What can we say October 9? 18th after Pentecost

    Jeremiah 29:1-7. I had one of those lightbulb moments when I read what Richard Hays wrote about the Epistles: we are “reading somebody else’s mail.” Jeremiah 29 is a letter to the exiles in the 6th century in Babylon, basically urging them to do what they’d prefer not to do, and what theologically they believe they will not need to do: build houses, plant gardens, take wives and look for grandchildren. Houses, gardens, wives and grandchildren: sounds like the good life in America!

   But it’s in Babylon, far, far from home. No quick fix for those Israelites – or for our people, whose horizons are embarrassingly short. How do we invite people (and ourselves!) into taking the long, long view, not minutes or hours or days but decades, even centuries. Reinhold Niebuhr: “Nothing worth doing can be achieved in a single lifetime; therefore we are saved by hope.” God’s good work, or the resolution to the nagging challenges of life in this world, are going to take a lot of time – so settle in. How does the preacher invite people into a time sequence beyond their own fantasies or even lifetimes?

   We don’t get absorbed into the alien world in which we find ourselves, and we don’t smugly pass judgment upon it either. Rather, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Where I live we have a coalition of churches called “Jeremiah 29:7.” I like that. It’s sensible – so seeking affordable housing, educational equity, food distribution is our unavoidable mission.

   Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon wrote a rightly popular book, Resident Aliens – speaking of big, Gospel-stuff, inviting people into work that roams beyond their personal existence, that is our labor for God in the place that has forgotten about God. How can the preacher not nag but invite into such life-giving ministry? What does this look like where you are?

   2 Timothy 2:8-15. Paul reports that he is chained. I’d whine and feel sorry for myself. But Paul is fixated on the larger truth that the Word is not chained, can’t be chained. How many prison experiences (Bonhoeffer with the Nazis, Paul and Silas in Philippi, Nelson Mandela at Robben Island, Martin Luther King in the Birmingham jail?) illuminate this truth? Paul’s poetic riffs in this text are startling, eloquent, and best repeated, recited, not explained: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will reign.. if we are faithless, he remains faithful – this last one being huge, our only real hope. We indeed are faithless, even the church’s best faithful, even the holiest among us, and surely the rest of us as well! – and yet it is God’s faithfulness, not ours, on which the future hinges. 

   This is the fulcrum of Karl Barth’s remarkable Epistle to the Romans. Faith, faithfulness in Romans is God’s not ours! – thankfully!

   And Paul’s counsel, “Avoid wrangling over words” (v. 14) is what we stumble into all the time, whether fretting over a sermon, struggling over offensive vs. inclusive language, bickering over all those buzz/code words like diversity, inclusion, racism, etc. Paul cares for his words, but his eloquence comes in saying and explaining with clarity what he means, and why it matters. Just lovely – and exemplary.

   Luke 17:11-19. The text opens up a vapid, disastrous option for the preacher. I once heard a sermon on the virtues of gratitude (which are many!) – with the illustration of one who, in the hospital, groused and complained versus the other patient who was grateful. This isn’t Miss Manners on how gratitude, writing thank-you notes and saying Thanks! incessantly forges a better path. Are we about gratitude here? or immense need? Joe Fitzmyer (in his Anchor Bible Luke commentary) reminds us here that Jesus “lavishes his bounty on those who need him most.”

   The co-star of this story was doubly, trebly, complicatingly alien, as he’s also a Samaritan. I love the observations of Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington: “Illness does not stop at political borders; neither need healing stop at the borders.” The whole translated image of “ten lepers” misses the nuance: leproi andres means leprous men: “Their humanity is not swallowed up by their diseases” (at least to Luke, and to us Christians).

   I love this: these ten are ostracized, as so many are (who are they where you minister and preach??) – and yet they have one another! Ten are together – and maybe we think of the function of gay bars, or deaf bars, where those who don’t collude easily with others find good company. In such a group, Samaritans and Jews were totally fine being together! How often do the broken figure out how to be together when the allegedly “together” religious people can’t? AA meetings?

   The text intrigues. Jesus heals these guys – but they don’t or can’t notice until they are on their way to the priest (as they have until then been excluded from worship in the temple!). They are grateful: the Greek is eucharisteo – implying to early Christian readers not thank-you notes, but the Lord’s Supper!!! Only one turned back – but we dare not divert into “exceptionalism,” the way people who speak of race talk of the one African-American who did well, implying the others didn’t but could have! No moralism here – as if, could we only be grateful, Jesus would heal and be pleased with us! Jesus heals the unhealable, and the Gospel is about realization of that healing and then joining in the Eucharistic table of love and the extension of this healing power to others.

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   Check out my book, valuable for preachers and laity (a good group resource!) during Advent, Why This Jubilee? - reflections on carols, sacred and secular.