My Old Sermon Blog

The great biblical theologian Karl Barth entitled his magnum opus, Church Dogmatics. The multiple thick volumes of Barth’s Dogmatics were in 2oth century theology a watershed that held back the tide of liberal watering down of the biblical message. His work helped restore Christian confidence in the basic story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For this coming Sunday, the “Baptism of the Lord,” the text from Acts chapter 10, verses 34-43, stands in place of an epistle reading and rehearses that basic story of the life and work of Jesus. It is a kind of mini-dogmatics. Peter’s sermon capsulizes Luke’s Gospel and looks very much like what was preached earlier in Acts by Peter as well as by Stephen and Philip in various contexts. There in chapter 10 the context is Peter speaking to the household of a Gentile, the Roman centurion Cornelius.

It’s fairly clear that Peter and the other early Christian witnesses accepted this basic story of Jesus: His anointing by the Holy Spirit; His miracles; His death by crucifixion (“hanging him on a tree,” verse 39); His resurrection from the dead; His authority to judge; forgiveness of sins in His name. It’s a brief statement of what Christians came to call “dogma,” settled opinion essential to genuine Christian faith.

However, in modern times the word “dogma” and being “dogmatic” fell into very poor repute. It began to imply “acceptance of authority without adequate grounds” (from an old Webster’s dictionary). Even in Barth’s time it was an unusual and bold move to deliberately label one’s work as “dogmatics.”

Yet there is a place for dogma in Christian life. If we are going to center ourselves around the person whom God calls His “beloved Son” in the Gospel for Sunday, Matthew 3:17, then the basic facts about who He is and what He did will be essential for us. It makes sense to be “dogmatic” about those things.

What we need to be less dogmatic about are issues just like the one surrounding Peter’s preaching in our text. Shall only those from a certain background and who embrace a certain very specific form of life be welcomed into the company of those receiving that dogmatic good news? For Peter it was the question of bringing the message to Gentiles and sitting at table with them in violation of Jewish dietary restrictions. For us, it may be a question of whether we genuinely wish to share the good news of Jesus beyond our own racial and cultural circles and practices and be in actual fellowship with others outside those circles.

As thoughtful Christians have always understood, we need to be dogmatic, but only about the things which really matter. Of course, sometimes discerning what really matters will be difficult and full o disagreement. But at least we know what remains at the core of it all. Thank you, Peter.

 

Among the mysteries I am pondering as the new year begins are the ratings on the Rotten Tomatoes web site for two films Beth and I watched as we greeted the new year. The first, a Brad Pitt vehicle called Ad Astra, was highly rated by critics (84% positive according to Rotten Tomatoes). Audience ratings, with which we agreed, told a different story. It was a pretentious mess joining together horrible space technology nonsense with banal pop psychology, all pretending to be some great journey of the self.

On the other hand, the film we did enjoy, Netlflix’s Murder Mystery, was more or less panned by both critics and audience (45% and 41% positive, respectfully). However, we had some good laughs at the antics which were somewhat reminiscent of older comedies and a send-up of the Murder on the Orient Express genre of multiple-suspect mysteries.

The above is all a light hearted lead in to a preview of my first sermon of the year, for Epiphany Sunday, based on the epistle reading from Ephesians 3:1-12. It’s about a mystery which is no longer secret. That is pretty much the case with what the Bible calls mystery. It’s not about deep, hidden things beyond human understanding, but about the things God has revealed in Jesus Christ. Here, it is especially about the inclusion of Gentiles in the Gospel.

The themes of revelation and inclusion are, of course, tied together thoroughly in the Gospel text for Epiphany. The magi are led by the revealing light of the star to worship the young child Christ. Thereby foreigners, non-Jews, are included in the story of Jesus from the very beginning.

Like any good mystery story, there were hints of the mystery, of that glorious including grace of God, in all that had gone before in the history of God’s people in Israel. But with Jesus the mystery is fully revealed. Now the only mystery remaining is how we will let that grace of Christ which is for all people play out in our own lives and in our service to Him.

We greeted the confirmation that we truly were expecting our first child with joy. After postponing children for 7 years so I could finish graduate school and seminary first, we were more than ready for that baby to come along. Likewise for our second after an interval of another 6 years, that time not by design. Both of our daughters were long awaited and gladly anticipated.

So it’s hard for me to understand the situation when a pregnancy is not greeted so gladly. But I can use my imagination to grasp and even empathize with how circumstances might make one feel the arrival of a child will be challenging or even overwhelming. Honestly, being new parents is hard enough even when that little one is loved and wanted.

This fourth Sunday of Advent, the Old Testament lesson, Isaiah 7:10-16, and Gospel lesson, Matthew 1:18-25, give us snapshots of two men who received the promise of a baby. Though they are separated by hundreds of years, the promised infant turns out to be the same holy Child.

The promise was first heard around 730 B.C. by the man who was then king of Judah, Ahaz. It was God’s response through the prophet Isaiah to Ahaz’s unwillingness to ask a sign of God after one was offered. Fairly clearly, the sign was originally intended to be assurance for the young king that God would protect him from his enemies to the north. But it’s likely that Ahaz had already connived his own political solution, a questionable alliance with another more powerful and more dangerous enemy.

So when Ahaz refused to receive a sign he would have understood, God gave him a sign much less plain to him, but much more pregnant, if you will, with potential, the prophecy that a young woman, a maiden, a virgin, would conceive and bear a son who would be named Immanuel, “God with us.” It is unclear if there was any birth in Ahaz’s time which might have fulfilled the prophecy, although both Isaiah and Ahaz had sons who might have been the eighth century child meant in the prophecy.

What is clear is that more than seven hundred years later an angel came to the carpenter named Joseph and spoke that same prophecy to him in a dream, this time clearly using the word “virgin” and assuring him that his betrothed’s pregnancy was in fact this promise fulfilled. In this case, the words found a willing welcome as Joseph arose and “did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.” And that difference between two men’s responses to the promise of a baby has made all the difference in the world.

As the rain falls gray and chilling around me here in western Oregon, the Arizona Highways magazine arrives to remind me that skies are clearer and temperatures warmer there in the state that was home to my mother’s family. I am blessed to be able to visit there once or twice a year and drive again highways through desert and mountain landscapes which have a desolate beauty with which I resonate.

I am also very aware from desert journeys of my childhood, before air conditioning in cars was common, of how blistering and unwelcoming a desert highway can be. The stretch of what is now I-10 between Los Angeles and the cut off in Arizona to Prescott is seared into my memory as a forbidding ride through hot, sandy desert where we more than once encountered blowing sand which forced us to pull over.

Growing up with trips through the desert also gave me memories of occasions when we would travel there in cooler seasons and the desert would present itself in ways often photographed in Arizona’s iconic tourist magazine. The seemingly barren landscape would blossom in vast fields of colored blooms. So that is the image in my mind as I read the beginning of this week’s text from Isaiah 35:1-10. I know for a fact that the desert can “rejoice and blossom,” even “blossom abundantly.”

But those hot summer car rides of my youth, through bare desert without a flower in sight, also help me appreciate what the text goes on to say, “Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees.” Yes, we were riding, not walking, but those sweaty hours in the car were hard on a child’s patience. It was always a huge treat to stop for a meal or a snack, to be given a can of pop or a milk shake (but not one of the then ubiquitous “date shakes” sold at establishments across that stretch of highway). Sometimes a bag of ice was bought and placed on the rubber floor mat beside our feet, bringing sighs of relief.

Isaiah’s lush prophetic images of the exiles’ return journey from Babylon suggest their own purely physical pleasure and relief from the heat, dryness and dangers of a desert highway between Babylon and Judah. Of course, the actual return journey at the end of the exile offered no such comforts. So these verses take on a future significance, a promise of blessings to come reaching beyond the return from exile and into the age of the Messiah.

In particular, the promises of healing in verses 5 and 6 are taken up by Jesus and applied to Himself in our Gospel lesson from Matthew 11:2-11 this week. John the Baptist in prison wondered if the Man he reluctantly baptized is in the fact the promised one. Jesus sent word to John that Isaiah’s promises regarding an even greater return for God’s people were being fulfilled… with one addition: “the dead are raised.” As John sat, very likely contemplating the likelihood of being executed, Jesus assured him that death was not the end of his hope.

As we pass through whatever dry “deserts” which lie before us, even the bleak desert of impending death, let us cling to the promises fulfilled in Jesus, not just the miracle of a blossoming desert, but the miracle of resurrection.

This Sunday’s Old Testament text, Isaiah 11:1-10, the prophetic lesson for the second Sunday of Advent, has way more than a single sermon in it. There are at least four distinct parts which each merit full expository treatment: 1) the first verse by itself; 2) verses 2-3a; 3) verses 3b-5; and 4) verses 6-10. Though I’ve chosen to focus on the last of these, the prophecy of a “peaceable kingdom” (to use an older style of speaking), I’ll be trying to show how the the first five verses support and lead into our expectation of that peaceful kingdom.

That first verse expresses an expectation for a descendant of King David, whose father was named Jesse. That “shoot… from the stump of Jesse,” that “branch… out of his roots,” we understand to be Jesus Christ, born in His human nature into the Davidic lineage. As Isaiah calls Him elsewhere, He is the Prince of Peace, the source and founder of a kingdom eventually meant to look like what is described in verses 6-10.

The second piece of the text, verse 2 and the first part of 3, has a special place in Catholic theology. While Protestants have fixated on what are termed “spiritual gifts” in the New Testament, the church fathers early on saw in this text seven “gifts of the Holy Spirit” poured out on Jesus and intended for every Christian. There is a little confusion in that in Hebrew there are only six distinct correlates here to “spirit of,” with “fear of the Lord” being mentioned again at the beginning of verse 3. But in the Septuagint (Greek translation), which basically was the Old Testament for the early church, “fear of the Lord” at the end of verse 2 is replaced with “piety” or “godliness.”

Those seven (or six if you must) spiritual gifts are pretty much intellectual qualities which empower what comes in the third section, the ability of “Jesse’s branch” to judge and instruct with perfect justice. That justice then becomes the foundation of the peaceful kingdom painted in gorgeous imagery by perfect harmony in the natural order.

Note that the end of verse 9 and then verse 10 bring us back around to the recognition that the peaceful kingdom arrives as those spiritual gifts of the mind are made present in human beings. Thus “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord,” and “the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him…”

Thus we realize that the peaceable kingdom arrives among us as we are instructed by Christ, receive the Holy Spirit’s gifts of grasping that instruction, and put it into action in our own lives. While that kingdom is as yet incomplete, certainly not yet wholly peaceful, we wait in hope for that day when He will come back to dwell with us forever, “and his dwelling shall be glorious.”

A few years ago my wife and I drove north a little way out of Anchorage, Alaska, hoping to catch a glimpse of Denali, the highest mountain in North America. We didn’t have time to drive very long at all (Denali is several hours from Anchorage), but it was a fairly clear day and so we tried to see the mountain without going too far. I think we succeeded, but, honestly, I’m not sure if we were looking at the right mountain or not. It is possible, however.

I know that I did in fact see Denali much closer up over 40 years ago on a Boy Scout trip to Alaska when I was 16. From the 30 or 40 miles distance to which one can approach Denali on a road, it towers over all the mountains around it, making them look like small hills. That huge mountain, 20,308 feet high, was an incredible sight which I still remember and have unfulfilled fantasies about climbing. I’ve never had the time, resources, or training for such an adventure.

The Old Testament prophecy text for the first Sunday in Advent this year, Isaiah 2:1-5, proclaims in verse 2 that the mountain upon which Jerusalem sits, “the mountain of the Lord’s house, shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills.” It’s a pretty audacious claim for a hill barely more than 2,400 feet high, dwarfed by all the truly significant mountains of the world.

Yet of course the prophet is not speaking of a literal, physical raising of Jerusalem’s elevation. The text speaks of a change in the spiritual perspective of the peoples of the world. The mountain which symbolizes the presence of God will become the world’s most important destination because people will turn and stream toward God Himself. Verse 3 says, “Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.'”

I’ve come to pretty strongly reject dispensationalist interpretations which focus on literal Jerusalem or Israel as the subject of this and other prophetic passages about those places. Such interpretations distract us from the call to “walk in his paths,” and have fueled foolish support for the modern state of Israel which continues to practice serious injustice toward Palestinians, including many Palestinian Christians.

This prophecy of the rise of the “mountain of the Lord” should first and foremost be understood to have already been fulfilled in the coming of Jesus Christ to that place, to Jerusalem. In dying and rising there, Jesus sent “instruction, and the word of the Lord” from there out to the world, and called all people to Himself.

The end result is not a rearrangement of earthly geography, but a rearrangement of human life as prophesied in verse 4, the complete fulfillment of which we still await. In Jesus we shall find peace and the end of war. That is the direction in which are lives as Christians are meant to be aimed. That is the mountain we ought to be gearing up to climb.

I’ve had my Oregon “vanity” license plate for a number of years. I like to think it is a clever jest from a biblical text, but many people simply don’t get it or look at me a little blankly when I explain. But after carrying that reference around on my rear end for a decade, it’s time I preached on the text, Job 41. Our congregation’s recent reading together of Job in the Tyndale Immerse series volume Poets seems an opportune moment.

For those who have clicked the link or looked it up, you have discovered that this is the grand but enigmatic description in God’s voice of a creature named “Leviathan” in Hebrew. The first verse in the NLT we’ve been reading from begins, “Can you catch Leviathan with a hook?” But I always remember and quote it from the King James, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?” Those words overlaying an Oregon salmon license plate constitute my little joke for a pastor’s vehicle which doubles as fishing transport.

A fishing pastor after my own heart, Eugene Peterson, in his The Message paraphrase, puts the question of that first verse like this, “Or can you pull in the sea beast, Leviathan, with a fly rod and stuff him in your creel?”

Various identifications have been made of the creature being named in this chapter, from an attempt to identify some actual earthly water denizen to a mythical creature, even a dragon. The Ancient Christian Commentary volume on Job says that pretty much all the church fathers interpreted Leviathan (and Behemoth in the previous chapter) as an allegorical image of Satan. And Thomas Hobbes famously named his work on the monarchical state Leviathan to evoke the creature’s majesty and power as an image for a government formed by implicit social contract.

By far the worst, in my opinion, interpretation/translation of Leviathan is the modern notion of making him a crocodile (see a footnote in the NRSV). As intimidating as that toothy amphibian might be in some situations, to my mind the crocodile inspires more of a wry grin at its shape and locomotion than awe at its size and power. And I think even ancient people were perfectly capable of capturing and caging a crocodile. I prefer to picture Leviathan as an immense mythical sea monster.

In any case, this chapter aims to declare God’s power and authority over even the most powerful and daunting of earthly, and perhaps spiritual, creatures. In verse 10, God says, “And since no dares to disturb it [Leviathan], who then can stand up to me?” In other words, since God is creator and ruler of even a creature like this, how could anyone, like Job, dare to confront God?

Thus I suggest that the church fathers’ allegorical notions were pretty much on track. No matter what great monster we confront as God’s people, whether the devil himself or some beastly government gone bad, God is in control and has sovereign power over it. If the proudest creature on earth, the king of beasts (verse 34) is still subject to God, then likewise for all the evils of life which may cause us to tremble in our boots.

As Paul says in I Corinthians 15:57 about the monster of death, “But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ,” and also says in Romans 8:39 “[nothing] in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

She had been unjustly jailed and spent a horrible night in a dank cell in a small town, until her friend and lawyer showed up to read the sheriff and deputies the riot act and get her out. That’s part of the story line in C. J. Box’s latest novel, The Bitterroots. His private investigator heroine, Cassie Dewell, is overcome with relief when her friend appears to pull her from a bad situation.

Our text from Job 19:23-27a displays Job expressing in verse 25 a hope for a deliverance similar to Cassie’s, for Job’s own “Redeemer” to appear and vindicate or save him from the trials he is experiencing. Capitalization of the word “redeemer” in many modern English translations reflects the ancient Christian consensus that we find here a reference to the divine Redeemer Himself, Jesus Christ.

Yet modern (since the nineteenth century) interpretation of this text in Job has tended to downplay or try to debunk the notion that the “redeemer” Job expects is divine. Even more, they seek to dissuade us from the familiar, traditional (in Handel’s Messiah for instance) understanding of verse 26, that the hoped for experience of a Redeemer will involve a resurrection, that Job looks forward to seeing God “in my body” (“flesh” in many translations).

I confess that I lack the skills in Hebrew to properly evaluate the arguments of the scholars pro and con for seeing here in Job’s words an expression of hope in a divine redeemer and in a bodily resurrection. There is at least some ambiguity in the words. But it seems the case for a negative evaluation of the traditional view turns in part on one simple linguistic matter and a couple of non-linguistic considerations.

Linguistically, the word for “redeemer” in Hebrew here is ga’al, which often signifies a human vindicator or avenger. However, the word is clearly also used to refer to divine activity and even to God Himself, as in the familiar Psalm 19:14.

Non-linguistically, one argument is that a lively expression of hope in a redeemer and resurrection does not really fit Job’s overall pessimistic tone in the course of his conversation with his “comforters.” This is somewhat true, but needs to be tempered by recognition of Job’s unwavering commitment to God despite feeling unjustly treated by God.

There is also lurking in the background of the modern interpretations the often asserted but often poorly argued position that there is no theology of resurrection or even the concept of an afterlife in the Hebrew scriptures. If one points to Daniel 12, modern scholars will often argue that this is a late (second century B.C.) text and thus not truly reflective of the mindset of ancient Israel in regard to what follows human death.

Though it takes us somewhat astray I will simply note that it appears to me that the odd story of the witch of Endor summoning the spirit of Samuel in I Samuel 28 pretty much devastates the notion that the Hebrew people had no concept of an afterlife. Whether or not the story of Samuel’s appearance after death is truth or fiction, it would have been incoherent to those who first heard and passed it along if they had no notions regarding human existence after death.

And of course, Jesus Himself in our Gospel reading for this Sunday, Luke 20:27-38, finds evidence in the Hebrew Bible for resurrection in the simple fact that Moses’ and then Israel’s expression of faith in “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” implies that those patriarchs are still alive, because “he is God not of the dead, but of the living.”

So I plan this Sunday to unabashedly affirm Job’s belief in a divine Redeemer and hope in bodily resurrection from the dead. He almost certainly did not grasp all that it would come to mean and imply, but he suffered his trials in the same faith and hope by which we as followers of Christ also endure and look forward.

Many people saw and were moved by the poignant photo of Brandt Jean offering a hug to Amber Guyger, the police offer who shot to death his brother Botham Jean after entering Jean’s apartment by mistake, thinking it was her own. It might appear to be the epitome of how we as Christians ought to express forgiveness.

However, what might be less well known, as least to my white friends, is the reaction that image provokes among people of color, especially African-Americans. Many of my Covenant African-American friends would ask that white Christians not imagine that such heroic acts of forgiveness actually bring closure to the pain and suffering of their communities. That hug must not be construed as excusing racial prejudice, constant abuse of white privilege, and centuries of systemic injustice that has disadvantaged and oppressed non-white people.

In this week’s sermon text psalm, Psalm 99, from our Poets reading as a congregation, I’d like to note verse 8. It struck me many years ago when I first noticed it appear in one of the psalms for my daily prayers. It still gives me pause whenever it comes around in that cycle of psalms for prayer:

O Lord our God, you answered them.
You were a forgiving God to them,
but you punished them when they went wrong.

The seeming paradox of that verse, both forgiveness and punishment at the hands of God, seems especially important to linger over in these times. Earlier in the psalm we read in verse 4,

Mighty King, lover of justice,
you have established fairness.
You have acted with justice
and righteousness throughout Israel.

Justice seems very much the issue in that tension we find in verse 8, a tension that arises just because our God is a lover of justice and fairness (equity). If God Himself can both forgive and punish then we need to consider the truth that forgiveness does not vacate or neutralize justice. Brandt Jean can offer that hug while still justly desiring that Guyger be punished for her crime. Even more, that hug can be offered without at all eliminating the need for drastic changes in a society where people of color are hugely more at risk of suffering the kind of injustice experienced by Botham Jean and more recently by Atatiana Jefferson who was shot by another police officer just about 30 miles from where Jean died.

My white friends may want to say that these shootings and other injustices were mistakes, aberrations, not the usual course of things. People just need to forgive and move on. The problem is that we are part of an evil, broken, unjust society in which these sorts of “mistakes” happen much more often to people who are not white than to those who are. I can attest to that in regard to a recent incarceration experienced by a developmentally disabled man of color in our own congregation. He might have ended up in mental health treatment rather than jail if he had been white.

Our God loves justice. In celebrating our Lord’s loving forgiveness, let’s not forget that other love of His. In our Gospel for this week, Luke 18:1-8, Jesus declares, “And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?” Maybe we need to think more about the Jeans and Jeffersons in our communities and worry that the promised justice of God might include some punishment for our own injustice against such people.

A young men at our church, a programmer, used to sport a T-shirt which reads, “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.” Categorizing people into two types is something we do both humorously and seriously all the time. We can joke that “There are two types of people in the world: those who think there are two types of people in the world and those who don’t.” More seriously, Christians reading the Bible are fairly apt to believe there are just two types of people, the righteous and the wicked or the saved and the lost.

Dichotomies fill our thinking about others. We categorize in terms of rich and poor, white and people of color, male and female, and all sorts of other binary distinctions we perceive in the world, whether correctly or not.

The book of Proverbs is no stranger to this “two-types-of-people”  thinking. We see wise vs. foolish, wicked vs. righteous, poor vs. rich, lazy vs. diligent, honest vs. dishonest, and several other bifurcations throughout its pages. Yet when we turn to Proverbs 9, we find female personifications of Wisdom and Folly, two women who’ve been vying with each other all along in Proverbs, addressing just a single type of person. In verse 4, we hear of Wisdom, “‘Come in with me,’ she urges the simple.” In verse 16, exactly the same the same is said of Folly, “‘Come in with me,’ she urges the simple.”

In other words, there is really only one kind of person in the world. At root we are all fallen, sinful, foolish human beings desperately in need of instruction. The only difference is the invitation and instruction to which we respond, to Wisdom’s call to come and learn and find life, or to Folly’s call to come and remain ignorant and remain dead.

Verse 10 of Proverbs 9 centers Wisdom’s house firmly in the sphere of right relation to God, “Fear of the Lord is the foundation of wisdom.” Ultimately, the choice between wisdom and foolishness is a choice to come to God or not.

Yet we all start in the same place. We all start out “simple,” sinful, lost. Things change when we realize the truth of that, when admit our ignorance and foolishness. We move away from Folly, about whom we hear in verse 13, “She is ignorant and doesn’t know it.” Declining Folly’s invitation, we cease to be the sort of person who would claim “great and unmatched wisdom.”

Ultimately, as Socrates discerned long ago, the difference between foolish and wise people is only their choice of direction, the invitation they accept. Moving away from claims to wisdom, the truly wise seek out instruction from Wisdom itself, from the One God, who actually has great wisdom. May we all, as this chapter urges, be wise enough to admit our need for correction and instruction and turn toward the “house” that is full of life.

“It’s O.K. to cry,” is pretty standard popular psychology advice. It also happens to be true. We seem to hear about men who supposedly still embrace some sort of macho male etiquette which forbids weeping or about women in business who do all they can to suppress tears for fear of displaying weakness. But my guess is that most adults do in fact regularly shed tears and, while they are perhaps embarrassed about in some social settings, most do not feel it wrong to cry.

At the same time, it is probably true that references to tears and weeping are much more prevalent in the culture of the Bible than in our own. Most people of that time were unembarrassed to shed tears or talk about their sorrows in public. In the famous shortest verse of Scripture we see it said of the Lord Himself, “Jesus wept.”

The biblical figure most associated with tears is probably Jeremiah. He had plenty to cry out. As God’s man presiding prophetically over the fall and destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C., he had plenty to cry about. Rembrandt’s painting shows him bowed in sorrow beside the burning, broken, and looted city of Jerusalem.

Our reading from Immerse: Poets this week includes a little book traditionally attributed to Jeremiah, Lamentations. Serious scholarship is about 50/50 on that attribution. Christian Scripture places Lamentations just after Jeremiah, basically accepting the tradition, but Hebrew Scripture puts it between Ruth and Ecclesiastes, leaving the authorship question open.

There is no doubt, however, that the book’s subject is lament over the fall of Jerusalem, contemporaneous with Jeremiah. For Jews the book is still read on Tisha b’Av, a summer day of fasting remembering the destructions of both the first and second temples.

For this Sunday’s sermon, I’ve chosen a text from the center of the book, Lamentations 3:19-51. It starts and ends with sorrow, but in the middle are words of hope, including some words in verses 22 and 23 made incredibly familiar by praise songs and hymns.

My hope is that a little time with this sad little book will remind us of the prominent place lament and tears have in God’s Word and also in God’s structuring of our lives. Jeremiah or whoever is very clear in verses 40-45 that the sorrows of his people have at least part of their origin in God Himself. Let us not be afraid to go to God with our own tears for what happens to us and to those around us.

This week our congregation has begun reading together once again a volume from Tyndale’s Immerse edition of the Scriptures. This fall it is Poets, the books of the Bible which include the clearly poetic books Psalms, Song of Songs, and Lamentations but which also includes those books we typically call “wisdom literature,” Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

Our first week reading was Psalms 1-41, the first “book” of the 5 books which make up Psalms in the Hebrew text. I’ve selected as my preaching text for Sunday the last of that section, Psalm 41. It seemed that the last psalm of Book One should have some significance, yet it also seems to be a less familiar, less discussed psalm.

I noted immediately the theme of health which governs most of Psalm 41, although prosperity (happiness in NRSV) is also mentioned (promised?) early on in verse 2. So-called “Health and Wealth” gospel came to mind. Is there a sort of promise here to claim that God will bless us with health and prosperity? I don’t think so.

For one thing, note the condition stated at the outset for those health and happiness blessing. The psalm begins by saying that joy or happiness will be the lot of “those who are kind to the poor.” That’s hardly what contemporary health and wealth preachers tell us. Their spiels are typically founded on some misguided notion that one must simply “claim” the blessings God wants to give. But the psalmist here suggests that God blesses those whose hearts are compassionate toward others in a way that mirrors God’s own compassion.

Moreover, the main section of the psalm, the majority of it, flies in the face of health and wealth preaching which suggests that those who are truly blessed by God will escape illness and misfortune. Instead, verse 3 says that the Lord will be there alongside when one is sick, the premise being that one will get sick. It’s wonderful irony that I write this while suffering from a cold!

So the biggest section of Psalm 41 is a prayer for healing together with a complaint about enemies who pose as comforters (maybe like Job’s comforters, whom we will also consider later this fall). Rather than a picture of unfailing prosperity and healthy, we get a much more realistic image of health that sometimes fails and human thoughts in time of illness.

Overall, however, the illness and complaint is “book-ended” by trust in God, from the first three verses confidence in God’s provision of happiness and health, to verses 11 and 12 again stating trust that God will give victory over both illness and oppressive human enemies.

I’m going to suggest that the psalm gives us very human space to complain and trust in God at the same time, much like Jesus did in His arrest and crucifixion. The final conviction of the psalmist is that he will be brought “into your [God’s] presence forever.” That is a hope that goes beyond any temporal health or wealth.

Prosperity gospel is just false. That’s the consistent teaching of Scripture. As Jesus concludes in our Gospel reading from Luke 16:1-13 this Sunday, “you cannot serve both God and money.” Instead our health and wealth rests in the Lord’s presence with us and ultimately in our presence with Him.

Jesus has a sense of humor. This Sunday’s Gospel lesson, Luke 14:25-33, proves it. Jesus told a couple of snarky little parables which very likely pointed a grinning finger at recent public events and the associated personages, a tower builder who did not calculate the cost needed for his project and could not complete it, and a king going out to war without determining whether the size of his military was sufficient against the force of the enemy. Both enterprises were absurd failures. We might consider those stories in relation to public figures and events today.

Jesus’ lesson was, of course, about counting the cost of following Him, what Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously termed, “The Cost of Discipleship.” He began the whole speech with the difficult demand that those who follow Him “hate” father, mother, wife, children, brothers and sisters. We’re helped with that word a little by biblical scholars who tell us it’s a Hebrew way of saying we must love Jesus more than all those family members. Yet even that is not simple and without cost. We reflected on that struggle to put Jesus first a few weeks ago in Luke 9:57-62.

People who make huge sacrifices without visible tangible benefits tend to be scorned. An entrepreneur who racks up large debt to get a small business started is a genius if money starts rolling in, but questions begin to arise if time goes by and no profit appears. For instance, financial folks are beginning to wonder about Uber, which, despite incredible growth in revenue, has never turned a profit and lost 5 billion dollars in the second quarter of this year.

Business failures, political failures, military failures are all the subject of satire and public scorn. Some would call such people “losers,” and profess a preference for “winners.”

Jesus, however, likes losers. Not those who suffer large financial or power losses because they’ve failed to carefully discern the cost of their fiscal, political or military ventures, but Jesus likes those who are ready to lose what they have in pursuit of the one venture in life which really matters, the one enterprise which produces a truly lasting profit. It’s the adventure of following Him.

In fact, Jesus says we cannot really follow Him if we are unwilling to be losers, “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” Not many of us take that too seriously, it seems. Maybe we are the losers for it.

We’re hosting a gathering of church friends and people are taking seats in our living room. There’s an assortment of chairs, from the love seat to folding chairs, from nicely upholstered armchairs to the piano bench. Not too surprisingly, the biggest most comfortable looking armchair goes unoccupied almost to the last. Someone will perch bravely on the hard bench or even on the bricks of the fireplace hearth before he or she will plop down in the nicest chair in the room.

I’d like to think that my brothers and sisters in Christ have learned well Jesus’ lesson in this Sunday’s Gospel reading, Luke 14: 1, 7-14. Like Jesus directed guests at a Sabbath afternoon meal, they want to leave the best seats for someone else, choosing something uncomfortable for themselves. And sometimes it does work out as Jesus and the Old Testament reading from Proverbs 25:6-7 suggest. Beth and I will notice some older dear soul squirming on a hard surface and insist she or he move to the nice chair.

Sometimes, though, some thoughtless younger person, or even I myself, will notice the empty chair and grab that comfy spot with no further consideration. Leaving the good seat for someone else is a lesson that keeps needing to be learned.

It’s not, of course, actually about seating arrangements at social events, although what happens in such situations is a fairly graphic clue to people’s spiritual attitudes and lives. In verses 7-11, Jesus simply used how people chose where to sit as an illustration of the general spiritual principle that humility is the route to honor in God’s sight.

Extended, that spiritual attitude of humility becomes generous hospitality in verses 12-14 as Jesus calls upon us to practice social relationships in a way that benefits others, particularly those most needy, rather than ourselves.

Though there is a promised reward at the resurrection in verse 14, the tenor of the whole passage is toward a way of life that runs counter to both ancient and contemporary cultural norms which suppose that we will normally do that which brings advancement and opportunity to ourselves. Instead, spiritual advancement calls for suppression of our immediate, present advantage in favor of others, again especially in favor of those most disadvantaged.

Last week in Chicago near the Art Institute, a friend and I came across an apparent street person lying face down on a bridge sidewalk. He was twitching, seemingly having a seizure. Another passerby already had his phone out and was calling 911. While the call was being made, the person on the ground stopped his odd movements, reached behind his back, and carefully adjusted his trousers. The three of us decided he was not in as much distress as it had seemed. However, we were gratified to see two Chicago emergency vehicles arrive on the scene in less than 5 minutes (this despite recent criticism of Chicago’s emergency medical response time). We left the fellow to their care.

Some situations are simply urgent. We try to have systems in place to offer emergency assistance, especially in medically dire circumstances, whenever possible. However, like our reaction to the man on the ground once it was clear our first impressions of his distress were overblown, we are also inclined to inaction when matters feel less urgent.

Such was the situation in a synagogue in which Jesus was teaching on the Sabbath, as told in Luke 13:10-17. A woman appeared with a serious and debilitating medical condition. However, as verse 11 explains, it had afflicted her for nearly two decades, 18 years. She was totally bent over and could not stand up straight.

In verses 12 and 13, we see Jesus take swift action as soon as He saw this poor woman. He called her over, spoke to her and laid His hands on her, healing her straightaway, if you will forgive the pun. She stood up straight immediately and began to praise God.

The leader of the synagogue saw the whole thing as less urgent than Jesus did. He deemed an 18-year-old condition not dire enough to warrant the breaking of Sabbath restrictions against work. In effect, he was asking why Jesus did not tell her to “Come back tomorrow,” during business hours.

Jesus saw it differently. In verse 16 He argues that 18 years is more than long enough. Why should this woman, daughter of Abraham, thus child of God, wait a moment longer to be set free from her affliction?

Our current western Christian culture has pretty much done away with any restrictions on what may be done on the Sabbath (a subject for another time), but we still need to learn from Jesus here about the urgent nature of His message and work. With so much need around us, both in our streets and throughout the world, are we guilty of, in effect, telling God’s sons and daughters to “Come back tomorrow” in order to receive help?

Let’s think again together about what our Lord shows us is the sort of thing which demands our urgent attention.