Lenten Bible Study Day 16; Luke 19

(NB: I've heard from a number of my fellow pilgrims that they were not able to leave comments on the posts that I've been writing. I am told that problem should be fixed. Our apologies for the problem.)

Luke Chapter 19 (NRSV)

Today we read of the entrance into Jerusalem. It's the event we celebrate on Palm Sunday - which traditionally marks the beginning of Holy Week. I hope you notice though that in Luke, we still have a way to go yet before we hear the story of the events of the Triduum (the three holiest days of the Church year: starting at sunset with Maundy Thursday night, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Day). All four of the Gospels have an account of the Passion of Christ, but each one of them differs in details and in how the events played themselves out. But that's something I'll write more about in a few days I imagine.)

But today we hear how Jesus, in fulfillment of the Old Testament prophesies, enters Jerusalem after descending from the Mount of Olives riding on a colt (Zech 9:9). His followers cut palm branches, shout Hosanna! and expect that this is the beginning of the end of the earthly occupation of the Holy City.

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan in their book "The Last Week", point out that, if you hold to the traditional understanding that this event happened a week before Passover, there were two processions that day. Coming from the other direction, and entering by another gate was a line of roman soldiers in full battle dress led by Pilate himself. They were coming at Pontius Pilate's command because there was a history of unrest in the city on the high holy days. The Zealots would take advantage of the crowds to settle scores - finding the confusion and noise an opportune time to kill someone by stabbing and then vanishing into the throng. Having the legion make a display of entering was intended to cow people into submission and to suppress any resistance.

So you have two competing views of power coming into Jerusalem at the same time. One descending. One ascending up from the plains. One representing force of arms, coercion and earthly power. One bringing the archetypal passover lamb into the city representing signaling the birth of the Kingdom of God. You have, in this moment, the Prince of Peace preparing to face the Gods of War.

As a number of observers point out, this historical collision of symbols represents more than the stark choice we are going to be presented with as Jesus is brought to trial. It also represents the struggle with in each of us of our own natures and desires. The roman procession represents the desire of coercion, the opposing represents the call to loving sacrifice for others.

In the events of Holy Week we chose. And we chose badly. And God used our bad choice for good. That's God's way. That is the nature of the Kingdom of God. God will work with what we give, but God's will shall be done.

How have you chosen poorly in your life, and then found that God was able to redeem that choice and use it for the purposes of salvation?

Lenten Bible Study Day 15; Luke 17 and 18

Luke, Chapters 17 and 18 (NRSV)

As we read our way through the heart of Luke's gospel, it's critical to keep the narrative context of Luke's writing in mind. The various incidents, teachings and healings that we encounter in these two chapters are all taking place "on the road to Jerusalem". Everything that Jesus is now doing in the Gospel has to be understood through the lens of the cross. He has traveled north out of the heart of the Jewish lands into the lands of the Gentiles and then the Samaritans and he's now looping back toward Jerusalem.

Everything written in both Luke and Acts ends and then begins in Jerusalem. It's the city of God, where Mount Moriah (where Abraham took Isaac to be sacrificed) is close to if not physically there, where the Temple of Solomon is built, and where Herod the usurper has rebuilt the cult center of Jewish sacrificial worship.

Jerusalem is the place where the priests absolve, on God's behalf, the sins of the people by sacrificing lambs and other animals to God. It's the place that psalmist laments and praises. It's the place where prophets die and the Kingdom is expected to be revealed. It is traditionally called the navel of the earth - and it's the central to three of the World's great religions.

And Jesus is going there, to die.

It's always seemed to me that Luke's story-telling pace picks up as Jesus grows closer to his cross. Perhaps that is just my own subjective reading, colored by the foreknowledge of what is going to happen. But there's this sense of history circling around a great whirlpool and preparing to be drawn down into the deep center of the vortex.

There's certainly a thread running throughout these chapters. Jesus is now intentionally preparing his disciples for the time that he will no longer be with them on earth. He warns them of what is going to happen to them. He encourages them not to lose heart, and reiterates again and again how important the message is that he is going to entrust to them. God has fulfilled the promises of the prophets, worked out the plan of salvation, and is bringing the opening acts of creation to a close, and to a new beginning.

Go back now and re-read the two chapters keeping in mind the context and setting. Does it change anything about how you hear Jesus' words? Remember what it feels like inside to sit in the dark, bare church on Good Friday and hear what Jesus is telling us. Is there a different quality to the way these words resonate within us?

Perhaps on this rainy, dark Wednesday at the end of February, as we wait for Spring to arrive, it's enough to just let the words of the Gospel work upon us. There is, as Luke underlines in the last verses of Chapter 18 in Jesus' words, something important to be revealed out of the darkness into which we are going. We are being called to follow, and not required to understand.

Lenten Bible Study Day 14; Luke 15 and 16

Luke, Chapters 15 and 16 (NRSV)

In these chapters of Luke's gospel we have two of the best known parables that Jesus told - and both are unique to Luke. The parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man (who is sometimes named "Dives") and the parable of the Prodigal Son are fascinating because in the first case we hear what appears to be a traditional understanding of Judgement and in the other a completely alien one.

The idea that there will be "hell to pay" for those who neglect the weak and poor in society is a common one in all the world's major religions. The idea that the life to come will have a different set of values, where the wealthy and powerful become beggars and the beggars are comforted fits in with much of what we read elsewhere in the Bible. But the image of God in the parable of the Prodigal Son is wildly different than what we imagine. It's no surprise at all that the people who hear are astonished - even today.

Dr. Kenneth Bailey, a New Testament scholar, spent much of his time as a young man in the peasant culture of the Middle East. That culture is deeply conservative and, in many ways, little changed from the time of Jesus' life. Dr. Bailey realized that the peasants, particularly those who had not heard the gospel stories, were a resource that would allow us in the modern Western world to hear the parables of Jesus in the same way the people of his day heard them. Dr. Bailey's study in particular of the parable of Prodigal Son is illustrative of the power of this idea.

When he told the parable to villagers, he asked for their reactions. While we tend to think of the prodigal or maybe the elder son as the key character, the villagers focused on the father. They couldn't believe that an elder in the community would allow himself to be repeatedly humiliated by the actions of his children. The son who asked for half the estate was, in their culture, wishing their father to die. The son who shamed his father by refusing to take his customary place at the feast to be held delivered a mortal insult. Both sons deserved to die. In some communities, both sons would have been formally shamed and exiled - and the story of their shocking behavior remembered for many generations. The family itself, once well to do, would have lost all their claims to status.

Even the odd detail of the father in the parable running to meet his returning son was shocking in peasant eyes. An elder never runs, never shows his feet. The children in the community would have mocked him for the rest of his life for such a sort of thing.

The father in parable makes an unforgettable fool of himself. He ruins the family's status. He refuses to defend his honor. He suffers mortal insult and does not retaliate. He gives away everything he has and keeps no power, no status, no living for himself.

And he represents God, the Creator and Judge of the Universe.

What Jesus is telling us, when we hear this parable with the ears of the people whom he originally told it to, is that God is willing to become completely powerless, to put aside all honor, to give up all authority to repair any breech in our relationships. God will do anything, suffer anything, to stay connected with us.

It's not at all the standard vision of God, wrapped in majesty and awe far out of our sight. It sounds rather like Jesus' description of himself, a mother hen who wishes to sacrifice her own body to a fox to save her chicks.

This not a vision of a God whom we need to protect from abuse or slander or insult. It's a God who will suffer all of that gladly on our behalf.

It's not the sort of God the World imagines. Jesus is telling us something that we want to believe, but have a hard time keeping in mind. Why is that?

Lenten Bible Study Day 13; Luke 13 and 14

Luke Chapter 13 and 14 (NRSV)

We've been keeping a relatively measured reading pace in Luke so far. Now we need to pick things up if we're going to get to the end of the Acts of the Apostles by Easter. So today we have our first two chapter reading day.

Jesus is beginning to teach about the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven. He warns us that all of us need to take the Kingdom seriously, none of us can presume it is simply going to happen for us. He reiterates that the Kingdom is primarily a place of mercy rather than justice. And then he reminds us that we need to respond to the invitation. The mercy that the Kingdom represents requires a response. (I often wish it wasn't that way, that we would have God's Kingdom sweep us all in whether we wanted it or not, but that's not what Jesus is teaching.)

The two very short parables about the Kingdom early on in the reading, how the Kingdom is like a mustard seed, or how a small experience of the Kingdom can change everything in our lives, became more real to me this summer than they had been previously. In late July, after having been elected as your bishop, I travelled to Rhode Island to start planning for my move here. Because the camp up at ECC was almost half over, I decided that I'd better swing by to see what it was like since it was going to end before I moved to Wickford at the end of August. The Rev. Meaghan Kelly gave me a tour, invited me to lunch with the counselors and staff and then had me sit down with all of them in the barn for a conversation.

I asked them to introduce themselves to me. I had hoped that would happen quickly and then we'd be able to start talking about their dreams for the camp program. That didn't happen. As they introduced themselves, many of them gave me their camp history. How they were second or third generation camp folks. "My grandparents met here." "My parents were married here." "I was baptized here." And they all talked about how the camp, the community of the camp was to them the emotional center of their experience of God and the place where their faith became real.

As a parent I recognized those words. Our daughter had a profound faith experience at the Diocese of Arizona's camp Chapel Rock five years ago, and that camp has become her church as a result. My own experience at a camp in Reading PA is similar. In all the stories there's a shared sense that this is a place apart, a mountain top, a moment or time in people's lives when they knew what it was like to live in the household of God.

I was just going to tell them the young people at ECC how wonderful they were when we were interrupted by a cloud burst and everyone ran off to their cabins to put their laundry under cover. What I had meant to tell them, and I suppose I'm telling them now, is that what they were telling me was that they had found a field with a pearl of great price within it. They had found a measure of leavening that had changed their life. They had seen the Kingdom with their own eyes.

But were they willing to respond with their lives? Would they, would you or I "sell everything" to posses it as Jesus urges us to do elsewhere? Would we allow the experience of the Kingdom to change our whole lives, not just the part that had experienced God's household here on Earth?
When young people leave camp, it's often with great sadness. They have, for the time they were there, experienced a community of deep love, mutual support and profound spirituality. They frequently ask why camp has to be so different from the rest of their lives.

It's not helpful to do so at the time, since they are actually grieving, but I want to ask them now, what do you need to do in your life so that camp is not a place apart from the way you live in the world? What do any of us need to do so that we can "possess" the Kingdom every moment of our lives?
We need to respond. We need to take it very seriously. At least that's what I hear Jesus telling us in the reading this morning.

Lenten Bible Study Day 12; Luke 12

Luke, Chapter 12 (NRSV)

The middle section of this chapter has Jesus' teaching about our proper relationship to our material possessions. It's not terribly comfortable to read for those of us living in houses with full closets, stuffed basements and packed garages. Even if we try to live as "lightly" as possible, we still tend to accumulate more than we need. Why is that?

Whenever I travel abroad - whether it is in Europe, Latin America or Africa - I am struck by the lack of material possessions that people think of as normal when compared to my experience here in the U.S. In northern Europe, where the standard of living is at least as high as ours here in the U.S., people still don't seem to have acquired as much as we have. They live in smaller spaces and are more thoughtful about what they fill those smaller spaces with. Perhaps its the density of population, perhaps it's a leftover from a nearly a century of cold and hot wars - but whatever - it's quite striking when compared with our big box stores filled with inexpensive things that we really don't need but buy anyhow. I recall when I was in my Physics graduate program and my office mate from Turkey scolded me because I only used one side of the paper I was taking notes on. He just couldn't imagine wasting an entire blank side of paper because it was too much trouble to flip the pad over instead of flipping the page up. I had frankly not noticed that I was doing that.

But I'm more than struck, I'm convicted of my own unconscious hoarding behavior when I visit Africa or places of great poverty in Latin America. I remember learning in Swaziland that a single ball point pen was considered a generous gift - and how the recipient would carefully use the gift until the pen went dry. Which is something I never managed to do because I thoughtlessly misplace the pens I use after only a few days of use. I don't even get that angry at myself - they're so inexpensive and so common that I just grab a new one.

When I traveled to Swaziland on behalf of my parish in Bethlehem PA, I carried a few thousand pens with me in my baggage to give as thank you gifts for people I met while I was working there. I didn't manage to give as many of them away as I thought I would. At the end of my trip I gave the bulk of them to the bishop of the diocese to give away as he saw fit. He was so grateful. I was ashamed that I was giving them away mostly because I didn't want to carry them home in my luggage. I didn't have enough room after buying things for people back in the U.S. He was grateful for something that I was giving him because it was an inconvenience to me.

How odd to me that it was that experience in Swaziland that has kept bothering me, and not the much more overwhelming effects of poverty that I also saw on my visit. Perhaps the small issue surrounding the wasteful consumption of a pen was something I could manage to understand. I certainly saw many things much more deeply troubling. The fact that it's the pens that bother me still are a reminder of how far I have to go before I'm able to see the economic inequality of the world we live in with the same sort of horror that God must view it.

It was that time in Swaziland in particular that changed the way I look at the things I posses. I've not managed to fully keep my things in proper perspective, but I'm at least regularly wrestling with them. I keep hearing God's voice in my ear: "Fool. This very night your life is required of you. And the things you have prepared, who's will they be?" We carry nothing with us on our journey home except our souls.

How have I prepared the one thing I will be keeping with me on that final journey?

How have you?

Lenten Bible Study Day 11; Luke 11

 

Luke, Chapter 11 (NRSV)

In the 11th chapter of Luke we begin with a private conversation between Jesus and his disciples as he teaches them to pray and then promises that God will hear their prayers. And then the action turns to the growing external opposition from the religious authorities which Jesus is gaining as he teaches and heals - and critiques and condemns.

This opposition, recorded in all four of the Gospels has always, as a religious leader, given me pause. I'd like to think that I would - that we would - get right what Jesus' contemporaries got wrong, but there's not much in the Gospels upon which to base that hope. It's telling that Jesus quotes the scriptures to the people who are meant to be the leading students of the scriptures and they don't understand either his words or the scriptures. And worse than not understanding, they reject what they can't understand - attributing God's actions to Satan, rather than admitting that they need to rethink, repent of what they think they understand.

When people ask Jesus for a sign, a prophetic sign so that they will know that he is indeed a prophet sent from God, Jesus tells them that they will have a sign but they will not recognize it for what it is. He says specifically that the people of this particular generation will receive the sign of Jonah but that they will not receive it.

What does he mean by the sign of Jonah? Jesus doesn't get swallowed by a whale. What is his meaning?

Ephrem the Syrian, a deacon, hymn writer and theologian of the 4th century taught that the point Jesus was making that Jesus, like Jonah, was going to die and that death was going to be cause of the "rising and falling of many". Some people would believe in God as a result of Jesus' death and his subsequent resurrection (like Jonah's who burst forth from the whale). Some people would reject Jesus because of his death - I imagine arguing that the Messiah could not die. (Shades of yesterday's meditation on the parable of the Good Samaritan.) In Ephrem's thinking, the Queen of the South, who signifies the Queen of Sheba who traveled to see Solomon and believed in God, represents the calling of the Gentile nations who see Jesus and also believe in God. (Ephrem's thinking is echoed in the writing of St. Ambrose by the way so it appears this was a widespread reading of this passage in the early Church.)

So what does that mean to you? What does Jonah signify for us?

Jonah, the reluctant prophet flees from God, is given up to death by being tossed into the stormy sea, lives for three days in the belly of the whale and is returned to life to call the fiercest enemy of the Israelites to repent, turn to God and live. In Jesus day, who are the enemies of the people of God? And who is it that ultimately turns?

Who would that be in our day? Because I think that's the point for us. We need to think about who it is that we believe is opposed to God's will in the world. How you and I might be asked, as Jesus' followers to be a sign for them - to show our own new life discovered in the teaching of the Messiah - so that they, the ones we imagine are God's enemies might turn and live too.

Who is it that God is calling us to give ourselves up for so that they might live? I don't think Jesus means for us to quote his words to them. I think Jesus means for us to take our own crosses and follow him so that by our actions, they might recognize Jesus too.

Lenten Bible Study Day 10; Luke 10

Luke, Chapter 10 (NRSV)

We are now in the large middle section of Luke's Gospel. Jesus has turned toward Jerusalem and the teaching and events we are reading are meant to be seen in light of what will happen during the events of Triduum (Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Day.)

Late in this chapter we read the story of the Good Samaritan. After the story of the Prodigal Son this is probably the most well known parable, but there's more to it than first meets the eye. Actually, that's true of every parable that Jesus tells. Each is like one of those sets of Russian nesting dolls. You open one and find another one inside. Then you open that one and there's still another. Just when you think you understanding the meaning and intent of the story Jesus tells, you discover that by opening one meaning there's another one inside. Both are true. All of the meanings are true. The fact that the parables have multiple meanings and applications is part of their design.

As an aside, the medieval Church believed that this wasn't just true of parables. It was believed true of the entire Bible. There was the literal story that the biblical text was recounting. There was another layer of meaning that was a teaching about the nature of the Messiah, and then there was another layer of meaning that was a teaching about the pilgrimage of our souls as we journeyed to God. (And then, depending on who you were reading, there was a fourth and even a fifth layer of meaning.) The idea that the Bible had a simple, easily understood single meaning didn't arrive in the Church until later in the reformation - and that idea reached its full bloom in the latter part of the 19th century.

Take another look at the parable of the Good Samaritan. When I was a teenager our youth group put on a skit based on this story. The teen who acted out the part of the priest who passed by the bleeding, wounded samaritan acted as if he was too fussy to stop to offer aid. Then the teen who acted out the part of the Levite did the same. We in the audience did our part by booing the priest and the Levite and applauding the Samaritan who took action. But what if there's more to this story than we recognized?

A number of ancient readers pointed out that this all happened on the road between Jericho and Jerusalem. The traveller is traveling away from Jerusalem. It's reasonable to think that the priest and the Levite were headed the other way along the road, which would mean they were heading toward Jerusalem and likely they were headed to the Temple to perform their required roles according the Law.

The Samaritan was bleeding. The commentators think that this explains the reason that the other two passed by on the other side of the road when they came upon the Samaritan. Contact with human blood would have defiled the priest and the Levite, making them ritually unclean and then unable to perform the saving sacrifices that the Law of Moses required of them. It wasn't (according to this view) that the two men were unwilling to render aid to the bleeding traveller, it was that they weren't allowed to by the Law of God.

It is the Samaritan who is outside of the Law, and even cursed according to the Law, who is able to save the person who is dying in the road.

There's a part of the Law of Moses (Deuteronomy 21:22-23) that says anyone who is killed on a tree is cursed. Jesus was killed on a tree. Over the history of the Church this verse of the Law of Moses has been quoted to show that Jesus couldn't have been the Messiah - no one can save another person when the first is cursed in the eyes of God.

But this parable, understood in light of the ritual duties of the priest and the Levite, shows the opposite. It was only the person outside the Law of Moses who was able to save. In other words, God has used, and does use, people who are outside the gathered community of God to save the people of God. What might this mean in our day?

Lenten Bible Study Day 9; Luke 9

 

Luke, Chapter 9 (NRSV)

Today, just before Luke's account of the Confession of St. Peter that Jesus is the Messiah, we read of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness. There's a special feast day commemorating the Confession of St. Peter. And in Luke's version, the Transfiguration follows - and it has its own feast day. (Actually the Transfiguration is also the traditional gospel lesson for the last Sunday in Epiphany that many of us heard read aloud a couple of weeks ago.) With the Confession and the Transfiguration Jesus is completely revealed to the disciples and to the readers of the Gospel as the long awaited Messiah.

But Luke chooses to precede this total revelation with the feeding of the multitude. There's no special feast day on our calendar commemorating this event. But, if you read much literature from the time that Luke was writing, you would recognize that the style of the writers was to put the most important story first, and then follow it with additional stories that explain the importance of the first one. It seems clear that something like that is going on here. One could argue that the feeding of the multitude - neglected as it is in the church calendar - is the greatest event in this series of events. Why?

In a book called "The Jewish Roots of the Eucharist" Old Testament scholar Brant Pitre looks carefully at the role of bread and blood in the Old Testament in hopes of unlocking additional meaning in the Eucharist for the communities of the New Testament. As Pitre investigated the writing of the rabbis to discover what they were expecting in the long awaited Messiah, he learned that one of the primary signs of the Messiah's arrival was to be the return of the manna.

You remember the manna? It was the miraculous bread that sustained the people of Israel as they followed Moses at the time of their forty years of wandering in the wilderness. It was given by God at the beginning of the forty years and ended as the people of Israel followed Joshua into the Promised Land. The sign that Messiah had come was to be the feeding of the people with the miraculous bread of the angels.

The feeding of the multitude in the wilderness is the first great sign in Luke that fulfills this specific expectation. While it seems to us to be a foreshadowing of the weekly Eucharistic feast, it was to the Jews of Jesus' day one of the primary signs that he was the Messiah. And now the two following stories of the Confession of St. Peter, and the revelation of the Transfiguration make much more sense. They are the exclamation points that underscore and emphasize what happens when Jesus feeds the multitudes with so much that there *12* baskets left over.

In essence then, the largest part of this chapter in Luke's Gospel is a clarion clear call that the Messiah has come. The prophecies are being fulfilled. The faithful remnant recognize and confess that this happening.

And the chapter ends with Jesus setting his face to go to Jerusalem. Just as the prophecies predict.

So what does it mean to you that Jesus is who Luke's Gospel says he is? What does it mean to you to participate in Peter's words that Jesus is Messiah of God? Has it made a difference in the way you live your life, in the choices you make about what you do or how you spend your money?

That's always been a key thing for me to look at in my own life - particularly when I go on retreat. I have confessed Jesus as Lord time and time again with my lips. How have I confessed him with my life?

Lenten Bible Study Day 8; Luke 8

 

Luke, Chapter 8 (NRSV)

A few years ago I was invited to take part in a radio show that intended to discuss science and faith. I didn't know much about the radio station, the host or the show. But the interview was scheduled for 1 AM, and I figured it would be an interesting experience so I agreed to participate.

It turned out to be a radio station that held to pretty literal and inerrant understanding of the Bible. That view isn't common in the Episcopal Church, so when I arrived and discovered that particular stance was going to frame our conversation, I was a little concerned about how I might participate. It turned out too that I wasn't the only clergy person there. There were two others. One was a young man who was a friend of the host. The young man had studied geology before he went on to Bible college. The other was, to my surprise and delight, a rabbi who was also a professor in the History of Science department at ASU. His particular speciality was the philosophy of science. (Any day I get to talk with a rabbi is a good day in my mind.)

The discussion went about as you'd expect. We all agreed during the first part of the conversation that there was no inherent conflict between science and faith. I did point out that such a stance didn't mean that conflict didn't arise - since it depended on what kind of science and what kind of faith we were talking about. The Rabbi agreed with me on that point.

But soon we three were challenged by a caller to the show who said that religious faith, particularly Christianity, must always trump scientific belief. "If science contradicted the Bible, then science was wrong because the Bible was clear and easy to understand and science wasn't. That clarity was a sign that the Bible was given directly by God." (According to the caller.)

The rabbi laughed.

There was a moment of silence from all of us. Then the rabbi said; "God does not make the Truth easy to find. God hides the Truth from us and expects us to use our Reason to uncover it. Why God does this I do not know. But this is what the Rabbis have always taught."

I was nodding my head yes to the rabbi's words. And I was doing so because I was remembering how Jesus would teach the crowd in parables like a traditional rabbi of his time, but that the meaning of the parables was often hidden. In today's chapter we read how the disciples privately approached Jesus after he had told a parable to ask the true meaning of his words. And he told them, reminding us as readers that he didn't tell the crowds the full meaning. Why didn't he? I do not know. But he didn't.

And this isn't the only case of this sort of thing. In a number of places in the New Testament, Jesus explicitly says that he is hiding the full meaning of his words from the crowds. Sometimes he tells the meaning to the disciples. Sometimes he doesn't. I don't know why. I've certainly wondered though.

I was remembering all of this as I read through the whole of Chapter 8. Jesus heals some, drives out the demons in some, stills some storms, but doesn't heal, exorcise or still others. Why? I don't know.

The Bible, like the rabbi said, takes the Truth and doesn't not present it in a simple way that it easy to understand. The Bible challenges us with contradictions, cryptic words and difficult to understand stories. Luke's Gospel has all of this.

Why does the Bible do this? I do not know. But as we begin our second week of readings in Lent, I hope that if this is the first time you've read a book of the Bible straight through, you're wondering the same thing. If it's not your first time, I hope you're still wondering why.

Lenten Bible Study Day 7; Luke 7

 

Luke, Chapter 7 (NRSV)

After having laid out a vision of the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus begins to move north in his ministry, out of the Jewish heartland and into the border regions.

He has an encounter with a Roman Centurion who asks that his slave be healed. Jesus heals the slave. Jesus encounters a woman in a village near Endor (where the famous seer lived during the time of Saul) who has lost her only son and Jesus raises the woman's son from the dead. He has emissaries from John the Baptizer who ask him if he really is the Messiah. Jesus tells the emissaries to report to John what they see happening with their own eyes and let John decide.

And then Jesus talks about the meaning of John's ministry and challenges those who would not receive it. Jesus uses an odd turn of phrase about how the generation he is speaking to is like children in the square - complaining that they played the flute but others refused to dance, or they wailed and the others would not weep.

An odd turn of phrase isn't it?

Essentially I've understood to this to mean that Jesus is taking people to task for trying to tell God how to be God. Playing the flute for people and expecting them to dance - perhaps while they are weeping is to try to force a group of people into a behavior that is exactly the opposite of what they need; or to weep and expect others to join in with you when they are celebrating and then be angry with them because they wouldn't do what you wanted is to try to force other people into your own mold.

Jesus' point appears to be that we do this with God. We want a certain kind of God all the while claiming that we are God's followers. What we're really doing though is only following God when God is taking us where we have decided we want to go.

We want a Messiah, but when the Messiah shows up doing all the things that prophets promised would the Messiah would do, our first response is not to follow, but to question.

There was a Saturday night live movie spoof based on the life of Jesus, that must have been shown recently (judging from the number of times I'm seeing it on my friend's Facebook feeds). It is a parody in the style of a Quentin Tarentino film . The parody is in the "historical revenge" genre and shows a resurrected Jesus taking revenge on the Jewish leaders, the Romans, and Judas; all in the bloodiest, most violent gun using way. The visual key is Jesus wearing the crown of thorns, carrying a backpack cross and using a very large assault weapon to extract his revenge and to even the score.

It's not as funny as I think the people who made the parody imagined. It's insulting - not so much to God (who seems to have a great deal of patience towards us and our sophomoric humor) as it is to any number of us who want a Messiah who will "kick butt and take the names of our enemies". Our enemies…

In the beginning of this chapter of Luke, Jesus is expanding the reach of his ministry and is starting to connect with people that the Jews of his time didn't expect the Messiah to connect with. And he's connecting by healing them, freeing them, releasing them from sin. He's not taking revenge for the slights that the gentile people have shown toward the chosen people of God. He's not acting like the Messiah of their dreams. He's acting like the Messiah of the prophets.

So here's something to meditate on today… how are you and I in our own day dreaming of a Messiah that responds to our dreams and not to those of the prophets?

Do you remember this quote?

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. — Anne Lamott

It's worth meditating on that today I think - especially in light of this seventh chapter.

Lenten Bible Study Day 6; Luke 6

Luke Chapter 6 (NRSV)

If this was yesterday, I would have focused today on the stories about keeping the Sabbath that are in the very beginning of this chapter. I worry that we have completely lost the point of the Sabbath in our own day - we don't unplug, we don't focus on family and friends we don't even focus on God once a week anymore. The Sabbath was one of the defining qualities of the Hebrew people and it was once that for us too. I wonder what we would regain if we each tried on own to recover the idea of Sabbath rest?

But it's Monday, not Sunday. So…

The majority of this Chapter contains the familiar words of the Sermon on the Plain. (As opposed to the Sermon on the Mount that we remember in Matthew's Gospel.) It, along with Matthew's version, is probably the most coherent presentation of Jesus' teaching anywhere in the gospels. It's not a verbatim report of course, but it does represent his longest direct teaching to his followers in Luke's Gospel. Much of it is familiar to you I hope. Certainly the beatitudes - the "blessed are the…" phrases that are found in verses 20 through 23. Perhaps you're familiar with the "woes" as well that follow in verses 24 through 26.

Which, oddly enough, reminds me of one particular wedding. The bride and the groom joined the Cathedral in Arizona where I was serving as dean and after a year as part of the community, asked me if I would do their wedding on Jan 1 a couple of years ago. (1/1/11 was a cool date for a wedding apparently. I hear Las Vegas was doing a lot of business that day.) For some reason I agreed.

The groom had a peculiar request (at least in my experience) and asked me in particular to preach on the beatitudes in Luke. The Prayer Book suggests that we use the version that appears in Matthew, but I'd never preached on that particular passage in the context of a wedding - much less the Lukan version. Having already agreed to do the wedding, I guessed there was nothing for it but to honor the preaching request too. So I spent most of the week between Christmas and New Year's Day (The Feast of the Holy Name) thinking about why the Prayer Book suggested the Beatitudes as a gospel for a wedding. There's nothing particularly matrimonial about them. The context and setting of the words in the respective Gospels has nothing to do with marriage either. So why are they assigned?

After a few days of noodling about, I stumbled across a writer who off-handedly mentioned that in Beatitudes, Jesus is sketching out description of what the Kingdom of God will be like when it arrives in its fullness. It will be a time of reversal, a time when we finally see where the arc of history has been taking us. It will be the time when we become God's people in truth and not just in promise.

And the words are used as one of the options for a wedding because at its best, the relationship between two people that truly reflects God's will for us, will look like the Kingdom of Heaven to the people who look at the relationship. The relationship becomes an icon of the Kingdom of God - a sign of the beginning of the breaking in of God's reign on Earth.

The Prayer Book makes the connection in the wedding liturgy, but looking at the Bible directly, perhaps we can see that all human relationships have the potential to become this sort of icon of the Kingdom. And even go so far as to suggest that we can use this idea to unlock the full teaching of the Sermon on the Plain.

Jesus is telling us that as we live into the characteristics that he is describing, we are drawing closer and closer to the reality of the Kingdom. And that we aren't just doing that for ourselves, we are becoming the sign of the Kingdom for the whole world. We become the proof of Jesus' teaching to people who are struggling with his words.

We become (to borrow a phrase from the Sermon on the Mount) a light that gives light to the whole world so that the whole world can find its way in the dark.

Isn't it interesting that Jesus ends the sermon he gives in the 6th chapter with a warning of what will happen to all of us if we don't heed his teaching?

So, here's something to think about today. What do you need to change in your most important relationship so that you might move toward becoming a living icon of God's Kingdom? What do you (y'all) need to take on? What needs to be let go?

And… are you willing to do that?

Church Service Snow Cancellations

Many prayers for safety! This page will be updated as often as we receive new info, so keep an eye on it. If you don't see your church here please also check your church's website and/or facebook page, as closing information may appear there first.

If your church is closed or if you are stuck at home, you can read Morning Prayer online with Episcopalians around the world at Mission St. Clare

Service Cancellations:

AS OF SUNDAY 9:00am

Holy Trinity, Tiverton: all Sunday services cancelled

Trinity, Pawtuxet Village: all Sunday services cancelled

Lenten Bible Study Day 5; Luke 5

Luke chapter 5 (NRSV)

Today, as I read the fifth chapter of Luke's Gospel, right off I'm reminded that our chapter divisions are almost totally arbitrary.

As a reminder, the present chapter divisions in our modern editions of the books in the Bible come from an Archbishop of Canterbury in the middle of the 13th century. I'm thinking of that today because the fifth chapter has a veritable potpourri of vignettes of the early days of Jesus' earthly ministry. There's the healing of the paralytic let down from the roof, the healing of a leper, the call of the disciples and a parable about the nature of the Kingdom of God.

When we read the Bible in worship we don't use the chapter divisions to order our readings for this very reason. We tend to read shorter parts of the chapter, parts that constitute a story or thought unit. The scholarly term for this sort of narrative unit is "pericope". (You'll hear clergy sometimes referring to that in their sermons.)

So what jumps out at me this snowy Sunday morning in first week of Lent? It's Jesus' words to his first disciples after the miraculous catch of fish. After sending the fisherman back out into the water to let down their nets again, he tells them "don't be afraid" (Luke 5:10) before the well known line "you will be fishers of people". It's after what is given as an order, in the imperative voice, that the new disciples leave everything and follow him.

"Do not be afraid". We've heard this phrase twice already. It was Gabriel's first words to Zechariah when Gabriel announced the coming birth of John the Baptizer. It was the first words the angelic host said to the shepherds in the fields near Bethlehem the night of Jesus' birth. (Did you notice though that Gabriel didn't say that when he appeared to Mary? Isn't that interesting…?) Now today, Jesus uses the same words to the disciples. And I suppose by extension to us.

(By the way, this is not the last time we'll read these words in Luke's Gospel. Pay attention for them as we go forward together.)"Be not afraid."

In the story that Luke is relating, there's a sense that Jesus is using the angelic formula because he too is a messenger, a herald. Though he's not anything like an angel. He is both God and Human and fully present with us. There's something much greater than an angel here - as evidenced later by the healing of the leper, and even more so by Jesus' claiming God's own authority to forgive sins, and proving that he can by healing the paralytic.

But why this particular phrase? I've often thought that it is because it's fear that keeps us from doing what God asks of us. Fear that it won't work out. Fear that we'll do it wrong. Fear that we will fail. Fear that others will reject us, or that we'll lose something. In the case of the angelic messengers the phrase is a reminder that angels bring awe. They're beautiful, but it's a "terrible, awe-full and frightening" beauty. They are not at like the tame angels we see in popular art and culture. It makes sense that their first words - except in the case of Mary - are an order to "stop being afraid". But it's also interesting that, since angels are God's messengers, that these are God's words to us too. Just like we hear from Jesus to his disciples.

Here then is something to meditate on today. Jesus is telling us that, as his disciples, we must stop being afraid.

What are you afraid of? What would your life as a disciple be like if you were no longer afraid?

Lenten Bible Study Day 4; Luke 4

Luke Chapter 4 (NRSV)

Today, in chapter 4, we come across the story of how Jesus is driven into the wilderness for forty days of fasting and trial. As a preacher I've spent a great deal of time thinking about this particular story because it appears in one version or another every year on the first Sunday in Lent.

For the first few years that I was preaching I focused on the lesson, and on the struggle between Jesus and the adversary that it describes. Later on I started to focus more on the meaning of Lent and calling people to take this season as seriously as possible. I wonder if I did that in part because it was hard for me to understand the starkness of the story and the fullness of the language and scenery it describes.

A bit more than six years ago I accepted a call to serve as the dean of Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix Arizona. I had never been to Arizona before. I'd hardly ever been west of the Mississippi. I was deeply familiar with the intimate lush green landscape of the mid-Atlantic. The desert seemed like a grand adventure.

When I first got out to Phoenix and saw the vastness of the Sonoran desert from the airplane it was hard to see anything but jagged rocks and thorny plants. I remember when we were buying a house and looking all around the valley. The real estate agent would point out that a particular house had a mountain view. I didn't want a mountain view. The "mountain" was a pile of dark brown dirt and some very jagged rocks. I didn't want to look at that every morning.

It took me years to learn to see the beauty of the desert. But eventually I came to see the fragility that was hidden in the crags. My eye learned to see the colors of a new palette. I noticed the tiny flowers hidden behind the thorns.

But I also learned to respect the desert. I used to lead hikes into the wilderness on Saturday mornings with whoever wanted to come along. On a couple of occasions people on the hike weren't working hard enough at drinking water. Dehydration comes on fast. And it's very dangerous. We had a couple of moments that were a bit more exciting than I wanted them to be.

The idea of one person spending forty days in the desert without food or water is more than I can wrap my head around. I learned from my hikes that the only way to manage in the hostile environment of the desert was to cooperate with the people around you. Those exciting moments stayed merely "exciting" because we shared our water and food with the person who had run out. I think the nomadic people's "over-the-top" sense of hospitality must come out of this same recognition. Either you cooperate with each other or you are in danger of dying.

Jesus though goes into the wilderness on his own. He is in the wilderness by himself. And Jesus doesn't cooperate with his adversary when he appears. (The name "Satan" in Greek literally means "adversary".) And Jesus is not overcome. This time of testing in the desert is not the same thing as retreat or spiritual fast - at least not according to the accounts. This is a real and desperate struggle in the starkest and least forgiving place on Earth. And Jesus both endures it and overcomes it.
In Mark's Gospel, the picture of Jesus that is presented shows us a man of great power who does things that leave the people around him amazed and confused. This story in Luke, so close to the Markan version, is a close echo of that. There's something deep and powerful at work here.

I wonder that sometimes we tame our experience of God. We reduce God to a nice manageable idea that we can get our heads and hearts around. But this story is a reminder that there is more to God and God's work among us than we are comfortable with.

Lenten Bible Study Day 3; Luke 3

 

Luke Chapter 3 (NRSV)

Today we read about the very beginning of Jesus' ministry. We hear Luke's version of John the Baptizer's proclamation, and hear how Jesus himself introduced and framed his appearance. We hear too of how the people of his own community couldn't bring themselves to believe. And how they ultimately rejected him. Their rejection is a foreshadowing of the later rejections that happen in Luke's Gospel when Jesus' people and his friends also reject him and carry out the threat to kill him that we hear in this chapter.

All of this is a reminder that the Gospel, like a piece of music, has themes that appear again and again in the narrative, sometimes with and sometimes without a resolution. We hear all this read in church on Sunday. And I'm sure you've heard wonderful sermons on these texts over the years. But what about the very end of the chapter, the part that lists the genealogy of Jesus? That's not something we ever read in the lectionary (at least not that I remember). It's certainly not something that I've preached on.

I remember when I read this the first time I was reading the Bible the whole way through. I skimmed over the names. I wanted to get back to the story. What I didn't realize at that time was that Luke didn't put anything into his version of the Gospel without a purpose. And it wasn't until years later, when I returned to this list of names and started paying closer attention, that I began to understand some of the points that Luke was making here.

One of the points being made is that you and I share common ancestors with Jesus - we too are children of Abraham. And by giving the descent all the way back to Adam, Luke is reminding us that we share a common humanity with Jesus. It's a reminder that Jesus is really like us - much more than we pay attention to in our every day lives. It's something worth meditating on.

But there's another, to me, more interesting thing in this list of names. Rather than a march of heroes from generations to generation as you'd find in other genealogies of Luke's time, there are some surprising names in the list. There are a few people who are not exactly paragons of virtue. If you have time, do a little googling of the names in the list. See what you can find out about their lives. How amazing that Jesus own story has these odd characters, these twists and turns, these mistakes in that path. That too makes him like us.

But note that Luke is taking this history, warts and all, and showing that without the good and the bad, there would have been no earthly ministry. Surely God had the choice of who and how the generations would run. And God chose this a twisty path rather than a straight one. In a sense it seems that Luke is reframing the difficult parts and giving them a new meaning. They were difficult yes, but look at the fruit they bore.

Have you ever had to reframe the story of the hard parts of your life? Have you gotten to the point that you can recognize that the person you are today would not have emerged unless the you had trodden the twisty path you did? It's something that I try to keep in front of me when I complain about things to God in my prayers. Oft times there's a pathway that is carrying me with a purpose, but as I'm walking in a deep valley, I'm not able to see the peak that is where I'm ultimately heading to.

What parts of your life have you already reframed? What parts still need to be seen in greater context of the whole journey? Isn't it fascinating that the end of the Gospel reframes the repeated rejections of Jesus, the first of which we read this morning?

Lenten Bible Study Day 2; Luke 2

 

Luke Chapter 2 (NRSV)

Once we get past the very familiar story of our Lord's birth in the first part of Chapter 2, we come to some stories that are rarely read in Sunday worship in the Episcopal Church.

You may remember the song that ancient Simeon sings when he sees Jesus brought as an infant to the temple on the eighth day after Jesus' birth (what we call Holy Name which falls on Jan 1.) That song, or canticle, is one of the most familar parts of Evensong. The story of Anna is similar to that of Simeon. In both cases we here of people who have spent their whole lives waiting to experience this apparently chance encounter with God. And having seen the infant Messiah, they know that they have completed their vigil - and essentially their life's tasks.

I've always found this sort of faithfulness and devotion inspiring. I wonder what it would be like for me to spend my whole life waiting for one vision or encounter with God - or with God's plan. I think it would be hard to have such unwavering faith in God over such a long time.

There's one time in my life that I met someone who had that sort of faith. I was a very young priest and was given the responsibility of leading a weekly bible study at a nursing home. The ladies (there were no men) who were living in the home ("for the duration" as they quipped) loved to come and sit while I read the Bible to them. We'd talk about the lesson and what it meant to them. They taught me a great deal. I made them laugh, and was happy to do that in exchange for the wisdom they shared.

There was this one person though who said something I've never forgotten. I had just read them the story of Sarah and Abraham - and how Sarah had been told that she was to have her first child in her late nineties, having waited her whole life for such a moment. Sarah laughed. I asked the ladies around the table, all of whom were sitting in wheelchairs, what they'd do if I told them that they were about to have a child. They almost all laughed too. All but one.

The one who didn't laugh looked wistful. I asked her what she was thinking. She hesitated and then blurted out that she would be grateful that God had finally answered her prayer. She was 95. She'd never had children. And apparently she was still praying every day that she might have one. She desperately wanted a child of her own to hold and to love. And even though it hadn't happened yet, she still believed that God would make it happen. She had never lost trust that God would do that for her. No one laughed. We just sat quietly basking in her faith.

I imagine that Mary, being told that she, as a virgin, would conceive and bear a child must have known that sort of trust, that sort of faith in God. I imagine that Joseph had a similar faith too. And of course Anna and Simeon are two of the great examples. Have you known people with that sort of faith?

Lenten Bible Study: Ash Wednesday, Luke 1

 

Luke Chapter 1 (NRSV)  "
Welcome.

Thank you for joining me on this journey through the story of Jesus birth, ministry, betrayal, death and resurrection; and the story of the beginnings of the Church. Together we'll be reading Luke-Acts for the next forty days or so. Today when I read the opening of Luke's version of the Gospel, I was reminded of how important it is for Luke to stress the historicity of the events of Jesus' life.

Luke begins by explaining what he means to accomplish in his writing - that this really happened in a specific place and at a specific time. Luke is making clear that he is not writing down a series of rumors or fantastical stories. He's telling us what has really happened. Then he turns to the account of the birth of John the Baptist and the encounter that John's parents had with the archangel Gabriel.

As I read these words, I'm remembering my first year as a seminarian at St. Thomas' Church in New Haven CT. My fellow seminarian decided that we should stage a dramatic reading of the birth of John as the sermon for the second Sunday in Advent that year. People dressed up in costumes and stood in front of the altar creating tableaus of the scenes that Luke's Gospel was recounting. My role was to be the archangel. I was wearing my newly purchased seminarian's cassock and surplice. We thought it would be a good idea for me to climb up a ladder behind the reredos at the high altar and to "appear" dramatically at the appropriate point in the story.

I'm not sure what I was thinking, but I decided it would be most effective if I climbed all the way up to the top of the reredos and balanced on a 2x4 on the very peak about 2 stories above the stone altar. It was certainly dramatic. I managed to climb up there without anyone noticing at first. Nobody expected to have someone standing up there so high. And then someone in the congregation gasped and pointed. My appearance was exactly what we had hoped.

People looked up in surprise and fear. They where rightly afraid that I was going to fall. (I should have been too, but I was younger then.) But the looks of surprise and fear on their faces was what I remember most about the moment. I was seeing in their faces what Luke describes in the face of Zechariah. What a moment that most have been. Suddenly all the stories, and the pronouncement of the scriptures became real to him. They weren't ancient history. They were standing right before him announcing a news that he could barely comprehend. The Gospel is like that for all of us I imagine.

How is the Gospel like that for you right now, today? What are the parts of the angelic message that cut to the core of your life? What are the parts that you're still keeping at arm's length? Why are you doing that?

Journey to Easter with Bishop Knisely and the Bible: Why & How

Each day throughout Lent Bishop Knisely will post a meditation here on our blog, which will lead us through reading all of Luke and Acts in preparation for Easter. Download the Reading Schedule and follow along day by day.

From Bishop Knisely's RISEN Magazine Article:

Recently a study was published that listed the top ten most "un-biblical" cities in the United States. Providence was number one. The study claimed that our region was the least likely place for people to take the Bible seriously, to change the way they live their lives because of biblical teaching, or to simply read the Bible outside of Sunday worship.

While there’s a part of me that wants to argue with the study’s findings, there’s another part of me that recognizes a grain of truth. I don’t think Providence is America’s least "biblically minded" city because there are no people of faith in the area. I think it stems from a discomfort with the way the Bible is often used as a bludgeon in social arguments.

So far in my experience, Rhode Islanders are an extraordinarily tolerant people. When they see intolerance buttressed by biblical proof texts toward their neighbors, what I think happens is that the biblical witness becomes suspect because of the willingness to live and let live that makes life here what it is.

But as admirable as that is for our common life, the Bible is a foundation of our common faith. When we reject the misuse of the Bible in debate, we must be very intentional about not also rejecting the Bible’s rightful role in our lives. And for us to use the Bible rightly in our common life, we must first know what the Bible is, and how powerful a witness to God its words can be.

 

I think the Episcopal Church in Rhode Island can be a leader in returning the Bible to its rightful central place in our faith. We can do that by committing ourselves to read and study the lessons it has for us, and then by working together to apply those lessons to our personal and common lives. And the step to doing that is to open our bibles and read.

 

Reading the Bible can be a daunting exercise. The word Bible means library, not book. The Bible isn’t a novel or a text book or even a single coherent story. It is a collection of stories and different forms of literature written over about three thousand years. Parts of the Bible are as different from each other as Beowulf is different from an article in the ProJo (And that’s only a time lapse of 1500 years.) You won’t pick up a Bible and find an easy read from Genesis to Revelations. It’s much better to create a plan of study that will introduce you to the major literature forms, the context in which they were written and how they have been understood differently over the intervening thousands and thousands of years.

 

This Lent I encourage you to start this process. I invite you to read with me over the next forty days, through the Gospel of Luke and its second half, The Book of the Acts of the Apostles. Or just come and listen to the Gospel of Mark read aloud in one sitting at St. St. Martin's, Providence on Friday March 8th at 7pm. Either way, it will start us on a journey of discovering what the Bible is all about and how we can receive its teaching today. It’s the most exciting journey I’ve ever undertaken, and though the end is not yet in sight for me, I invite you to join me wherever you’d like on the way.

Blizzard Nemo: RI Church Closings

Many prayers for Safety as we clean up from Nemo! Throughout the storm we will be posting our churches' closings and service cancellations here.  This page will be updated as often as we receive new info, so keep an eye on it. If you don't see your church here please also check your church's website and/or facebook page, as closing information may appear there first.

If your church is closed or if you are stuck at home, you can read Morning Prayer for February 10th online with Episcopalians around the world at Mission St. Clare


Service Cancellations:

AS OF SUNDAY 7:30am

• Christ Church, Linoln: All services cancelled
• St. George's Central Falls: All services cancelled
• Good Shepherd, Pawtucket: All Sunday services cancelled due to parking ban.
• Trinity, Newport: Sunday 8am service cancelled 10am still ON. 4pm Evensong is cancelled.
• St. Peter's By-the-sea, Narragansett: 8:00 Services and Christian Education cancelled. 10:15 sertvice is ON.
• St Elizabeth's, Hope Valley: All sunday services cancelled
• St. Barnaba's, Warwick: All Sunday services cancelled
• Grace Church, Providence: Morning services cancelled, 4pm Ordination of The Rev. Rebecca Gettel is ON.
• St. David's on the Hill, Cranston: All services cancelled
• St. John's Barrington: All Sunday services cancelled
• St. John the Divine, Saunderstown: All Sunday services cancelled due to power outage
• St Peter's and Andrew's, Providence: Annual meeting cancelled, Sunday services still on
• Trinity, North Scituate: All Services Saturday and Sunday are cancelled
• Christ Church, Westerly: Saturday night service cancelled, no Sunday 7:45am service.

AS OF FRIDAY

• St. Barnabas, Warwick: Sunday soup luncheon postponed to 2/17, services still planned.
• St. Mary's Portsmouth: Saturday 5pm service is cancelled. Sunday services still planned.
• Saint Stephen's, Providence: Saturday AM requiem for parishioner Chester A Files Jr. is postponed to a later date. Sunday services still planned.
• St. Luke's, East Greenwich: Friday night Spaghetti Supper cancelled. Sunday services still planned.