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15th Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 17
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Special “Twos-day” Edition
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Preachers call it “feast or famine.” There are weeks when a sermon will fight you tooth and nail…and then there are weeks where inspiration strikes and you randomly find yourself writing not one, but TWO sermons.
I literally flipped a coin on which sermon to preach. At the 8AM service, I preached on the Gospel and how we should imagine the Pharisees as faithful rather than obstinate. At the 10AM, I preached on Song of Songs (Also called Song of Solomon) and the need for the church to understand desire and sexuality as gifts from God.
Below are both sermons.
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Old Testament Lesson: Song of Solomon 2:8-13
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The Song of Solomon is a unique entry in the biblical canon for two reasons.
First, while the story unfolds with both a male and female narrator, the feminine voice is responsible for the majority of the book.
Second, the book tells the story of a romantic love between a young couple. Over the years, attempts have been made to make the text less scandalous—but those interpretations often ignore the simple facts of the text.
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Psalm 15 describes the character of a righteous person: one who speaks the truth and acts with integrity.
I would invite you to notice the spatial relationship between righteousness and sinfulness. The righteous, those who act ethically, dwell upon God’s holy hill where, presumably, they enjoy God’s protection and design. We can well imagine that those who do not act morally are further away from God’s presence, and therefore easily “overthrown.”
The Psalm helps illuminate the Israelite understanding which join morality (or lack thereof) with blessings (or curses). When read next to our Epistle and Gospel lections, the Psalm helps provide the ethical orientation which guided the Pharisees’ spiritual approach.
Re-reading the Psalm after the Gospel, we recognize the stakes of the idiom “cleanliness is close to godliness” isn’t about washing one’s hands, but making a decision to remain as close to God’s presence as we can through the observance of the law.
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The passage begins by contrasting divine gifts with human inconsistency, describing every good and perfect gift as coming from the unchanging Father of heavenly lights.
The passage then pivots to ethical instruction, urging readers to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger, and highlighting the importance of not merely listening to the word, but doing what it says.
The Epistle follows it’s own tour of the New Testament, so it is rare when the Epistle reinforces the gospel’s narrative highlighting the understanding that our actions are the manifestation, for good or ill, of the faith we claim.
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Gospel: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
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After five consecutive weeks of tracing through John chapter 6, we finally return to the Gospel of Mark.
Jesus is no stranger to controversy. Multiple times in all four gospels, Jesus is accused of failing to observe the commandments regarding the sabbath and dietary restrictions.
As I outline in my sermon, I think there is value in not painting the Pharisees as mustache-twirling foils to Jesus, but rather as a group of faithful Jews who saw strict observance of the commandments as central to their hopes of restoring the Davidic dynasty.
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8AM Sermon - Gospel of Mark
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The manuscript for this week’s sermon is included on the right. This is a “preaching” copy, so there are not academic references. Please read with patience and grace…
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Proper 17
Year B
St. Stephen’s, Orinda
Great things, Thou hast done, O Lord, my God. I would name them and proclaim them, but they are more than I can tell. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Yesterday, I was at Bar Mitzvah of a family friend of ours. During the ceremony, the Rabbi spoke about the 613 mitzvot—the commandments of Moses. “These rules,” the Rabbi shared, “were the way God demonstrated his love for God’s people. If we follow the rules God has for society, we will discover the beauty of a just, loving, and compassionate society.”
This morning, we have a debate over the rules God has shared with God’s people. The Pharisees and the Scribes notice that some of Jesus’ disciples are eating with defiled hands, that they ate without first ceremoniously washing them. Jesus turns the tables on the Pharisees, arguing instead “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
All too often in our gospel, the Pharisees are presented as the “bad guys” of Jesus’ time. Time and time again, they are described as interested only in the legalistic minutia, convinced that if they rightly interpret and follow all of scripture, then they can earn their lofty place with God. But what if we understood that their interest in ritual purity comes from a place of reverence instead of one-upsmanship? What if we were just a bit sympathetic to the suggestion that the rules God shared are worth following. What if we shared the Pharisaical concerns that Jesus and his disciples could not possibly represent a new revelation of the Holy if they held the holiness customs of Judaism with such contempt? As it turns out, Jesus’ teaching this morning is far more forceful when we understand the Pharisees not simply as “the bad guys,” but as ardent followers of the Jewish faith and Law.
To fully understand the Pharisees you need to take a step back and look at the larger context of Jewish history. For 1200 years, the holiness of the Jewish people has been inexorably linked with their fortunes. From the Exodus; to the wandering in the desert; to the giving of the promised land; to the battles with foreign nations. From Moses, through the Judges and Kings, from the exile and back to Jerusalem, their holiness or lack thereof is linked to their success or lack thereof.
The Pharisees then, arise in as a people obsessed with maintaining the ritual purity demanded by scripture. They saw the law as creating a holy nation, and it was only through their strict observance of the law could they lay claim to be God’s people. Their religious fervor was a demonstration of how seriously they believed the law of God was to be taken. These aren’t the bad guys, the Pharisees simply wanted to live into God’s call to be a holy people.
It is through this understanding that we can begin to understand just how shocking Jesus and his disciples must have been to the Pharisees. I mean, this fellow Jesus is going around claiming to be God’s anointed one, his messiah, his Christ, but instead of helping the Pharisees call people into a holier state of religious observance, his followers can’t even be bothered to wash their hands before eating. How can this man be God’s messiah if he doesn’t even follow the Law?
Now, I said that understanding the centuries long history of the Jewish people was key to understanding the Pharisees’ concerns for ritual purity. But that same context also allows us to understand Jesus’ challenge to the Pharisees. When the “Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me.”
When the Pharisees challenge Jesus’ relationship to God based on his cultic purity, Jesus responds by drawing upon the tradition of the prophets in asking about how the Pharisees’ can claim to have a relationship to God based on holiness instead of compassion. That is the heart of the debate between Jesus and the Pharisees this morning—do we define holiness and sinfulness through observance of dietary laws, or by the inclination of our hearts?
This is the question which the prophets asked Israel again and again during it’s history. Time and time again, Israel believed that it could return to God’s favor through returning to the letter of the law rather than by observing its spirit. A man desperate to right himself with God approaches the prophet Micah, asking him “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? With the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten though sands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my souls?”
Micah, in perhaps the greatest summation of religion ever delivered, responds “He has told you, O mortal, what is good: and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
We know what is good and what the Lord requires of us. It is not cultic purity, nor is our holiness based on dietary laws—(I’m sure that comes as a great relief to those of us who were planning of have a Cheeseburger tomorrow!) What God is concerned with is the inclination of our heart and our capacity to reduce the suffering of our neighbor.
It is there, within the human heart, where Jesus’ concern lies. Multi-grain rolls and cotton-polyester blend table cloths are not what will separate us from God. It is our heart, and whether it is drawn towards the service of other or to the service of self, which ultimately will decide our righteousness.
Jesus’ rebuke of the Pharisees represents more than a mere quibble over a legalistic interpretation of the Law, it is an attempt to correct the very structure of how we define holiness and sin and how the word of God should regulate the life of God’s people. Too often, the Bible tells us, people search for a way to justify themselves before the letter of the Law rather than obey it’s spirit. It’s the line of thinking which Isaiah, Micah, Amos, and other prophets rejected outright. They, like Christ, hoped that the Law would tip the heart towards God, not prop up a corrupt and broken society.
There’s an old rabbinic admonition that insists, of anything and everything, “If you don’t give thanks for it, it’s bad for you.” The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the air you breathe, the people and the things of your life, if you don’t give thanks for it, it’s bad for you.That’s because giving thanks for something puts it in its proper place, it places the thing as part of our relationship with God and God’s relationship with us.
I think that is a wonderful understanding of how the law was meant to operate in our hearts. We should pause and think about the blessing of food before we eat. Whether that takes the form of a ritual washing of the hands, or if it merely means saying grace at every meal instead of only at dinner, the hope, the intention of the law, I believe, is that it will bring us closer to God, and make us more fully aware of the Grace of God which operates in our daily lives.
The Pharisees believed that they could earn their righteousness before God by their strict observance of the Law. And I want to underscore the point that there were some Pharisees who were motivated by a deep reverence. But we should not assume that the Pharisees are extinct. While they may not identify themselves as such, there are Christian Pharisees in our own time. They seek to weaponize Scripture, to shame and separate God’s people by their own definition of sinfulness. They have the gall to label others as impure.
But the Good News this morning is that we have been given the template of how to respond to those Pharisees, both ancient and modern: “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.’”
Where are our hearts? How do we honor God? How do we demonstrate our thankfulness for the Grace God has poured out in our lives? With what fast do honor God?
The answer, once again, lies with the Prophet Isaiah, where God describes perfectly what the law requires: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.”
The Good News this morning is a bit of a double edged sword. On one hand, we freed from the somewhat draconian dietary laws that governed our Jewish ancestors; on the other hand, we are bound that much more to the spirit of the law of Moses. The responsibility we cannot shake or shrink from is to love and care for our neighbor and the least among us. When that happens: when we feed the hungry, when the naked are clothed, when the sick and the dying are tended to, at that time, we will find ourselves once more brought into the unity of the faith of Jesus Christ, and can proudly bear the mantle of His name.
Amen.
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10AM Sermon - Old Testament
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Proper 17
Year B
St. Stephen’s, Orinda
Great things, Thou hast done, O Lord, my God. I would name them and proclaim them, but they are more than I can tell. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
As a general rule, my typed sermons are five and half pages. Now, don’t get too excited, my sermon this morning is the standard length of five and a half pages. Although, strangely, three of them were left almost entirely blank. All these pages say is “wait for congregation to stop awkwardly fidgeting in the pews.”
This morning, I’d like to preach on the Song of Solomon, a book in the Bible predominately focused on sexual love between two partners. Doing so, of course, means that our time together this morning will be spent exploring the theological dimension of sex and sexuality.
Ahh…here it is. Wait for awkward fidgeting to stop.
I think the first thing we can and should do this morning is to acknowledge the awkwardness. It is a sad commentary on the Christian Church that teaching and preaching on sexuality is at best, oxymoronic, and at worst, paradoxical. The reason for this, is quite clear. Church teaching on sexuality can be summed up in this way: Sex is a dirty, sinful, shameful, and depraved act—save it for the one you love.
At its core, the Song of Solomon is both a remarkable as well as a remarkably strange entry into our biblical cannon. With its vivid imagery, the story is one of love, desire, and fidelity expressed through sexual love. The story is told by both partners of this relationship, but the overwhelming majority is written from the woman’s perspective. Given the less-than-stellar reputation of the Judeo-Christian tradition in dealing with female sexuality, it’s almost a complete and total surprise that this book is even in our Bible, at all. The Jewish midrash records that there was quite the debate as to whether or not Song of Solomon should be included in the Hebrew Bible. At Bet Din, or the House of Judgement at Jamina where Jewish sages debated which books should be part of the scripture, we learn that eventually, history was bent by the will of one Rabbi Akiva, who argued “For all of eternity in its entirety is not as worthy as the day on which Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy, but Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”
As valuable as Rabbi Akiva’s defense of the Song of Solomon, or the Song of Songs, as it is also known, was, his cause was aided by a growing interpretive strain which saw the story as an allegory of the love between God and Israel. Christian scholars would later adopt this allegorical interpretation as the story of the love between Christ and his Church.
Like the third rail of the BART tracks, there seems to be something both terribly powerful and frightening about this story. Jewish and Christian scholars seem to bend over backward in order to redirect or sublimate the text. A surprising number of commentators described the story as a love story between husband and wife. And while it is true that on one occasion, the man describes the woman as his bride…its not entirely clear that they are actually married. Perhaps they are betrothed—that seems to be the only plausible explanation as to why the man and woman are forced to sneak outside of the city walls to rendezvous with one another, narrowly escaping a judgmental crowd which threaten to beat the woman on one occasion.
And to me, every effort to sublimate, legitimize, or transform the story into allegory does each of us a great disservice. Rabbi Akiva was correct, the Song of Songs does deserve a place among the “holy of holies” within scripture, for within its pages is a vision of sexual love marked by desire, fidelity, and partnership between two partners.
In our text for this morning, we hear the voice of the woman both remembering and anticipating her love. The natural world reflects and magnifies the woman’s stirring and longing for her beloved, and the beauty and the balance of the natural world recall and affirm the goodness of God’s creation. It is nearly impossible to read the Song of Songs without recalling the story of Eden. In Genesis, God creates Adam. God shares that it “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.”
A partner.
God then creates every living thing, showing them to Adam and allowing the created to name each species. But none of them are right. It is only when God causes Adam to sleep and creates Eve from the man’s flesh that Adam finally recognizes a partner.
There, in the garden, man and woman live not as master over one another, but partners towards one another. It is their mutuality which is the final affirmation of God’s creation. When humankind is banished from the Garden, God punishes Eve, saying “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” But in the Song of Songs, the woman shares "I am my beloved's, and his desire is for me.”
“As Ellen Davis has argued, the Song reverses the curses of the Garden of Eden, including the rupturing of the relationship between man and woman. There is a mutuality about this love that repairs that rupture and places the lovers back into the Garden.”
In our lectionary this morning, the woman repeats the invitation of her beloved: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.” As Prof. Wil Gafney reminds us, The man asks his love to run away with him; it does not appear that they are running away from anything or towards anything. They just want to be together. The natural beauty of the world around them reflects their love, blossoming flowers, fruit-laden trees, singing birds. It is paradise.
“The natural world evokes all of the senses as does the love between the couple. The very physicality of this text as scripture is its gift. The woman, man, their love and their world are all God's good, creation. There is no division between body and soul.”
More than that, we see the love drawing us towards a new life. Whether understood allegorically as God calling Israel out of Egypt, or Christ rising from dead and appearing in the garden, love calls us into a new creation, a transformed reality. When read without allegory, the devotion and commitment of one who is at the same time deeply loving and deeply loved, harnesses the power to infuse great purpose and meaning into the life of a lover.
If I had to use one word to describe the Song of Songs, I would choose “embodied.” The lovers again and again articulate their love for one another’s bodies. It is a reminder that our physical bodies are created—beloved, beautiful, and a reflection of God. The Song of Songs is a reminder that loving relationships are set within, and not in spite of our physical selves.
But where in this story of sexual love, is the good news? What lesson can the Song of Songs offer, even if it is somewhat uncomfortable to talk about in church?
To me, the Good News of the Song of Songs is the gentle reminder that we are all a reflection of the God who created us. Our sexuality and our sexual desires are a part of our created selfs, intended by God for a purpose. Like our bodies, our sexuality is a gift from God. As Jesus reminds us from our gospel lesson, our sexuality has the ability to build up or defile our spiritual lives…and because it has such great spiritual consequences, it is high time that the church regularly reflect on the gift of sexuality.
The Song of Songs affirms human sexuality as a lens through which we can understand the beauty and the purpose of creation. Without this affirmation of our sexuality, I fear the church is doomed to repeat the dangerous and paradoxical understandings of our past. It is only when we can look positively upon our sexual selves can we begin to create an moral framework for how Christians are to use this gift in the way God intended. As surprising as the Song of Songs may be, it nevertheless upholds the biblical principle that sexuality is best expressed through a partnership marked by love, affection, mutuality, and care.
The Song of Songs offers the Christian Church the means of untangling our often-times paradoxical approach to sexuality. It is a book in which the feminine voices the beauty and grandeur of creation. And whether we gladly welcome this vision of desire, or even if it makes us a little uncomfortable, it is a book worth sitting with.
[Wait for congregation to stop figiting…]
Amen.
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To know, to love, and to serve Christ.
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