My Old Sermon Blog

In a recent Zoom session where many of us did not know each other, we each did our best to briefly introduce ourselves, just as we might have if meeting in-person. While on-line interaction is some arenas may grant a certain degree of anonymity, the more human response to most social relation is a desire to be known, to be recognized as the person you are.

In our Gospel text this week, John 1:43-41, we find the story of Nathanael’s encounter with Jesus beginning with Nathanael presuming to know something about Jesus based on from where Philip tells him Jesus comes. Nathanael’s “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” in verse 46 reeks of the sort of baseless and often vicious prejudice by which we are often prone to characterize others, whether it is a matter of geographical origin, race, language, political affiliation, or even gender.

Philip’s response to Nathanael is a profound example for us in responding to all kinds of unreasonable presumptions of knowledge, both personal and otherwise. The apostle does not chastise Nathanael for the regional bias he exhibits by his rhetorical question about Nazareth. Instead Philip encourages Nathanael to investigate for himself, to “Come and see.”

Would that more of us were willing, like Nathanael, to let our prejudices and biases be challenged by a deeper examination of the evidence. In verse 47, Jesus Himself recognizes a special quality in Nathanael by declaring him “an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” Perhaps one aspect of that lack of deceit was a lack of self-deceit, a lack of imagining that he already knew all there was to know about a person from Nazareth or other subjects as well.

The great surprise for Nathanael as he willingly comes to see Jesus for himself is, of course, that Jesus already knows him. It’s not a failure of humility that he recognizes that Jesus has some insight into Nathanael’s character when He says that he is without deceit. That honesty was apparently something for which Nathanael was striving, and was probably connected to his willingness to go see Jesus at Philip’s invitation.

That same spirit of open honesty gave Nathanael the opportunity for a moment of genuine revelation when Jesus responded to his inquiry regarding the source of His personal knowledge of Nathanael. Delightfully, we’re not told what Nathanael was doing under the fig tree Jesus mentions in verse 48, maybe it’s just where he happened to be when Philip came to invite him to meet Jesus. But Nathanael’s keen and attentive and honest mind was swift to realize that the only source Jesus could have for such knowledge was supernatural. So much for Nathanael’s own supposed knowledge of the inferiority of those from Nazareth.

In the end, Nathanael came to knowledge far truer and far more important than the false “knowledge” he thought he had about people from a certain town. In verse 49 he correctly identifies Jesus as both the Son of God and the Messiah (“King of Israel”). At least in the way the Gospel stories are told, it will take others far longer and require far more persuasion for others to arrive at the same solid conclusion.

In his essay, “The Will to Believe,” philosopher William James suggested that there are two principles for acquiring knowledge. Succinctly, those are “believe truth and avoid error.” In other words, one should make oneself open to believing what is true while at the same time doing one’s best to avoid believing what is false. While many philosophers would argue that it’s a little more complicated than that simple slogan, it is not at all a bad principle for those seeking knowledge of God to follow, as did Nathanael. Be willing to lay aside error caused by one’s own prior biases while at the same time being willing to embrace truth when it is plainly displayed by evidence. Nathanael is a role model desperately needed in our times.

It is challenging to write this on Wednesday afternoon as the drama of a riot in our nation’s capitol building unfolds. How in the world does the story of Jesus’ baptism, told extremely briefly in Mark 1:4-11 (actually just in verses 9-11 of the larger text) relate to protestors storming the capitol and causing injury to law enforcement officers, at least one shooting, and various property damage?

My only thought is to turn to where I was planning to go with this text anyway, to the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus as He came up out of the water. The Spirit came in the form of a Dove, which Christians have also recognized as a sign of peace, based on the account of the end of the flood in Genesis 8:11. In Galatians 5:22, the third fruit of the Spirit is peace. Talking about the gifts of the Spirit and their use in worship, Paul says in II Corinthians 14:33, “for God is a God not of disorder but of peace.”

For the sermon I plan to talk some about how the words “inspire” and “inspiration” are built upon the word “spirit.” “Inspire” means both the physical act of drawing in breath (“breath” and “spirit” are the same word in the languages in which the Bible was written) and the more abstract act of filling oneself or another with “spirit” in the sense motivating and energizing emotional energy.

All I can find to say right now is that true Christian inspiration will never be toward the motivation of violence, but toward the motivation and encouragement of peace. Any “inspiring” of others which destroys peace is not the work of the Holy Spirit, but just the opposite, the work of an evil spirit.

Let us pray for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. It was promised by John the Baptist in our text in verse 8 to be brought by Jesus. We believe that baptism in the Spirit is part of our own baptism as followers of Jesus. Then let us remember that we have been baptized into peace and speak and act accordingly. In all that we say and do in days to come, let us pray to be inspired by the Spirit of peace.

I dropped off 3 items at the UPS store this morning to return to Amazon. One was a book that arrived damaged and the others were clothing that didn’t fit. The commercial giving season that comes with Christmas is over and the season of returns has arrived. There also may be some discounted purchases being made, but Beth and I aren’t really doing that this year. In any case, in many people’s view, the time for gifts is done until next year.

Yet the great Christian tradition, until recent American decades, has long viewed the days after Christmas as a continuing time for gift giving, up to and including January 6, the feast of Epiphany. At least part of the reason for that is because that day is celebrated as the arrival of the magi in Bethlehem as told in Matthew 2:1-12. One key part of the narrative is that the mysterious figures from the east brought extravagant gifts to the toddler Jesus.

Those gifts of the magi have, in fact, been the primary basis by which their identities have been imagined and filled out in Christian legend. Though Matthew in no way identifies them as “kings,” their bearing of gifts, especially those gifts, connects them with the kings who “come to the brightness of your rising,” in Isaiah 6:3 (see also verse 6) and “the kings of Arabia and Saba” who offer gifts in Psalm 72:10. Those connections were made early, probably by at least the third Christian century, and so we have the hymn, “We Three Kings” and many other songs, poems, and stories.

That number 3 itself is the result of simply counting the number of different gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. Nowhere does Matthew tell us there were three magi, only that there was more than one, but Christian imagination quickly apportioned the three sorts of gifts each out to one each of three bearers. Further speculation on their eastern origin assigned each of them a country more or less east of Judea, gave them names and even ethnicities, and firmly fixed them in Christian life and thought.

The biblical truth of the matter, however, is that the only recorded gifts for the Christ Child did not arrive on “Christmas,” close to His birth. Instead they came a year or two later in the hands of those strange visitors. Apart from the fact that the birth of Jesus is itself celebrated as the greatest Gift of God, if we wanted a more accurate traditional portrayal of events surrounding the coming of our Lord, we might do well to more often imitate European and other traditions which include gift giving on Epiphany, the day we remember the magi bringing their gifts.

A lesson we might draw from all this is that our generosity and giving of gifts, especially to the poor and helpless, is something which ought not end at Christmas, but extend beyond that day, and not just until January 6, but throughout the year. Wise people give generously. Let that be at least part of what we take away from this Sunday’s Gospel.

My mother grew up in the shadow of what was at one time the largest copper mine in the world. That mine was in Jerome, Arizona and Mom spent her youth in Cottonwood, a town that supported the mining community with agriculture, shops, etc. In between was Clarkdale, the town that, as I understand it, grew up around the smelting operation.

It required a great deal of turquoise green copper ore in order to extract any significant amount of pure copper. The ore was crushed, treated with chemical and at some point “smelted,” heated and melted down at temperatures high enough to separate a much more concentrated copper “matte” from the “slag,” which was drawn off and discarded. You can still see huge slag heaps near Clarkdale. A tourist train ride now takes visitors pasts those heaps as part of a tour of historical sites of interest in the area.

As I read our text for this week, Malachi 3:1-4 speaking of the coming Messiah as a “refiner’s fire,” I picture those heaps of waste mineral from the smelter operation near my mother’s childhood home. It makes me wonder if our Lord has to melt off a similarly large proportion of “slag” from our lives in order to produce anything really good or useful.

Yet I’m also reassured that the Lord sees us as valuable enough to refine, that even the most corrupt of us, like the Levites of Malachi’s time, are worth the time and effort to redeem and purify what is good in us.

And even if we feel like slag heaps sometimes, like God has cast us off in His refining of better, more productive servants, the grace of Christ still keeps working to refine us. There is a present day operation, Searchlight Minerals, working at methods to recycle that heap of slag by Clarkdale to extract gold and other precious minerals. That’s what our Lord would like to do with us.

Yet as the recitative from Handel’s “Messiah” based on this text emphasizes, in the heat of God’s refining fire, “Who can stand when he appeareth?” That’s the question isn’t it? Will we allow ourselves to face the heat and be refined into something better than we are now? Or will we melt away under that divine gaze which will lay bare all our innermost thoughts and failings? Our hope lies only in the fact that Jesus our Lord freely offers us the purity and holiness which can stand when He appears. But we must accept it, let the dross be burned away, and become new people. It’s a continual process which is not always easy nor comfortable.

I was in the shower getting ready to go to high school when the 1971 San Fernando Valley earthquake shook the Los Angeles area. I was just bounced around a little. Then I pulled on some pants, and our family got outside to avoid anything falling on us. In our city of Santa Monica, the shaking was hard, but not devastating. Things fell off shelves and a hanging light fixture in our garage crashed to the floor. North of us in San Fernando and Sylmar, many were not so fortunate. People died in falling buildings, freeway overpasses collapsed or were damaged, and transportation was snarled for months.

Years later, visiting us in California from the Midwest during Christmas vacation before we were married, my wife was frightened one night by a much smaller earthquake that shook her bed on our pullout sofa. The rest of us slept right through it. Now here in Oregon she reminds me that the whole Pacific Rim is due for a big one sometime. She took a CERT (Community Emergency Response Training) class a few years ago. We have earthquake insurance on our home.

The people of Israel to whom the prophet Haggai spoke would have been almost as familiar with earthquakes as we were in southern California. The region sits on and between various faults and rifts and seismic activity is common. Josephus records an earthquake during King Uzziah’s time. Modern Israeli geologists fear that the area, like the Pacific Rim, is overdue for a “big one.”

So it is interesting that, in our text from Haggai 2:1-9, even as he exhorts the returned exiles to return to work on rebuilding the Temple (abandoned for almost twenty years), he records God’s word that “In just a little while I will again shake the heavens and the earth, the oceans and the dry land. I will shake all nations…” Fans of Handel’s “Messiah” will remember the bass aria that begins with that text. The music itself forcefully vibrates to picture the shaking to come.

It’s clear enough that the “shaking” in this text is metaphor for the tremors of war and violence, but the citizens of Jerusalem could not have escaped the association with the literal shaking of earthquakes. Whether earthquake or war, the warning seems a strange part of a message aimed to further a building project.

The tricky part of the text is what immediately follows the shaking. In the NLT translation we’re reading in Prophets, it’s “and the treasures of all the nations will be brought to this Temple.” In this translation’s interpretation, it’s a promise that the wealth of surrounding people’s will support and finance the project and make the Temple even more glorious than its destroyed predecessor.

Yet there’s an ancient interpretation and translation which takes that sentence about “treasure” in a different direction, translating the word more literally as “desire.” So in “Messiah” the bass sings, “and the desire of all nations shall come.” That phrase in English “desire of nations” finds its way into at least three of the hymns of the season: “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” which we’re singing every Sunday this Advent, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” and “Angels from the Realms of Glory.” The understanding throughout is that what will come to the Temple, even as the world is shaken, is what all nations truly desire, the Lord Himself as He became incarnate in Jesus Christ.

There are some good linguistic and contextual reasons for the more mundane NLT translation of “the desire of nations,” but when the writer of Hebrews in the New Testament takes up and quotes Haggai 2:6 about the shaking of earth and heaven, he says clearly that the purpose of shaking created, temporal things, is “so that what cannot be shaken may remain.” That seems to fit with the sense that the prophesy is not in the end driving at a construction project which will be subject to fault lines and shifting tectonic plates. Instead, something better, more long lasting, more glorious, which all the nations do in fact desire, is in sight. That is the arrival of Christ the Lord.

The message for us is that God does and will shake things up for us, whether it’s the ground under our feet or a comfortable way of life. That shaking is a call to turn our eyes from that which is so easily shaken and even broken, and to seek that which is truly most desirable in this world. May that great desire of nations come quickly to us.

One of the pleasures of this season is driving around after dark looking at Christmas lights. There may be more of that this year, both the lighting and the looking, as other Christmas activities are curtailed. Not far from us on McClean Blvd., this display has lit up December nights for years. It’s definitely a bit much, but the joyful light in the darkness is still fun to drive by and take in.

Light in the Advent season before Christmas is one way we as Christians may recall the presence of God in the world, that He is here shining in the light of Jesus Christ, even in the darkest of times. Despite the often dark and bleak times and messages of the prophets, they also pointed toward that light of God’s presence breaking into the world.

The last nine chapters of Ezekiel, chapters 40-48, are weird. Of course, one might be inclined to say that about the whole book, starting in chapter 1 with the famous vision of the wheel(s) and the four-faced, many-eyed cherubim. Yet up to chapter 40, one might be able to view most Ezekiel’s prophecy, even fantastic images like the resurrection of the valley of dry bones, as pretty well-grounded in the past, present and/or near future reality of the nation of Israel and the exiles from Judah.

Much of the first part of Ezekiel is about the departure of the light, the movement of that fantastic cherubic vision away from the Temple and away from Jerusalem. The corresponding mundane fact is the destruction of that Temple and the exile of the people who worshiped there. It’s a sad, dark word indeed. But starting in chapter 40, and even before in the prophetic images of chapter 37, there is a hopeful promise of the light, the presence of God returning and renewing His people.

But when we do get to chapter 40, it also feels like the whole thing starts to “jump the shark,” a term coined from an episode of the “Happy Days” television show when Fonzie jumped over a shark on water skis. It has come to signify a story line in TV or film that adds some absurd gimmick just to keep the viewer’s interest and also signals a decline in quality of the show from that point on. It seems to fit the final chapters of Ezekiel, with his long, dull explication of the layout and dimensions of a hypothetical, never-constructed Temple pictured with the fantastical feature of a river flowing out of it.

The final bit of Ezekiel, chapter 48:30-35, goes even beyond that imaginary Temple to picture the whole city of Jerusalem reconstructed, focusing on the 12 gates to the city, to be named after the 12 tribes of Israel as designated by the original 12 sons of Jacob/Israel. If we turn to the end of Revelation, we realize that the apostle John has taken up that same image and transformed it into a scene of great light, by giving it twelve foundations adorned with twelve kinds of jewels, and making each of the gates a giant pearl (the source of our talk about the “pearly gates”). The new Jerusalem is lit up like a Christmas display, but all with reflected light shining in gem stones.

And that light gleaming off the city of God is there to assure us that He will never abandon us. As the last words of Ezekiel say, “the name of the city will be ‘The Lord is there.'” Our confident hope is that the prophet is right. There is there and here now, as we travel toward that gleaming city, catching glimpses of its light and of His presence along the way.

I can’t remember who it was, maybe Larry Niven, but I recall an essay by a science fiction writer discussing the possibilities of low tech, very simple ways to preserve masses of information. The writer talked about someone else’s suggestion that something like the Library of Congress could be carried upon just two “sticks” of precise length. The ratio between the two lengths would a non-repeating decimal number in which all that information was encoded. The writer also noted the additional suggestion that you wouldn’t even need two sticks, just one with a mark on it in the right place, indicating the ratio between the two parts.

I think more information would be necessary in order to “read” those sticks, such as the measurement system employed or at least the base of the number system. But that image of masses of data saved in such a simple format stuck with me. I remembered it when I read the text I selected from our reading this week in Immerse: Prophets, page 378, Ezekiel 37:15-28. There God tells Ezekiel to take two sticks, mark them with the names of the divided kingdoms of Israel, and then hold them together as if they were one piece of wood. That prophetic image of the two sticks is used to convey a huge vision of God’s plans for both Israel and the world. Most of the remaining chapters of Ezekiel are devoted to fleshing it out (in yet another image of an imaginary temple which was never built).

The big promise in the text is that God will gather His people from the two parts of Israel, the completely defunct and dispersed northern kingdom, and the exiled remnant of the southern kingdom. “I will bring them home to their own land from the places where they have been scattered. I will unify them into one nation on the mountains of Israel.” As any student of Bible history knows well, that prophecy was not fulfilled. Yes, exiles, or at least descendants of exiles from Judah returned to the land. But there was never any real return of those from the tribes in the north.

Yet the prophecy is strangely echoed by our Gospel text from Mark 13:24-37, for the first Sunday in Advent. There Jesus predicts in verse27 that at the time of His return, He will “send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of earth to the ends of the heavens.” So there is a gathering and reunifying of God’s people yet to come. It’s not a literal rejoining of the tribes of Israel, but it is a hope for the bringing together of people from all over the world, from all over creation.

In Ezekiel, the agent of that unification is “My servant David,” who “will be their king, and they will have only one shepherd.” Again it is not a literal promise, not a return of the dead king, but instead a reference to the Messiah who comes from the lineage of David, as we also remember in Advent. That Davidic servant, who Christians know to be Jesus, will “be their prince forever. And I will make a covenant of peace with them, an everlasting covenant.”

In a divided nation in a divided world, that promise of a coming day of unity and peace is particularly sweet. Yet the fulfillment is probably as hard to picture as was the reunification and gathering even of “lost” tribes was for those who first saw and heard Ezekiel display those two sticks and proclaim the rejoining of the people. Yet there it is, across the centuries, from Ezekiel to Jesus, the hope that God will bring together the cracked and broken human race and make us one in Him. That’s a lot of information, an incredibly huge picture there in just two sticks.

And since that unity is the future toward which God’s plan for us is headed, we do well to seek it in whatever ways we can, whether in humble attempts to reach across political or racial divides, or in even the seeking of peace between nations. The Gospel lesson ends with Jesus’ admonition to stay awake and alert, not to sleep away the time of waiting for His return. As He says there, we each have work to do, the work of bridging the divides, seeking out His lost sheep and bringing them home. Yes, it will take His return to complete that work, but it was meant to begin long ago. Why else keep reminding us down through the ages that such is the goal? Let us be about the work of peace. Let’s keep putting the sticks together.

As we waited this year for our oldest daughter (that’s a stock photo there, not our daughter) to give birth to our first grandchild, one of our conversations pretty early on was about COVID-19 concerns. It wasn’t about just the risks of prenatal care visits, going to the hospital for the actual birth, etc. It was a concern about what would happen if, Lord forbid, our daughter contracted the virus. Would it pass on to the baby?

Fortunately, that fear was unfounded and Susan never came down with COVID-19 and, in fact, tested negative shortly before our grandson was born. Perhaps even more fortunately, it appears that transmitting the virus to an unborn baby is something about which pregnant women don’t really need to worry too much. See this discussion of the relevant studies and data on the Harvard Medical School blog.

Yet there are physical conditions which can be transmitted from mother to baby, and pregnant women are given stern warnings about the effects of alcohol, smoking, and other drugs. We also live in an age when we worry about the passing of genetic liabilities from generation to generation. However, our text for this coming Sunday from Ezekiel 18 makes it abundantly clear that, while future generations may be affected greatly by what their parents or even more distant ancestors do, moral responsibility, like the coronavirus, is not transmitted directly from parent to child.

The 18th chapter of Ezekiel opens with God’s questioning of a popular proverb (which also appears in Jeremiah 31:29, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, but their children’s mouths pucker at the taste.” That NLT translation has the right idea, but I still hear the KJV’s more literal rendering of the second half, “the children’s teeth are set on edge.” In any case, it was a way for the exiled people of Judah to deny responsibility for what had happened to them. They were suffering, so they imagined, for the sins of their ancestors.

That shifting of blame seems to be a human universal, starting with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. We see it writ large across the political landscape of our country right now. God answers it all by a careful and explicit denial that He, as the moral judge of the universe, engages in such transference of blame. With the example of shifting character across three generations of a family, the Lord asserts that he holds each human being accountable for his or her, and only his or her, own sins and relationships to God and to other human beings.

In recent conversations about structural racism, a natural question might arise whether those attempting to address racist structures and policies are doing just what God denies, holding present generations accountable for what their ancestors have done. One can imagine those who resist the charges of implicit bias or structural racism also quoting that ancient proverb about parents and children and sour grapes. But we need to read the whole chapter, reflect carefully on what the concerns about structural racism actually are. The point is not to hold present generations morally accountable for what previous generations did, but to hold present generations accountable for their actions once they become aware of unjust structures and unconscious practices.

Through it all here in Ezekiel, there is the idea of individual human free will. Jemar Tisby calls it “contingency” in his book The Color of Compromise. Injustice does not have to be. What one’s parents did for good or for ill does not constrain us, nor does it bind our own character. There is always freedom to disastrously turn from a good path on which parents set us, or to repent and turn from an evil example set by parents, thereby receiving God’s forgiveness and grace.

In the overall ethic of Scripture, Ezekiel 18 stands as a needed corrective to the absolutely correct emphasis on human community and our collective accountability to God and human nature as essentially social. That communal character is real without absolving any of us of individual responsibility for our own behavior and character. We are both one and many (in the parlance of ancient philosophy), just as is God’s own self as Trinity. What one does alone matters and what we do together matters. That’s the biblical ethic of responsibility.

Sibling rivalry is a familiar human phenomenon. It appears in the first few pages of Scripture in the deadly jealousy Cain has for Abel. It’s a theme which continues later in Genesis with the births of Jacob and Esau. That particular rivalry and conflict is at the heart of this week’s sermon text from the obscure and tiny book of the prophet Obadiah.

Like Jude in the New Testament, Obadiah has no chapters, just 21 verses total. While other prophets offer messages that focus directly on Israel or Judah, i.e., those specifically regarded as God’s people, Obadiah focuses on the nation of Edom, a relatively small country south of the Dead Sea. And it’s almost totally a message of judgment. There is little redemptive comfort, other than a triumphant note that Israel, “Jacob,” “Joseph,” will be a flame to burn up Edom, “Esau.”

Thus Obadiah hearkens back to the fact that the people of the small nation of Edom to the south of Israel were regarded as the descendants of Jacob’s brother Esau. The prophet personalizes Israel and Edom by designating them by the names of their ancestors. In verse 10 he proclaims God’s judgment on Edom “because of the violence you did to your close relatives in Israel, you will be filled with shame and destroyed forever.” But literally the Edomites are being chastised for what they did “to your brother Jacob.”

Despite Obadiah’s personification of Israel and Edom as brothers, it’s fairly clear that their populations in his time were more like (very) distant cousins. So there is some justification for the NLT’s “close relatives” translation. In any case, there is a long-standing national enmity rooted in the origins of those two peoples from two (twin) brothers who did not care for each other.

Genesis 33 actually leaves us with some sense that Jacob and Esau were reconciled, but the initial rivalry appears to have been carried down the generations. In Numbers 2o, during Israel’s time in the wilderness, the then king of Edom refuses the Israelite refugees from Egypt safe passage through the land of Edom. They are forced to take a circuitous route around Edom, which results in the Israelites becoming impatient and rebellious against God and Moses. It’s worth noting that, unlike other passage permissions which Israel then took by force when a nation declined, Moses and his people chose not to take up arms against Edom, against kin.

Evidently, though, Edom did not feel such restraint. It’s difficult to date Obadiah’s prophecy and thus to discern exactly when and what Edom’s offense to Israel was in his time. But it most likely arose out of Edom’s actions during the Babylonian invasion of Judah. Psalm 137:7 suggests that Edom had a part in the destruction of Jerusalem. In the apocrypha, the book of I Esdras 45:45 says that the Edomites burned down the Temple during the Babylonian conquest (though it also says elsewhere that the Babylonians burned the Temple). The overall implication is that Edom betrayed an alliance with Judah against the Babylonians, switched sides, and participated in the devastation of Jerusalem. For that betrayal, Obadiah announces judgment.

Jacob and Esau, Israel and Edom, seem like images of many long-standing rivalries and hatreds both large and small in human life. One despairs of any healing or reconciliation. And Obadiah seems to offer little hope in that regard, but instead only the promise of gleeful revenge by Israel and final domination of Edom and its territory.

Honestly, I’m not quite sure what to make of Obadiah in relation to the universal message of mercy and grace in Jesus Christ found in the New Testament. If we can understand “Israel” in the prophet as a stand-in for all those redeemed by the Lord, regardless of race or nationality, then perhaps those closing promises of victory over enemies can be comforting.

That cousin relationship of Edom to Israel might resonate a little for us in the warnings Jesus gave to His followers about commitment to Him causing estrangement even from members of one’s own household. In these polarized times when some forms of Christianity are identifying strongly with political ideologies, we might also consider the possibility that brothers and sisters even in Christ may betray us and become enemies. It’s a terribly sad thought.

Perhaps, though, the best take on Obadiah is to look at the last verse which assures us, “And the Lord himself will be king!” Then we can remember what Jesus taught about the nature of the kingdom of God, forgiveness of enemies and all the rest, and trust that this difficult little prophet is looking forward in hope to the same great day of love and peace toward which Christians aim.

It’s November 4, the day after Election Day, and nothing is settled. All the tension which preceded the election is unresolved as we wait for more votes to counted in a handful of states. For those who care deeply about the results, it feels impossible to relax. And whatever the outcome, it seems as if unrest, rather than rest, is likely.

As we read together the last portion of Jeremiah, chapters 37 to 52, we encounter a time of great unrest in Judah. In the first, prose section, we find the narrative of Jeremiah’s dealings with the people of Jerusalem and their last king, Zedekiah, during the conquest and occupation by Babylon. Jeremiah himself was bounced around in various sorts of imprisonment, including being dropped into the mud at the bottom of a cistern. No rest for that prophet.

Zedekiah and the well-to-do of Jerusalem measure their options, including an escape to Egypt, but Jeremiah prophesies that there is no true refuge for them. Even when Zedekiah attempts escape and is captured, and it seems the city might enjoy a brief respite under a Babylonian appointed governor, rest is short-lived. A scheming noble court official assassinates that governor, bringing down the wrath of Babylon and causing the rest of the nobility to flee to Egypt after all, dragging Jeremiah with them. Jeremiah correctly prophesies that the Babylonians will show up there in Egypt as well. There’s no rest for anyone in those first months of the Babylonian conquest and Jewish exile.

The remainder of Jeremiah after those narratives is mostly a collection of poetic oracles against various nations, making it clear that Judah is merely one of a number of nations to be judged by Babylonian conquest. There is no rest even in surrounding countries. Then there is a long oracle against Babylon itself. God declares that it, in turn, would be judged and conquered. At that time, approximately 70 years from Babylon’s first incursions in to Judah, Jews in Babylon will be able to return and seek rest at home once again.

In the small passage I’ve selected from the start of that oracle against Babylon, the beginning of chapter 50, page 297 in Prophets in the Immerse series we are reading, Jeremiah uses the familiar image of sheep, lost sheep, to describe the plight of the exiles. Up until then, they could not find their way home, but ultimately God will bring them back.

I’m taking the sermon title and theme from a taunt in verse 7 which Jeremiah puts on the lips of the Babylonians toward Judah,

We did nothing wrong in attacking them,
for they sinned against the Lord,
their true place of rest,
and the hope of their ancestors.

It’s a word to all God’s people in all tumultuous, restless times. We must not sin against the Lord by forgetting where our true rest is, what our real hope is, received from those who have gone before us. If biblical history makes anything clear, it is that all the governments of this world will be judged and found wanting and ultimately brought down. If we try to rest in one of those human power structures, we are bound to be disappointed. Our true place of rest is the Lord. Let’s haul our sheepish selves back to His pastures.

At the beginning of our reading this week, we came to a famous image in the prophet Jeremiah, the potter and his clay, a metaphor for God and His people, Jeremiah 18:1-12. It was an image Isaiah also used and Paul takes it up in Romans 9. The general message is that the potter makes whatever he wills from the clay, and, if he is not pleased with the result, has the liberty to smash it down and start over. For Jeremiah this is a symbol of what God is doing with the people of Israel as the Babylonian captivity is beginning. They are being crushed so that God can reform them into something that pleases Him more.

Theologians drawing on Paul’s use of the potter image have seen it as support for a more Calvinistic doctrine of individual predestination, God choosing to do as He please with each human “vessel,” bringing some to redemption and beauty while condemning others to His wrath and destruction. But it’s a mistake in reading both Jeremiah and Romans to interpret the image in individualist terms. In both cases the biblical writers clearly have in mind a lesson about God’s disposition of a group, of the people of Israel in particular.

Moreover, in the Jeremiah text there is a clear indication that a people, a nation, are not mere clay in the Potter’s hands. Their fate very much depends on what they do. So Jeremiah gives us these words from God, verses 7-10:

“If I announce that a certain nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down, and destroyed, but then that nation renounces its evil ways, I will not destroy it as I had planned. And if I announce that I will plant and build up a certain nation or kingdom, but then that nation turns to evil and refuses to obey me, I will not bless it as I said I would.”

So some arbitrary, predestination of individuals by divine fiat seems far from the minds of these Bible writers as they display the potter’s wheel as a picture of God at work. Yet there is here plenty of warning for nations or spiritual communities in regard to how God deals with those who refuse to heed His commands. That’s in fact how the passage ends, with the people saying, “Don’t waste your breath. We will continue to live as we want to, stubbornly following our own evil desires.”

With a little trepidation, I’m going to hazard the guess that God may be currently doing a little crushing and reshaping of His people in our country. This recent article talks about the decline of Christianity among white Americans. And we have long known the geographical center of the bulk of Christian believers has moved east and into the southern hemisphere. I see the divine hand remolding His church, partly in response to the unfaithfulness, injustice, and complacency of western white Christians.

What’s the good news? Just that God promises grace to those who repent and renounce evil ways. God won’t throw us away, but reshape us into something better than we’ve been. As I’ll also say in the sermon this weekend, Jesus Christ is the way He does that. Jesus crushed for sins, rises again to reform us into the human beings God means us to be.

 

I was a freshman in college when I first paid much attention to the little book of the prophet Habakkuk. It was “interterm” at Westmont College and the faculty offered short 2-week courses, often on material that was not their regular discipline. I ended up in a study of Habakkuk with, I think, a chemistry professor. I could not really grasp his fascination with and love for the message of this relatively obscure bit of Scripture.

I did appreciate the fact that Habakkuk asked philosophical questions of God, in particular questions which raise the problem of evil, particularly in relation to human behavior. He begins the book by asking God, “How long…?” How long would God allow “evil deeds,” “destruction and violence,” and the perversion of justice in the courts? All those evils have a contemporary ring to them and I am still inclined to ask such things today about injustices and abuses of power occurring in our country and around the world.

God’s answer to Habakkuk is not very comforting. He intends to punish all that evil and injustice by bringing down upon Judah “a cruel and violent people,” the Babylonians. These agents of God’s vengeance on injustice sweep across the land and devastate everything and everyone in their path.

Then Habakkuk asks how such divine justice can itself be just. The people of Judah may be bad, but the Babylonians are worse. “Should you be silent while the wicked swallow up people more righteous than they?” Then the prophet said he climbed up to his “watchtower… There I will wait to what the Lord says and how he will answer my complaint.” God’s answer is that the power and wealth of the Babylonians will not protect them in turn from divine judgment and that they too will one day “get what you deserve.”

The last bit of God’s answer to Habakkuk does as other prophets have done and compares the Lord to lifeless idols. They are silent but God speaks. In the end, then, “the Lord is in his holy Temple. Let all the earth be silent before him.”

Having raised questions about God’s justice in a very Job-like manner, Habakkuk also finally meets God and we find his attitude, like Job’s changed in the end. The final chapter, our text for this week, is a prayer that describes a vision of God coming in power and glory, wreaking devastation on the Babylonians and all those who do evil. None of which, also like God’s response to Job, answers our very human questions about why all that pain and suffering is necessary.

From the perspective of age I understand, or at least appreciate more now my college professor’s affinity for Habakkuk’s questions and, perhaps to some, unsatisfying conclusion. For I find myself deeply moved, in a way I was not at age 19, by Habakkuk’s final affirmation of faith, that he will simply “wait quietly” for the day God will deal with the invaders. In the meantime he says,

Even though the fig trees have no blossoms,
and there are no grapes on the vines;
even though the olive crop fails,
and the fields lie empty and barren;
even though the flocks die in the fields,
and the cattle barns are empty,
yet will I rejoice in the Lord!
The Lord is my strength!
He makes me as surefooted as a dear,
able to tread upon the heights.

The concluding words of the book are actually a musical notation to accompany the song just shared with stringed instruments. Such a sung prayer, a psalm, answers almost none of my questions “Why?” but it fills me with a sorrowful joy. It acknowledges all that is lost in human wickedness and lets me grieve over it, but at the same time affirms a God of grace who will come to restore and renew someday. In the meantime, one can walk surefooted through perilous times by trusting in that God.

Both I and my children grew up with Walt Disney’s Fantasia as part of our cultural experience. I hope children as well as adults still watch it. It’s incredible how the art of that animated concert has held up for 80 years. One of the most memorable pieces of Fantasia was the Mickey Mouse version of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a story based on a poem by Goethe and set to music by Paul Dukas. In it Mickey the apprentice, one day when the sorcerer is away, attempts to escape the drudgery of hauling water by enchanting a broom to do the work for him.

The result is soon disaster because Mickey does not know how to turn off the magic. Chopping the broom into bits only results in each bit becoming another animated broom which hauls even more water. Soon the sorcerer’s workshop is flooded.

In the Disney movie, Micky is rescued by the return of the sorcerer who is stern and angry with him. In the Goethe poem, the sorcerer tells the apprentice that only a master should summon such spirits. The line became a cliche in German, a line about “the spirits that I called,” used in regard to summoning help that one cannot control, particularly in politics. It’s an image that Christians might do well to recall in these times in America.

In a very little read or preached book of the Old Testament (no reading from it is in the lectionary), there is a passing reference to “magic” (or “sorcery” or “witchcraft”) in verse 4 of chapter 3 of the prophet Nahum. The overall context, both of the chapter and the small book as a whole, is a prediction of the destruction of Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian empire, in God’s judgment for its sins and its offenses against the people of Israel.

In the first few chapters of chapter 3, there is a poetic and graphic description of ancient warfare:

Hear the crack of whips,
the rumble of wheels!
Horses’ hooves pound,
and chariots clatter wildly.
See the flashing swords and glittering spears
as the charioteers charge past!
There are countless casualties,
heaps of bodies–
so many bodies that people stumble over them.

Then the reasons for this vengeance wrought upon the city of Nineveh:

All this because Nineveh,
the beautiful and faithless city,
mistress of deadly charms–
enticed the nations with her beauty.
She taught them all her magic,
enchanting people everywhere.

The magic in sight is not so much the literal working of spells, although that was part of ancient culture. It’s more the “magic” of that “mistress of deadly charms,” that seducing of the nations by Assyria’s wealth (described further on in verse 16, “Your merchants have multiplied until the outnumber the stars” and power. The power in particular seduced Judah during the reign of king Ahaz, who formed an alliance with Assyria against the northern kingdom of Israel. Assyria then turned and subjugated Judah under King Hezekiah and was only turned away from destroying Jerusalem by divine intervention.

Magic is really about power and control. Assyria’s magic was its ability to convince other nations of its power and even to welcome it, as the Assyrian general Sennacherib suggested to Hezekiah in Isaiah chapter 36. But both history and the biblical record, including Nahum’s prophecy, show that such power is of the sorcerer’s apprentice sort, a seductive illusion of control that soon overpowers those who seek to employ it.

Nahum reassures us that God is not blind to the destruction wrought by the magic of power and that it will have its own judgment. And our Gospel lesson about the vineyard in Matthew 21:33-46 show us how God ultimately responds to such power by submitting to it in the crucifixion and death of His own Son, which actually results in victory and vanquishing of evil power in the Resurrection.

For us right now, it would be well to heed Nahum and the sorcerer’s apprentice and beware the seductive magic of power, to be wary of the “spirits” we summon in a bid to control what happens in the world around us. Nahum reminds us that power belongs only to God and that our attempts to employ it, even for good, will often turn out like Mickey’s misadventure.

In a college history of philosophy class I learned of Immanuel Kant’s insistence that ethical imperatives are universal and absolute. For instance, one must not lie in any circumstances, including to save the Jews hiding from the Nazis in your basement. Many of us, including yours truly, would conclude at that point that Kant is just silly and that the expedient, life-saving lie is sometimes necessary and morally acceptable (yes, I know the Corrie Ten Boom story).

The problem with that, I think, quite reasonable approach to Kant’s absolutism is that it leaves us open to further and further inroads on the truth in the name of expediency. How many lies by public officials shall we tolerate in the name of various political goals? For some the answer appears to be, “Quite a few.” The outcome, though, is that in culture accustomed to public lying the truth becomes almost indiscernible.

The prophet Isaiah, in chapter 59, pictures for us a society in which truth has taken a bad fall, a culture filled with, even based on lies. It has become almost impossible to tell what is true and false. Verses 3 and 4 report, “Your lips are full of lies. . . No one cares about being fair and honest.” Then verses 14 and 15 state, “Truth stumbles in the streets, and honesty has been outlawed. Yes, truth is gone, and anyone who renounces evil is attacked.”

The overall concern of Isaiah in this chapter is justice, but he correctly discerns that justice depends heavily on truth-telling. Without truth, justice falls too. Even Superman knew that in the late 50s television show that told of his “never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.” These days I might wonder about whether Christians can embrace the third of those aims, but at least they are in a healthy order, with truth coming first.

In Hebrew the word used by Isaiah for truth is ehmet. Evidently some rabbis like to point out that the three Hebrew letters of the word are the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. They conclude that truth embraces the beginning, middle and end of every concern. That again gives truth its proper priority in the pursuit of human aims like a just society.

I believe that one of the great gifts Christians can offer the world is a thorough-going commitment to truth of all sorts. Good Christian scholarship is ruled by a dictum perhaps first stated clearly by Augustine, “… let every good and true Christian understand that wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master…” But even earlier Christians like Irenaeus and Justin Martyr argued that all truth should be properly claimed by Christians. Justin said, “Whatever things were rightly said among all [people] are the property of us Christians.” Those sentiments are captured in the simple slogan, “All truth is God’s truth.”

Of course we also ground our Christian claim to truth in the fact that our Lord tells us that He Himself is the Truth. Commitment to the truth is at root a commitment to the One who is the Truth. But if all truth is rightly the possession of Christians, then we ought to be a little jealous about it, and maybe a lot upset when it is abused. And I mean being upset not just about the distortion and denial of our own peculiarly Christian truth in Scripture and doctrine but being concerned about truth of all sorts, whether it is speech in the public square, science, history, or even simple attribution of authorship for Facebook memes.

So my hope is to let the words of Isaiah call us to the assistance of truth in every arena where it is stumbling, putting it back on its feet in our own speech and communication of every sort. Let us seek truth and thereby seek true justice in and through the Lord of Truth.

I’ve been unable to discover when the English word “idol” first began to be used in a positive sense. The first use of the term “idolize” in relation to honoring a human being appears to be from the late 16th century. But a term which in the Bible and for at least three quarters of the Christian era functioned solely as a pejorative term for foreign gods now is in common use to denote a person who is respected, or at least popular, and who is often held up as an example for others. Though such usage clearly predates the television show “American Idol,” that bit of popular culture has engraved the secondary use upon the American mind and probably supplanted the primary meaning of the term. It’s likely many currently would find nothing pejorative in the term “idol” at all.

Yet the usage of “idol” in Scripture is uniformly negative. The second commandment forbids idols. In Acts 17, Paul is grieved when he walks through Athens and finds the city “full of idols.” And in the prophets, idolatry is roundly and repeatedly condemned and even mocked. For our sermon text this week I’ve selected a couple of passages from our reading of Isaiah in Prophets, Isaiah 41:1-10 and Isaiah 44:6-20. I noticed verse 7 in the first passage years ago and thought the image of an idol being nailed down so it would not fall over was especially humorous, especially in light of the story in I Samuel 5 about the Philistine idol of their god Dagon falling on its face in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant.

The second passage from Isaiah 44 is an extended bit of idol mockery, detailing the process of idol carving and then pointing out that wooden idols, in particular, are made from the same material one burns to cook food.

What is interesting and instructive in both texts is that mocking the worship of idols is not an end in itself. In both texts and throughout the prophets, idols are denigrated in comparison to the true God. There is often, as there is in these texts, an account of what God has done for His people, followed by the question, implied or explicit, of whether an idol would be capable of anything like that. Thus in verse 17 of chapter 44 the idol maker is pictured completing his work, then falling down before the image he has made and saying, “Rescue me! For you are my god!” The implication being that it is only the uncreated God who made all things who rescues and saves.

One might wonders if the prophets are being a bit unfair to the idolators in and around Israel. One imagines they might have created images with the same intent that Christian statues, paintings, icons, etc. are made today. They are not objects of worship in themselves, but vehicles by which a supernatural being being represented is honored. It seems fairly clear that statues of the classical gods of Greece and Rome were understood in that representative way. Paul seems to acknowledge that in Acts 17 when he suggests that a Greek shrine to an “Unknown God” is actually directed toward the true God who created the world.

That more charitable construal of idols is worth considering in both intramural dialogue both between Christians about images and in interfaith dialogue with non-Christians. Though there has certainly been and continues to be much simple and foolish belief in magical/supernatural power invested in material objects, the larger point is the comparison of every lesser object of worship with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Contemporary Christians tend to be conscious that the idols of our time are often less explicitly physical images of gods. As that secondary use of the term “idol” suggests, the idols which tempt us can often be other people. They can also be flags or political parties, possessions (Jesus made us very aware of the idol often named “Mammon”) or ideologies other than the Gospel. Yet all of these need to be held up to the prophet’s vivid comparison. Can any of these rescue us like God can rescue us?

To that end of keeping that comparison front and center, we may want to reign in our own tendency to mock or denigrate the idols or gods of others and emphasize our celebration of the glory and salvation of our God as displayed in Christ our Savior. Like Isaiah, we might freely invite comparison and let our Lord speak for Himself as He does in Isaiah 44:6, 7, “I am the First and the Last; there is no other God. Who is like me?”