John 1:1-4a, 14, 16-18 Today is the day before Epiphany or, as UCC Pastor Vicki Kemper puts it in our daily reading for today, “Tonight the season of gift-giving and divine presence we know as Christmastide comes to an end.” Tomorrow, we enter a new liturgical season, Epiphany.
Epiphany has several tightly nuanced meanings. I ‘ve spoken about its several meanings before when we come to this multi-faceted feast day. The phrase it is most often translated as is “to make manifest.” It refers to the times when something becomes clear or visible or obvious; when something right in front of us suddenly becomes plain to see. In the scriptural sense it refers to events that happened when the Christ Child was born – angels in the sky singing praises and pointing shepherds toward the newly-born child; a star like no other shining over that same child; priest-kings from distant countries, bringing rich gifts and bowing down before the child in a stable -- all saying "look here – look here and understand what it is you are seeing. Something is being revealed to you that prophets have awaited for hundreds of years. Something is being manifested to you.” These are stories we have heard all our lives, whether we are children playing our first role in our church’s annual Christmas pageant or elders looking back and remembering so many Christmases long past, but this very repetition can create a problem for us. As we spoke last week, we’ve heard these stories so many times that they have, in a way, lost their meaning. Adorable as babies are, it is not the infant Christ who has filled our lives with grace upon grace – it is the adult Jesus – the Son – the Word -- who has made God known to us. In our daily reading for today our writer Vicki Kemper gives us a sentence that I found myself reading over and over again just for the beauty and wonder of what it says to us. Here she refers to our reason for these early stories – our reason for Christmas – as “the one who put flesh on God’s love.” God’s love for us is such an amorphous, formless idea – it is something we believe in but how can we image such a thing in our thoughts? How can it be part of our everyday world? We can know God’s love because the Son, the Word, chose to put flesh on God’s love, and he became that flesh that made love tangible for us – and presented God’s love in a way that we can at least partially understand. When we read, “The Word became flesh and dwelled among us,” this is what it means. Not that Jesus put on a human disguise, but that the Son, the Word, became flesh, just like us, to live among us as one of us. When we shake hands, when we hug those dear to us or reach out to lift up one who needs help, what we hold is God’s love. When we are down or lost ourselves and someone embraces us and helps us face the world, what we are held by is God’s love. When we welcome a new-born child, the flesh we welcome is God’s love. As it is written in our scripture for today, from the first chapter of John, “…from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace…No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, the Word, himself God, who is close to God’s heart, who has made him known to us. Grace upon grace…This is gift of Christmas…grace that is with us throughout the year, throughout our lives, because of Jesus’ gift of himself. Grace that is given us at Christmas, into Lent and Easter – and on through every moment of every season. May we always be aware of just how immeasurably we are blessed – and in so doing, let us share that gift – that grace upon grace with all around us. Amen. John 1:1-5 Today is the First Sunday after Christmas (and the last Sunday in 2024). We’ve had the gifts and the glitter, the parties, the carol singing, the family feast – and it all, we hope, has been lovely. So, what comes next?
For many of us it seems, it’s just a matter of clearing up the clutter and packing up the Christmas ‘floof’ until next year. [And I’ll admit, the temptation is great!] But Christmas – the birth of God’s child among humankind -- is just the beginning of a long and complicated story. This is not, remember, simply a story about the birth of a particular child. It’s a story that is told in a very particular way so that we learn important connections from it. It’s tricky from the very start and its tricky parts are the things we learn the most from. We’re told that the child was born of a unknown teenager of a mother, who is somehow still a virgin. We’re told that the sky was filled with singing angels at the child’s birth, but no one appears to remember anything about this as the child matures into adulthood. Somewhere in the first couple of years a trio of foreign magician-priests from Persia follow a new star, and find child and present him with unlikely gifts and then blab to Herod about it, which leads to the Slaughter of the Innocents and the family’s flight to Egypt to save the child from state-authorized murder. At the age of twelve, and back home again, Jesus is teaching the elders in the temple and everyone accepts that and then conveniently forgets all about it. After this, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph conveniently disappear from public notice until John the Baptist arrives on the scene years later to point out that this Jesus is one whose sandals he isn’t worthy to unlace. All these stories end up being connected when a voice from the clouds, which can only be from God, announces this person as his own beloved Son. All the key words from these stories – virgin, Bethlehem, angels, magi -- serve only to affirm that this child is the one foretold from ages past – the one who is promised by prophets – the one who will one day free the Hebrew People. These are all good stories, but their primary purpose in scripture was always to connect Jesus with these ancient prophecies – to connect Jesus to the past. The one thing these stories leave out is any connection to us, today, — to what comes next. It is easy to get so caught up in these mini-dramas, and to identify them so thoroughly as the point of Christmas, that we forget that in actuality the whole reason for Jesus’ coming and living among us, is to teach us to live out our lives as God wants us to do – we -- the ordinary people living around the adult Jesus, as well as those of us living our lives 2000 years later. Jesus lived among us to teach us to feel the things we should feel and do the things we should do in our lives, every day. To accept ourselves as God’s beloved ones and to care for each other, truly and deeply. And none of these things are in the old stories – they’re all in the “what is yet to come”. As poet Howard Thurmond expressed it so very beautifully in his poem, The Work of Christmas: When the song of the angels is stilled, When the star in the sky is gone, When the kings and princes are home, When the shepherds are back with their flock, The work of Christmas begins: To find the lost, To heal the broken, To feed the hungry, To release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations, To bring peace among others, To make music in the heart. [So -- how do we do that? and where do we start?] Isaiah 9:6 Today is the second Sunday in Advent – the Sunday of Peace. This message is going to be somewhat brief because in our in-person church we are having a discussion based on the reading in our daily meditation booklet and then moving into this message on Peace and what it means.
“Peace” is a word that we tend to think of as meaning “an absence of conflict” and not much more. It’s what is left over when we remove conflict. Take away war, arguing, conflict of any kind and we’re left with peace. That is by far its most common meaning in both scripture and everyday usage. That’s good, surely. It’s not wrong – but it is incomplete -- because here, once again, we find ourselves up against our old biblical bugaboo of translation. “Peace” is an English word and the bible was most certainly not written in English. The two words from scripture that we generally translate into Peace are the Greek “Eirene” and the Hebrew “Shalom.” Of these two Shalom is the most important for our purposes here because when the Greek Eirene is used in a scriptural setting it is most often used to express the same complicated meanings as shalom rather than some of the more subtle nuances that could be found in the Greek original. As I said at the beginning here, translating shalom as peace is not wrong, but it is woefully incomplete because the Hebrew shalom has many deeper meanings that do not ordinarily appear in our English Peace. In the words of Reinaldo Siqueira, a prominent professor of Hebrew Scriptures, Shalom signifies wholeness and goodness and total satisfaction in life. This, he believes, is that abundant life that Jesus promised! It’s the establishment of a lasting, righteous, goodness. It's being in a right relationship with all that shares this world with us – one’s fellow humans, the natural world, and even – and perhaps especially, being in a right relationship with oneself, because it is certainly possible to get that one wrong. It’s a relationship of harmony and wholeness, which is the opposite of the state of strife and war. The absence of conflict and anger is a negative state. We value it because a negative force is removed from our lives, leaving us with peace. The possession of the Shalom which Jesus promises is a positive value, not based in what is removed but in what is given, what we keep. The addition of this shalom is what allows us to live – not only without fear, but it enables us to enjoy that deep shalom which is love and goodness and peace. It is the wholeness, the completeness that is God’s gift to us and the gift we give each other. With the coming birth of the Prince of Peace let us embrace this wholeness with the deep joy that comes with giving our whole selves over to the Shalom of the Prince of Peace. Amen. Proverbs 3:1-4 As I mentioned last week, the past three weeks have simply been a crazy time of one thing after another – coming at me hard and fast with hardly a moment to draw breath between them. There’s been a week long visit with family from back east involving a very active two-year old running five adults into near exhaustion; a much more involved Halloween celebration than I’m used to; an ordination; and a couple of Sundays where I didn’t have time enough to actually prepare a sermon, and so, ended up winging it with the help of a very responsive congregation. It makes me tired just to type that all out.
While searching for a theme for this Sunday’s message I stumbled on a story I don’t remember reading before. It’s from a booklet of Advent meditations and is about faithful friends who will always have your back. It’s a very moving story. I’ll share it with you shortly but first I need to say that after reading the story I realized that I, and several loyal friends, have only recently lived very similar stories, and it led me to see those recent stories in a different light. This is the story I’ve stumbled on. It’s in the 2014 Advent Daily Devotional booklet from the Stillspeaking Writers Group. This particular story was written by Quinn Caldwell who is the pastor of a Congregational Church in New York State, where one member of his church is from India, having been relocated here by his company. Caldwell had invited the gentleman to read the scripture at their Christmas Eve service and he had agreed, and when he arrived almost 30 others came with him. They sat quietly while he shared the reading and as he returned to his pew, each one shook his hand to congratulate him for doing his job well. Later in the service the pastor gave his standard “everyone is welcome here” invitation to share communion and, much to his surprise, every one of the reader’s friends came forward and as they received, each responded with “Merry Christmas!” It was later learned that none of these visitors were Christian – they were there to support their friend and colleague -- but they had taken the time to study in advance and find out the proper responses so they could participate in a respectful manner – honoring both the church setting and their friend. These are the companions we all should be grateful for on our journey through this life. Thinking about this story it felt kind of familiar, and then I realized that was because I had participated in two similar events very recently – twice actually in the past week. First example – a group of friends meets most every week for a musical jam night. It’s not an open mic, just a group of friends meeting to share our music and enjoy each other’s company. A week or so ago a couple from our group were scheduled for a gig at a location they had never played – they also had another member of our group opening for them. It was a bigger than usual deal because it might lead to bigger gigs for them down the road. So the night of the performance most of our jam group showed up to be support for them. In my husbands’ and my case I know, it was probably the busiest week we’ve had in months, but we were there for our friends -- musicians need audience – and it was a delightful evening! The second example occurred three days later – same basic group but a very different setting. One member of our jam group was being formally ordained into the ministry by her denomination. This is a big deal thing. Only two people from our group were connected to the religious aspect of this event but – once again – multiple members of the jam showed up just to celebrate with our friend and honor the importance of her ordination to her. Again, this was not a specifically Christian group of folks from the jam – some have connections to other denominations, some claim no such connection at all – but they showed up because this is so important to our friend and they wanted her to know they cared. But the most important piece of it all, to my admittedly Christian view, was that, when we were called to share bread and cup at the table, every one of this mixed group, went forward to share the meal – just like the transplants from India from Quinn Caldwell’s story – they were there to love and support their friend on her big day. These are the true and faithful companions for our journey – some of the many that God places in our lives to share – for a shorter or longer while – our journey through this life. We are blessed to have them, and we are often blessed to be them for others, as we are called and sent by God to build and strengthen the Reign of God, here and now. In this time of confusion and fear and personal carelessness that we are living in right now, there are many who need the support and friendship of others, whether they are long-time friends or strangers we have just met along the way. The examples I’ve shared here are happy examples but there are so many occasions that may not be quite so happy, for us to walk with others and support them, and show them “Hey, I’m here, and I will walk this road with you for as long as it takes.” May we always be up for the task – and the joy of companioning and traveling with our brothers and sisters. November 3, 2024 * Proper 26 I don’t have a specific scripture to speak on today, just a group of maybe disconnected ideas – at least they feel disconnected – but important. Our messages for the past several weeks have dealt with how to tell what has been the voice of God, and what has been just humanity voicing its opinions – how to hear God actually speaking through the scriptures we read. When we finished last week, I said that was the end of all that for awhile and I was glad because I was tired of reading instructions to go out and kill our enemies because God said it was OK, or to slaughter the obviously innocent because they were descended from enemies of hundreds of years before. The same old battles for power and ascendancy seem to fill so much of the Old Testament especially. So today I’m turning to prophets who called out for peace and justice among the people. Not to discern if this was God speaking or not, but simply to show that it IS here. But even here there is plenty of violence since these stories seem to always start with an angry God who demands retribution and punishment before we can get around to peace and charity. The Old Testament, in particular, was not always blood and political mayhem. Even here there were those who heard God’s voice as a voice of love – strange though some of it might sound to us today as a loving voice. And we should not lose these teachings because we most decidedly need to hear them even today – especially today. Prophets such as Amos, Ezekial, Micah, and Isaiah spoke out strongly against those in power who bullied, used, and abused the powerless and poor all to their own advantage. Religious rules existed which forbade such behavior – but they were, then as now – easily ignored by those with money and status. This sample from Isaiah is a beautiful example of the genuine love and caring that we can also find in the midst of all the bloodshed: From Isaiah 11 (1-9) A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him … With righteousness he shall judge for the poor -- Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist and faithfulness the belt around his loins … And a little further along in this extended reading, comes this beautiful song of shared peace: The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. And here is one that we are all familiar with from Micah 6:8: He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. But Micah had much more to say to listeners then and still today. “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. For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem… They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken… And we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever. These are promises from God – promises not only for the people of Micah’s time, or Isaiah’s. These are promises for us today as they have been for all peoples down through 3000 or so years – years when the rich and the powerful have done what they want and the oppressed have been forced to bear it. These are, however, not promises yet to come. In God’s time these promises are now – always in God’s now. There will be a time someday, and there is a time right now When all shall sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken… These promises are real someday to come and they are real today, this moment. There is / will be peace and generosity and kindness in this world. It is the Word of God – that we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever. Let us not be so lost in the greed and hatred and fear that we overlook and forget the promises of Peace -- promises given for Then, and for Now, and for All time to come.
This reading doesn’t come from the bible. It was taken from a book titled, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, by Rachel Held Evans, a young blogger and writer who died much too soon in 2019 at the age of 37. Two of her several books were New York Times best-sellers, including the one I just quoted.
I have to admit, when I first heard this book’s title, I cringed. Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s the Christian publishing world was swimming with earnest books instructing women how to be good, subservient Christian women, recognizing the husband’s role as ‘head of the family’ and keeping our silence in church matters. I hated those patronizing, dismissive, treacle-y books, and this title sounded like something written in that same line. It isn’t. For the past few months here – and actually a lot longer since it is a recurrent theme – we’ve been going through different readings from scripture and trying to discern which might truly be God’s words to us and which are just another human’s opinion. I did not intend that this message should center on Rachel herself, but sometimes it can help us in our own journey to understanding when we find someone articulate who has faced the same issues. Rachel Held Evans was born into an evangelical biblical-literalist family where every word was presented as straight from God’s mouth. She believed her family’s teachings completely until her young adult years when she began to realize that she knew real flesh and blood people who were good and kind and loved Jesus and yet were condemned by the very teachings she claimed as her own. She spent the rest of her too-brief life working to determine what she actually did believe and why. What she could claim and what she could not of all she had been raised to believe. Is there anyone among us who has not struggled with parts of the bible that don’t at all agree with what we believe or what we can believe is the voice of God speaking? The title of this message is “What Are We Looking For?” What is it we are expecting or hoping to find within the covers of this book? The answer there depends largely on who we believe wrote it. If you believe that every word came straight from God’s lips you are going to approach it differently than if you start out believing it is a series of stories about people’s experiences of something they believe to be God in their lives and their struggle to articulate that experience. There are differences of opinion as to when the oldest parts of the bible were written but they were written at least 1500 years before the birth of Jesus. That’s a lot of time and a lot of opinions. Add in another 100 years to include that New Testament and understand the number of people who wrote parts of all this and we are faced with a whole lot of people, from many different backgrounds and beliefs writing over a very long time span. It isn’t simple and it’s when we try to make it simple that we can get ourselves all tangled up in theories and confusions of all sorts. It isn’t simple at all. As Rachel says in our opening quote: If you are looking for an out-dated, irrelevant ancient text, you will find it. If you are looking for truth, believe me, you will find it. So – how do we look at scripture when we set out to learn from it? Are we looking for reasons to put others down or an excuse to hate? Or are we looking and expecting to find a God speaking to us of love and caring? Are we looking for validation for our current actions or are we hoping to find clear directions for how we can best be part of following Jesus’ way? Can we look at a story from 2500 years ago and see that, while we might not agree with them today, they were, perhaps, trying their best in circumstances we have never had to face? Can we see how we can learn from their experience? One more quote from Rachel -- one I have great fondness for reads like this: “I have come to regard with some suspicion those who claim that the Bible never troubles them. I can only assume this means they haven’t actually read it.” I've known some of these people. Those of us who do read it know that we will always find stumbling places but if we come to the readings with love and humility and a true desire to learn to live as our God wants us to live – a way that benefits us all – a way that lifts up this beautiful creation God has given us – we will find the answers here – here in scripture and in our hearts where the Holy Spirit lives with and in us. We read, we discuss, we share – and we find God with us – always -- in the words. Amen. Luke 10:25-37 After all our discussions of how and why John’s gospel account seems to differ from the other three gospel accounts and how carefully we need to work to understand just what the writers are trying to convey with their particular style, I thought it would be interesting to check out just how complex any gospel can be – and not just John’s.
The one we’re looking at here today is from Luke and it is chock full of language and history that the writer probably assumed later readers would understand. Maybe we do, and maybe we don’t. A lawyer one day asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. The answer wasn’t especially tricky, since it appears multiple times in scripture – In Deuteronomy, in Matthew, in Mark, and here, in Luke: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” Luke is the one who gives us this long story to explain just how that works. But first, a little history. After hearing the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman last week it surely won’t surprise us to see how often the Israelites could insert their hatreds into their religious beliefs. (Listen to any news story today – it’s still there.) This time, Jesus' target audience, the Jews, hated the Samaritans (who followed the Law of Moses) to such a degree that they had destroyed the Samaritans' holy site on Mount Gerizim about 100+ years before Jesus’ birth, because they believed they followed pagan beliefs. The Samaritans, in turn, hated the Jews and had more recently desecrated the Jewish Temple at Passover with human bones – human bones being “unclean.” This belief, likewise, plays its role in our story today. The story comes around in response to the Lawyer’s question: “Who is my neighbor? – The one I’m supposed to love as I love myself?” There are five active characters in the story as Jesus tells it -- a traveler who is robbed, beaten, and left half dead alongside the road, a Jewish priest, a Levite, a Samaritan, and an inn keeper. Because the nationality or ethnicity of the victim/traveler is never specified it is assumed he is Jewish. The priest and the Levite both serve in the Temple, the priest as intermediary between the people and God -- offering sacrifices and prayers, and acting as judges. Levites were a lesser level of priests. They prepared the sacrifices and prepared the temple for public gatherings – serving as something like a sacristan or sexton. Both groups were bound by purity laws. In Jewish culture, contact with a dead body was understood to be defiling. It is possible that both the priest and Levite assumed the man was dead and therefore passed him by -- avoiding him to keep themselves ritually clean. It’s sort of a gray area because they didn’t know he was dead, they just assumed that as the easier choice, whereas the better choice would have been to check to see if he were indeed dead (which of course, he wasn’t). They both cared more for their own “purity” and sanctity than the chance he might be alive and in need of care. Enter the Samaritan – the despised outsider – the true “neighbor” -- who apparently without hesitation tended to the injured man with his own hands and his own oil and wine – and provided for his further care – while knowing that he himself would most likely be ignored and rejected had the script been flipped. While the Samaritan is indeed the hero of the story, my second favorite actor here is the inn keeper who took in the injured man and arranged his further care for partial payment and a promise from a stranger – a Samaritan at that – to pay the rest the next time he came through. That may be the part of the story I find the most astonishing. But we know who Jesus means when he speaks of the one who is the “true neighbor.” It is interesting that in this question and answer between the lawyer and Jesus it is not Jesus who gives us the answer, although he certainly sets it up. It’s the lawyer who possibly hoped to “catch” Jesus who ends up answering his own question “Who is my neighbor?” ….. “The one who showed him mercy.” May we all go and do likewise. Matthew 15:22-28 After our Annual Fall Women’s Retreat last month I came home full of new ideas and new ways to see the work we do in our churches. Since we were still in the middle of our Summer Sermon Series on John’s Gospel, I didn’t really have time to share much about the retreat and the teachings we shared there.
Well, we’ve finished with John now, so we have time to go back and check out the retreat theme, “New Hope -- Where do we go from here?” a question that challenges us to live out the Gospel, empowered by the Holy Spirit in this present, postmodern world. Our Keynote speaker, Dr. Sharon Jacob, visiting professor of New Testament, from Claremont, had plenty to share with us. But before we get into that I want to – briefly – remind us that we are a story-telling people. We humans have always told stories about ourselves and all that share this world with us – ‘how did we get here?’ stories, ‘what’s it all mean?’ stories, ‘why did this happen to me?’ stories – stories that shape us and stories that explain us. The Bible is a book of such stories. Some we accept as not literally true but still making a good point, such as: ‘Noah’s Ark’. Some we accept in part while rejecting other parts such as the birth of the baby Jesus as a human child – most of us believe that part – but we ignore the part of that story that says the sky that night was lit up by angels singing praises to God (which absolutely no one seemed to remember at any time in the following 30 years.) I titled this message “Reframing those Old, Old Stories.” Reframing is a psychological technique that involves changing the way a person understands a situation, experience, or emotion, by changing the information that surrounds it – basically, putting it within a new framework. – viewing it from another point of view that may change our interpretation of what we’ve read. The reading we opened with today comes from an example Dr. Jacob shared with us, involving the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman and her demon-possessed child. This one is available from both Matthew and Mark. Now, as we’ve always accepted, Mark’s gospel is the first one written down and read by many. We know that much of Matthew, put together later, was taken directly from Mark and there is one note in these two versions of the story that you and I have no way of knowing about unless we know a lot of Near Eastern history, yet this primary point makes all the difference in how we would hear this story if we heard it 2000 years ago – or today. In both versions a non-Jewish woman comes to Jesus asking him to heal her possessed child. In both versions Jesus at first rejects her and her plea, comparing her to a dog (!) -- and in both versions, eventually changes his mind and heals the child. In Mark’s telling, the woman is simply described as a Syro-Phoenician – a geographical descriptor telling where this story takes place and that the woman is non-Jewish and therefore not as important to him as the Hebrew people he usually walks among. In Matthew’s version, she is described as a Canaanite woman -- and this matters. When the Hebrew people ended their forty years in the desert after escaping from slavery in Egypt, the area we generally lump together as the Near East, was inhabited by several different peoples of different ethnicities. There were few solid boundaries between them and the whole area, in general, was referred to as Canaan and the people as Canaanites. It was this loosely defined area that God “gave” to the Hebrews as their long-promised new homeland. The Hebrews marched in and waged bloody war, killed off many of the inhabitants and settled in their promised land. The Canaanites resisted and became generational enemies. But this was long ago – even in Jesus’ time -- and for Matthew to refer to the people who now lived in the northern realms as Canaanites was simply inaccurate – deliberately so. That term was no longer used – they were simply Syro-Phoenicians – as Mark described the woman -- not the Canaanites they had invaded and battled centuries ago. This was a case of Matthew pushing his readers into an Old Testament mindset to manufacture a justification for Jesus and his disciples to be so contemptuous of the mother who was pleading for her child’s healing. We are being forced to few this woman and her child as outsiders – people not included in God’s special covenant with God’s chosen people. Such a little thing, so easy to overlook with a casual reading – especially if we today don’t know the ancient history. We aren’t going to understand that “Syro-Phoenician” is OK but “Canaanite” is not. A small thing and yet it makes such a big difference in the story we read and our understanding of this Jesus person -- who we believe, from all other evidence, to be loving and kind – and yet somehow – uncharacteristically – comes across here as an arrogant jerk. Mark tells us the same story, but without the layers of contempt that this woman would dare to ask Jesus for help. Jesus is still rude (by our standards) but to a much lesser degree. In many ways he is simply acting like a Jewish man of his time. Such instances occur all through the bible – and they color how we hear and interpret what the scriptures are saying to us. In many cases, they can sway how we believe what the stories tell us. We need to be ready to hear them and recognize them when we are seeking God’s intention. As Jesus himself discovered as his ministry progressed, God’s promises are not only for the children of Israel but for all God’s beloved children. John 6:35-40 This will be (I think) the last in this current series of discussions looking into John’s Gospel and what makes it so often different from the Synoptic gospels. This has not been the usual bible study format, going verse by verse in the order written. Instead, we’ve somewhat randomly taken specific points of interest and delved a little more deeply than usual into those particular points.
I’ve left today’s subject to last because I think it may well be the most important for us. We are a people of Bread and Cup and our Table Theology lies at the heart of most everything we do. Our gathering at table and the words of institution are central to our worship – and yet these words did not appear anywhere in John’s gospel. They do appear in each of the synoptics:
But, again, none of this is included in John’s gospel account. In all four accounts Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem for the Passover celebration. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, this is the only Passover mentioned and Jesus’ only appearance in Jerusalem. Again, John is different. Three separate Passover celebrations are mentioned here and this is apparently, Jesus’ third visit. After the triumphal entry into Jerusalem -- which begins the final week of Jesus’ human life -- there was a meal -- it is mentioned, barely – John’s scripture simply says there was a meal. And for the writer of John, apparently, the most important thing that happened at this meal was Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. The rest of the evening is taken up with Jesus’ long discourse as he tries to squeeze in all that he still needs to say to his followers before his inevitable betrayal and arrest. So – what – if anything, does all this have to tell us about our table theology? We have four gospels – three of them place a strong emphasis on the institution of Holy Communion – one does not. Does that in any way invalidate our gathering at the table? I don’t think so – different places, different times. We’ve recognized before that time and distance strongly affect what scripture has to offer us today. There is some lack of agreement as to which of the four gospels was the last written. For a long time most mainline scholars believed John was the last gospel written, but in more recent years there has been a strong argument put forth the John was next to last and Luke was the latest gospel. Mark was written first, possibly as early as 30 years after Jesus’ with death, with Matthew following another decade or two later and John and Luke another two or three decades more. The point being that there was a lot of time between Jesus’ death and any of them being written down. It is totally unreasonable to expect that they could all four have chosen exactly the same moments to record. Even the synoptics, similar as they can be, differ widely in a great many ways. Add to this that John’s community lived at some geographical remove from Jerusalem, which was the physical center of the growing Christian faith. His stories grew out of a community that had different sources for their shared Jesus stories, a community that faced different challenges and likely shared different ethnicities. We today read scripture with an additional 2000 years of interpretation adding to (or perhaps confusing) our understanding. We read trusting in the Holy Spirit to guide us and trusting, as well, our own gut reactions to what we read, our own understanding of this Jesus person – and we trust God to speak to us fairly and honestly, showing us all we need to see and hear to live our lives as God would have us lead them. We read Mark and Matthew. We read Luke and John, and we hear – through each of them -- that we are loved – and that is the most important message of all. One Bread, one Body, one trusting, sharing people. |
Rev. Cherie MarckxArchives
January 2025
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