Second Sunday after Pentecost in Year A
Listen to true prophets! Righteousness and Justice for All Creation! Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary—Year A 2011 By Dennis Ormseth Readings for: Second Sunday after Pentecost Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18 Jeremiah 28:5-9 Romans 6:12-23 Matthew 10:40-42 In 2011, the long “green season” of “Time after Pentecost” begins with lectionary thirteen in the sequence that begins with the Sundays after the Epiphany and ends with Christ the King. Accordingly, in the narrative of these comments on the lectionary, we resume the procession into the new creation by the power of the Holy Spirit given in Pentecost, moving forward in hope toward the fulfillment of the mission of the Lord, the Servant of Creation. In another year, we might have already considered several aspects of the formation of the body of Christian presence in the creation. And on previous Sundays in another year, we would have considered “the call to table fellowship” and “God’s desire for mercy,” along with Jesus’ teaching of his disciples “about the joys and burdens of following in his footsteps” and how “such following comes at a cost.” (The list is from Diane Jacobson, “The Season of Pentecost,” in New Proclamation, Year A, 2002, edited by Marshall D. Johnson, p. 118). But as it is, in this year’s lection, the disciples’ first movement forward is appropriately marked by a strong and encouraging word of welcome from those who are to receive them. We disciples make present the Lord, the Servant of Creation. Welcome is a warm word of hospitality, a word that offers place in which to dwell. Mindful of Jesus’ Easter promise in his Farewell Address to his disciples to “go and prepare a place for you,” we hear this anticipation of the disciples’ outreach with the joyful awareness that we, too, have been prepared to be able to be “home” for these witnesses to the Servant of Creation, in our place, and with them Jesus himself and his Father. That is indeed what Jesus promised them: “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” (See our comment on the texts for the Fifth Sunday after Easter). With those who have been sent out in the power of the Spirit of Life, comes the Servant of Creation and the God of Creation. Acclaiming Jesus as King may compromise his role as Servant. Thus we find ourselves this Sunday gathered for our worship of the God of creation whose steadfast love, according to Psalm 89: 1-2, sustains all generations. What was promised in covenant with David, we are given to understand, is now being extended, through Christ, to all nations. Care must be taken, however, to note the ambiguity inherent in this use of the psalm, lest we welcome a view of God that is subversive for care of creation. In verses excluded from the assigned reading of the psalm, the Hebrew monarch is presented as mediator of God’s gracious presence in and through all creation. As Walter Breuggeman observes, the psalm reiterates an affirmation of the monarch expressed in 2 Sam 7:12-16, which may “be regarded as the beginning point for graciousness without qualification as a datum of Israel’s life and for the assertion of messianism wherein this particular human agent (and his family) is made constitutive for Yahweh’s way with Israel” (Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, p. 605). But while efforts to qualify the absoluteness of this claim are made in the Old Testament by making the monarch subject to the Torah, Breuggemann suggests that the tension between these commitments is not easily maintained. If “the purposes of Yahweh have now been entrusted to a human agent . . . what is from Yahweh’s side a singular intention becomes complicated both by high aggrandizing ideology and by uncurbed self-service.” For the church, he notes, there is a temptation to “take the high lyrical claims of oracle and royal psalm and ‘supersede’ the narratives of sordidness, so that kingship takes on a somewhat docetic flavor.” Christians appropriate “for Christology the highest claims of kingship and assign to Judaism the demands of the Torah,” which both distorts “the way in which Jewish interpretation kept Torah and messiah in fruitful tension,” and “overlooks the way in which this same tension continues to swirl around Jesus” (Ibid., pp. 609-10). The Warrior God (Psalm 89) is opposite to the God who sustains creation (Psalm 104). The selection of verses from Psalm 89 for this reading nicely illustrates this temptation. The implications of this ambiguity of the psalm’s images of God for our relationship to the creation are significant. The God who “rule[s] the raging of the sea” (89:8), the psalm proclaims, “set[s] the hand” of his servant David “on the sea and his right hand on the rivers” (89:25). As Arthur Walker-Jones points out in his book on The Green Psalter, the images here reflect the continuing influence in Israel of the ancient mythology of the warrior god, who creates by destroying Leviathan, the symbol of chaos, which will compete in the tradition with the more ecologically oriented images of God’s relationship with creation exemplified by Psalm 104 (Walker Jones, pp. 155-57). The relationship of the warrior god to creation is clearly one of domination and control, which, as we saw in connection with our comment on The Holy Trinity, is inconsistent with the Trinitarian view of God as relational (See our comment on Holy Trinity in this series; cf. Terry Fretheim, God and World in the old Testament, pp. 43-48). The selection of only versus 1-4 and 15-18, serves to conceal this concern from the congregation, but it does not manage to remove from the reading the triumphalist spirit of the monarchical ideology. It also hides the fact that the psalm, taken as a whole, is a lament for the failure of the monarchy to keep the covenant of David, the failure that itself manifests the brokenness of that ideology. We welcome visitors who bring gifts—and “baggage” The presence of Christ as the Servant of Creation, in any case, brings about a decisively different reality. The gospel lesson for this Sunday, we have suggested, is concerned with the extension of the Christian community out into the world, as gatherings of those drawn to Jesus welcome his disciples. We find ourselves amongst those so gathered, and are delighted by the company we share with them around the word of their testimony and we are delighted by the meal that they have taught us to share as a sign of our communion with Jesus in the presence of God. As a congregation, we are of course pleased to welcome newcomers of almost any kind. The growth of a congregation is naturally seen as a sign of success in meeting people’s needs, whether spiritual or social, and perhaps even material. The growth is likely to be credited to the spiritual gifts of the congregation’s leaders and those with whom they amply share these gifts, the local disciples, as it were. Such growth is typically rewarded by heightened confidence in the future of the congregation, greater pride of the members in their choice, and their collective prestige in the larger community, not to forget higher salaries for the staff. So, at least in a general way, we have some sense for what Jesus is talking about when he suggests that those who welcome a variety of newcomers into their gatherings receive the rewards associated with the arrival and welcome of assorted outsiders. Strangers bring gifts; the disciples bring gifts of word and sacrament, and the blessings that go with them. But sometimes strangers also bring “baggage,” in the metaphor of our times. They bring baggage of different kinds; and the congregation has to deal with that, as well. So we might often find ourselves asking, “what are we letting ourselves in for, as we welcome these newcomers? What, specifically, are we letting ourselves in for, in welcoming these disciples of Jesus?” If we welcome prophets, what is the reward? Jesus suggests a few instructive analogies. First, of special interest to us in view of our discussion about of the character of the monarchy, he says “Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward” (Matthew 10:41a). The trick here is that, as our first reading from the prophet Jeremiah conveniently reminds us, prophets come in different kinds, with different agendas relating to the reigning powers in the land. There are prophets of a rosy future, like Hananiah; and there are prophets of doom, like Jeremiah, who wears the wooden yoke of obedience to Torah. As Diane Jacobsen puts it, it’s a “Case of the Dueling Prophets:” Who are the true prophets and who are the false prophets? At issue is: How can one distinguish true prophesy from false prophecy, a subject taken up in Deut. 18:9-22? Which of us, given a choice, would not choose good news over bad? We will want to believe the bearer of good tidings; and we will tend to dismiss the harbinger of woe. So it was throughout biblical history. The people were wont to choose Hananiah and to dismiss or even to kill Jeremiah. Jeremiah responds to Hananiah’s smug assurance with the same clear and obvious message as Deuteronomy—time will tell (Jacobsen, p. 115). The rewards of the prophets vary, depending on the prophet! The prophet’s rewards: Hananiah’s promise that the exiles in Babylon will return in two years, irrespective of the people’s disobedience, Jeremiah insists, is a lie; instead, he “has broken wooden bars only to forge iron bars in place of them;” Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon will continue in absolute control (Yahweh has “even given him the wild animals”) until the people turn and repent of their disobedience. The prophecy will end in death, in the first instance, Hananiah’s own. By way of contrast, Jeremiah foresees “days surely coming” when, Yahweh promises, “I will restore the fortunes of my people, Israel and Judah, and I will bring them back to the land that I gave to their ancestors and they shall take possession of it.” Before then, however, the nations will be convulsed with “warfare, famine and pestilence,” as the “fierce anger of the Lord” works itself out and “he has executed and accomplished the intents of his mind” (Jeremiah 30:24). Prophecy always embraces all creation—animals, vegetation, land and people. The prophet’s mention of “wild animals” reminds us that Jeremiah’s prophecy embraces the wide net of all creation. As Terry Fretheim writes in an illuminating essay on “The Earth Story in Jeremiah 12,” God’s purposes in the world must be conceived in relation to the story of all of God’s creatures, including the land. Using Isaiah’s language (65.17-25; see 11.6-9), God is creating a new earth and it will be populated by animals, vegetation, and people (see Hos. 2.18-23). Comparably, the salvation oracles of Jeremiah are remarkably inclusive in their orientation, including non-Israelites (e.g. 3.17; 12.14-17; cf. 29.7) and the land itself (31.5, 12, 14, 27; 32.42-44; 33.10-13; 50.19). When the trumpet sounds, and God rides the cloud chariots into a new heaven and a new earth, the children will come singing, leading wolves and leopards and playing among the snakes. They will not hurt or destroy, for God will, finally, ‘give rest to the earth’ (50.34; see Isa. 14.7; 51.3) (Fretheim, The Earth Story in Jeremiah 12,” in Readings from the perspective of Earth, ed. by Norman C. Habel, p. 110). The reception of Jeremiah’s vision, in sort, will be rewarded with confidence in the restoration of the whole creation. Who are the true and false prophets in climate change? Will we listen? We find ourselves in something of a similar contention between prophecies these days in the debate regarding climate change. Prophets on the right promise peace, with only modest adaptations needed to adjust to the more or less natural changes in climate they foresee taking place in the next half-century. Prophets on the left see instead a doomsday of sorts, climate changes that will engulf whole cities as well as alter habitat for uncounted species. Which prophets do we prefer? Politically it is clear that the American people are choosing the Hananiahs of our time, in spite of the weight of scientific evidence that the prophets of the left have tied around their necks. It is a choice for economic development, over against the restraints of ecologically disciplined policies of sustainable growth. Economic growth is, as we argued in our comment on Jesus Sermon on the Mount (Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany), the Earth-destroying idolatry of our age. And that choice makes, each year, more likely the results foreseen by the prophets of doom. Setting the reputed uncertainties of scientific prediction aside, the church of Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Servant of Creation, will have to decide on which basis the rule of that Servant will be upheld: Will we do what we want? Or will we instead look forward to what God the creator and Jesus the servant of creation will do, and so enlist in their cause? Will we choose a course that follows the imperative of economic growth, or will we turn around and re-vision our future? Those who welcome a prophet, receive a prophet’s reward. If we welcome righteous people, what is the reward? Justice for the whole creation! The second saying, “whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous,” broadens the scope of the discussion of rewards, but with the same results. “Righteousness,” in the Gospel of Matthew, we recall, refers to “actions that are faithful to commitments and relationships.” We welcome Jesus as the one chosen by God to “fulfill all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15). As we have shown in our narrative of the church year from Epiphany to Pentecost, Jesus’ mission embraces righteousness and justice for the whole creation (See our comment on Matthew 3 in “The Baptism of our Lord” in this series). The reward for those who receive Jesus as the Lord, the Servant of Creation, is re-direction toward the purposes of God for God’s beloved creation. Our second reading, Romans 6:12-23, is relevant here as well: the “righteous ones” are those who do “not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions.” They present themselves “to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present [their] members to God as instruments of righteousness.” In Christ, the Servant of Creation, they belong to the dominion of life for all creation. Those who receive a righteous person, receive a righteous person’s reward. If we provide (a cup of) “water” to the poor, will it be polluted or pure? And so, finally, the special relevance of the third saying: “and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple, truly I tell, you, none of these will lose their reward” (Matthew 10:42). The phrase “little ones” refers here to the disciples and points, Warren Carter suggests, to their “vulnerability and danger as a minority group. . . . It recalls the context of persecution and exhortation to persevere which is evident throughout the chapter” (Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, p. 245). It suggests to us also those made vulnerable in society by the struggle with the conditions of poverty, for whom a mere cup of water is a precious gift of life. Jesus, we remember, is more than a little aware of the importance of water as necessary to the flourishing, not only of human beings, but also of all creatures. “Water,” as we put it in our comment in the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob, (see our comment on Third Sunday in Lent; cf. John 4:5-42) is “the touchstone of the query concerning the presence of God.” It probably should go without saying, (but won’t) that to provide the stranger with a “cup of water’ that is beyond proverbial and therefore truly and completely righteous and life-giving, the water will be pure and safe for all to drink, whatever it takes to bring it to the scene. And with that availability, the congregation does indeed, at a minimum, have its reward. As metaphor for the source of all life, furthermore, the cup of water carries astonishingly greater significance: it represents the whole of the creation in its capacity to fulfill the purposes of God, so that all of creation might be freed to flourish in its time. It is indeed a sign of the presence of the Lord, the Servant of Creation. And those who give that cup in the name of Christ, truly, none of them will lose their reward. |
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