the shame we feel when certain facets of our lives which we would rather remain in the dark are brought to light.

Yet the light which exposes the deeds of darkness in verses 19 and 20 is not merely the light of exposure, though that is included. It is the light of perfect goodness in the person of Christ set against the evil and darkness of the world. So evil is not merely exposed, but shown to be what it is by comparison with the good of Jesus.

Which puts me in mind of a more recent contribution to theology about the meaning of the Atonement. Rene Girard suggests that at the root of human violence is the aim to create a scapegoat for all the resentment and envy we feel toward each other. I’m not sure if it works for all our violence, but it certainly fits much of the racial enmity and violence we see around us. Jesus comes into that system of scapegoats and dies as a victim who is obviously and clearly innocent, thus revealing all the violence for the injustice that it is. His innocence is the light which exposes the darkness of violence.

However, I would add that exposure of sin is not the end of the story. When Jesus is raised from the dead, the light of His risen life becomes the illumination in which we are to go on living. By the power of His death and resurrection, we become people who like the light, who want to live in it, so that as verse 21 says, “it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

When I get home, will I have enough room to get out of my car on my way into the house? My wife and I have an ongoing interaction around where our two cars get parked in our garage. It’s a matter of inches. She usually arrives home first and parks on the left. She wants to leave enough room between her door and the freezer to get out comfortably. The problem is that if she gives herself too much space, then when I get home and park on the right it will be difficult to open my door and squeeze out.

As Jesus enters Jerusalem and cleanses the temple in this Sunday’s text from John 2:13-22, He is acting to make sure that God is not squeezed out of His own house, the place of worship.

For Jewish worshipers of that time, God was being squeezed out by the very apparatus of that worship, by the buying and selling deemed necessary to make possible the sacrifices God wanted. The key element of interaction and conversation with God was being squeezed out.

This Lent it would be good to ask how our own practices of worship and especially all the other seemingly necessary activities of modern life might leave little room to meet and talk with God. In worship are our concerns with music or a good seat or the clothes we or others wear distracting us from our Lord and squeezing Him out of our attention as we gather.

In daily life, we might wonder if all the things we deem important, from work to entertainment, from shopping to responding to text messages, might not be squeezing space for God from our hearts and minds.

Jesus swept the Temple to make new room for God there. Let us take a strong and energetic broom to our own spiritual worship spaces and make room for Him among us today.

It just hit me that it is the height of spiritual arrogance to even consider preaching on our text this week, Mark 8:31-38, in light of the suffering of Christian brothers and sisters in other parts of the world.

With Christians losing their heads for Jesus in Egypt and being abducted in northern Syria, it seems really foolish to try and find some way to talk to comfortable North American Christians about taking up a cross and losing our lives for the sake of Jesus and the Gospel. Any sort of metaphorical “cross” we might imagine, any kind of “sacrifice” of our lives seems like a lame joke compared to the literal deaths and enslavement of fellow believers.

And I was just griping on Facebook about a mistaken bank charge of $8.45 and the time it will take to resolve it. Now as I read these words of the Lord asking me to join Him in cross-carrying, I feel chastened and ashamed at how petty some of my concerns are.

So for right now, I’m just going to let this text sit on me for a bit and try to discern what God might have to say to Christians like me when other Christians are experiencing the reality of this text much more deeply and painfully.

I’m a hiker and backpacker, not a mountain climber. But if I can walk up a mountain with little or no scrambling or “technical” difficulty, then I will do it at the behest of others. Thus I can say I’ve hiked to the top of Mt. Whitney in the Sierras (highest point in the continental United States) and a few other middling peaks like Mt. San Jacinto in southern California.

Though I don’t seek out the experience (I’d rather hike to a good fishing spot), I am always glad that I’ve made the effort to get to a mountain top. I totally understand why those places figure so prominently in Scripture as places of prayer and encounter with God. They are beautiful, isolated, and humbling. To see the world spread out beneath you is to be almost forced into praise and humility before the One who made it all.

However, we must not read back into Scripture our modern fascination with the natural beauty of wilderness. Seeing nature as somehow sacred in itself, a kind of natural temple, is the peculiar invention of the late nineteenth century and the romantic poets. Prior to that people of course saw the beauty in wild and lonely places, but they were also just that, wild and lonely, places where fear and loneliness were experienced, places that if possible begged to be tamed by a human hand.

So a mountain top in Scripture represents a place very much apart from human society, a place of withdrawal from ordinary human interaction in order to interact with God. In other words, a mountain top was a good place to pray.

It is only the first two verses of Luke 9:28-36 which records that Jesus’ purpose in climbing what we call the Mount of Transfiguration was to pray. Matthew and Mark do not mention prayer as they tell the story. So as we celebrate the Transfiguration this coming Sunday, I plan to read the account from Luke and talk about where it is that we go to pray.

One might read this text and put it together with what Jesus says about praying in private in Matthew 6:6 and conclude that all prayer is to be done individually and privately. But that would simply ignore all the clear evidence we have in the book of Acts that the first Christians prayed together as the Church. And we must note that while He appears to be the only one praying in the Transfiguration account, Jesus was not alone. He had taken a small prayer group, if you will, with Him to the top of the mountain.

The upshot is that while prayer can certainly take place anywhere, there is a great value, demonstrated by Jesus Himself, in withdrawing for prayer to places set apart from the ordinary busyness and distractions of life. That can be individual prayer in a totally private place or it could be group prayer wherever believers assemble together in God’s presence, as that little group did on the mountain.

So we can pray everywhere, but prayer is enriched when we come away from the rest of life and make ourselves totally available to God. It’s why we go to church. It’s why we observe quiet times and retreats and other ways to focus our hearts and minds on our communication with God. Even if we cannot climb a literal mountain, we can climb up and out of all the other things we do and meet God. And, like Jesus was transfigured, we may find ourselves transformed by the time we spend that way.

I pretty much dislike Christianeeze, those expressions which sprinkle our conversation and prayers with terms and phrases which would baffle any non church-going person. Though having grown up in and then served in a church all my life I imagine I use some of that language without even realizing it.

The term “prayer warrior” is one of those expressions which just grates on my ear most of the time I hear it. Though its intent is to affirm that someone offers deep and constant prayer, it just sounds cheesy to me, almost oxymoronic, with the suggestion that the peace and contemplation of prayer is some sort of act of violence. It puts me in mind of a joke from the Charles Stross “Laundry Files” novels. One of the characters is a logician and a violinist, but also a “combat epistemologist.” Stross never quite explains how philosophical inquiry into the foundations of knowledge can serve a military purpose.

However, our text for this Sunday, Ephesians 6:18-20, does in fact connect prayer with battle in a way that is obscured by most English translations. What is translated as a complete sentence in verse 18 is actually the conclusion to the sentence begun in verse 17 (or possibly in verse 14). In other words, the reception of the “helmet of salvation” and the “sword of the Spirit” in verse 17 is to include and be accompanied by “praying in the Spirit at all times in all prayer and supplication, keeping alert and always persevering in supplication for all the saints.” So prayer is a key part of life wearing “the armor of God.” Hence “prayer warrior” has some biblical support.

I’m reminded of a an old Korean woman I heard pray when we held a joint service with our sister Korean church many years ago. I didn’t understand a word she said, but the intensity and fervor with which she addressed the Lord was amazing. Afterward I said, “If I’m in the hospital with a serious illness, I want her to pray for me!” There was a Christian who clearly went to battle in her praying.

Of course, my chosen focus in regard to prayer this week is the matter of whom we pray for. This text answers that by calling us to prayer for “all the saints.” Paul goes on to specifically ask prayer for himself, but the first direction is to pray for all Christians. This dovetails nicely with what we’ve already said about the Lord’s Prayer as a corporate prayer and the main and model prayer for followers of Jesus. We pray together and we pray for each other. I think I’d be willing to say that if you are only praying for yourself, your prayer is seriously deficient.

So this week I’d like to think about how our prayers can better fulfill the direction here and be a constant offering of intercession and supplication for “all the saints.” May the Lord help us to grow in our awareness of the larger needs of His people, both those close to us and those in distant parts of the world, and may He enable us to be good “prayer warriors” on behalf of them all.

I’ve always liked the Jewish story that there is a small group of righteous men whose presence in the world preserves it from disaster. This story is based on a passage in the Talmud which says, “The world never has less than thirty-six righteous men who receive the Divine Presence every day.” The Jewish legend around these 36 Lamed Vavniks (which just means “36ers”) or Tzadikim Nistarim (“hidden righteous ones”) has it that these persons do not know each other and often do not even know that they themselves are one of the number. If one of them learns it about himself, he never tells or admits it to anyone.

That Jewish 36 seem to sustain the world simply through their righteousness, but the Talmud’s description that they “receive the Divine Presence every day” suggests to me that we might identify their primary work as prayer. They are people who are constantly in the presence of God, speaking with Him, and perhaps, like some biblical models, interceding for the rest of us. That’s born out by the legend’s connection with an actual biblical model in Abraham’s intercession for Sodom in Genesis 18, where the presence of just 10 righteous persons would have saved that city.

That Talmudic story came to my mind today as I thought about my brief sermon text for this coming Sunday, I Thessalonians 5:16-18, three very short verses which conclude with “for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” I’m taking, of course, verse 17, “Pray without ceasing,” as the answer to the question implied in my sermon title. When to pray? Pray continually, without ceasing.

The implication of the connection of that direction to pray without ceasing and the Talmud story is that our prayers really do matter. The time Christians spend in prayer really does make a difference to the welfare of the world and the people around us. And perhaps without those prayers the world would be much worse off than it is now.

As Karl Barth wrote about prayer he was quite concerned and said more than once that we ought not to interpret the direction to “pray without ceasing” in such a way that we end up not praying much at all. That is, he was worried that as we recognize the literal impossibility of any person constantly voicing prayers without stopping, we would then take the command of verse 17 to imply some sort of constant “attitude” or “spirit” of prayer which didn’t involve any actual spoken prayer at all.

Barth’s answer is that the call to pray without ceasing is a call for the whole community of the Church to be regularly in actual spoken prayer, and that of course means that individuals need to be regularly and daily in prayer. I think that might mean that together we are praying without ceasing, with never a moment going by but that a believer somewhere is speaking with God on behalf of us all.

To the same sort of end, the ancient Christian answer to verse 17 was to pray the “hours,” especially in monastic communities for whom a primary occupation is prayer. So the ancient rhythm of praying at several fixed times of the day was developed out of the Jewish synagogue practice of gathering for praise and prayer at fixed times each day (see Acts 3:1 for instance). So contemporary religious orders and many liturgical churches continue to practice fixed times of daily gathered prayer to at least some degree.

The question remains how those of us who live and worship in the Protestant free church tradition might best live out the direction to “pray without ceasing,” without the structure of the “hours.” Surely, as Barth maintained, it will not be by failing to pray at all, but by encouraging each other and coming together in some regular way to fulfill that commandment to pray. When to pray? All the time. Often. Every day. Several times a day. Now how will we let that happen in our lives?

We did not say the Lord’s Prayer very often in the church in which I grew up. It was considered important enough to memorize and I did so at an age so early that I cannot remember it happening, maybe at home, maybe in Sunday School. But the Lord’s Prayer was very seldom said in public worship.

When I encountered churches with more liturgical tradition I found that the Lord’s Prayer was often a component of every worship service. Here in our own Covenant denomination I found the Lord’s Prayer connected to the celebration of Holy Communion, so that basically meant recitation in worship once a month. However, we now have a second, early service where Communion is received and the Lord’s Prayer is said every Sunday.

The understanding in the church of my childhood was that any sort of rote or written prayer, even the Lord’s Prayer, was inferior to eloquent extemporaneous prayer, composed as it were in the moment. So it’s only later in my life that I have been able to take Jesus more at His word when He offered this prayer to his disciples in response to their request, “Lord, teach us to pray,” in Luke 11:1, and as a simple direction, “Pray then in this way,” in verse 9 of our text for this week Matthew 6:7-15.

So I will preach this text as I try to live it now. This prayer Jesus gave us is meant to be prayed in just these words. Our Lord gave us words to say when we don’t have words of our own. And as Hauerwas and Willimon argue in their little book, Lord, Teach Us, as we pray this prayer we learn our theology, we learn about God and how He works in our lives, and we learn how we are to live, just by praying this prayer.

Of course, we must pray thoughtfully and with some understanding. That’s why sermons and books on the Lord’s Prayer exist. We’re meant to grow out of childish ignorance of the meaning of these words (like the little boy who thought God’s name here was “Art”) into an intentional appropriation of this prayer as a blueprint for our relationship with God and others. Hauerwas and Willimon say that you might define a Christian simply as a person who prays the Lord’s Prayer.

Of course prayer is not restricted to the words of the Lord’s Prayer. We can and should pray in other words, for specific needs. Let us, though, keep coming back to the basic fact that when Jesus set out to answer the question about prayer for this week, how to pray, He gave us this prayer.

The simple and straightforward reason to pray is that it works. That’s essentially what Jesus tells us in our text for this week, Matthew 7:7-11. “Ask and it will be given you…” And many of us who pray can tell at least one or more middling to truly dramatic stories about a time when prayer really did work.

When I was in seminary a member of the church we attended had gall bladder surgery. I visited him in the hospital afterward and he told me that one of the conditions of his recovery and release from the hospital was to be able to urinate normally. That had yet to happen following the surgery, so he asked me to pray for that event. I did so. Later when I saw him out of the hospital he told me that the prayed for event had happened within an hour of my prayer. He compared it to Chaplain O’Neill’s famous prayer to stop the rain for General Patton during World War II, although the effect was the reverse, starting a flow rather than stopping it.

But as C. S. Lewis and many other thoughtful Christians know and have pointed out, the clear effect of prayer is not easily proved. Lewis dismissed the possibility of studying prayer statistically, say by having hospital patients prayed for in some controlled way, because such a study would prevent any real prayer from occurring. Nonetheless there have been a number of attempts to study prayer in just that statistical way. As one might expect, the results are thoroughly inconclusive.

Jesus’ assurances about prayer in our text are placed into the context of an analogy, a parable about human parents and their children, which can help us to see why prayer cannot be regarded or tested as a kind of divine vending machine, yielding statistically measurable results. Even fallible human parents are disposed to give the very best they can to their children. This is what Jesus tells in verses 9 to 11. Yet we also know that the best human parents do not accede to every whim or request their children express. Such a practice would be foolish, poor parenting. Thus this parable about parents giving good gifts both assures us of God’s intent to answer our prayers for the best and explains why many if not most of our prayers are not answered in the way we expect.

Nonetheless, the assurance that “how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” is plenty of reason to pray. What remains is to understand what those “good things” God wishes to give us are. Luke 11:13 helps us get at this by taking those same words of Jesus and rendering them, “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” Prayer works because it connects us in a loving relationship with God our Father who always wants to give us what is best, and what is best for us is a deep and abiding relationship with His own self.

I’ve enjoyed a week of vacation after Christmas and I’m grateful to church member Bryan Kane for preaching at Valley Covenant on December 28.

For the first Sunday of the year we are adopting a Methodist practice and joining in a service of renewing our covenant with the Lord and with each other as a church. This is based on a service created by John Wesley in August of 1755, which later became a frequent New Year’s Eve or Day observance in Methodist churches.

Wesley attributed part of this service to a Puritan source, but some scholars see roots also in German pietism. So it’s especially appropriate for us as a Covenant church, out of the Pietist tradition, to adopt and join in this service for the beginning of the year.

As part of our service, we will use words similar to these from a wonderful, humble prayer by Wesley:

I am no longer my own, but yours.
Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing, put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you, exalted for you, or brought low for you;
let me be full, let me be empty, let me have all things, let me have nothing:
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours.
So be it. And the covenant now made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven.
Amen.

We’re also celebrating January 4 as Epiphany Sunday, so we remember that part of our covenant with God is to share the light of Christ with the world.

May this new year be full of renewal and blessing for you all!

Peter Jackson’s third hobbit installment is out, and I’ve very little inclination to go see it. I’ve loved the book and the rest of Tolkien’s middle earth story since college. But the films get The Hobbit all wrong. It’s not just the extraneous elements and silly action worked into the films. It’s that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of Tolkien’s vision in the ridiculous weight and length given to battle scenes in the films.

Part of the genius of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is their fine display of a theme that grows out of Tolkien’s Christian faith. That theme is the victory of the small and weak over the great and powerful. It shows up in Bilbo’s usefulness to the strong and experienced dwarfs and in the revelation of the dragon Smaug’s tiny unarmored spot to little Bilbo, then to a little bird, then to a rustic bowman named Bard, who fires an arrow into that weak spot. It’s no surprise that Peter Jackson fails to comprehend that theme of weakness conquering strength and has to transform Bard the Bowman’s simple arrow into a machine launched wood and steel missile.

You could say that Tolkien’s whole hobbit cycle is an extended meditation on our sermon text this week, Mary’s song in Luke 1:46-55. The previous three Sundays of Advent each given us a psalm with a theme of restoration, in which I’ve seen God’s work to restore those traditional gifts of Advent, hope, peace, and joy. Now as move from the psalms to the greatest of the canticles (all those biblical songs which are not psalms), I believe we can see how God chooses to restore love in our world. He does it by showing His love in unexpected directions and ways.

In her song, spoken in response to being hailed as blessed by her cousin Elizabeth, Mary first reflects on God’s favor to her despite her lowly status. Though Mary is engaged to a man descended from King David, and may herself be of that lineage, she and Joseph are clearly poor, distant descendants of the great king. So she expresses her praise and joy because God “has looked with favor on his lowly servant,” and “has done great things for me.”

Mary so well understands her lowly position that her thoughts and song immediately turn from her own self to the favor that God is showing to all lowly people through her, so in verse 50, “His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.”

Then verses 51, 52 and 53 each take up that hobbit-like theme of God overcoming the great and powerful in favor of the humble and weak. No, it’s not that God somehow hates the rich and powerful. It’s that in His love He wants to restore the balance of the world by uplifting those who have been forced down and make it plain that His love is the true power behind the universe. And He constantly hints at the force of love and His plan to restore it completely to our world by working through small and powerless people, like Mary.

Verses 54 and 55 show that this great reversal and restoration through the small and weak is the way God has been working all along. It’s according to a promise God made to another at-the-time insignificant person whom Scripture regards now as the father of faith, Abraham. As our text from Romans 16:25 and 26 says, this whole process of love working in mercy toward those who are lowly is the great mystery of salvation revealed through Jesus Christ. It’s that mystery which Mary is celebrating in her song.

Over the years I’ve been blessed by the writings of Marva Dawn. As I take up Psalm 126, with its themes of restoration and rejoicing, I think how Marva Dawn’s own life embodies some of the tensions felt in this psalm. Many, many Christians have been encouraged by Dawn, as witnessed by an Amazon reviewer of one of her books, “She has a keen sense of service and rejoicing that every book she writes conveys, so we can find that same joy in life.”

Yet anyone who knows just a little about Marva Dawn realizes that her life has not been easy, certainly not pure and unmingled joy. She has struggled for decades with health issues that limit her mobility and tax her energy. I remember a lecture she gave once here in our community when her obvious weariness with travel derailed her whole talk into a rant about the difficulties of airport security for a person with handicaps. But that glaring moment when she lacked joy demonstrates, as I said, the tension in the psalm between past joy in God’s help and restoration and the call for help and restoration of joy in the future, as well as the importance of one of Marva Dawn’s own answers to the problem of lack of joy.

Like last week’s psalm, 85, Psalm 126 seems to be post-exilic, reflecting Jewish life after the return from Babylon. Verses 1 to 3 express a great height of joy as God’s restoring grace, and it seems natural to understand “restored the fortunes of Zion,” as the restoration and rebuilding of Jerusalem after the exile. But verses 4 to 6 make it clear that in the present moment of the psalm joy is a hope rather than a current reality, just as it is for many of us as many points in our lives.

How then shall we understand Paul’s direction in the epistle lesson from I Thessalonians 5:16, “Rejoice always?” How can anyone of God’s people accomplish a constant rejoicing? Marva Dawn’s answer is that it is accomplished by the joint work of the community. When I cannot rejoice, some other believer can, and vice versa.

It’s also well to remember the familiar distinction between happiness and joy. Happiness is typically a more transitory state which comes and goes and pain and pleasure come and go. Joy is something deeper which comes from an ongoing and enduring sense of God’s goodness and that there is hope for the future.

So despite my title above, perhaps the message of the psalm is not so much about the restoring of joy, but about joy which continues because of the sure and confident hope that the Lord will “restore our fortunes,” as in verse 4. Such hope can be mixed with sorrow, as the tears and pain of hard labor are mixed with the planting of a crop. But there is both present joy and joy to come in the knowledge that grief will be redeemed and bring with it a good harvest.

The theme of restoration, which runs through the psalms for the first three Sundays of Advent, continues this week in Psalm 85. Once again it’s hard to determine the time and place of the creation of this song. The word “restore” shows up in verse 1 and verse 4 in two different tenses and modes. The first three verses look back to a time when God did restore His people, forgiving them, ceasing to be angry, and restoring their land. Yet the next verses are a call for another restoration, “Restore us again,” in verse 4.

So the psalm writer is looking back to a previous experience of God’s grace and restoration and asking for his people to experience that once again. Thus scholars guess a post-exilic context (after the Jewish people return from Babylon) when there has clearly been a restoration, but national prosperity and security remain unsettled. But it’s impossible to be sure.

The last section of the psalm, starting in verse 8, envisions what this second restoration will look like. One of the key elements is peace. “Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his people, to those who turn to him in their hearts.” Then we get the evocative image of the second part of verse 10, “righteousness and peace will kiss each other.”

Peace is God’s gift to those who are faithful and righteousness. Verses 10 and 11 are images of human response to God’s gifts of salvation. Our faithfulness springs up from the earth in verse 11, while God’s holy righteousness looks down with favor from heaven.

Yet our own righteousness in response to God is definitely in sight. The psalm ends in a verse which evokes the Gospel reading from Mark 1:1-8 about John the Baptist as the messenger Isaiah foretold who would go before the Lord to prepare His way. “Righteousness will go before him, and will make a path for his steps.” John called the people to prepare for Jesus by repentance and amending their lives toward righteousness.

The result is the gift of peace, beginning in peace with God. Verse 10’s images of love and faithfulness embracing, righteousness and peace kissing, indicate the divine and human reconciled, brought together in harmony, in peace. And from peace with God comes then the blessed gift of mundane peace, healing and harmony in our world.

The sun came out for awhile today. It’s a pleasant sight here in western Oregon where our northern latitude and rainy winter make for many days of gloom. And by April and May I will be aching for the sun to come out and shine as it does so brightly here in the summer months. We need that sunshine just to drive back the moss on our roofs and restore our spirits.

As we enter Advent that spirit of waiting for the sun to shine and restore us fits the texts from Psalms from which I’ve chosen to preach this year. For the first three Sundays of Advent, Psalms 80, 85 and 126 all speak of God’s restoration of His people Israel. The first one in particular, Psalm 80, repeats three times (verses 3, 7, and 19) the urgent prayer that God restore us by letting His face shine on us, intensifying it each time by adding to God’s name as He is addressed, first “God,” then “God of hosts,” and finally “Lord God of hosts.”

As the dismay in regard to the grand jury decision in Missouri continues to spark protest and violence across the country by people who feel their lives are not valued, the need for light and restoration seems great. We’ve been people who like to think that racial division, persecution and enmity is a thing of the past, overcome by events of the last two centuries. Yet here we are forced to admit that races in America still distrust each other and that there is much injustice. It seems to me to call for prayers asking God to restore our hope and courage and willingness to seek the peace and reconciliation He wants to give us in Jesus Christ.

Our Gospel lesson from Mark 13:24-37 pictures dark days in which the coming of Jesus “in power and glory” will shine with sudden brightness. As we wait for that great shining dawn in the future, we can still also look for the light of Christ to shine on us and on our present situation. Certainly the people who first wrote and sang Psalm 80 were thinking in terms of some immediate and present answer to their prayers. That’s why their pleas are framed so urgently. So we ought to ask and look for our Lord to shine on and in whatever darkness we experience.

One on-line reflection on this text suggested that Psalm 80 could be the basis of a sermon on photosynthesis. Certainly as the middle of the psalm (skipped by the lectionary) reflects on God’s people as His vineyard, we can see how God’s face shining us might be like the effect of needed sunlight on stunted and wilting plants. I think of our backyard blueberry plants which, under the big oak and fir trees around our house, don’t get near enough sun to grow well and produce many berries. Like those bushes, we and our neighbors around us desperately need more light in order to flourish.

Unlike blueberry bushes, we can ask for what we need. We are invited by this psalm to cry out and ask God for His light. When we feel in need of restoring brightness, we can seek it and look for it in the person of Jesus Christ. Let us do some of that crying and seeking this Advent.

We come to the end of Proverbs and the end of the church year at the same time this coming Sunday. The tension is that chapter 31 of Proverbs feels just a little odd for the Sunday of Christ the King. To many American evangelical Christians, the good woman of this chapter seems like a fit subject for Mother’s Day, but it’s hard to see how she relates to a celebration of our Lord’s royal reign over His church and all creation.

However, let’s note that the Gospel lesson for this Sunday is Matthew 25:31-46. There Jesus compares His kingly judgment of the nations with separating sheep from goats, the sheep being those who were kind and helpful to people in need and the goats being those who neglected to offer such kindness and help. But the clincher for our text from Proverbs is that Jesus tells us “I was hungry… I was thirsty… I was a stranger… I was naked… I was in prison.” We are see help rendered to those in need as help given to our Lord.

Note what the good wife of Proverbs 31 does. She keeps her family fed and clothed. She is constantly serving and blessing her husband and children. And in verse 20, “She opens her hands to the poor and reaches out her hands to the needy.” She’s also industrious, wise, frugal and completely honorable.

As my wife has often noted, the wife of Proverbs 31 is a pretty intimidating role model. And we might ask why it is wives who get singled out for all these expectations here in Proverbs? Why not a similar list for husbands? One answer might be that all the rest of the book is aimed at male virtue, as the writers speak to young men, counseling them away from foolishness and wickedness and toward a variety of virtues, including faithfulness and care for the poor. So perhaps this chapter doesn’t signify some extra burden of expectation on wives, but demonstrates that women actually need just a little encouragement, less than men, to do well.

But I also want to follow Augustine and other church fathers who saw here in the good wife of Proverbs the bride of Christ, the Church. As I began to suggest above, it is the work of the Church to feed and cloth and care for God’s people, especially those in need. It is the work of the Church to give honor to her Lord. It is the work of the Church to teach wisdom (verse 26). And, as in verse 28, it is the Church’s joy to receive the approval and praise of her Lord.

So it’s a little odd to read this chapter on Christ the King, but not totally bizarre if we all place ourselves in the good wife’s role, together as the Church being faithful to our King. Let us serve Him and His family by acts of compassion and mercy, and let us live in such a way that Christ is “known in the city gates,” by the good impression of His Church.

The idea of the “golden mean” is part of philosophy’s stock in trade. It’s locus classicus is in Aristotle’s ethics, in which we learn that virtue, good character, is a matter of balancing between extremes, usually of excess or deficiency. So courage means avoiding cowardice on the one hand and recklessness on the other hand. Similar ideas are found in other philosophers, including Confucius in the east. Thomas Aquinas makes the mean between extremes part of his conception of Christian virtue.

Balancing between extremes is a biblical idea. Long ago my best friend Jay, another philosopher, pointed out to me verses 8 and 9 from Proverbs 30, our chapter for this coming Sunday. It’s a prayer to God asking for a balance between being poor and being rich, “give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food I need, or I shall be full, and deny you, and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ or I shall be poor, and steal, and profane the name of my God.” Jay correctly saw that prayer as an admirable desire and a good plan and hope for life.

A “mean” is of course a mathematical concept and it’s fitting that the much of Proverbs 30 is in the form of sayings constructed around comparisons which count down first 3, then 4 items on a list. The number 4 actually figures throughout the chapter, with four questions asked in verse 4 and 4 “There are those” statements in verses 11-14.

Verse 15 starts out the “three, yes, four” pattern with thoughts that correlate with that prayer for neither poverty nor riches. We are told there are four things that are never satisfied, that never say “Enough.” The only possible way God can grant that prayer for a balance between wealth and poverty is if we who pray it will not be like these voracious entities which are never satisfied.

This chapter is interesting and even amusing in its use of numbers to express wisdom, but it’s also challenging. One wonders what quite to make of it all and what practical lesson to carry away from reading all these little verbal tricks. It may be well to go back to the beginning where in verse 1 the writer (a new name appears, Agur), expresses weariness with the whole business of seeking wisdom. Instead, he vents his frustration in verses 2 to 4 by denying he has learned any wisdom and wondering if it’s even humanly possible. Thus we may turn with some relief upon the affirmation of verse 5 that “Every word of God proves true.” Wisdom is possible. It comes from God.

Even though we may come up with clever ways to order our thoughts, like Agur’s groups of 4, we also, like Agur, must acknowledge our limitations and how far short our wisdom falls. That should not keep us from trying to learn and be wise! It’s fair for Agur to say he is weary because he has worked hard at grasping the wisdom of his time. It’s not fair for the college freshman to discount and ignore the wisdom being taught to him or her before any effort has been made to comprehend.

The vastness of God’s wisdom is an invitation to delve deeper, rather than permission to be content with a shallow skimming of the surface. The riddles in the arithmetic of this chapter invite us to think more, not less. And in the end we will find that our hearts are things that can be satisfied when they are filled with the knowledge of God.