Here’s what we’ll hear from the scriptures this Sunday:
Isaiah 44:6-8 A short and brash prophetic voicing of God’s challenge to any other that would make the same claim of identity as God does. I like it when God’s speech gets “chesty” like this… issuing challenges and put downs to any other who would dare refer to themselves by the same deeds and power. The “snub” I especially like is in vs 7: “Who is like me? Let them PROCLAIM it” because it reminds me of the psalm that refers to little idols and carvings that people bow down to that cannot talk. SPEECH distinguishes a living, real, and completely free God from a dead, fake, and completely bound one.
Psalm 86:12-25 Antiphonal verse 11: “Teach me your way, O LORD, that i may walk in your truth: give me and undivided heart to revere your name.” Lots of talk in the Older Testament hands over rich imagery: faces (like when Moses walks off the mountain and has to wear a veil), hands (like God’s hand holding up the sun in its course so that a battle could continue in favor of the Israelites), feet (“how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news…” from Isaiah 52). And “heart talk” is always poignant. Here the Psalmist asks God for “an undivided heart” calling to mind the reality that the heart of a needful sinner remains divided and subject to the winds and whims of temptation, weakness, and evil. Remember the part of Ps 51 that we sing after offering? It’s very similar language coming from a writer (most likely King David after being convicted by Nathan for the death of Uriah) who also knows a reality different from the one requested: “create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me…” Powerful stuff.
Romans 8:12-25 Our tour through Paul’s apostolic tour de force continues in one of this letter’s most vital chapters. He refers to people who have received the Gospel of Christ by a title often employed explicitly and implicitly in images by Peter in his letters: heirs. in vs 17 of this passage, concluding a meditation on the flesh and its limits coupled with a reflection of the power of the Spirit of God (the Holy Spirit), Paul writes that we who have received a “spirit of adoption” become children of God, “and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ…” Lovely words in the ears of anyone who feels or has ever felt put beyond God’s reach.
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 The missing verses contain other parables: the Mustard Seed, the Yeast, and a reflection by the writer of this gospel account on Jesus’ use of parables to speak to the crowds in order to fulfill a prophecy contained in Psalm 78 verse 2: “I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old…” As I hear Jesus tell the parable about weeds being planted among wheat, and then explain privately (in a house) to his disciples the meaning of the parable, the explanation of Article VIII of the Augsburg Confession came to mind. In defining what “the Church” is, the confessors observed that, for the present time, weeds are mixed in (latin: “per mixta”) with the wheat, as hypocrites and evil persons are also mixed in with those who truly believe the Gospel. Articles 17 and 19 also come to mind… I’ll leave that to you to explore.
I don’t know yet what direction the texts are taking me, what they are reading in me this week, how they are working on the community in and around SLLC, but it’s still early. With the monotony of moving, the physical strain and the mental fatigue that comes along with a job that to me always feels like some sort of weird and ineffective penitence (does effective penitence truly exist?… yes, see CA XI, XII, and XXIV) for my consumerist iniquity, I’m feeling a bit (more than usually) out of sorts going into this Sunday. I side emphatically with my dad when he observes that his own preaching tends to suffer in proportion to the amount of pastoral visiting he can do during a particular week.
