What can we say July 9? 6th after Pentecost

    Genesis 24:34-67 (various verses). Such an earthy (and long!) story! Could be fun to preach – but it may be more fitting as Bible study material, I’d say. The drama happens at the well – which must be the Bronze Age equivalent of a bar! – where you might meet a guy, a girl? Too hilarious for overly sensitive people regarding tattoos and piercings: “So I put the ring on her nose.” Oh my. Rebekah and her maids mounting their camels: these are not poor people! I love the tender, hopeful, and oddly romantic notice that as it reports how he took her – “and he loved her.” Almost surprising, in such a world, maybe in ours. Isaac gets a wife – “and so Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.” Is that the point, or a benefit of marriage? Then? Now?

   Romans 7:15-25a. Michael Gorman calls this “one of the most difficult and diversely interpreted texts in Romans,” and he’s right. Who’s the “I”? Paul himself? His pre-conversion experience or his current struggle as a believer? Gorman surveys the scholarly options, and concludes that Paul probably is speaking “imaginatively about the experience of nonbelievers: – either Jews or Gentiles. He’s giving voice to what it’s like to live “in Adam” instead of “in Christ.” His thoughts on the "I" are especially compelling given that Paul yields to a "We" in chapter 8: “The introspective, frustrated ‘I’ of Romans 7 has become the liberated, united ‘we’ of Romans 8.”

   Yet as a reader in 2023, I have to say the words on the page flawlessly portray what I find life as a Christian to be like. I don’t understand much that is in me, and much that I do. I lunge toward things I prefer not to do (or think or say or feel), and goods I intend (to think, do, say or feel) don’t happen.

   Mind you, we recoil at verse 18: “Nothing good dwells within me.” I’ve felt that and so have many of my listeners – but that is a voice that barks in the dark from an unhealthy place, not a spiritually discerning place. Scripture here can reiterate the harm my negative views are already wreaking on me – and my people.

   If Paul didn’t struggle as you and I do, I have to wonder if he, who’d been super-zealous as a Jew, was similarly super-zealous as a Christian, not veering off course or struggling with things much at all. I know, and semi-understand and lean toward either envy or pity of such people…

   For preaching, I’m not sure I could devise a solid sermon just on this text. To me, it’s better to life a few phrases from it while illuminating some other text. That’s preaching a text without letting it become a straitjacket.

   Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30. Oh, this piping and children business must have made a big impression on Jesus’ first followers, but it’s a bit elusive nowadays. Davies and Allison see Jesus’ listeners as being “like disagreeable children who complain that others won’t act according to their desires and expectations.” You wonder if some children were doing just this nearby! They complete their read of the comparison: “John the Baptist came not eating or drinking but demanding sackcloth and ashes – but people wanted to make merry! Jesus came asking for joyous fellowship – but they demanded he fast!”

   The lectionary skips over verses 20-24 – either understandably or sadly. “Woe to you, Korazim!” You can visit its ruins easily, just a little ways off the road from prettier stops like Capernaum and Tabgha. Grey stone construction, mere rubble. Was it the centuries doing the damage or Jesus’ curse? We like Jesus weeping over cities – but cursing them? He must have, or some whitewasher would be expunged this – like the lectionary gurus did! He has a go at Capernaum too – which isn’t lying in ruins so much nowadays. Jesus – not the sweet shepherd cuddling with a little lamb! – compares the judgment bearing down on them to that of Sodom. Like a nuclear wasteland? Oh my.

   Then back to something you can read in front of your five year old: verses 25-30 – clearly, since Jesus says what is “hidden” can be revealed “to babes.” The Greek, nepioi, means simple, childlike. What a God is our God! God’s highest wisdom and truest self, not requiring immense intelligence or piles of learning, but a simple, childlike trust, wonder, curiosity. No wonder we baptize such people. They don’t mind vulnerability. A newborn’s eyesight is a mere 20/400 – perfect for seeing the mother who nurses you, without getting distracted by the troubles way across the room. All this and more in my book on Birth: The Mystery of Being Born.

    On all the mystery: St. Augustine, who knew and explained and helped us understand so much about God, reminded us, “If you understand it, it is not God.” Whatever we glimpse has been “revealed,” not figured out or deduced!! That word “revealed” in Greek is apokalupsis – an apocalypse, something earth-shattering and world-annihilating, definitive, ending the old, ushering in the new and unfathomed.

   Speaking of Greek: one of the New Testament’s most intriguing words, “handed over,” paradidomi, is exploited in a unique way here: it’s not that Jesus is “handed over” or “delivered,” but rather “All things have been delivered to me by my Father.” What things? Important things? The truest things? Hidden things? Let these questions linger, as they aren’t answered in our text either! Not bad sort of to zigzag around the reality the passage must have in mind.

   I think it’s crucial to emphasize sabbath with our people – genuine rest, disconnecting from social media and the so-called smart phone. Sabbath isn’t just doing nothing or a vacation or taking a nap. It’s a day for God, a day of a break from the grind, a day for delight. Read, if you haven’t, three fabulous books on Sabbath: Abraham Heschel’s Sabbath; Christopher Ringwald’s A Day Apart: How Jews, Christians and Muslims find Faith, Freedom and Joy on the Sabbath; and Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (maybe his best of all his books?) – all three just fabulous, wise, quotable, amazing.

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