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.
