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Preaching the Textsfor Ordinary Time
Guy Sayles
First Baptist Church, Asheville, North Carolina
Just as the vast majority of Christian history unfolds between the out-pouring of the Spirit on the church at Fentecost nearly 2,000 years ago and the future fulfillment of God’s dreams for the cosmos in the “second advent” of Jesus, so the bulk of the liturgical year comes between Pentecost Sunday and the First Sunday of Advent. We sometimes call this long season—24 Sundays in 2014—“Ordinary Time.” Though the season technically gets its name from the “ordinal” numbers which mark its progress, we may find it both irresistible and helpful to think of these Sundays as invitations to reflect on the church’s faithfulness and effectiveness in the challenges and opportunities of its mundane, day-to-day, and “ordinary” existence.
“Housework”: The Tasks and Opportunities ofOrdinary Time An image of the community of Jesus’ disciples which appears in two of the lectionary texts of this season is “household” (Matthew 10:24-25, June 22; Matthew 13:51-52, July 27). When we imagine God’s community as a “household,” we can also think of the tasks and responsibilities of church life as “housework”—the ecclesial equivalent of such ordinary things as preparing meals, washing dishes, doing laundry, and paying bills. Years ago, when poet Kathleen Norris had just begun to date the man who later became her husband, they attended the Roman Catholic wedding of one of his high school classmates, an Irish-American fellow from Long Island. Norris had left her Presbyterian roots behind in college, and she attended worship only when she visited her grandparents in South Dakota. She was unfamiliar with the actions and practices of a Catholic mass, and she was intrigued by the Eucharist. She says,
At one point, 1 gasped. “Look at that! The priest is cleaning up! He’s doing the dishes.” I found it remarkable—and still find it remarkable—that in that big, fancy church, after all of the dress-up and formalities of the wedding mass, homage was being paid to the lowly truth that we human beings must wash the dishes after we eat and drink…. And I found it enormously comforting to see the priest as a kind of daft housewife, overdressed for the kitchen, in bulky robes, puttering about the altar, washing up after having served so great a meal to so many people.1
The Lord’s Supper is bread and drink, baptism is a bath, and preaching is family story-telling; worship is, in many ways, housework. Housework is, by its very nature, repetitive. You work all weekend to get the clothes clean for Monday, and when Friday arrives, you have to start all over again. Cook dinner, feed the family, do the dishes, and make the grocery list for tomorrow’s supper; on and on it goes, the same things, again and again. Similarly, in the household of God, there is a lot of recurring housework. The church year is a grand cycle: Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Ordinary Time, and back to Advent. Some years fly so quickly by that it seems we were just
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putting away the Advent wreath when it is time to get it ©ut again. In ehureh life, there are seores of repeated and predictable tasks. Each year, for instance, we nominate and elect leaders, draw-up budgets, promise to fund them, and offer ministries which we hope will be transformational. Such tasks are as regular and as common as mowing foe lawn in foe summertime. We occasionally grow weary of these “church chores,” which is understandable, but we also know that when we can no longer see foe value of them, it’s a sign that something has gone wrong, just as a lack of attention to the condition of one’s home or body is a possible indicator of depression. Ordinary Time gives us opportunities to reflect on foe significance of unspectacular but steady faithfulness to foe mission and ministry of the church. Most of us will not demonstrate our love for God and neighbor (Matthew 22:34-40, October 26) in a single gesture of heroic self-sacrifice; instead, we will show our love by our diligence in the daily tasks of caring for the people, communities, and places we call home. Housework matters because we do not have healthy and welcoming homes without it.
A Community ofSelf-Giving Love: Trinity and Reign ofChrist Sundays We do “housework” of ongoing church life with foe assurance that we are part of a community of self-giving love. The First and Twenty-Fourth Sundays after Fentecost frame Ordinary Time. The First Sunday (June 15) is Trinity Sunday, a day to celebrate foe mystery that foe one God is a community of three persons who delight in mutual, generous, and other-regarding love. The Twenty-Fourth Sunday (November 23) is Reign of Christ Sunday, on which we acknowledge that Jesus’ gracious and truthful reign creates a beloved community of justice, compassion, and peace. The entire season, then, is held in the embrace of divine love—foe love who is Trinity and foe love which energizes and characterizes Jesus’ rule and realm.
Trinity Sunday (June 15): Genesis l:l-2:4a; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20 When we attempt to describe God, we often reach for western philosophical terms like omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, abstract labels which have far less resonance in Scripture than relational words like Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, ٢٠Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Ouly a handful of biblical texts make straightforward ontological claims about foe nature of God (Exodus 3:14; I John 4:8), but there is an overwhelming abundance of texts which helps us to know who God is by what God does. We know God primarily by means of verbs: God makes, blesses, and sets limits. God judges, forgives, and reconciles. God sends, gathers, and hosts. God suffers, rejoices, and, most of all, loves. The God who is Trinity also calls people to share foe divine mission in foe world, a mission which extends God’s life-giving and life-gladdening love to everyone and to all things. Gur texts describe two mandates which God gives to God’s people: to tend wisely and well to creation (Genesis l:l-2:4a) and to make disciples of Jesus (Matthew 28:16-20). At foe dawn of creation, having spoken foe world into order out of chaos and having fashioned human beings in foe divine image, God gave them this vocation: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill foe earth and subdue it; and have dominion over foe fish of foe sea and foe birds of foe air and over every living thing that moves upon
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the faee of the earth” (Genesis 1:28). In the lin§ering lightofhis resu!־reetion,Jesus gathered his followers onaGalilean mountain and gave to them this commission: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and 10,1 am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20). Both mandates are global in scope: “Fill the earth and subdue it.” “Make disciples of all nations.” Both are grateful responses to the generosity of God. We labor to nurture it and to tend to the earth which sustains it. Filled with wonder over the grace given to us by the crucified and risen Jesus, we work to share his gospel with the world. We answer these mandates as people whom the Trinity deeply blesses by making us part ofthe community of God’s own life. Immersed in God’s Trinitarian nature, we experience “the grace ofthe Tord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion ofthe Holy Spirit” (2 Corinthians 13:11-13). We live in the “love of God” who is our Creator and the Source ©four worth and value. The God who made us loves us with an everlasting love. We live “in the grace ofthe Tord Jesus Christ” who accepts us as we are, forgives our sins, and has mercy on our brokenness. His grace frees us to live passionately and joyfully. We live in “the communion of the Holy Spirit.” We are never completely alone, even when we feel most afraid and most forsaken. We are held in the koinonia of the Spirit, a koinonia which is both the inner life of the Trinity and the shared life of the church which the Trinity creates and sustains.
ReignofChristSunday(November23):Ezekiel34:ll-16,20-24; Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46 The Bible’s most enduring image of leadership is not commander, warrior, judge ٢٠elder. It is, instead, shepherd: one who tends, protects, leads, and nourishes the flock. Shepherd isn’t, as we might think, merely an image of religious leadership. It’s an image of what we would call civic, cultural, and economic leadership as well. Tike the other peoples of the ancient near East, Israel thought of its kings, not only or mainly its priests, as shepherds. For us, anyone who is in a position to care for the well-being of others is a shepherd . Elected officials are shepherds for their constituents; CEOs are shepherds for their corporations; doctors are shepherds for their patients; parents are shepherds for their children; teachers are shepherds for their students; and pastors are shepherds for their congregants. Everyone who offers leadership, however vast ٢٠modest its scope, is a shepherd. Ail of us need shepherding. We need guidance: someone to help us find the right path ٢٠to rescue us when we have strayed from it. We need protection: someone to warn us of hidden dangers, to shelter us from avoidable adversity, and to provide for us havens of restoration. We need nurture: someone to share with us the nourishment of truth and the sustenance of wisdom. Because we all need shepherds, it’s especially heartbreaking when the people we trust to care for us seem too busy, distracted, ٢٠insensitive to do so, and it’s crushing when the people who were supposed to be our shepherds use and abuse us. Shepherds who do not care tenderly and skillfully wreak havoc and inflict great harm. Think of the damage done by indifferent or corrupt shepherding:
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Clergy wh© are merely professional in toeir care and offer staged eompassion and pretend empathy to h e strnggling, CEOs who drive their colorations into bankruptcy, take a golden parachute into luxury, and leave average employees without jobs ٢٠hope, Elected officials who grow rich in office but become calloused toward h e legitimate needs of the poor and marginalized. Parents who neglect or abuse their children.
Shoddy ٢٠unethical shepherding wounds the body, bruises the soul, and rends the heart. Shepherds are accountable to Cod for what happens to heir sheep, and the Hebrew Scriptures tell us that Cod has particular anger toward selfish shepherds. In verses which precede our text from Ezekiel,God warns Israel’s heedless shepherds of impending judgment (Ezekiel 34:1-10). Then in our text, God pledges never to leave the vulnerable, lost, and hungry sheep of Israel in the hands of those self-centered shepherds (see 34:11-16). Christians believe that God’s pledge found its most complete fillfillment when Jesus came to live among us. In Jesus, God searched for scattered sheep. In Jesus’ arms, God carried the injured back to safety. In Jesus’ mercy, God nurtured the weak back to strength. Jesus shows us that God is a shepherd who does not rest until all the lost are found, all the displaced have been welcomed home, and all the hungry are satisfied In Matthew’s Gospel (25:31-46),Jesus told a story about the lastjudgment which makes it clear that, as St. John of the Cross put it, “At the end of the day, the subject of the examination will be love.” The parable’s shepherd-king does not divide the sheep from the goats on the basis of beliefs they professed, doctrines they affirmed, ٢٠positions they defended. This judgment hinges on the presence ٢٠absence of compassion. The shepherd-king says that when people showed mercy on the least and lost, they were merciful to him. With this story, Jesus claimed to be starving with the hungry, to be clothed only by shame with the naked, to be silenced in the voiceless, to be uprooted in the homeless, ٠٢be desolate with the abandoned, and to wrestle with limitation in the sick. Jesus wants to know: Did you see me in the least of these? Did you feed me by sharing your bread with the hungry, clothe me by offering a coat to the naked, visit me by spending time with the prisoners, care for me by nursing the sick, and love me by welcoming the stranger? A couple of years ago, I met a young woman, an entrepreneur and activist in our town, who introduced me again to the Jesus who told this parable. A mutual friend had brought us together for lunch. As soon as our food was in front of us, she looked ^ ־ سctongly in toe e ^ ^ n d wito a ؟uiet irtens^
I grew up around here. My grandfather was a preacher. 1 heard toe stories about Jesus from him. I don’t have much to do with organized religion, because, to me, toe people in churches don’t sound ٢٠act much like him. They spend a lot of time fussing over and protecting things he didn’t seem to care about. If I understand what he said, when I feed hungry people, I feed him. Right? And when 1 help them find shelter, 1 shelter him. Right? So, what I want to know from you is, what do yon intend to do about all
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these people in our own eommnnity who don’t have enough to eat ٢٠a deeent plaee to live or any hope for a real job?”
My new friend wasn’t harsh with me, and she didn’t attaek the ehureh, either. In fact, in an odd way, she believes that the church has more potential for good than some of us believe it does. With fierce love in her heart, she challenged me to listen again to the Jesus I talk about all the time—the Jesus whose rule and reign creates and sustains a beloved community of justice, compassion, and peace.
Broken Families and Salvation History: The Genesis Texts in Ordinary Time (June 22-August 17) God often creates beloved community out of broken relationships, just as God crewed toe h eav e^n d toe earth from the swirling chaosofa“formless void” (Genesis 1:1). The readings from Genesis in Ordinary Time are toe stories of shattered and shattering families; in another way, they are toe stories of God’s salvation. There are childless couples who yearn for a baby, and parents who grieve over toe lives of toe children they do have. We read about preferential treatment, raw ambition, and deceitful scheming. There is envy, hatred, and violence alongside occasional incursions of mercy, love, and peace. Divisions in toe families of Israel’s patriarchs and matriarchs were in Genesis the seedbed of much of the hostility which came to exist between Israel and its neighbors. These Jl-t0(>human stories provide astonished testimony that God brings salvation to God’s people precisely through brokenness. That astonishment pervades toe stories about Joseph which occupy roughly toe last fifth of toe book of Genesis (chapters 37-50; see toe readings for August 10 and 17). As Genesis narrates his story, Joseph’s envious brothers sold him into slavery, but he rose from servitude to become one of the most powerful men in ancient Egypt. Toward toe end ofhis life, he was reconciled wito his family when his brothers came to Egypt during a time of severe famine to beg for food. The Joseph stories warn us about toe effects of arrogance and jealousy, inspire us to five wito courage and integrity, and urge us to hope in God’s providence. The narratives show how a rejected brother became the source of deliverance for his estranged family. They give evidence that forgiveness can transform malice. These stories tell that God works wito us to absorb adversity and pain into a larger purpose. They invite us to trust that God is present even when we can neither see nor hear nor feel toe intimations of that presence.
The Gospel ofMatthew, Discipleship, and Ordinary Time The Gospel lessons for Ordinary Time are from Matthew, as they are for nearly all of Advent 20I3-?entecost 2014. This gospel intends to shape its readers into devoted disciples of Jesus who “hear his words and act on them” (7:24-27) and who respond obediently to his commission to “go and make disciples of all nations” (28:18-20). Matthew tells toe story of Jesus in a way that seizes us wito the same amazement that grasped toe people who encountered him in toe first century: Jesus’ teaching “astounds” us (7:28), his compassion touches us (9:36), and his call makes us his followers (4:18-22). A concern for toe formation of faithful disciples permeates Matthew’s Gospel. In Matthew 10, Jesus prepared his disciples for a brief “mission trip,” an opportunity
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for them to do the kinds of things they had seen him doing (narrated in Matthew 8-9). At the heart of that training session, Jesus offered this brief and “־ description of diseipleship: “A diseiple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master. It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master” (10:24-25, June 22). To be a disciple of Jesus is to be engaged in a process of becoming progressively more like him. In Matthew lb, following ?eter’s confession ofjesus as the Messiah,Jesus spelled out the terms of diseipleship: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (16:24-25, August 31). Disciples of Jesus lose their lives—they set aside the limited definitions and distorted images of self which give them their identity—in favor of the authentic life Jesus offers, defined by the will and way of God, shaped in the image of Jesus. As our lives become increasingly like his, we are able, as ?eter did, to confess Jesus to be “the Messiah, the Son of the Living God” (16:16, August 24). Matthew presents ?eter as an exemplar of diseipleship and affirms his central role in the community of Jesus’ followers. Matthew does not “photo-shop” his picture of Peter by editing out the impulsive disciple’s flaws and failures. Instead, Matthew unfiinchingly shows that ?eter, like us, often stumbled along the path of following Jesus. ? ٢٠instance, Rudolf Schnackenburg believes that Matthew’s story of Jesus’ walking across stormy waters toward his frightened disciples in a wave-tossed boat (14:22-33, August 10) presents Peter as a “paradigm of faith and doubt.”^ On the one hand, ?eter risked stepping out of the boat to move toward Jesus; on the other, he was distracted from Jesus by the upheaval and chaos which raged around him. Sinking in the water, ?eter’s cry for help is also the continuing prayer of the church: “Lord, save me!” (14:30). Throughout his gospel, Matthew unhesitatingly describes ?eter’s capacity for bluster (26:33-35) and denial (26:69-75). Nonetheless, ?eter was the disciple to whom God first revealed Jesus’ identity as “the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (16:16, August 24). Matthew records (Mark and Luke do not.) Jesus’ affirmation of ?eter’s confession: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! ? ٢٠flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my ?ather in heaven” (16:17). Jesus also identified ?eter as “the rock” on which he would build his church (16:18) and as the bearer ofuni؟ue authority (“the keys,” 16:19) in the Christian community. The nature and extent of Peter’s authority became (and continues to be) a cause of debate between “Catholics” and “?rotestants”; however, Peter’s central and vital importance in the early church is clear. At least until the ascendancy of the Apostle ?aul among Gentile Christians, ?eter was the pivotal leader of the early Christian movement. Itis well-known that Matthew organized his gospel to presentJesus as the church’s Moses—its authoritative teacher. Matthew includes five major discourses ofjesus which parallel the ?entateuch, the “five books” which comprise the Torah of Moses. Each discourse contains collected teachings ofjesus on particular themes. The five discourses and their general themes are:
The Nature of Christian Diseipleship The Disciples’ Mission in the World The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth Chapters 5-7 Chapter 10 (June 22 and 29) Chapter 13 (July 13-27)
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Chapter 18 (September 7 and 14) Life in Christian c©mmunity Chapters 24-25 (November 9-23) Present Trouble and Future Triumph
These diseourses are preeeded and followed by extended narratives of Jesus’ aetions ; in faet, the whole of Matthew’s gospel is patterned by this alternating rhythm of Jesus’ “words” and “deeds”—foe words diseiples are to obey and foe deeds they
This five-fold organization of Jesus’ teaehing in Matthew underseores Jesus’ Moses-like signifieance for the church. Jesus is not so much a “new Moses”; he is, instead, a still-deeper revelation of the heart and soul of God’s will, foe same will of God toward which Moses and foe prophets had pointed. Jesus did not come to “abolish but to fulfill” foe law which Moses received and taught (see Matthew 5:17-20). Jesus concluded this third discourse with a brief parable which describes a “well trained scribe” (or “fully-discipled teacher”) whose calling was to be a “master of the household” and to tend to a storehouse of wisdom which had been stocked with treasures “new” and “old” (Matthew 13:51-52,1 اy 27). In Jesus’ culture, householders managed large estates which belonged to foe wealthy. A householder was responsible for meeting foe material needs of everyone in the household. He managed its business affairs, supervised its servants, and saw to education of its young children. This job required sound stewardship. The manager could waste nothing: things both new and old—hand-me-downs and new garments, stored grain and fresh produce—had to be used. Jesus’ followers have a similar task: to use all of foe resources of God’s wisdom , both new and old, to meet foe needs of foe household of faith. For members of Matthew’s church, fois text assured them that they would have foe wisdom they needed to meet foe challenges they faced after Jesus’ death and resurrection. They had “old” treasures, which were their memories of the ministry of foe earthly Jesus. They would also receive “new” treasures from his always-speaking Spirit. Jesus had promised, “I am with you always, to foe end of foe age” (28:20). Notice that Jesus mentioned “new treasures” first: they were to be given highest priority. This text cautions foe church about foe danger of our allowing foe “old, old story” to become “old hat.” ft challenges us not to turn our hearts into museums of things past and invites us to allow foe Holy Spirit to make them theaters of God’s ever-new drama. God is always up to something new, beckoning us into foe future, and God is always reminding us of something old, anchoring us to God’s mighty deeds in the past. Ordinary Time invites us into foe storehouse to rummage around in foe apparently everyday, mundane, and familiar resources of revelation and to discover in them the eternal, foe ‘ and foe surprising gifts of God. In this season, we have foe opportunity to discover that all times are ordinarily extraordinary.
Notes 1 Kathleen Norris, The رﻣﺢ’س ‘ﺀ؛ م،،و Mysteries (Ne^ York: ?aulist ?re3 -1 , (1998 , <.؛ < ؛ 2 Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel ofMatthew (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 8.
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