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PREACHING THE LECTIONARY: THE McGREGOR PAGE
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CURRENT CONTENTS OF THIS PAGE
(updated May 4, 2008)
--Pentecost 2 – (May 25, 2008)
--Trinity Sunday – (May 18, 2008)
--Pentecost – (May 11, 2008)
--Links
Pentecost 2 – May 25, 2008
Isaiah 49:8-16a
Psalm 131
1 Corinthians 4:1-5
Matthew 6:24-34
Whence Comfort and Hope?
Each of these Lections presumes a former state in which comfort and hope were missing.
"’Come out, … show yourselves.’ They shall not hunger or thirst, neither scorching wind nor sun shall strike them down…” (Isaiah 49:9-10) Picture people in such want and fear that they are hiding.
“My heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.” (Psalm 131:1) The Psalmist says this following the previous Psalm, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.”
“But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court." (1 Corinthians 4:4) With these words Paul alludes to the heartbreak and disappointment he has experienced at the hands of the church he founded.
No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other.” (Matthew 6:24-34) Jesus begins this teaching by describing the common moral state that makes life so agonizing.
Where is the comfort, where the hope? You want the prose or the poetry? Jesus doesn’t mince words. One can either serve God or money, “money” standing for everything self-serving. Comfort and hope centered in the self vanish in hard times. If you want comfort and hope you can count on, then you had better count on God.
Paul demonstrates what Jesus said when he rests his case with God and limits the power his detractors over his spirit. He wouldn’t have spent four chapters on the subject, however, if following Jesus’ teaching were easy. He is struggling here to keep God at the center of his ego support, but by the time he gets to the thirteenth chapter he will have succeeded.
There is a prosaic side to life, but we also have a poetic side. The actual return to Jerusalem from Babylon was not what Isaiah describes. They got back, but there was nothing easy about it. Mountains didn’t flatten for them. They had to climb every one of them, but the climb was different because of the poetry. Comfort and hope are as much a condition of the heart and mind as they a condition of the circumstances. We need changed circumstances, but even more we need hearts and minds that draw comfort and hope from their source, that rest on God.
“But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.” (Psalm 131:2)*
*Note the female images in connection with God’s comfort and steadfast love here and in Isaiah 49:15
Trinity Sunday – May 18, 2008
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20
No Better Words
One God and one creator of all, this is the uniting concept at the foundation of Biblical faith. Whatever role Satan or other powers play, it is a subordinate role bound and limited by God. Human beings, made in God's image, have a special intermediate role between God and the rest of the creation. Whatever angels or other heavenly hosts may do is unimportant. The drama of life has but two main actors, God and human beings. Human life is a dialog between God and us with the rest of creation our shared responsibility.
This unitary understanding of God is precious. It simplifies and solidifies the psychological landscape. It is like growing up in a home where love unites your parents. You don't live with the terror that your home is going to explode. That is the terror generated by dualism, by the "good god - bad god" belief system. Some people within the Christian tradition elevate Satan to such a level that they create a second god for themselves and live in a fearful dialog with that god. Genesis lays for us a firm foundation. Don't let the minor references to Satan in the balance of the Scriptures unbalance the picture. We believe in one God!
We believe in one God who is beyond naming or defining. We do not rise above God and look down on God. We never see God from the outside. We can never talk about God in terms of God's boundaries, but we can set up boundaries for our talk about God, and that is what the doctrine of the Trinity is. The Trinity is the boundaries for Christian talk about God. "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you." (2 Corinthians 13:13) We do not confess God faithfully unless we confess God graciously acting in Jesus. We do not confess God faithfully unless we confess God who loved all life into existence. We do not confess God faithfully unless we confess God's grace and God's judgment bound in the communion of the Holy Spirit. God is like a stable home with two parents held together by love. The doctrine of the Trinity is a more stable understanding of the one God than the unitarian alternatives, one God who is Father, one God who is Son or one God who is Holy Spirit.
You have to have the Trinity to make sense of loving Jesus. You can’t truly love someone who is dead and gone. One can love St. Francis of Assisi from historical accounts, but that isn’t loving the person. If someone says, “I talk to St. Francis every day. He walks beside me, speaks to me and guides me.”, then that person has a vivid imagination but not a personal relationship. Yet we say this about Jesus, experience Jesus in this way without implying that we need a psychiatrist. What is the difference? God who is God the Son is Jesus not dead but risen. God who is God the Holy Spirit is not Jesus gone but Jesus present.
The doctrine of the Trinity is a confession not a definition. Who can define God?! Christians can only confess their historic and person encounter with God. To confess God apart from God in Christ is impossible. To confess Christ apart from God the creator of all is impossible. To confess God in Christ apart from our experience of both through the Holy Spirit sustaining the church is impossible. Therefore, we are constrained by our experience of God to confess the one God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There are other words, but there are no better words.
Pentecost – May 11, 2008
Acts 2:1-21
Psalm 104:24-34, 35b
1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
John 7:37-39
The Big Bang
Pentecost is the church's big bang. Exploding out of that energy-laden center are all of the church's gifts and all of the church's potential: the utterance of wisdom, the utterance of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, the working of miracles, prophecy, the discernment of spirits, various kinds of tongues, the interpretation of tongues and even the forgiveness of sin. The expansion of this spiritual universe is endless renewal, reformation, democratization and unification. Anthropologists try to explain the church in terms of human proclivity, sociologists in terms of human interaction and historians in terms of institutions and leaders. But the truth about the church is a spiritual explosion initiating the expansion of a spiritual universe moving today as it did on the day of the big bang.
It surely must have been with this understanding that John adds the parenthetical comment, "Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified." (John 7:39) Clearly the Hebrew Scriptures report on the work of God in terms of spirit, but the impact of Pentecost on the church was such a big bang as to set aside anything that preceded it. In the scientific community too, there is little talk about what would have preceded the big bang. It is not that no history exists before; it is just that the big bang subsumes history.
Notice the connection between the coming of the Holy Spirit as John describes it and the creation of Adam as Genesis describes it. God breathed into little Adam the breath of life, "nephesh". It is another form of "nephesh" that Jesus breaths into the disciples. The first "nephesh", Old Testament scholar Bill Power, described as "a bundle of desires" like a nest of baby birds, beaks wide open, straining upward toward the meal in the mother's mouth. At Pentecost, "nephesh" the yearning becomes "nephesh" the empowering -- one giver, one Spirit, one gift in two parts, the second seeming to subsume the first, empowerment setting aside yearning, but really they go together. Pentecost is the completion of God's gift of life. For this reason we talk about it as if there were no history of the Spirit before, but of course there was.
There is a history to the work of the Holy Spirit, but history doesn't grasp the Spirit. We can use history to claim that Christians have it and Jews don't, but that would be an abuse of the revelation. Time is not important to the Spirit. The big bang is for everyone. It is the beginning of everyone's time, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu... One of the manifestations of the neo-Pentecostal movement, the last half of the 20th century, was the fellowship across denominational lines among Pentecostals -- Roman Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist and "old line Pentecostals". Where years of hostility had frustrated theological and ecclesiastical unity, focusing on the work of the Holy Spirit has brought Christians together. It is as if we had all been ducks in separate fenced-in pens until the flood came and the water rose above the top of the fences. Suddenly, we were all riding the same wave.
When we focus on the gifts of the Spirit and the fruits of the Spirit, we discover that we have brothers and sisters across all historical and theological barriers. Where we find the fruit of the Spirit -- love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control -- we have found God's completed creation. Where we find the gifts of the Spirit, the utterance of wisdom, the utterance of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, the working of miracles, prophecy, the discernment of spirits, various kinds of tongues, the interpretation of tongues and the forgiveness of sin, we find the church.
And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language, Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindu, Buddhists?
Roland McGregor, United Methodist Pastor
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
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