Bruce Epperly challenges us to think more carefully about God and human suffering in his Adventurous Lectionary for the week.
Takeaway:
Adventurous theological reflection challenges images of God as unilateral punisher and bully. These images are unworthy of Jesus of Nazareth.
This is a very interesting Adventurous Lectionary.
Bruce Epperly comments on the lectionary passages for next Sunday (Epiphany 3B), which are extraordinarily well suited for a process theologian. Well worth checking out!
Bruce Epperly has an excellent set of comments on the texts for Advent 1B at Process and Faith. In particular take a look at the discussion of our perception that God has abandoned us in the comments on Isaiah 64.
But are we abandoned, and what would it mean?
Perhaps, as later Jewish mysticism suggests, God must withdraw for creation to burst forth in creativity and freedom.
Read the rest . . .
This is just a very short note with a link. I’d like to tie the repentance described in Psalm 32 to Leviticus 6 (5 in Hebrew). I wrote about that previously on my Participatory Bible Study Blog. This passage describes the priestly doctrine of repentance.
Well, I’m back again on one of my irregular forays into lectionary blogging. I hope visitors in the meantime have found value in the links to other people’s lectionary blogging found in my sidebar.
It’s not hard to find a theme in this week’s lectionary texts, nor to imagine why those are the texts for today. I think the Romans passage ties the theme together nicely, and if I were to teach this myself, I’d probably start from that point.
Paul tells us that one sin made everyone into sinners, and thus one obedient man, or one act of obedience (carried throughout his life) could make us right with God again. Our texts simply point to the pieces of the puzzle. In Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7, we have the original temptation and fall. Here the first couple are placed in the Garden of Eden, but directed away from the tree. Yet they eat in any case.
In Matthew 4:1-11, we have the opposite effect. Note that in Matthew 4:1, it is the Spirit that leads Jesus into the desert to be tempted. Even more so than Adam and Eve were directed away, Jesus was directed into the test so that he could pass and show that he would reject divinity, improperly offered. Adam and Eve were human and wanted to be gods. Jesus was God and accepted humanity (Phil. 2:5-11).
The final element of this puzzle is Psalm 32 which, in my view, connects us to the other two. It describes guilt, repentance and forgiveness. It is repentance, a turning to God and away from evil, that allows us to be incorporated into the family that Christ represented in his act(s) of obedience. Lent is not just about the fall and redemption. It is about us becoming part of that new family of faith, incorporated into God’s family, established by the obedience of Jesus Christ.
This is from the Epiphany 1A lectionary.
This passage interested me because of the reference to revealing God’s wisdom to the authorities in the heavenly realm through the church (Eph. 3:10). The reason for this interest is the “great controversy” theme that I grew up with as a Seventh-day Adventist. The foundation for this is Ellen G. White’s book The Great Controversy, and it has been taken up by a number of Adventist authors.
One of these was my professor Dr. Malcolm Maxwell, and another is Dr. Alden Thompson, author of Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?, which is published by my company.
This great controversy theme essentially sees the world as a theater with heavenly beings watching the way good and evil plays out. Amongst the texts on which this is based are Job 1 & 2, which has God demonstrating his righteousness to the waiting heavenly court, and of course this passage, in which the church shows the heavenly powers God’s wisdom.
It is one explanation for the reason that sin has to run such a long course. Why doesn’t God step in if he can and if he cares? There are many, many explanations for this, but this explanation suggests that if God wants to deal with sin permanently, the entire universe must see just how evil sin is on its own, and also see how good God is in redeeming fallen creation.
Alternatively one can connect this with ancient cosmology. To quote the just released Ephesians: A Participatory Study Guide (also by my company):
However, we should remember that according to the ancient world view what happens on earth mirrors what is also happening in heaven (Matt. 6:1 0). Therefore, even as the church delivers this message ? concerning the mystery of God ? on earth, the church is also delivering the message that God is sovereign over all things to the rulers and authorities in the heavens. This message is rooted in the belief of the church that in the resurrection of Christ, these powers that be, which seek to block the purposes of God, have been defeated (40).
Come to think of it, the two aren’t really in opposition, though they look at the issue from different angles.
I wonder how many pastors will have the guts (or lack of good judgment) to preach on the authorities in heavenly places?
That’s a pretty obvious theme, but it would seem even more odd to skip it! The second Sunday in Christmas is a good day to commemorate these events.
There are a few different items that strike me here.
One of the great benefits of using the lectionary, especially for major days during the church year, is that it helps us keep these various days in context. It’s easy for Christmas to be simply the holiday of giving, the one that allows us to sing all that good music and have some parties. Keeping track of the Christmas season lets us see some of the things that follow: the opposition, the danger, the hardship, and eventually death and resurrection.
It’s easy to separate things. People who attend church on Christmas as Easter miss what comes before, after, and between. There is no Christmas without an emptying (Phil. 2:5-11). There is no Easter without Good Friday.
Christmas is not simply a celebration of giving; it’s a celebration of sacrifice and also of receiving-receiving God’s gracious gift. Easter is not just a celebration of new life. It’s a celebration of the sacrificial death that preceded it and the way that “…by means of death he can do away with the one who has the power of death, namely the devil” (Heb. 2:14).
It’s been about six weeks since my last post, and unfortunately that’s actually a fairly short gap for the way I’ve kept this blog up. But the two Old Testament passages this week (Jeremiah 31:27-34 and Psalm 19 or Psalm 119:94-107) as well as the epistle caught my attention.
In the modern church we read these scriptures frequently and think about the Bible as we have it. In fact, we often use the phrase “word of God” as a synonym for “Bible.” Now I don’t want to detract from the nature and value of the Bible as God’s word, but that is not all of God’s word. More importantly, when these passages were written, there wasn’t a Bible, and much of what we have in our Bibles was not even written yet (depending, of course, on the dating of 2 Timothy).
Even if one dates 2 Timothy quite late, it would doubtless be dated before most of the New Testament was regarded as scripture, and thus it would refer to the Old Testament scriptures as know at the time. Psalm 19 and 119, of course, were written substantially earlier yet, and may have been referring primarily to the Torah, or the first five books of the Bible.
So why do I think this is important? Do I think what these passages say of scripture is not applicable to the Bible as we have it? Actually I definitely do think these passages should apply to the Bible as we have it. But they should also apply to the Bible as it was at those earlier times.
You see, too often we think we can skip some of those very Old Testament passages that are praised by these writers. “Profitable” or “more to be desired than gold.” Yet when I ask Christians if they have read the entire Bible, they’ll often ask if it counts even if they haven’t read Leviticus, or Numbers, or a variety of other passages.
Besides the value of the passages in their own context, I don’t think you can really understand the book of Hebrews without really understanding the tabernacle service as it’s described in Exodus – Numbers. You will misunderstand much of the New Testament if you don’t ground your study in the Old. And again, that’s ignoring the value of the passages in themselves.
Let’s look for the value, the “profit” in all of scripture!
