Eighth Sunday After Pentecost
July 19, 2015
| Reading 1: | Reading 2: | Reading 3: | Reading 4: |
| 2 Samuel 7:1-14a | Jeremiah 23:1-6 | Ephesians 2:11-22 | Mark 6:30-34, 53-56 |
Eighth Sunday After Pentecost
2 Samuel 7:1-14a and Psalm 89:20-37
The lesson from Hebrew Scripture highlights once again the “royal covenant” with David. There will be a sacred place for the people of Israel made by God—and vice versa, there will be a sacred place for the Lord God. There are intimations that the dwelling place of God is a particular place (the temple in Jerusalem) and yet the Lord God is omnipresent. This presents some potentially rich process themes: the presence of God as universal, God as omnipresent. Yet, God we also see God in the particular and the concrete.
We need to be very careful here. The emphasis on the particularity of sacred space, “blood and soil,” has been used to justify racist policies, racial exclusivism, even the “final solution.” Yet do we not come to know the universal aspects of sacred space through our rootedness in the particularity of sacred space?
Psalm 89 extols the royal covenant with David. God says: “ My faithfulness and steadfast love shall be with him; and in my name his horn shall be exalted:89:25 I will set his hand on the sea and his right hand on the rivers.” God’s steadfast love is always there luring, beckoning, comforting –giving strength.
The typical pattern of prophetic literature is repeated: the people sin, depart from God(in their hearts, with this parting manifest in the presence of social injustice), God ever ready to forgive and take them back: “89:31 if they violate my statutes and do not keep my commandments,
89:32 then I will punish their transgression with the rod and their iniquity with scourges;
89:33 but I will not remove from him my steadfast love, or be false to my faithfulness.
89:34 I will not violate my covenant, or alter the word that went forth from my lips.”
Jeremiah was a prophet around the time or just before the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans in 586. In typical prophetic fashion , he too pronounces the message of judgment. With him, the hopeful side of the message anticipates a “righteous remnant” and faithful shepherds whose righteousness will help restore all of Israel. There is an allusion to a royal descendent who will restore righteousness and peace.
Where do we see “righteous remnants” (“not self-righteous remnants!”) in our world? One possibility for the preacher is to engage in reflection on “substitutionary sacrifice”, which the very term “righteous remnant” suggests. Is the idea of a substitutionary sacrifice a hopeless anachronism? How might it be reinterpreted in process thought, if at all? I shall pull this and the Epistle together below in the section on the Gospel.
The Psalm is perhaps the most famous of the Psalms, the 23rd. The dominant image is that is that of a steady, constant, abiding strength that gives strength and confidence to us to overcome all fear, insecurity, and anxiety—because God strengthens us, “cum forte” “with strength,” beckoning us to internalize that strength.
The Epistle’s central theme is the breaking down of divisions through Jesus Christ. Here the division is between “circumcised” and “uncircumcised,” between Jew and Gentile: “2:19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God,2:20 built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.”
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
Part of the background of this passage depicting Jesus’ healings is Jesus proclamation of the closeness of the Commonwealth of God. Wherever he is present, heals, forgives sins, has table fellowship with sinners, the Kingdom of Commonwealth of God is present.
But what about Jesus’ healings or “healing miracles?” Quite typically, this, and related issues, have divided fundamentalists and evangelicals from liberals? Were these healings suspensions of the “laws of nature?”
Instead of speculating, I shall give what I think is a fairly typical liberal Protestant answer from the perspective of process thought—with a little flavoring from Schubert M. Ogden. Hopefully, it will have plausibility for evangelicals.
In my experience as both an Episcopal priest and more especially as a person who has experienced lengthy hospitalizations, I would maintain that one of the most important aspects of healing is having a sense of being cared about. When I was hospitalized for nearly five months in 2014, I felt overwhelmed by the number of visitors I had—and the caring they conveyed! I mattered to them and to their lives! I was amazed at the number of students who showed up. Their presence speeded up my healing as I became determined to return to the classroom by the fall semester instead of taking the semester off (also to go to a Red Sox game!).
I had a powerful intuitive sense that our lives matter in an ultimate sense –to the universe; to God (in the consequent nature, the receptive side of God). This is the steadiness, “the cum forte” of the 23 Psalm. Taking into ourselves, our lives the lives of others is the kind of substitutionary sacrifice that elicits creative transformation. And it is the unbounded love that is the foundation for overcoming all our divisions.