Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Samplings

I'm still plugging away on the lectionary. Here's some samples from the dozen or so I have not yet published:

Proper 16

I think the 21st century speaker can repeat these themes of community building without the language of worship or “delighting in the Lord” or stopping to explain who the ancestor Jacob is. Our rituals can involve more direct symbolism of where our attentions should turn. Whether those attentions turn on a certain day at a certain time, is not always that important. And there doesn't need to be lot of promises about springs of water or our needs being satisfied. It doesn't hurt to talk about how investing in your community has a tangible return, but the work itself should be its own reward. You may not see a direct payoff to serving up a free meal, but someone in that line will undoubtedly go on to contribute in a way that benefits others. That's how it's supposed to work.

************************
The book of Jeremiah may have actually been written by Jeremiah, a prophet in the time of King Josiah. As we get further along in the Bible we know more about the people discussed. Jeremiah probably also wrote Deuteronomy. This "second law" of Deuteronomy was intended to fix the problems of Israel being exiled by the Babylonians. Here he's proclaiming his authority by saying God literally put words in his mouth. And he gets to destroy and overthrow. This is why we have secular governments and democracy now.

  Proper 14, on the Hosea text 

For Old Testament help, I frequently turn to John C. Holbert. http://www.patheos.com/Progressive-Christian/The-Only-God-John-Holbert-07-22-2013. This week, he lays it out pretty clearly. After discussing the odd behaviors of other prophets, he says, “…, but the use of a woman of the evening for an object lesson is quite something else. For those of us who are feminists—and I hope all you readers consider yourselves feminists, too—it is deeply offensive to use a woman as a metaphor for human idolatry. Such literary effects do nothing but demean women and hold men up for the crude and misogynist beasts that they too often are.”

*******************************

Rather than try to understand the mind of a 1st century Palestinian who couldn't have heard of the word “science” since it hadn't been invented yet, I'll just make an observation. While Protestants and Catholics were killing each other for the right to worship differently, while thousands of new denominations were being created because new information about the Bible was coming to light and as people began to understand how the brain worked and that mental illness was not demon possession, we were also discovering that we are a small planet on the edge of a vast galaxy with galactic neighbors and all that took billions of years to come into being. We are gaining this knowledge so fast, the language is not keeping up. We are going to have to come up with a new word for “universe”. It's supposed to mean all that exists, but we are finding there is something before time and outside the boundaries of everything we know.

Proper 11

Amos then tells us what the punishment is going to be. Besides the terrible acts of nature, God will stop speaking to us. If we continue to act this way, this is what will be passed on to our children. If we teach them to be profitable business owners and managers, but don't teach them that the economy is built by people doing work then earning wages then buying the goods from those very businesses, then those businesses will fail. The lessons of how to create a prosperous country through a healthy working class will be lost. The ideas of educating your populous and providing a healthy environment will be ridiculed. This is what was happening when the Kingdom of Israel was crumbling. It has happened throughout history.
  
 

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Palm Sunday, 2019

This one won't come around for three years, but I really wanted to get it out there. At best, I'm an Easter and Christmas Christian, so I went to church today. It was also a chance to catch up with a couple old friends.

Link to this week's text
Explanation of this series

Isaiah 50:4-9a, Luke 19:28-40
Palm Sunday, Last Sunday of Lent

The most important influence in my theological life has been Roger Lynn. I heard his Easter message in 1993 and it turned my head around on the meaning of the New Testament. In a way, that sermon was just doing what Paul did. He turned the cross, a symbol of torture and oppression, into a symbol of love and forgiveness and community. Roger also brought that message into the modern world and breathed new life into it. In 2016, I visited him in a small church where he is semi-retired and his message was just as powerful. He used the Luke passage from the liturgy of the Palms, and the Isaiah and Philipians passages from the liturgy of the passion.

He started by pointing out something that is easy to do, to see these stories as our memories of the stories handed down to us from Sunday School or TV specials. In those, Palm Sunday is a big parade and celebration and everyone is singing “Hosanna in the highest” as the King arrives. But we read the words in the Bible and it doesn't sound so ostentatious.

This story has palm fronds, and as far as I know, the history of why they were used is sketchy. It also has a donkey, not a great stallion. This symbolizes the opposite of self-aggrandizement. Instead of setting up shop and having others bring people to see his miracles, Jesus sends his disciples out to heal. He's saying we just need to open ourselves up to what we all already know. We don't need a big stick to prove we are powerful.

If we look into the historical context, we know that the people who would have been part of the community that is depicted in this story would have been people with no opportunities, no security about where their next meal was coming from. The people who owned the vineyards were not providing jobs, they were using the banking systems to confiscate more land from those who could barely make it to selling the next bushel. The people in this story are not middle class folks going to an Easter parade, they are protesters, staging a demonstration.

The other thing the TV shows depict is a world where no one has thought of these ideas of working together to build a just and peaceful world. However, in the Isaiah passage for today, we hear about turning the other cheek. The message of the New Testament is not unique in history. This is why it says if people were silenced, the stones themselves would talk. The message is that this is the nature of things.

Roger and I parted company a bit at this point. He differentiated people from stones and eventually led to the conclusion that we “need more Jesus”. That may not mean anything to you, but remember we are looking in to what it means to have stones sing Hosanna. If that can have meaning, then “more Jesus” can too.

We came from minerals and we return to dust, but that is not an end. We are not just our component parts. We are born of love and survive because we are loved. We endure the pain of child birth and the risk of raising children because we don't see ourselves as simply existing. We know there were many who came before us who made this a better place and we want to build on that foundation.

We want this even if we see the reality of pain all around us and see more people bent on destruction than working on creation. Even the feeling of loneliness tells us that we desire others, and from that feeling we infer that others desire us. If all of the beautiful poetry and music that speaks of friendship and togetherness were destroyed, we would still know this. If we were prisoners being beaten to work all day and barely given enough to eat or time to rest, we would still know this. We know that people who have endured such suffering did not give up hope. Some did, but not all.

Children do not intuitively know to hate people with different color skin or different abilities or different clothes or according to how much stuff they own. That has to be taught. Love on the other hand, comes completely naturally.

If you only look at the biology and theories of how we evolved into animals that have the ability to reflect on the past and consider the future, you miss part of the story, whether it is this Biblical story or the story from science. Even if you accept the theory that we are completely lacking free-will, that everything we do is a product of some chemical reaction, that does not lead to the conclusion that you should stop thinking and stop planning. Those chemical reactions are giving you the desires that call you to a brighter future. If you once thought there was some bearded man in the sky out there doing the calling, but now you think not, that doesn't change that the call is still coming in.

If you are someone who looks at all the facts, calculates the risks, and determines it is unlikely you will succeed, but then goes ahead and does it anyway, you have an evolutionary advantage over the one who is stopped by those calculations. Some people call overcoming the odds a miracle. If you understand probability, it's just overcoming the odds, but I kinda like giving it that another name.

According to probabilities, you don't really overcome the odds, it's just that some people make it and some don't. But if we knew exactly why some do and some don't, we wouldn't need probabilities, we would have certainty. Certainty is a good thing to have when you are thinking about jumping off from a high place. When you are a poor person speaking up against a powerful empire, expecting to be heard, we call that crazy, but fortunately, a few keep doing it. If you are living in a free society, where you can speak your mind with minimal consequences, it is because someone did that.

Philippians 2:5-11

In the Philipians passage, Roger said there is a feeling of it being a hymn, and it might have been, but was then incorporated into this letter. He said the Greeks had a sense of words forming from the essence of what was being said like the bouillon of a soup. I'll leave it up to you to look into that.

The feeling of it is included in the above. It draws on the symbolism we all know. That symbolism draws on Old Testament ideas of the messiah and from classic mythologies of dying and rising gods. I think this passage differentiates itself from those simple “corn gods”, the ones who arrived in spring, helped the crops grow, then died in the fall as a symbol of decay to be later reborn again. This is a son of a god that does not exploit his equality with his father god. A humble god who wants the poor to be fed and women to be recognized, who wants to see an end to war.

By the end of the passage, we've switched to him being exalted and bending our knees and confessing his glory, but I wonder how well that translation has held up. I wonder if we have lost the sense of the bouillon those words were simmered in. Certainly, in America, it seems we pay more heed to the one whose name is above every name and have forgotten that part about being a humble servant. People go to church to get to heaven, not to hear about the example set by the one who came from there. Well, some do, fortunately not all.

Monday, March 14, 2016

21st Century speaking


I have two months "in the can", from June 12 to August 21. I'm not stopping to put them all up just yet, just offering these teasers for now. I do take requests. 


Luke 13:10-17

The symbols in the Luke verses have a little more meaning than many of the verses in recent readings. Jesus calls this woman to him. But he's teaching in a synagogue, that's male territory. The inclusion of women in the early movement may be a significant factor in why Christianity has survived. When men began fighting the Romans in the uprising of 70 AD, an exclusively male movement would have suffered. No doubt the women also contributed to the more compassionate nature of the movement. (See Richard Carrier's chapter in John Loftus' collection, "The Christian Delusion")

He also challenges the law. The details of exactly which laws were the right ones (the ones Jesus came to fulfill Matt 5:17) and which were wrong is not laid out in any detail. You only get clues like this, that healing someone is more important than watering your donkey. It doesn't seem that difficult of a choice. This story carries more weight if we understand how these additional laws, supported by the elites played a role in maintaining their status (as we saw in Luke 11 back in week 12).

You also might want to compare this to the similar story in Mark 2 and 3. Mark is the earliest written gospel that we have, and this similar story comes earlier in that gospel. It sets the tone in Mark. It's important to Luke, but Luke is addressing the growth of the movement into the upper classes.

Today, we are dealing with questions of moral law like family values. Some Christians say things like; staying in a marriage is the only right thing to do. This is sometimes followed so strictly that a single mother is shunned and her children are not given the support they need. This is done regardless of the circumstances of how she came to be a single mother. Hopefully, a thousand years from now, everyone will have difficulty understanding why someone would say that, just like we have trouble understanding why the Pharisees acted as they did.

Jeremiah 1:4-10

The book of Jeremiah may have actually been written by Jeremiah, a prophet in the time of King Josiah. As we get further along in the Bible we know more about the people discussed. Jeremiah probably also wrote Deuteronomy. This "second law" of Deuteronomy was intended to fix the problems of Israel being exiled by the Babylonians. Here he's proclaiming his authority by saying God literally put words in his mouth. And he gets to destroy and overthrow. This is why we have secular governments and democracy now.

As an aside, I live where there are lot of billboards about abortion. One of them uses this “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” partial verse. I'm pretty sure this is Jeremiah making this claim about himself and what God said to him, not every egg that has ever been fertilized or in this case, every soul that existed before it was even conceived. If I were to say that God speaks to me because he spoke to Saul, I'm pretty sure the people who made that billboard would have a problem with that. It's convenient to say that God can know us individually in that way, but inconvenient when someone says they have a relationship to God that doesn't fit their narrative.

Isaiah 58:9b-14

Often, an easy way to increase your understanding of the lectionary passage is to simply read the whole chapter that contains it. Verse 6 tells says the yoke is the yoke of the oppressed. In the included verse 9, it is also about not arguing with one another about what to do next. The other verses expand on the ideas of sharing bread with the hungry and bringing homeless into your home. Acts like performing a fast are said to be meaningless if these actions are not also taken.

However there is also mention of honoring the Sabbath, so ritual acts are not to be eliminated. This author, as many in the Bible do, sees the two things, ritual and working for the community as integrated, almost one and the same. As we've been seeing lately in Luke and some of the Old Testament passages, this theme of doing more than merely appearing to be godly is repeated throughout the Bible. The reminders to actually do some kind of work usually are often mixed with reminders to pray or to remember God. Here, the Sabbath is not just the day to stop working, it's the day to refrain from pursuing your own interests. It is not some arbitrary rule designed to oppress you, or to focus on something imaginary, it's a reminder of how to build a community, through peace, with justice.

I think the 21st century speaker can repeat these themes of community building without the language of worship or “delighting in the Lord” or stopping to explain who the ancestor Jacob is. Our rituals can involve more direct symbolism of where our attentions should turn. Whether those attentions turn on a certain day at a certain time, is not always that important. And there doesn't need to be lot of promises about springs of water or our needs being satisfied. It doesn't hurt to talk about how investing in your community has a tangible return, but the work itself should be its own reward. You may not see a direct payoff to serving up a free meal, but someone in that line will undoubtedly go on to contribute in a way that benefits others. That's how it's supposed to work.



Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Trader Joe's Ginger Beer


I don't know why it's called “beer” or what is “brewed”, but it's not bad. I picked this up in the liquor store part of Trader Joe's in the north suburbs. Ginger beers are usually too much ginger for me, but I've found a couple “brewed” ones that were pretty good. This is also an unfiltered. They don't mention it, but there were flaky things in the bottom of the bottle. I took a chance on it because it has lime and lemon juice in it, my favorites. Those flavors mixed nicely, not too tart. It also has “natural” flavors, which you never really know what that could be.

It also has real ginger extract. You really feel that on the back of your throat. It doesn't stick though, like some ginger beers do. The lemon-lime comes through, like a Squirt, only better. They let me buy a single, but I would definitely go back and get the four pack.  

Pray

If you are trying to follow the lectionary series in order, I just skipped a few weeks. I will have a website up in the next couple months that follows the schedule.

Hosea


For Old Testament help, I frequently turn to John C. Holbert. This week, he lays it out pretty clearly. After discussing the odd behaviors of other prophets, he says, “…, but the use of a woman of the evening for an object lesson is quite something else. For those of us who are feminists—and I hope all you readers consider yourselves feminists, too—it is deeply offensive to use a woman as a metaphor for human idolatry. Such literary effects do nothing but demean women and hold men up for the crude and misogynist beasts that they too often are.”

So, yes, this is saying what you think it is on the first read. We don't get any details about just what they did wrong here, but God is obviously fed up with it. Depending on where you want to go with your sermon, you may need to do some more research into the context.

The names obviously have some symbolic meaning, so I'll cover those quickly. “Jezreel” is “God Sows”, in this case it will the bad kind of sowing. “Lo-ruhamah” is “not pitied”, that's followed by God's words about not pitying Israel. “Lo-ammi” is “not my people”. God is going back on his promise that Israel is his chosen people. It does get better, but scholars speculate that the verses about having pity on the house of Judah and how things are going to turn around, were added later, much in the way modern preachers would like to turn this whole passage around and make it something it's not.

Psalm

The Psalm goes perfectly with the Hosea passage. It accepts the idea that God can be vengeful and angry if he wants. It's saying its our job to let him know we are here for him and that we are certain he has a plan that we can all trust.

Colossians

I'm spending extra time on the parable this week, so I'm going to focus on only one aspect of the New Testament reading.

2:8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.

Putting “philosophy” and “empty deceit” next to each other like that implies philosophy is deceitful. Bill O'Reilly now says Christianity IS a philosophy, so I guess he sees it different. Neither Bill nor the Bible discuss the details of this. Greek philosophy would have been known, certainly in the 1st century, although we can't know how well versed in it the authors of the Bible were. There is no direct philosophical debate in the Bible. Here it is described as “according to human tradition”, so they are acknowledging that there is a distinction between Biblical teachings and some sort of secular school of thought. It also says, “elemental spirits of the universe”.

Rather than try to understand the mind of a 1st century Palestinian who couldn't have heard of the word “science” since it hadn't been invented yet, I'll just make an observation. While Protestants and Catholics were killing each other for the right to worship differently, while thousands of new denominations were being created because new information about the Bible was coming to light and as people began to understand how the brain worked and that mental illness was not demon possession, we were also discovering that we are a small planet on the edge of a vast galaxy with galactic neighbors and all that took billions of years to come into being. We are gaining this knowledge so fast, the language is not keeping up. We are going to have to come up with a new word for “universe”. It's supposed to mean all that exists, but we are finding there is something before time and outside the boundaries of everything we know.

These discoveries, that the very fabric of our being was cooked in the first stars then blown apart only to come back together to form more stars and planets and atmospheres and creatures that could then reflect on all of this and ponder the mystery of it and experiment against that universe to discover why it is here and why we are here, none of this is covered in any part of the Bible or in any theology. We have discovered where we came from and evolution gave us a theory of how we came to care about each other. We found out that we were not put here as stewards of someone's creation with some unknown purpose, instead we are completely interconnected to that creation. We are part of its cycles on a biological level and if you get down to the smallest physical level, we are exchanging particles with everything around us. It is difficult to even find the boundaries.

These are profound discoveries that have altered the relationship of human beings to the planet, but religion refuses to integrate them. A few tepid attempts are made and they usually involve getting the science wrong. The Pope closed the universities in 1277 because he was afraid of anyone attempting to reach God using reason. If they had succeeded, why would we need a Pope, and if they failed, people would have to choose between thinking for themselves or not. He had to reopen the schools, but the world had already begun to move on.

There are references in this passage to pagan worship and other warnings to stay away from other religions. One of the few phrases I find agreeable is the one about not getting “puffed up”. That's wrong even if you happen to be technically correct. But I can't salvage much else from this passage. If someone has found a way to integrate all of our modern knowledge into their services, I would love to hear about it.

Luke

This passage starts with the Lord's Prayer, then tells us the parable of the Friend at Midnight, then tells us more about prayer. A basic reading might just see it as a suggestion to pray often. I will spend a little extra time on this parable because it is included in William R. Herzog III's Parables as Subversive Speech. This is a rare book that covers many modern interpretations and offers conclusions based on all data available to the modern reader. It considers the parables in light of Paulo Freire's work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It covers 9 parables, and is an invaluable tool for anyone serious about Bible study. Thankfully, it also accessible to the non-scholar.

Herzog spends 11 pages on this passage, going into great detail on the Greek word anaideian, which appears in verse 8 as “persistence” or possibly “importunity” in some translations. Translators have had trouble determining if this applies to the neighbor being awakened, or the friend at the door. Applied the wrong way, it can appear that Jesus is portraying God as the neighbor, who is reluctant to bother with the petitioner at his door. This could be a parable about being persistent with your prayers, something Luke definitely advocates.

To unravel this, Herzog spends almost a page just on how the community that Jesus is preaching to would handle its bread making; small loaves or large, community oven or not, everyone baking on Monday or a system of rotation. If this is not interesting to you, serious Bible study may not be your thing. If you want to have “our daily bread” mean anything other than a vague analogy to eating, these are important details.

Herzog doesn't just jump around wildly speculating, he sights theological, archaeological and textual evidence and how they support the different interpretations they have published. Without this information, we would be left trying to apply this story to our own experience. Would you even answer the door at midnight, even if it was a friend? Do you expect friends to make appointments? This is a family with children, is the friend being inconsiderate? Almost every word needs to be carefully considered to get the correct interpretation.

Herzog considers one theologian that he, and many others, think got it wrong. Herzog only gives us the name Levison, who says anaideian should be applied to the sleeping neighbor. If it doesn't it would lead to the view that prayer is nothing more than badgering God into submission. Levison needed to translate the word to “strengthen” to make this work. Herzog calls this “theological slight of hand”.

Preachers often do this, but rarely will they tell you they are doing it. Your only clue will be if you have not heard it before. If you haven't, you can check with your favorite source or a more familiar preacher, but even then, you are limiting your sources. This is the problem with theology, there is nowhere you can go to get a consensus answer. There is no code book like there is for electricians. It's not a science where some things are still speculation and others are well established theories based on empirical evidence, and data that has been verified as factual after repeated experimentation. This citing of many sources and discussing them is what makes a work like Herzog's so valuable.

To help us understand the irony in this parable, Herzog spends a few pages on the idea of “The Moral Economy of the Peasant”. They had to deal with the reality of a subsistence lifestyle, where they felt that any gain of their own was done at the expense of their neighbors. They felt powerless to deal with the ways they were being exploited, so they looked for how those means resulted in something left over for them. It is hard to understand for anyone living in a society where much is provided. They knew there was an elite status that they could never obtain, but they expected those elites to draw a moral line at limiting their exploitation in a way that left them with their subsistence living.

In this system, reciprocity was a norm. You helped others when they needed it and they understood the obligation to reciprocate. Also important, as was discussed two weeks ago earlier in this same chapter, there was a tradition of itinerant preaching. This tradition of receiving a traveler is included in the Holiness Code of Leviticus. This is not simple utilitarianism. It is friendships developed to alleviate the increasing pressures of those elite patrons. This act of giving mere sustenance, bread, is a participation in the hospitality of Abraham. As Herzog says, “every time they place their meager resources at the disposal of the village, they participate in some small way in the continual redistribution of wealth for the sake of protecting and caring for the vulnerable, as envisioned in the Torah.”

I've left out a lot of the details, but Herzog concludes that the parable is breaking a boundary. Modern readers can recognize this, but they have a very different set of boundaries. Boundaries were set by the Torah in 1st century Palestine, but the elites had rewritten those boundaries with an oral Torah. They used that to continue to pursue their acquisitive greed at the expense of peasants and rural poor and still be Torah-clean. To them, extending hospitality to a stranger was shameless, using the “importunity” interpretation of that difficult Greek word. They were fools.



The parable delivers the punchline in verse 8 with irony. Jesus turns that judgment into an affirmation of village hospitality. By doing so, they created a messianic banquet, making a mockery of the lavish banquets of the elite that were done to promote themselves, not the community. This was a system of justice by the impure that those practicing the purity laws couldn't comprehend. The villagers didn't cave in to the desire to hoard and accumulate. This ordinary action of sharing bread was no small matter. 

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Fruits vs Flesh


There is some good advice here, if you can tease it out. The teasing out requires defining words like “Spirit”, “flesh”, “slaves”, and “impurity”. The rest of the Bible is not going to do this for you. It uses these words as if you already know what they mean. It talks about these things, but it’s ultimately up to the individual to understand them.

For “slaves”, I would prefer the word “servant” here. The term “servant manager” is going around as a buzz word these days. It’s what Bob Dylan meant when he said, “everybody’s gotta serve somebody.” This is a continuation of the theme from Luke Chapter 7, two weeks ago, where Jesus shows us that we need to break out of the narrative. If we conquer our masters and then squander our freedom, we are still slaves to the old system.

On the other hand, if you have a team that tries to make their managers look good, and managers that see themselves as servants to their employees, you probably have a department that is accomplishing a lot. Both Jesus and Hillel said “love your neighbor” is the most important commandment, so I won’t attempt to add to that discussion in this brief format. It’s a theme that comes around a lot. If you want to explore more from the Leviticus passage to Paul, here’s a nice commentary from Theology of Work. 

What makes this passage unique is its attempt to sort out the “how” of being a good servant to your fellow humans. When you are in your meetings trying figure out how to spend your tiny budget, don’t waste time biting at one another. That’s a good one to keep in mind, but then it says, “Live by the Spirit”, capital “S”. In a rare Biblical moment, it gives a list to try to explain what to avoid. But like always, it’s ambiguous and unhelpful.

For example, I don’t see why, on occasion, I can’t have some fornication and some drunkenness, responsibly with a committed consenting adult, of course. If by “carousing” it means having multiple partners, I can see merit in saying that’s wrong, but I’m not going to judge others who do that, again responsibly with consenting adults. I realize jealousy is not a healthy emotion to empower, but I am a human and I have feelings, shaming me for being that is not going to fix anything. How about envy? Isn’t it good to want things to be better, to look to someone who has accomplished something and try to figure out what made them a success? The devil is in the details and details are not forth coming in this passage. The only one that’s clear is “sorcery”. I’m not going to waste my time trying to make magic tricks actually work. They are illusions, for entertainment only. That’s probably not what this writer (who was probably Paul) was talking about.

He does a lot better with the “fruits”. We could spend hours discussing what “love” is, but we can at least agree it’s a good thing. One of my favorite short readings on this topic comes from John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement. His sermon on this is titled, “Upon Our Lord’s Sermon On The Mount: Discourse Twelve.” It begins with “Beware of false prophets”. You may not like the religious language from two centuries ago, but push past that, the stuff about “fruits” is near the end.

After having studied that sermon, and from studying people in debates and speaking at political rallies, I noticed the people I trusted showed more from the “fruits” list than the “flesh” list. Showing some anger is fine. There are some nasty things out there that should make you mad. But you need to offer a compassionate response. Sometimes you might also offer a retributive response. Other times compassion should be the only response. All of this is about the show. Underneath whatever you say, if you are confident, if you have studied it and understood the facts and used your own powers of logic to work through the difficulties of the issues, your patience and gentleness will naturally be on display.

There’s one other sentence right in the middle of this passage that is not as important as a modern lesson, but drops a hint about the Biblical narrative. “...if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law.” The “law” is scattered throughout both testaments and is notoriously contradictory. It’s also ambiguous as I’ve pointed out here. This statement contradicts others that say you are always subject to the law. This could be a statement about the “New Covenant” that Jesus brought, which is another thing that is not well defined. I like to think of it as permission to think for yourself. And I like to think that even 1st century Christians advocated for that.

If you pass the test of being a good person, however that’s defined in your community, you don’t need to worry about rules anymore. Locks on doors aren’t there to keep out good people; they are there to tell good people not to open that door. Bad people will find their way through. Good people will impose the rules on themselves simply by knowing what “good” means. If there was no such thing as good people, security systems would have to be like fortresses and we would all carry weapons. There are of course actual places like this and there have been many of them throughout history.

I should mention Galatians also deals with the issue of Christians getting circumcised or not. Maybe he is just saying you don’t have to do that. It’s hard to say what Mosaic laws Paul wanted us to follow. There is very little reason for the average modern person to be concerned about this. Use good judgment, learn from others, respect those who don’t think like you, listen to your elders, you’ll do fine.

Music suggestions
Gotta Serve Somebody, Bob Dylan

Luke

From this, we see Jesus is now setting off for Jerusalem, no more messing around. In the first encounter, he makes a point that this is not a military exercise. The next response is indirect, he doesn't welcome the person who wants to join in or tell them they aren't qualified, but warns them the journey might not be so easy. You will be leaving your nest and may not always have a nice place to rest.

Noam Chomsky once told a story of meeting with people who protest their governments, in the United States and others in Central America. Regardless of how you feel about Chomsky or protesting, the sentiment of how these people approached it relates to this passage. In America, people would ask him what they should do. They had done some high profile action and appeared on the news and got a meeting with an official, but then things didn't change. When he went to Central America, the people would come to the meetings with him and say, "this is what we're doing". They knew, when speaking truth to power, you have to keep up the good fight.

The last two encounters are pretty harsh. He's talking about some pretty drastic actions; giving up your family obligations, even a funeral (or attending to a dying father or maybe just asking for his permission to go on this journey, depending on how you read it), giving up your farm. To make them valid, there better be an awfully good reason. One reason could be that you believe the end of the world is coming before you will harvest this year's crop. Millions of people have believed in thousands of documented accounts of the coming of the end of the world. It is completely plausible that people in the 1st century would believe it.

Even if this is not about the end of the world, it is saying, put Jesus first and drop everything else. I don't see good advice here.  

Kings

This passage picks up immediately after the “still soft voice” passage from last week. The lectionary includes the part about anointing Kings, but skips these two verses.

17 Jehu will put to death any who escape the sword of Hazael, and Elisha will put to death any who escape the sword of Jehu. 18 Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel—all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him.”

Why do you think they decided to do that? It would be interesting to ask the people who created this lectionary. Lists of scriptures to read have been around for a long time. It would be interesting to see exactly when these two verses were dropped out. It is an example of how we have cleansed our churches of the blood and gore that is prevalent throughout the Bible.

In so doing, we lose our own history. We take a commonly asked question about the relationship of religion and war and we take an important fact about it out of the common memory. We subtly tell our preachers not to talk about these things. Here the Bible shows us a common practice of connecting church and state. The prophet anoints the Kings and tells them God is behind them in putting others to death. It doesn’t matter that this particular war did or didn’t happen. If the Bible is supposed to show us how to act, then why are these two verses plucked out of the middle of the story as if they no longer apply? That is not a rhetorical question.