The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost - October 25

Your Call
Proper 25
Mark 10:46-52

There is a method of Biblical analysis called form criticism. Form criticism. Criticism not in the sense of a negative put down, but in the general sense of analysis. It grows out of the awareness that stories in the Bible tend to fall into distinct categories and within each category the stories follow a typical form or pattern.

For example, there are miracle stories. And at least most of the miracle stories follow the same pattern; they are told according to a form that is consistent for miracles stories. Other categories would be things like infancy narratives or prophetic utterances. Again, within a given category, the stories tend to follow a set pattern or form.

The way the stories are told were shaped by the literary and social norms and expectations of the day. This is how you told miracle stories in Jesus’ day. We do the same thing today. There is a particular form for telling fishing stories (including the element of exaggeration!); there is a particular way we tell stories about sports rivalries or natural disasters.

For the Biblical stories the regular forms also probably helped people remember and tell these stories when they existed only in the oral tradition. Scholars can spend whole careers on this sort of thing. Form criticism is a useful tool for studying how Biblical stories may have changed or evolved over time. And, although it may all seem pretty arcane to us, I would say that all tools for Bible study are good… Anything that draws our focus and attention to the words of Scripture is good.

The story of blind Bartimaeus which we heard as today’s Gospel falls into the category of a healing story. There are lots of healing stories in the Gospels.

The story of Bartimaeus contains the elements of a typical healing story.

1. Someone has a problem. In this case Bartimaeus has lost his sight. 
2. There is some factor that complicates matters. In the typical form of a healing story, there is a bump in the road. Some factor that complicates matters. In this case, Jesus’ disciples try to silence Bartimaeus, to keep him away from Jesus. 
3. Jesus effects the cure. 
4. The cure is confirmed. 
5. There is some response. Bartimaeus becomes a disciple of Jesus. 

Just another healing story, with all of the typical elements in a healing story.

But this is also a call story. It is the story of how Bartimaeus becomes a follower, a disciple, of Jesus. There are other call stories in the Gospels. James and John. Matthew. Typically, Jesus directly addresses the person, saying “follow me.” And, somehow, in that personal interaction, that personal encounter, whoever it is chooses to follow, becomes a disciple.

But the story of Bartimaeus it is NOT a typical call story. It doesn’t fit the form. First of all, others are involved. Those same disciples who sought to keep Bartimaeus away from Jesus act later to bring him to Jesus. And then Jesus doesn’t say “follow me,” he actually says “Go.” Your faith has made you well. Go.

All of this reminds me that, ultimately, each call story is unique. As unique as each one of us.

Jesus has communicated his love for us and his desire to each of us that we be his disciples. He communicates in ways uniquely tailored to each of us. In the colloquial phrase, he meets us “where we are.” Just like he met James and John and Matthew and Bartimaeus where they were, he meets us where we are. And calls us each, personally, to be his disciples. And we have responded. You have responded. Your being here is a response.

A call story. It may be a direct encounter with Jesus. Or may involve others leading us to Jesus. It may be immediate or gradual process of understanding. Jesus may speak to us in the midst of healing or in the midst of struggle. Jesus may speak to us personally while we are quietly reading God’s word in Scripture or as a thunderbolt from heaven.

Each of us has a personal, unique call story. Do you know yours?

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost - October 11

In This Family, We Share
Proper 23
Mark 10:17-31

Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!"

End of sermon?

Jesus said, “How had it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.”

For folks who take the Bible literally word for word… What do literalists do with this passage? Many seem able to overlook it. One of the problems with strict literalism is that it really is all or nothing. Either the Bible is word for word literally true, or it’s not. You can’t claim literal truth just for the passages you like.

But those of us who aren’t literalists shouldn’t feel too smug. We do the same thing. We pick and choose. Cherishing the passages we agree with and dismissing those we don’t. And we do it quite casually.

It’s very hard, I think, for any of us to take the Bible seriously enough to let it challenge us… It’s hard to take the Bible seriously enough to let it challenge or confront our personal opinions.

How hard it will be, Jesus says, for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.

As a non-literalist, what to do with today’s Gospel?

Jesus and his disciples lived in a time when there was a prevalent understanding among Jews that wealth was a sign of God’s favor. They believed that God rewarded righteousness or faithfulness with prosperity, material wealth. (I don’t know if some of you subscribe to that belief. As you may know there is a whole strand of contemporary Christianity, known as the prosperity Gospel, which directly teaches that God rewards faith with prosperity.)

The disciples, then, are quite sincere when they ask: if the rich can’t get into the kingdom of God, then who can? If the people who are demonstrably favored by God can’t get into the kingdom of heaven, then who in the world can??

Part of what Jesus is doing in this passage is debunking that understanding. That’s not how God works, he says. Riches don’t equate to God’s favor. So if we don’t share that view, then Jesus isn’t really talking to us… Whew… We’re off the hook.

But still Jesus says, “How hard will it be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.”

There’s another line of exploration of today’s passage that I found interesting this week.

It comes from the beginning of today’s reading: As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

The word is “inherit.” What must I do to inherit eternal life? How have I missed that all these decades?

He does not say: What must I do to receive eternal life. Or gain. Or acquire. Or earn. Or find.

He says inherit. I’m not a Greek scholar, but I know enough to be able to sort of track things down. And the Greek word (klēronoméo) means inherit. With its very specific meaning of something that is bequeathed. And there isn’t really anything someone can “do” to “inherit;” it depends upon the person making the bequest.

Apparently, in Jewish law of the day children were always heirs of their parents. A parent didn’t have the choice to disinherit a child. When the young man uses the word “inherit,” he places his question within the context of the family. And all children of God were inheritors of God’s promise. All children of God were bequeathed eternal life in God’s kingdom.

All the young man had to do was join the family. Become a child of God.

But Jesus said one thing to him: In this family, we share.

In the family of God, we share. We share joy. We share pain. We share responsibility for one another.

Go and sell what you have and give everything to the poor. Was it really just poverty that the young man lacked before he could enter God’s kingdom and inherit eternal life? Or was it maybe compassion? A sense of connection and mutual responsibility for others?

Jesus didn’t tell him just to sell his possessions. Jesus said, sell what you have and then give the money to people in need. He was grieved, the Gospel says, at the idea of losing his possessions. I imagine he was also grieved because up until this point his life had been all about him. Thinking of others’ needs was not a happy exercise.

All he had to do was join the family of God. A family that shares. Being a child of God means being blessed with lots and lots of brothers and sisters in Christ. It also means treating them that way.

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (St. Francis' Day) - October 4

Our Relationship with Creation
St. Francis' Day

Today, October 4, is St. Francis’ Day. In the guidelines that govern our common worship, today is the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, and that takes priority over a saints’ day. Our regular commemoration of Sundays is the most important factor in our worship. So the Scripture readings for today are those for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost. But today is St. Francis’ Day! And, at least for me, preaching on St. Francis is a lot more inviting than preaching on the lessons for today! And, after all, we’ll have the blessings and challenge of Job and the theological intricacies of Hebrews for several weeks ahead. The reading from Mark deserves faithful and scholarly exploration, but that’s for another day. Today is St. Francis’ Day!

In this week’s e-vangelist I shared a quote about St. Francis that is memorable for me. It comes from the book that sets out our calendar of saints and provides brief descriptions about them. The current iteration of the book is called Holy Women, Holy Men. St. Francis, it says, is probably the most admired but least imitated among the saints. Most admired, but least imitated. We do admire Francis, but almost in a fairy story sort of way, it seems. We are less eager to see him as a real human being who might be a model to us of discipleship. His voluntary acceptance of poverty and identification with the suffering of Christ are not attractive to most of us.

And we should think hard about that. But Francis has other things to teach us, too.

I want to share an extended quote from a reflection on Francis written by an Episcopal Deacon in Long Island. I don’t know anything about the writer; the reflection appeared this week on the website of Episcopal Relief and Development.

I’ve taken to calling myself a creationist these days, in part (grinning impishly) because I like to see how people react and in part because I have come to believe. (Still grinning impishly.)

But really – because of St. Francis – I have come to believe in creation. Not as a static event chiseled in the stone relief of our cosmic narrative, but as an open-ended and dynamic process where every thought and action, person and particle are some how only a few degrees of separation apart.

I am so grateful that Francis heeded his call. As he knelt piously in front of a dusty Byzantine icon of the crucifix, in a busted and crumbling church in the Umbrian valley, something spoke in him, maybe even to him. “Francis, you see that my church is in ruin. Go and rebuild it.”

Not only did Francis – in a fervor worthy of a recent seminary graduate – rebuild that little church stone by stone, he began the more laborious task of offering the world a different perspective of itself; a perspective that still has the potential to change everything.

In Francis’ time, the predominant view of the cosmos was hierarchical. In an attempt to reconcile philosophical and Christian worldviews, the medieval mind conceived of the universe as a ladder. God was at the top, radiating truth down to the dimly lit earth below – for most, matter was less than spirit.

Francis’ own sense of order, however, did not spring from the university or the monastery. Francis was, in a sense, not corrupted by the popular paradigm where divine aspiration could only move in one direction: up. For Francis, Creation was like a web – an expanding sphere of interconnectedness – with God at the center and all components, creatures, moving in myriad directions: out.

It is interesting to consider that when Francis recited the Canticle of the Creatures on his deathbed, he never mentioned animals, pets or otherwise. Certainly he loved and honored all creatures great and small, recognizing their value and part in the drama of the universe. But instead, he mentioned the sun, the moon, the stars, wind and fire and he called them all brothers and sisters. To do so was to name, in an intimate way, his and our deep relationship to the world of matter that surrounds us. (Jesse Lebus HERE) 

Francis saw God’s creation as a dynamic, on-going web of relationships. It’s that idea of relationship that I want to stress. We use it sometimes with respect to nature or creation, but do we really think about what it means.

What is your relationship with creation? How would you characterize the “nature” of your relationship with nature? Or, better, with all of God’s creation? What are the qualities of that relationship? I hope you’ll consider this your spiritual homework for the week. Reflect on your relationship with creation.

Relationships, by definition, are active. They involve interactions, give and take. This isn’t about your perspective on creation; it’s about the give and take of your interactions with creation and the quality of those interactions.

What is your relationship with the sun? What do you give? What are you given? What do you take?

What is your relationship with water? What sorts of interactions do you have with water?

What is the quality of your relationship with the creatures of God’s creation?

Our relationships with other human beings provide us some models or metaphors that we might consider as we reflect on our relationship with creation.

Friendship. Is your relationship with creation like a friendship? Friendships enrich our lives very much. However, even the best friendships are usually intermittent, occurring in just a particular place or time in our lives.

Or is your relationship more like the deeper commitment of a marriage?

Do you think you have no relationship with creation? You do. You do have interactions with creation. Give and take. We all do.

Relationships can be abusive.

Or they can be casual. The interactions taking place, but not having and real meaning or significance.

There are a series of human relationships that are, by their nature, hierarchical. Which doesn’t fit as well with Francis’ view of creation.

A parent – child relationship.

An employer – employee relationship, something most of us have at least some experience with. But if creation is like our employee, what’s the bottom line? What is our company’s goal?

We often talk about environmental stewardship, but I’m a little less keen on that image now. It’s a hierarchical one. Where we are the overlord or manager.

Francis saw creation as a non-heirarchical, integrated, dynamic, ongoing process, interconnected and inspired by God. God is in the interactions.

Francis offered us the relationship model of siblings. The sun, the moon, the stars, wind and fire are our brothers and sisters. Anyone who has a human brother or sister knows it is not always a perfect relationship. But as a model for our relationship with creation it reminds us that we spring from a common creative source: God. And we interact more or less as equals within a larger whole.

Francis challenges us to ponder the quality of our relationship with creation. But, especially on St. Francis’ Day, he also reminds us to celebrate our place in God’s wondrous creation.