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| St. Paul: On The Same Page
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| What is this blog about? - Friday, June 01, 2007Each week I'll be writing some thoughts about the upcoming Sunday lessons, two Sundays ahead. My hope is that this will help laity be better prepared for worship, that it will help me to be better prepared for preaching, and that it might possibly be a service to some of my fellow pastors as well. NOTE: this is not a heavy exegetical blog. I won't be digging into the Hebrew or Greek. That is step-one of the sermon preparation. This is step-two, some cogitating about the devotional application of the text. How can we apply it to our lives. I hope it's helpful.
You can find a schedule of all the Sunday readings here.
You can read the SPOTS Devotion from St. Paul here in pdf format. read more ... |
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This is a funeral sermon.
At least that's how I think of it. Zechariah (whose name means "Yahweh remembers") is a priest and prophet after the Babylonian exile. The people he is preaching to are the folks whose parents and grandparents had been dragged off to captivity with hooks in their cheeks. They lived 70 years in a foreign country while their homeland was destroyed. And now these are the remnant, the smaller number who returned after the Babylonian Empire fell. What would their life be like?...
OK, so I never got back to blog on the Gospel lesson for last week, but I preached on it and that sermon audio is posted (for what it's worth), so you can check that out if you want.
I really wanted to preach on the Jeremiah text because it has always fascinated me how he openly confessed that he didn't want to preach. He tried not to preach. But he found that he had to - and whenever he did, he had to tell the truth... which was bad news and got him into trouble...
"O Lord, you deceived me..." There are lots of interesting things about these verses, not least of which is this one raised by Jeremiah's opening words. Did God "lie" to Jeremiah?
The word translated "decieved" could have been rendered "seduced" or "enticed". But the effect would be the same. Does God mislead us?...
Is it law-and-then-gospel, or is it gospel-and-then-law?
We normally preach God's law, which convicts us of sin, and then preach the gospel, the good news about his forgiveness and love for us so that we can be comforted in our grief over sin. But in this case God tells the Israelites the gospel first. "I carried you on eagles' wing and brought you to myself."
Why?...
I've often thought that Hosea should be published as a marriage manual - but if it were, who would ever get married?
What do people want out of marriage? We want companionship, sexual intimacy (the primary thing if you follow the magazines), economic stability, perhaps children, a sense of tradition and home. But who among us ever got married just to prove the power of God's love?...
While we're in this chapter I can't resist commenting on verses 10-12. "The land you are enteringn to take over is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you planted your seed and irrigated it by foot as in a vegetable garden. But the land you are crossing the Jordan to take possession of is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven. It is a land the Lord your God cares for; the eyes of the Lord your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to the end."
In a few weeks, on June 8, Karen and I will celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. Those verses were the sermon text we chose for our service...
"Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds..."
My wife is really good at memorizing things. A Bach sonata, a 15 verse hymn, a book of the Bible, she likes to take a piece at a time and commit lots of things to memory. And the result is evident. When we face any trouble or need she is often ready with "salty" words - words of comfort and wisdom that she has committed to memory.
But is that all these verses are about?...
(25 May) Let's try a larger font and see it that's more friendly.
Prophecy is weird and confusing. I don't mean to be negative. It's just that there is a cultural disconnect here that frequently messes us up. We "moderns" (and even in this so-called post-modern age we are still pretty much modern in our outlook) always see things in a linear fashion. We like our history in timelines. We like our books to have numbered pages and chapters. We expect movies to move from exposition to conclusion...
Wow... this could be a whole huge discussion of creation versus evolution. We could go over some of the questions people have raised about "how" God created, the differences between the accounts in chapter 1 and chapter 2. There are layers of symbolical connections in the order of the 6 days and meaning in the existence of the Garden.
But it feels like we've discussed all this stuff 100 times. And that's a dilemma for me. Is it just me that has talked this to death, and you still have lots of questions? (After all, I've talked this through with umpteen different Bible classes in 3 congregations, but you might not have been there.) What do we really need to talk about here?...
Context. We really don't get what's going on till we look at the context. Consider the Pentecost OT lesson. It would be easy to focus on the fact that the Holy Spirit comes upon the 70 elders (not just on the appointed spiritual leaders - the priests, or Moses and Joshua), and that this is not in competition with Moses.
Taken out of context, I've heard some people try to use this as a justification for not requiring ordination in order to preach or conduct other distinctive tasks of spiritual leadership. That's not the point....
Prophecy is strange to us. In modern movies and books like the Harry Potter series a prophet goes into a trance, gets eerie, maybe starts to speak in a different voice (more like he is possessed than anything else) and then utters some obscure poetic reference. Prophecies are prose enough to clearly apply to a certain person, but poetic enough to be capable of misinterpretation (which, of course, is what makes the story exciting).
The "Servant Songs" in Isaiah....
"Dem bones... Dem dry bones..." The song doesn't do it justice. It's all bouncy and jivy, but I don't imagine this was a comical or hilarious scene. This was not just about dancing bones, or even just about the resurrection of these dead bodies. This was a field of war - the scene of carnage and destruction. And God changed it. What does this mean?...
A sense of extreme frustration seems to permeate these verses. The chapter begins with a joyful tone. The Lord's servant is coming and he will establish justice. It continues with God's promise to open the eyes of the blind and free the captives. It goes on with, "sing to the Lord..."
But then, the prophet reflects God's anxiety (for lack of a better word, this is, after all, an anthropomorphism). He reveals what it will cost God to do all these wonderful things...
"We also rejoice in our sufferings..."
OK... how real is that? My instinct suggests that this is something that we can do in theory, but when we actually come to a time of suffering then we'll find it a lot harder to rejoice. That's what my instinct says. But surprisingly my experience tells a more complex tale...
If we followed the Hebrew tradition, I might give names to the rooms in my house. The living room I might call "Resting" or "Singing." The family room I could call "Laughing" or "Playing." And the kitchen and dining room I would call "Whining and Dining."
Although it happens elsewhere too, it seems that the dinner table is the place where issues get raised. As I think back, I can remember so many arguments about so many trivial things...
What are the dominant themes in this text? God's grace in calling Abram - Abram's faith in following God's call and leaving home - the incomprehensible vastness of God's promise to Abram. Those are the first that spring to mind. But - what part of this is likely to resonate with listeners on a Sunday morning? Or, more important, what part of this ought to resonate with them? What does God want to show them?
It's hard to preach on Bible stories that are hyper-familiar. Like the Noah's ark wallpaper and toys that cause our people to forever think of Noah as 6 inches tall, the story of the Fall Into Sin is too familiar. It is not familiar in a good way, because people have studied and understood it. But it is familiar in a bad way, because people have skimmed it many times and think they know what it means...
Few pastors will preach on this text because we just heard it in the Advent/Christmas season. "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given..." But it gets repeated now in the Epiphany season because of the earlier verse (2), "the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light..."
In the midst of presidential campaigning, these verses make a nice contrast. I took a few young people to hear Senator John McCain speak yesterday...
After much prayer - thought - consultation - and debate, I've decided to continue with the blog, but in a new direction. Only 5 people responded to the survey. Only a dozen or so, as far as I can tell, have been reading the blog. And I was just about ready to give it up. One thing stopped me. (Oh Lord, don't let it be me ego deceiving me.) Some people who read the Advent devotions wrote to me to express their wish that I would continue writing.
Here's the thing. No publisher is asking me to write anything. I got to write the Lutheran Hour Advent devotions this once because a friend of mine happened to be in charge of them. So I don't hear any calling to a wonderful book-writing career. But... I have enjoyed writing these posts. And there are some people who would like to read more. So... with trepidation, I will start up again.
New rules, however. Rather than write about the SPOTS devotions, I'm going to try to work further ahead. I plan to write a few posts a week about the upcoming Sunday lessons for TWO Sundays ahead. That serves two purposes. 1) Even if no one else is reading this, it will help me to be more prepared for preaching. And 2) just in case some of my brother pastors find this useful (and I guess you never know), it might be a way to help others bring new ideas into their sermons. Also, if you are following the SPOTS it will be the same readings - just another week ahead.
I'm also going to open up comments again, but with this difference. I'll allow comments that offer other ways to look at or apply the text - but I won't get into internet debates or publish anyone's bad tempered criticism.
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