Tag: Sunday sermons

Scripture explained

Mass complainer finds relief, somehow . . .

Looonnnggg song and organ recital between readings Sunday, 8:30 mass, we spectators caught in a web of musicality for a good ten minutes! Participation? Or obedient listening, waiting for the spirit to move us. Blah.

Followed by 2nd reading, slow and moony by soft-voiced woman. Then 8:50 the gospel, at long last. Followed by sermon, at-first slightly bookish but logically progressing — with, lo and behold (they say there is no grace), a sense for the listener that this was the dawning of a time of peace and good will towards his fellow-worshipers.

Look, you never know what’s going to work or when or quite how. But the elderly male worshiper found something new in mass this day. Along with his incurable woolgathering, of course, but that’s another story . . .

Rev. Wright prophetic?

What’s prophetic and what isn’t in a preacher is nicely covered in this comment on “The role of the American pastor,” posted at The Political Inquirer, in which the writer says Rev. Wright’s comments were “prophetic.”  Not so, says the commenter, blogger at TotalTransformationTest.  Wright’s

primary audience is not the American public, but his predominantly black congregation. Don’t forget that prophets usually are disliked by their own people because they condemn their actions.

What part of blaming the white man for everything from inventing AIDS to commit genocide on black folks to the idea of the government peddling drugs in black communities makes the men and women in his congregation uncomfortable with their own moral failures? Quite frankly, it is exactly the opposite.

It is as if an Old Testament prophet had told the Hebrews to blame the evil in their own hearts on the surrounding nations and not on their own individual inability to remain loyal to God. Rev. Wright certainly doesn’t deserve the application of the term “prophetic” to anything he does. Unless the only requirement for such an appellation is simple demagoguery.

Quite a good point.  When you massage audience sensibilities, as I say below, you are not quite prophetic.

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Pfleger, Wright tell people what they want to hear

It’s been a banner few months for preaching, something that’s not much discussed by daily newspapers but regularly performed for and imposed on worshipers.

What a teaching moment for homiletics professors it has been.  The word is academic for preaching and close to “homily,” which is a Scripture-based sermon of generally shorter length.

This is as opposed to stem-winders for which Fr. Michael Pfleger of Chicago’s St. Sabina — now on leave — has become more famous than ever, not to mention his big brother in the ministry, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United.  These are neither short nor Scripture-based, except in sound-bite snippets tossed off in entertaining fashion.

But that’s a fine point.  The essence of Pfleger’s and Wright’s better known preaching has been less Scripture-slicing-and-dicing and more bringing of coals to Newcastle.  Preaching against white racism to black people?  Really?  Bold fellows!

The preacher is supposed to do more than massage preconceptions.  When these two reverend gentlemen preach against marital infidelity or cheating in business transactions or telling lies, do their people rise up in joy and holy pandemonium?

Not hardly, to use a popular double negative.  Do they ever preach this way?  Probably not.  Few do.  Do they preach against black racism, except as a throwaway line, saving fervor for condemning whites?  Probably not.

Anyhow, the stuff we read about that makes the news is basically preaching to provide a feel-good experience for people who now and again entertain bitterness in their Christian hearts. 

For a few short hours on Sunday, they can hear their bitterness confirmed by the messenger from God.  It’s a sort of purgative, from which they emerge more convinced than ever that white folks just don’t get it.

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Death sting eliminated

Ezekiel delivers the ultimate promise from God, quoting him:

O my people, I will open your graves
and have you rise from them . . .

Paul tells Romans the same thing:

If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,
the one who raised Christ from the dead
will give life to your mortal bodies also . . .

This is great news, to say the least.  It solves the ultimate mystery.  These two short (5th Sunday Lent, 3/9/08) passages lead to John’s long account of the raising of Lazarus.

He’s sick and not long for this world, or so people thought.  Jesus decided to use him to make the Ezekiel point about graves opening — and to anticipate the Paul point about resurrection.

The body was in Judea, where they were laying for Jesus.  “You’re sure you want to go back there?” his people asked him.  He answered mysteriously about a twelve-hour day (of daylight, we presume) and stumbling in the dark, meaning let’s go before it’s dark.

There was the back-and-forth with the dead man’s sister, who unwittingly sets him up for his clinching argument, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

He immediately puts it to her: “Do you believe this?”  She can’t say yes fast enough.  This was Martha, who got something of a bum rap earlier for getting tied up in housework when something big was happening — the biggest she would ever come up against.  It was a mistake she wasn’t going to make twice.

She sends for Mary, who gets up to go and meet Jesus outside of town.  “The Jews,” present everywhere you turn in these stories, follow her.  She arrives shaking with grief.  He catches his breath at the sight: this Mary broken up, racked with sobbing.  He groans and cries.

“The Jews” see it.  Some of them get nasty about it: “Could not the one who opened the eyes of the blind man have done something so that this man would not have died?”

Jesus goes into action.  Roll the stone away, he says.  The body will smell awfully, says Martha, the practical one.  Didn’t I tell you not to be that way? Jesus says.  The stone is removed, Jesus prays to the Father, he issues the call: “Lazarus, come out!”

He comes out: “Untie him and let him go,” says Jesus, and the rest is history — the gospel truth, we might say. 

As for those “Jews,” they are pretty much understood to be the Jewish authorities.  “Johannine [John] Christians” were Jews in conflict on the basic issue of messianic identity.  This gospel, a sustained argument for Jesus as messiah, is for Jews who knew Greek, to convert them or to defeat them in an argument. 

The late Rev. Raymond Brown, a Catholic scholar of the first water, concedes anti-Jewish sentiment here.  At the very least, there was rivalry, sometimes intense.  That’s how it was in those days.

 

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Seeing and believing: the light shines

“Fill your horn with oil,” God told Samuel.  He was sending him to Bethlehem, where one of Jesse’s sons was to be king. 

God didn’t leave such matters to chance.  In the story of his people, he was calling the shots — for their own good, needless to say.  He was a benevolent despot.  They had to learn to trust him. 

He was not capricious, however, demanding to be placated, not one to be feared, period.  We have to compare him to other gods of the day.  “Compared to what?” is the key question here, as in most other places.

This time Samuel, sent to find the new king, got a lesson in substance compared to mere appearance.

As Jesse and his sons came to the sacrifice,
Samuel looked at Eliab [one of the sons] and thought,
“Surely the LORD’s anointed is here before him.”

He had to think again:

“Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature, [God said]
because I have rejected him.
Not as man sees does God see,
because man sees the appearance
but the LORD looks into the heart.”

So the pleasantly appearing hotshot is not necessarily the one.  It does not rule him out, however.  The son who is chosen is

ruddy, a youth handsome to behold and making a splendid appearance. The LORD said, “There-anoint him, for this is he!”

Go figure.  The lesson seems to be that we should look before leaping, hold our judgment in abeyance sometimes, wait for guidance, in this case divine.  I like that. 

This son — the youngest, called in from his sheep-tending after Samuel has seen the others — is the least likely candidate for anointing from that oil-filled horn.  Splendid appearance or not, he was chosen in apparently a judicious manner.  It was David, of course.

So much for the first (Old T) reading for this past Sunday, the 4th of Lent, A-cycle.  Now chimes in Paul in a snippet from his letter to the Ephesians about light (good) and darkness (bad), warning against the “fruitless works of darkness” which are “shameful even to mention.”

We may consider God here as one who “looks into the heart.”  Yes, that’s God, and that’s also the honest man or woman, who is implicitly urged here to take a second look, and a third, etc., in any case to avoid fooling himself or herself.

We may also consider “shameful,” which is a description that does not come easily to our lips, we being 21st-century Westerners.  “Have you no shame?” lawyer Welch asked Joe McCarthy 50–plus years ago, and his words reverberated in article, column, headline, TV news clip.

We learn morality by being shamed, argues Lee Harris in his Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West.  We are shamed into behavior required by the tribe or by the community that inevitably is part tribal.  This by Harris is one of two book-length essays on this general subject since our 9/11 catastrophe.

On to the 3rd reading, from John 9, which is surely what you heard about Sunday from the preacher if you heard a preacher.  It’s the story of the man blind from birth whom Jesus used as launch pad for a sharp rejoinder to the Pharisees: he’s not blind because the parents sinned, as they said.

“Neither he nor his parents sinned;
it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.
We have to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day.
Night is coming when no one can work.
While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

That’s a seminal, almost modernizing comment, lifting affliction from the realm of blameability — seminal because it tears us with ears to hear out of the ever-threatening superstitious approach to life.  A preacher could spend some time on this point, speaking up for reason as Jesus did and doing what he or she could to undercut un-reason. 

We don’t usually look to a miracle-worker for that, but miracles imply a discernible order in things, something to be investigated.  If there were no investigatable nature of things, it would be silly to claim a miracle; the word would have no meaning.

And of course, we can’t miss this light-darkness contrast, echoing Paul to Ephesians in the 2nd reading.  In a world of electrical appliance, we have no idea how impenetrable darkness can be.  My friend Charlie stood on a Himalayan high spot and saw moon and stars as if he could touch them.  He was living in a Nepali village in the course of his Jesuit missionary years.  With no city lights, even in the distance, he saw the dark, as it were, clearly.

That clay made of dirt and spittle to heal the blind man was a Sabbath violation.  Accused, Jesus lived up to another pivotal announcement, in Mark, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.”

My.  Again the modernizing statement, in its call for the second look, the inquiry, the reassessment.  It’s somewhat like God tutoring Samuel in his choice of a king from Jesse’s sons.  We are supposed to be thoughtful.

Ah, but all in all, it’s a great story, this blind man’s buffet of pictures and dialog, and more power to the preacher who can retell it lovingly — and thoughtfully, shedding light where there is at least semi-darkness.  That would be nice.

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Complaint received, taken seriously

Third Sunday Lent has Jews thirsty in the desert, complaining to Moses.  Fearing violence to himself, M. asks God what to do.  God says, hit this rock with your staff, and make sure the elders of Israel are watching.  Do it and from the rock will come water.  He did it, and out came the water.  They had quarrelled with Moses and tested God; so the place was called Massah (testing place) and Meribah (quarreling place), apparently as a memorial to the experience.

 The second reading, Romans 5:1-2, 5-8

Brothers and sisters:
Since we have been justified by faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have gained access by faith
to this grace in which we stand,
and we boast in hope of the glory of God.

And hope does not disappoint,
because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
For Christ, while we were still helpless,
died at the appointed time for the ungodly.
Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person,
though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die.
But God proves his love for us
in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.

is not a commercial from Barack Obama, nor did he approve this message, about hope — though there are times when some of us think he thinks he did.

Tomfoolery aside, this hope business is very important.  Believers can be cast down by their belief, holding for God and afterlife but either giving up on Him and it or nervously putting them out of our minds.  This from Paul is to buck us up.  Jesus died for the ungodly, he says.  That’s us.

The third reading, from John 4, offers high drama in its account of Jesus talking with a low woman.  It has one of the top Gospel punch lines, when after Jesus tells her to call her husband and she says she has none, he replies,

“You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’
For you have had five husbands,
and the one you have now is not your husband.
What you have said is true.”

The air fairly crackles with tension.  What can she say?  Nothing in direct response, but instead a shot at religious history:

“Sir, I can see that you are a prophet.
Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain;
but you people say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem.”

How this much-wed woman getting water at the village well knew enough to say this — just the right thing to advance the discussion — is better left unwondered at. 

Jesus goes on to predict a new way to worship, on no special mountain but “in Spirit and truth.”  He tells her he’s the Messiah.  Convinced, she runs to tell others, just as his followers arrive, amazed that he has engaged her.  You can see the movement, the stage business.

The followers can’t even get him to eat something.   “I have food to eat of which you do not know,” he says, on a roll now with his coy semitic folk talk in which questions call forth riddles.  The harvest has arrived, etc. 

Meanwhile, the people of the town are convinced he’s the real thing.  He is “truly the savior of the world.”

Flash back to the desert, Moses trying to corral his reluctant fellow travelers on their way to the promised land.  We are supposed to get a connection here.  This is Jacob’s well, in Samaria.  The woman calls him “our father Jacob.”  It’s all one history, John’s Gospel tells us, as the other gospels and epistles also say.  It’s bigger than all of us.  Let’s get off our high horses and act that way.

Update: One preacher couldn’t abide the five-times-married part, a reader relates:

At MY parish, the Gospel was sanitized. The priest at the 7;30 read nothing about a woman married 5 times. She was just a woman. So the story had little point at all, except the back and forth about wells and living water.
 
Fortunately, I had prepared before Mass by listening to the Lutheran minister on WGN. He gets it. “Why is this woman going to the well at high noon? Everyone else would have been there in the early morning or the cool of the evening. This woman is trying to avoid people!

Then after he mentions Jesus chiding her about her 5 husbands he ends by saying, her witness was so profound when she ran to tell the villagers, that everyone believed her.

 

I think the feminists have gotten to my pastor (or to the liturgists). Maybe they don’t want negative things said about females. Maybe Adam and Eve bit into the apple at the same time, etc.

Tsk, tsk.

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