Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

 The readings for Sunday, February 23, 2025:

First reading
Genesis 45:3-11, 15

Psalm
Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40

Second reading
1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50

Gospel
Luke 6:27-38


Turn the other cheek. Give up your clothes if asked. This Sunday we get to Luke's version of texts which have been so misunderstood through the centuries that it’s hard to remember what Jesus was really saying. Jesus was NOT saying to let your abuser batter you day in and day out. Jesus was not instructing us to let evil steamroll right over us. Jesus was not even calling us to pacifism, a stoic acceptance of brutality that will buy us a better condo in Heaven for enduring hell on earth.

No, these are resistance texts. Yes, resistance texts.

These are texts that show us how to resist evil in such a way that evil elements will not turn around and destroy us. Likewise, these are texts that show us how to resist evil in such a way that we don’t become the evil that we are resisting.

It’s important to remember that the culture of Jesus was a vastly different culture. It was a culture based on honor. It was a culture based on social hierarchy. It was also a culture ruled by Romans who were not going to tolerate social unrest, Romans who would not hesitate to slaughter dissenters.

Jesus shows us how to live in this world, how to resist evil without being destroyed by evil. If you want to read the best text on this idea, I recommend Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination. It is one of the best books of theology I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of theology.

Let’s focus on the turning of the other cheek, since this passage is so well known. Notice that Jesus gives specific cheeks in specific order. That’s a detail lost on us, but it wouldn’t have been lost on the people who heard Jesus’ instructions. Walter Wink explains today's Gospel passage in great detail to show that Jesus doesn't advocate passivity but instead shows a way to maintain one's dignity in the face of overbearing oppression.

For those of you who would sneer at the idea of resistance working in our evil, evil world, I would say that nonviolent resistance can bring mighty social change.

Walter Wink, writing in 1993, notes, “In 1989 alone, there were thirteen nations that underwent non-violent revolutions. All of them successful except one, China. That year 1.7 billion people were engaged in national non-violent revolutions. That is a third of humanity. If you throw in all of the other non-violent revolutions in all the other nations in this century [the 20th], you get the astonishing figure of 3.34 billion people involved in non-violent revolutions. That is two-thirds of the human race. No one can ever again say that non-violence doesn't work. It has been working like crazy. It is time the Christian churches got involved in this revolution because what is happening in the world is that the world itself is discovering the truth of Jesus' teaching, and here we come in the church, bringing up the rear.” And of course, more lately we can point to a variety of revolutions which have fairly peacefully gotten rid of dictators who had been in power for decades.

Maybe we are not up for the task of resistance, which can be scary and can lead us to unexpected places. At the very least, we can pray. We can pray for those people who are doing the heavy lifting of resistance. We can pray for those who are transforming their societies for good, whether they live in our country or on the other side of the planet. We can pray for the softening of the hearts of the hard ones. We can pray that we have the wisdom to recognize evil when we see it. We can pray that we have the courage to resist evil in whatever forms it comes to us.

Sunday Report

Yesterday was a more harrowing drive to Bristol than I like, especially in the first half hour (darkness and rain and wind and big trucks).  But it was a good day at Faith Lutheran.

For our Confirmation class, we looked at the baptism promises and the affirmation of baptism promises, which are essentially the same.  We talked about what it means to live into these promises.  Even the ones that seem straightforward, like bringing children to the word of God could have some nuance:  that could be the Bible, most obviously, but even things like hymns can contain the word of God.

I will continue to stress that what we're talking about is a lifetime journey, not a one time test, like a driver's license.  I want them to know that even if they're not sure about everything, it's O.K. to live with some mystery.

Then we headed upstairs for worship.  I was happy with worship and with my sermon, which you can view here or read here.  There was a good vibe in the congregation, even though the attendance was a bit lighter.

On our way home we had rain and snow at the higher elevations.  Down here on the other side of the mountain, we had sun, but so much wind I didn't want to go back out.  Luckily, I didn't need to.

Sermon for February 16, 2025

Luke 6:17-26

Does this text seem familiar?  It should—in Luke 1, which we heard on the last Sunday of Advent, we hear a version of these words as Mary rejoices with Elizabeth.  In Luke 4, which we heard three weeks ago, Jesus preaches his first sermon, which sounds like a shorter version of what we hear today.  And today, Jesus elaborates on the ideas that we first heard from Mary—clearly Mary has trained her son well.

This text might feel familiar in other ways too—and yet different in key ways.  You might remember that this sermon happened on a mountain.  And yes, it did—in the Gospel of Matthew.  But here, in the Gospel of Luke, instead of having people look up to Jesus as he preaches from a mountain, Jesus looks up at the disciples as he preaches on a plain.

Last week Jesus told Simon Peter to cast his nets into the deep water.  This week, Jesus delivers his message on a plain, a level place.  As with last week’s deep water, we might not understand a level place in the ways that prophetic tradition would recognize it.  Professor Ronald J. Allen says, “The word “level” often refers to places of corpses, disgrace, idolatry, suffering, misery, hunger, annihilation, and mourning”—and then Dr. Allen traces the word across 6 prophetic texts in the Old Testament.  Jesus is on a plain with us, on the level, giving us even-handed discussion about what it means to follow him during the desperate times in which we find ourselves, whether it’s the Roman empire or late stage capitalism.

He must know why he has attracted a following:  people come to him eager for healing, yearning to have their demons evicted.  Throughout the Gospel of Luke, the Holy Spirit has been on the move, demonstrating Divine Power, and the beginning of today’s Gospel is no different.  In the middle of level ground, Jesus gives us plain talk about the Kingdom of God, which is different from earthly kingdoms.

In ancient times, people saw evidence of Divine favor in earthly circumstances.  In the ancient context, people knew that that someone was blessed by God—or gods and goddesses--because they were rich, because they weren’t hungry, because they had respect from every corner of society.  Ancient people assumed that if one was poor, if one had desperate circumstances, if one’s life was marked by death or other forms of doom, that it was because a person had done something to deserve that fate.  Ancient people saw divine favor expressed in quality of life

Jesus tells us of a different reality.  The poor aren’t damned, the hungry aren’t doomed, the mourning aren’t perpetually sad, the reviled aren’t forever cast away.  Indeed, when we live on the land of the level, we are surrounded by people whose lives are wrecked.  And here comes Jesus, echoing the words of the angel Gabriel to his mother Mary, words that say, “Hail, o blessed one.  The Lord is with you.  You have found favor with God.”  Jesus tells us over and over again that when we feel lost, when we feel abandoned, when we feel most outcast from our society, God is right there with us, on that plain.

And then we get to the Woes.  Blessings and woes—it’s the language of the prophets, the message that God has not abandoned us, the message that there is a penalty for living lives that seek success by the world’s markers, not by God’s.  Jesus knows how easy it is to fall under the spell of our larger society that tells us that we should value wealth, comfort, prestige—it was true in the time of Jesus, and it’s just as true today.  

In the Gospel of Luke, we get many parables about wealth, about the dangers of trusting in earthly wealth.  Each Gospel warns about wealth in its own way;  the Gospel of Luke returns again and again to the message that earthly wealth takes us away from God.  That is not to say that those of us who are wealthy are beyond salvation.  Not at all.  

In fact, if we look at the book of Luke and the book of Acts as one narrative story written by the same person (and we are fairly sure that both books were written by the same person), we see a radically different way of living, radically different from the ways that the larger world would see as rational.  In the book of Luke, over and over again, Jesus tells us that God’s blessing will look radically different than what the world trains us to expect a blessing will be, and that wealth is not the mark of greatness that the world tells us it is.  By the time we get to Acts, the disciples have begun to put this idea into practice.

The early chapters of the book of Acts show that the disciples have pooled their wealth, that they are neither rich nor poor, that they hold their goods in common.  They eat together and they worship together and they help the poor—and this new way of life attracts people, just like the new way of life that Jesus proclaims attracts people.  

If we look at the Sermon on the Plain, we see that there is a middle way between the brokenness of our current world and the stories of success that our current world tries to sell us.  If we share our wealth, the poor will get their reward, and we will avoid the spiritual dangers that come with extreme wealth.  If we share our food, then the hungry will be fed, and we will be nourished too.  If we comfort those who weep, then at some point, smiles will return to their faces and to ours.

Make no mistake—living this way can invite scorn, or worse.  Jesus warns us again and again of the cost of discipleship, that the larger world might exclude us, might revile us, might defame us because we choose to live out our Gospel based lives.  But that will be fine.  Jeremiah tells us, and the Psalmist tells us, and Jesus tells us, and another several thousand years of wisdom from all sorts of spiritual thinkers—they all tell us that if we live the way that Jesus calls us to live, we will find ourselves like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither.

If we find ourselves in a time of drought, we don’t need to be anxious.  If we perceive that we are in a place that prophets would have recognized as one of corpses, we don’t need to fear.  Our roots run deep.  We will continue to have green leaves.  Jesus speaks to us on the Plain, on our level, showing us again and again that there is a way of healing, a way of hope, that we can find blessings in places where most people would see as desolate.

The Feast Day of Saint Valentine

Here's one of those strange feast days, a feast day that's more popular in the general culture than it is in the church culture that pays attention to saints and their days. 

Those of us in religious circles might spend some time thinking about this feast day and the ways we celebrate it, both within our religious cultures and in popular culture.  I've often thought that marriage at its best is sacramental:  it demonstrates to me in a way that few other things can how deeply God loves me.  If my spouse's love for me is but a pale shadow of the way God loves me, then I am rich in love indeed.

I use the word marriage cautiously.  I don't mean it the way that some Christians do.  I mean simply a love relationship between adults that is covenantal and permanent in nature, as permanent as humans are capable of being.

I realize that this day is fraught with sadness and frustration for many people. I went to elementary school in the 1970's, before we worried about children's self esteem. If you wanted to bring Valentines for only your favorite five fellow students, you were allowed to do that. So, some people wound up with a shoebox/mailbox full of greetings and treats, and some wound up with very little.  I was in the middle, but instead of focusing on how lucky I was to have love notes at all, I compared my haul to those of my prettier friends.  I'm still working on remembering the wisdom a yoga teacher told me once:  "Don't compare yourself to others.  It won't help your balance."

I still worry about how this day might make people feel excluded.  I worry that as with baptism, we don't support people in their covenantal relationships in all the ways that we could.  I worry that a day that celebrates love in this way makes people who don't have a romantic relationship feel doomed.

To me, this feast day is essentially a manufactured holiday, yet another one, designed to make us feel like we must spend gobs and gobs of money to demonstrate our love.

Every day, ideally, should be Valentine's Day, a day in which we try to remind our loved ones how much we care--and not by buying flowers, dinners out, candy, and jewelry.  We show that we love by our actions:  our care, our putting our own needs in the backseat, our concern, our gentle touch, our loving remarks, our forgiveness over and over again.

And sustained by the love that sustains in our homes, we can go out to be a light that shines evidence of God's love to the dark corners of the world.  Every week, we are reminded of the darkness, and some weeks it intrudes more than others.  We must be the light that beats back the darkness.

On this Valentine's Day, let us go out into the world, living sacraments, to be Valentines to one another, to show a weary world the wonders of God's love.

Incarnation and Aging Wombs

Before I went to bed last night, I worked on my homework for my seminary class that looks at Christmas and Easter texts and considers what they mean when looked at without the middle part of the story.  For our homework, we look at the Bible text and come up with 10 questions or observations.  Then we write two paragraphs that respond to the secondary reading and come up with two questions for class discussion.

Our text this week was Luke 1:  5-56, which includes the story of Elizabeth.  I had written a bit about why it was so important to be clear that Joseph had nothing to do with the creation of the baby Jesus and wondered what it would have been like had we not worried about proving the paternity of Jesus.

That thought led me to this question:  "If Elizabeth had been the one to give birth to Jesus, if Jesus had come from a barren womb, from an elderly female body, would the shape of Christianity be different?"  I had never thought about this question, and now I can't stop.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The reading for Sunday, February 16, 2025:

First reading
Jeremiah 17:5-10

Psalm
Psalm 1

Second reading
1 Corinthians 15:12-20

Gospel
Luke 6:17-26

We may feel that this Gospel is familiar; careful readers may see a difference between what we read this week in Luke, and the more common version of the Beatitudes we usually read in Matthew.

Luke begins similarly enough with 4 Blesseds: "Blessed are you who are _______." It sounds much more familiar than the way that Matthew says it: "Blessed are the ______."

Unlike the Beatitudes that we read in Matthew, in Luke, 4 blessings are followed by 4 woes: Woe to you who are rich, full, laughing, spoken highly of.

Is Jesus really cursing those of us who are wealthy and well-fed, those of us who are in a good place in our lives? That would not be the Jesus that I know. I don't usually wish I had a knowledge of Greek and a gospel written in Greek, but here I do. I wonder if there's a better interpretation of "woe."  Similarly, we should resist thinking that it's better to be poor--most commentators agree that the more appropriate interpretation is that Jesus is saying that God prioritizes the poor.

One of the traditional approaches to this version of the Beatitudes is to say that this text shows Jesus upending the traditional order. Everything our culture teaches us about who is a winner and the vast lot of us who are losers--Jesus comes to tell us that in the Kingdom of God, we can look forward to a new social order.

That idea can lead us to lots of new questions: is this Kingdom of God Heaven? Is it an earthly Kingdom? Did it come when Jesus came to us 2000 years ago or is it still in the process of evolving?

And if we're more honest, those of us who are in a less-distressed/more comfortable part of our lives might wonder where our place will be. Do we need to give up all our money? Are our happy days numbered? Is Jesus reminding us that all is cyclical? What does Jesus really want from us?

These are the questions that have kept theologians busy for centuries. Some have said that if you were choosing the most important passages of the Gospels, we'd do well to choose this text. Some have called it a guidebook to the proper behavior of Christians. Is this text an updating of the Ten Commandments or the replacing? Or something else altogether?

For those of us who see the Bible as a guidebook for moral behavior, we might see ourselves challenged to approach the text in a new way. For those who see moral behavior as our ticket to Heaven, we might also be challenged to think differently.

Christ came to announce that God's plan for redeeming the world had begun. That plan involves our pre-death world, which is not just a place where we wait around until it's our turn to go to Heaven. No, this world is the one that God wants to redeem. Christ comes to invite us to be part of the redemptive plan.

Sermon Feedback and Recording for February 9

Yesterday was one of those up and down days.  When we left to drive to Bristol, I thought I had a strong sermon.  As I was delivering it, I felt like I was stumbling and that nothing was clear.

My spouse thought it went well.  He thought it was bleaker than usual (I didn't) and struggled to end on a hopeful note.  His commentary made me feel even worse.  Yet I was interested to see how the sermon came across in the recording.  There was one notable time when my spouse was not at all impressed with my sermon, but when he watched it several more times, he changed his mind and declared it one of my best sermons ever.

Often the recording of the sermon is posted to the church's Facebook page by the time we get home, but yesterday, it wasn't.  We had been having problems with the sound equipment, so I thought it might not get posted this week.  But this morning, there it was.

One of my parishioners had posted it onto her timeline saying, "I needed this today. More than even I knew."  I realize she might have been talking about the whole worship service, not my sermon.  But I needed to hear a comment like that.  I felt like I stumbled more than usual yesterday, and my internal mean voice kicked in to tell me that I was stupid and worthless.

Even though I have learned to hear that mean voice for what it is, even though I am fortunate not to hear it often, it's still exhausting when I'm in that downward spiral.  I came home yesterday absolutely wiped out.

I watched and listened to the sermon this morning (go here to view it).  I am relieved to be able to say that it is a stronger sermon and a stronger delivery than I was remembering.  I am happy to be able to vanquish that inner mean voice.