August 4, 2024 - The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Good Morning!
When I said 'yes' to John's request that I preach today, I had not looked at the assigned readings. And at first glance, they are a somewhat boring bunch. In church speak, by the way, they are called the Propers. Don't ask me why.
What we have are "and then" pieces: last week David organized the killing of Uriah, now we read about Nathan calling him out on it; Psalm 51 is a real downer, a hymn about miserable me. Paul continues writing to the church in Ephesus. Finally, the follow-up to the feeding of the five thousand takes us back to the earthly ministry of Christ.
Does anything connect these choices? How does the Gospel according to John fit? Or are we just plodding through Ordinary Time while we wait for the exciting bits when we reach Advent?
And who sets the lectionary anyway? You got it - a committee. Now this cranky old lady thinks the last time a church committee got anything right, it was the production of the King James Bible!(though I might add to this the sterling work of our search team, and the resulting call to our new rector, John!)
Stuck with the readings as required, I knew I needed to take a longer look. Today I share with you what I found.
First, King David's story takes us from a cocky kid who killed a giant with his sling and a rock... to a King, reveling in the perks of power: see what you want? Grab it. Let nothing get in your way. This week, Nathan tells him in no uncertain of terms what a miserable excuse for a king he has become by arranging the death of her husband to claim Bathsheba. To my surprise, David comes around and agrees: "I have sinned against the Lord."
I trust that Nathan rebuked David in private and that he did so out of love for his monarch. A healthy community allows for such corrections when clearly needed and acted upon in love.
Next, Psalm 51 appears to take us further into the notion of sin: not just David, but the whole human race. Remember the old saying "In Adam's fall, we sinned all." Even Henry's lovely voice could not lessen the sting of Verse 6: "Indeed, I have been wicked from my birth, a sinner from my mother's womb."
God knows I am not perfect, but I refuse to believe I am a worm or that I am in the company of worms this morning!
The writer Kathleen Norris helped me here, urging us to see the psalms not as separate bits of emotion, but as a whole. "A Benedictine community sings Psalms at morning, noon, and evening prayer, going through the entire Psalter every three of four weeks.... to the modern reader the psalms can seem impenetrable: how in the world can we read, let alone pray, these angry and often violent poems from an ancient warrior culture? [but to say the psalms aloud] frees them from the tyranny of individual experience... they inevitably pull a person out of private prayer into community, and then into the world."
Finally, Lord knows I am not a particular fan of Paul, but I must admit his letter to the Ephesians is right on today: "The gifts [Christ] gave us were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers... to equip the saints for the work of ministry... speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped as each part, working properly promotes, the body's growth."
In other words: it takes a community to help each member flourish. It takes a prophet like Nathan, speaking the truth to power, yet in love, to call David back to his anointed ministry. It takes a choir to sing us through the whole Psalter, joining with voices over the centuries as well as this morning in churches around the world - a community of song embracing the varieties of human experience.
And it takes a community to recognize that we have different gifts and different baptismal ministries - all supporting the whole.
If Epiphany has an overall ministry, I believe it is this: Wherever you are in life and faith, you are welcome here. We are happily pledged to welcoming all, to open communion at this table, to Sunday brunch in the parish hall. And those are good things; we need to keep doing that.
But, as I see it, the work of discerning and supporting each other's ministries is by far the most important. We know about Tom Blaising and his work with the Pullman food pantry; about Rosie Thurber's fierce commitment to prayer; about Sheri Ippel's work with the children in our midst. And we all support those ministries as we are able.
Meeting a new person for the first time, though, I have never had the courage to ask, "What is your baptismal ministry?" But is that not an appropriate question? As members of the body, should we not ask, "Do you need help discerning your call? Help in carrying it out?"
Before we depart the church, we have often asked "that we may be called to be the answer to another's prayer." Everything we do here helps us respond to that prayer. What we do here as a community, enables us to follow our baptismal ministries "out of private prayer, into community and then into the world."
When you wrestle with today's readings, you may come to different conclusions. And that is good! Our culture has, in some respects, turned the Bible into a "battleground" of interpretation: from the "literal" readers (whatever that means) to Thomas Jefferson who took a little knife and cut out the bits he did not like.
My personal mentor in biblical wrestling is Verna Dozier, our own twentieth-century prophet. Verna was a high school English teacher and an active Episcopalian. She knew her Bible (and Shakespeare) backward and forward. She shared her studies through teaching, workshops, speaking, and writing. She was particularly interested in reclaiming the authority of the laity. A graduate of Howard University, she taught English literature in the Washington, DC, public schools for 34 years. Though she did not formally study theology, two seminaries gave her honorary degrees; well-known organizations, like the Alban Institute, recruited her for their programs.
Verna reminded me that what is written in the Bible is not a prescription, but a history. If we look at the New Testament as a fool-proof formula, we can fall into the trap of trying to affix first-century views onto a twenty-first-century culture.
I am grateful to be able to give her the last word:
"The Bible is being used in ways that it was never intended to be used. The Bible is being used as if it were an answer book, a rule book, a guide for every hour and every day of our life... the Bible was the worshipping community's book, written by a people who wanted to express their faith in how God acted in history.
"The unspoken preface for biblical books is always, 'This is how we see it.'
"That preface is explicit in the gospels. The gospels are always called 'the gospel according to' and what that means is 'this is how this faith community saw it.' They do not say, 'This is the absolute, not-to-be-challenged way it is.'
"As God's action did not begin with Jesus, so it does not end with the early church. It ends with us. That is our baptismal call, to become a part of the people called to do God's work in the world, and the preacher's task is to keep that call before us."
Thanks, Verna.
Amen.
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